Comments

  • The Limitations of Abstract Reason


    A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the Constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.Colo Millz

    Thanks for posting this Burke quote. It's a good model for useful political debate. American conservatives salute the 1776 Revolution, however, at the time, it was a radical change. No one was more aware of that than the minutemen who empowered it.

    The US constitution has continued to be radical through the centuries as most people readily acknowledge that some of its ideals are yet to be fully realized.
  • The Limitations of Abstract Reason


    The resulting debate, therefore, concerns the epistemology of moral improvement: whether justice is better secured by refining the wisdom of the past, or by subjecting that past to rational critique guided by universal moral principles.Colo Millz

    Why do you present the debate in such a rigidly binary structure?

    According to the Gospels, the arrival of Jesus triggered a clash between a hidebound religious elite and a revolutionary advocate for the common people. Traditions stand good until they don't. Civilizations die, and new ones are born. I don't believe the staunchest conservative would be content to thoroughly regress back to the culture and society of even one hundred years ago.

    On the flip side, I doubt even the most woke radical would dive headlong and carefree into a thoroughly unstructured future, anarchic and recalcitrant.

    The point being that radicals and conservatives need each other, their rabid partisan rhetoric notwithstanding. History can neither afford to fly out of its orbit on a lark, nor plant itself in in the sand like an ostrich.

    For Hazony, as for these earlier conservatives, the task of statesmanship is not to perfect society through rational schemes...Colo Millz

    Perfect society? Who's going to do that anytime soon?

    ...but to preserve and prudently amend the tested traditions that sustain moral and civic life.Colo Millz

    How is this any less a rational scheme than the one put forward by the progressives?
  • The Preacher's Paradox


    Preaching faith means either not having it or betraying it.Astorre

    This dilemma expresses the difficulty, or impossibility, of making a close approach to the divine.

    According to Kierkegaard, the only true preacher is the one who lives faith in silence.Astorre

    Why does Kierkegaard write "...the only 'true preacher,' instead of 'the only truly faithful person' is the one who lives faith in silence."? With the insertion of "preacher," the sentence sets up as self-contradictory, given the dilemma quoted at top.

    I conclude that talking about faith means abandoning it. As soon as you try to convey faith, you rationalize it, and therefore betray its nature.Astorre

    Human nature cannot abide total irrationality. No part of cognition, faithful or otherwise, can be of use if devoid of reason. Of course humans rationalize faith in transcendence. How else could they have any understanding of it?

    As for internal monologues concerning the divine, the same absolute human demand for semblance of reason applies. How does it matter if Kierkegaard ruminates on God in total privacy? Is it not true that as soon you try thinking about faith, you rationalize it, and therefore betray its nature?

    What about maintaining an open mind? Couple this with the concession God will not be understood, or even known beyond perplexing glimpses, and you have a procedure for accepting visitations from the divine with an open mind.

    Listen to the fool in motley as soon as listen to the wise man, for the divine is a horrid beast of miracles as with Moses aglow in the dark for days after his descent from Mt. Sinai, and witness also Job and his poxy boils in payment for iron faith in the almighty.
  • Truth Defined


    Holism

    • The math operators are the questions; the equal sign is the answer; the variables and constants are the subjects

    • Within this environment, the truth is dynamic identity symmetrical and conserved. It is the emergent whole arising from the interplay of subjects, questions and answers, and the math logic that integrates their dynamic functions

    • Subject_Question_Answer form a trio that animates creation.

    • The unsearchable fundamental is identity.

    • The math operators are identity operators that ground zero and one. This binary duo is sufficient to represent all of creation

    • N + Additive Identity (0) = n; N – Subtractive Identity (0) = n; N * Multiplicative Identity (1) = n; N / Divisive Identity(1) = n

    • Truth outside of temporal dynamism is neither created nor destroyed, but only revealed

    • Identity outside of temporal dynamism is neither created nor destroyed, but only revealed

    • The immortal soul of an existing thing outside of temporal dynamism is neither created nor destroyed, but only revealed

    • The immortal soul has expression as the invariant point of a topological manifold
  • Truth Defined


    Your cognitive sword is skepticism, propelling you forward thrusting and parrying at the devious world of deception?ucarr

    And what is your proposed better alternative to that?Copernicus

    I have no better alternative to propose. I'm not judging your outlook. Skepticism is a worthy attitude given our world so fraught with deceptions. Like other useful things, it needs to be carefully controlled, lest good turn to bad. Life tricks us at both ends. Too trusting and we get duped; too skeptical and we get deprived.

    No, in posting my previous communication, I was attempting to better understand you. When I have some idea how the other person tends to see the world, that helps me understand individual statements which I can then put into context.
  • Truth Defined


    My general impression of your narrative says, "You want to pair the metaphysics of knowledge relationships (p →q), as dynamically governed by an emergent and energetic inter-relation, viz., truth, with empirical experience. Dynamical, energetic identity transformations across space and time forming symmetries that conserve identity and support an enduring POV embody the living experience of truth.

    We gaze into the looking glass and learn to live with our mirror-image devilish playmate.
  • Truth Defined


    We are homosexual at an early age" – why is that suddenly true?Astorre

    Homosexuality supporting later heterosexuality is one of my conjectures that is subject to refutation.ucarr

    I never got an answer to any of my questions.Astorre

    You've gotten a response to each and every post you've addressed to me. As I say above, my conjecture about sexual identity ideation is subject to refutation. Possible refutation confers legitimacy upon conjecture.

    My post is about a=a, or identity. Sexual identity ideation spins out from this center as one of the core identities of the human individual: gender identity. The young child learns basic attributes of his identity. As he comes to awareness of sexual difference, he seeks esteem for his own group first. This seems natural to me because, as I've said, you must learn to love yourself before you are equipped with the self-esteem to begin to love the very different other. Whether or not the individual advances beyond the island of his own gender and, crossing over to the other side, discovers and consummates the nirvana embedded in love beyond selfhood is an open question.

    Statistically, it's supposed to be the case that nine out of ten do, with one out of ten, or ten percent of the population, being homosexual.

    All of this is possibly refutable. I expect you, now, to bring on the counter-narrative, if you have one. This instead of you continuing to attack such trivia as my diction, or the other inflated, reputation-building rhetorical device, attacking the opponent's methodology while abstaining from entering the trench war. The authentic battle is down in the trenches where the fighting rages over the logic of the premises and the viability of the propositions arising from them. My post is filled with possibly refutable propositions. Do you attack their logical details, as Banno does? No. You attack the diction of my sentences instead of their logic and conformity to reality, as evidenced below:

    It's like an exercise in the aesthetics of symmetry and transformation that remains at the level of abstract contemplation. You wrap basic arithmetic in a poetic veneer, calling it the "dynamism of identity" and the "emergent property of truth," but what's next?Astorre

    What do you have to say about the logic of symmetry and transformation presented as the dynamism of identity? Have you read about this, or heard it being discussed? You imply it's cliché, but you cite no standard references. You ask, "Where is the breakthrough beyond what is already known?" Might the blossoming of human identity into symmetry and transformation from the extensional substitution of a=a nevertheless unitary be the breakthrough fusion of QM uncertainty you're looking at but not seeing?

    My Identity Manifesto is filled with attack points. Have you read it? If you have, why are you attacking me instead of attacking my propositions?
  • Truth Defined


    Consider: ∧². This is the higher order of conjunction. So, the conjunction of conjunction might be written as a+ba+b.ucarr

    You quote me incorrectly. Here's the undistorted quote.

    Consider: . This is the higher order of conjunction. So, the conjunction of conjunction
    might be written as .
    ucarr

    Higher order conjunction (across symmetry) suggests itself as a central component of mind emergent from brain. If there's truth in this conjecture, then it might be the type of symmetric extension that empowers your mind to understand the logical rules you cite as your refutations of my conjectures.

    I respect your decision to walk away from our engagement here. Your input has motivated me towards a degree of logical clarity I couldn't've achieved without you. Thank-you for your time and energy.

    I don't think your work here is done. For that to be the case, you need to write a logical proof establishing that the two quotes below confirm extension by substitution is disjoint from identity.

    There are no laws prohibiting the multiplexing of a=a.
    — ucarr
    Yes, there is. Substitution is extensional. Indeed, that's the very definition of "=".
    Banno

    Definition 1.1 (Extensionality). If A and B are sets, then A= B iff every element of A is also an element of B, and vice versa. — Open Logic, p. 25

    Your proof must counter-narrate:

    Likely the most simple symmetry element is identity, represented by E (from the German word "einheit", meaning unity). Identity is the symmetry element of existence; all objects have this symmetry element, even if they have no other symmetry element.Spectroscopy Online
  • Truth Defined


    Your cognitive sword is skepticism, propelling you forward thrusting and parrying at the devious world of deception?
  • Truth Defined


    "A scratch and my arm's off, but the other impels a sword."
  • Truth Defined
    Identity Manifesto

    Truth is an emergent property of the dynamism of identity.

    Identity is a core element of the interrelations of numbers.
    7=7 is an identity.

    The dynamism of identity is exemplified by the myriad faces of transformation without change.

    3+4=7, 6+1=7, 5+2=7

    Can you know the truth without knowing yourself?

    Is there any knowing divorced from a sentient self? For example, does an insentient computer know what’s in its database and what’s in its memory circuits?

    The conjunction of insentience and knowing sounds like an oxymoron.

    Can you participate in the act of knowing without knowing that you’re knowing?

    The knowing of an insentient computer is a simulation of knowing borrowed from the programmer.

    The essence of my structure of truth consists in two seemingly disparate things converging to a common point. In this phenomenon, the two things are true to each other at the point of identity.

    Knowing yourself is the foundation of all your knowing.

    Am I saying that all that you know becomes yourself? Yes, I am. This is tantamount to saying all that you know is known with a point of view, your point of view. Eliminate your point of view and there is no view; you’re back to the insentient computer.

    Sentience resides in the personal point of view.

    Rationalism says, “Don’t take things personally.” This an impossible task for the sentient. Strip the sentient of his POV and his memory collapses. Too long a stint in a sensory deprivation tank will cause this collapse because the subject forgets who he is. We only maintain a sense of self through contact with the world of other things. This tells us that we are the world.

    QM tells us the same thing. We are entangled with the world around us.

    Regarding causation, if a implies b, then we understand each term always converges to a common link binding it to the other term. Initially, before discovery of the causal link, a and b might appear to be unrelated. Through observation we discover that one event, the cause, always leads to another particular type of event, the effect.

    As a clarifying example, consider the springtime onset of high volume, high density airborne pollen. When this occurs, the immunization doctor gets an upsurge in patients suffering with effects of allergies. Pollen density and allergies are true to each other as cause and effect.

    Math is particularly good at modeling convergence of seemingly different things to a common point.

    Two equations look different yet they share an ordered pair of coordinates that defines their intersection at a common point. Together they comprise a system of equations. The systemization of the two equations pairs them to a common point. Apparent difference, through independent truth to one position, converts the disparate equations into a unifying system.

    Can someone write a counter-narrative describing a relationship of truth that doesn’t reduce to an identity, or reduce different-seeming things that converge to one identity?

    Essence and truth converge at the point of identity. What is the essence of something? Its identity. The essential truth of something is defined by its identity. How can it be otherwise? We do not know what a thing is until we know its identity. We therefore cannot know the truth about a thing until we know its identity.
  • Truth Defined


    Each operator has its identity, so operator identities are fundamental to logic.ucarr

    What am I to make of this? What is the "identity" of "^" or of "⊃"? Am i to write "^=^"? In what logic would such a string be well-formed? How do I assemble such an expression?Banno

    Go one day with your understanding stripped of and then make something of that day's coherence.

    Write any logical symbol as an identity. When you find one absurd, inform us.

    Regarding , attempt to place a small object so that it becomes uncontainable. Inform us when you succeed.

    Am i to write "^=^"? In what logic would such a string be well-formed? How do I assemble such an expression?Banno

    Consider: . This is the higher order of conjunction. So, the conjunction of conjunction
    might be written as . What's an example application of ? Suppose you're tracking the rate of acceleration of a giant comet moving on a collision course with earth. Knowing that the movement of the solar system's motion accelerates the acceleration of the comet, you must also know the acceleration of the comet's acceleration in the context of the moving solar system. So, the higher-order conjunctive acceleration of the comet is its momentum identity.

    Conjunction, like every other thing, has an identity. Logic, therefore, unfolds and contracts as the valid continuity of identities. There are no laws prohibiting the multiplexing of a=a.
  • Truth Defined


    Don’t be so quick to walk off the battlefield. I know orthodoxy is your sword in this particular battle, but improv offers you another rewarding role to play.

    You can’t assemble a logical expression without the operators. Each operator has its identity, so operator identities are fundamental to logic.

    The orthodoxy dictating proper use of a=a was originally improvised and subsequently propounded into establishmentarian practice. Okay, so now you’re a mouse running around in someone else’s clever maze. Don’t kid yourself you’re not looking for your own playing field, if you can discover it.

    Don’t scurry back to establishment correspondents who’ll semaphore more of the same rote patterns enshrined in textbooks. That’s not doing the real work before us now. If you’re content to rehash the history of your predecessors then you’ll probably blow me off. That’s okay, but the fun I seek, for which you denigrate me as a woo- woo chaser after undisciplined whimsy, is supported by the imperative to live now fully while you can.

    I need you to stay on the battlefield and work the trenches in close combat with me. Your job is to tear the guts out of my theoretical sallies, if you can.

    We will both have a chance to win because you might reaffirm the foundation of your orthodoxy, or I might see clear to a new foundation.

    I need your reasoned response to my question, “If you can’t write a logical expression without use of operators, how can they not be sine qua non identities?

    New morphological expansions in math and logic is our work in our generation.
  • Truth Defined


    In your personal lexicon "poetic" denotes what?

    ...formal logic has very fixed rules... it has to be shown to conform to the rules... And what you have here doesn't.Banno

    Logic is not based on identityBanno

    Logical operators (∧, ∨, ↔︎, ¬) are not logical identities?

    How do you write a sequence of logic without logical operators?

    Nor is it a symmetrical expansion of identityBanno

    The symmetries of quadratic functions don't example symmetrical expansion of quadratic equation graphs?

    The symmetrical quadratic functions identities are not identities?

    Falsehood is not broken symmetry, as you suggest in your third dot, so much as a logical constant, ⊥.Banno

    If you looked into a full length mirror and saw your mother looking back at you, would you affirm the truth of the symmetry?
  • Truth Defined


    T-sentence: "p" is true if and only if p.

    As definitions of truth go, this is The One.
    Banno

    As I read T-sentence, it invokes the bi-conditional; the two terms support each other in identity.

    A=A pictures the bi-conditional in all of its beautiful simplicity.
    ucarr

    I use invoke to say that, "T-sentence cites the bi-conditional operator as its authority for its definition of truth."

    Are you saying (p <-> p) = (p=p)?Hanover

    I think they each say something very similar. You have your identity. Your possession of same is conditioned upon the individuality of that state. You're mentally unsound if you're fundamentally uncertain about who you are.

    Is your use of the word "picture" an allusion to Wittgenstein and you're suggesting it's his position that the two bi-conditionals are identical?Hanover

    A=A is a graphic image you can see. As such, it pictures the symmetry and conservation and mirror-imaging of self clearly and succinctly.
  • Truth Defined


    I asked ChatGPT to pull out the argument in your post, and it offered:

    Condensed Argument Form
    Banno
    • The law of identity (a=a) expresses a symmetry fundamental to logic and to being/selfhood.
    • Logical reasoning (relations among terms) expands this symmetry outward into the relational world.
    • Logic preserves genuine symmetries — falsehood is a broken symmetry.
    • Personal identity mirrors physical conservation: the self is what persists through transformations.
    • When false identifications occur, reason (logic) restores symmetry by distinguishing self from non-self.
    • Art and imagination temporarily play with symmetry by allowing false identifications.
    • Thus, our intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic lives are structured by a tension between the conservation of identity (a=a) and the imaginative violation of it (a=¬a)
    .

    You can do me a favor by specifying how each of the seven bullet points above is an empty banality that can give no instruction to a child in primary school. No scattershot generalities such as saying, "They're clichés garnished with five-dollar words." No, I want you to use specific details in your arguments. For example, regarding:
    • The law of identity (a=a) expresses a symmetry fundamental to logic and to being/selfhood.

    In response to this, you could attack its central premise: Identity_POV_World are a triad of interwoven ecology that's animated with life indivisible. If you can show they are divisible, then you might've killed the triad.
  • Truth Defined


    ...I haven't seen a single non-speculative statement here.Astorre

    The prudence of the pragmatist can sometimes make him appear far more astute than the theoretician. Reality pairs them together as a set never divided. Dreaming through immaterial possibilities seems the work of the addled fool. In our hardscrabble world of business savvy affirming courtship with expedience, speculation becomes a magnet for contempt.

    Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein were theoreticians. We respect their successes. We respect the practitioner more easily because his work begins with the success already won by the theoretician.

    While it's true that theorizing should be constrained by conjecture, we don't know where the next correct idea in abstraction might arise. Without it, we might still be doing calculus on an abacus.

    We are homosexual at an early age" – why is that suddenly true?

    "AI, becoming humanoid, will soon support the fluidity of all races and genders" – why is that?
    Astorre

    Homosexuality supporting later heterosexuality is one of my conjectures that is subject to refutation.

    AI identity fluidity, another possibly refutable conjecture, seems to follow from ease of transformation. Human gender fluidity is fraught with violence because gender boundaries are regarded as being unbreakable. If AI can do it easily and endlessly, why not? Being smart in life means being adaptable. Why wouldn't they flow through the spectrum of identities as adaptations to existential and social realities more complex than their human counterparts?
  • Truth Defined


    ...it [truth] depends on the existence of propositions and shared criteria of correctness.Sam26

    Adequation of intellect and reality, and don't forget the entanglement of the two.
  • Truth Defined


    Can you give reasons why infrared couldn't be measured in 1000 BC, or 1,000,000 BC?ucarr

    We didn't have the technology.Copernicus

    Things and their yardsticks are entangled. Since one implies the other, we see that conjecturing existence of things unmeasured is in fact a measurement of sorts of those unmeasured things. This is a convoluted way of saying that seeing a thing - whether literally or within the mind's eye - equals measuring a thing. Were this not so, how could a conjectured thing have any likeness to the thing? With no such corresponding likeness, the conjecture would be unintelligible.

    Our technologies would have to invent technologies to make themselves see things like we see through our invented technology.Copernicus

    Technology is not entirely invented. If I wish to measure something in nature, my instrument of
    measurement must bear some resemblance to the object measured. The agreement of tool to object is instructed by the object.

    It's true that the sentient arises from the ecology of its environment. If the ecology of the sentient is a closed system, and yet the sentient dreams of things lying beyond the system, then there exists a suggestion closed systems are incomplete, and thus the closure of the system is incomplete.

    Our lack of final knowledge of what we know doesn't compel us to conclude what we know incompletely is false.
  • Truth Defined


    Veritas est adequatio intellectus et rei

    ↪ucarr

    This seems to me a definition of essence but not truth
    JuanZu

    I don't know if you're addressing Aristotle, Israëli, Aquinas or me, but the correspondence theory nowadays lacks adequation with QM's entanglement of intellect and ecology.

    Being_Identity_Truth How do we disentangle this trio? I say each implies the others. Can you narrate a world of beings without identities? Can you narrate a world of truth without identities and beings?
  • Truth Defined


    ...to human is to need creativity, even if it seems "pointless".ProtagoranSocratist

    Pointless activity flings open the shutters of the mind to worlds of possibilities. Pragmatists preach nose-to-the-grindstone productivity, but a world of grunts without dreamers piles up grain that rots in the sun.
  • Truth Defined


    T-sentence: "p" is true if and only if p.

    As definitions of truth go, this is The One.
    Banno

    As I read T-sentence, it invokes the bi-conditional; the two terms support each other in identity.

    A=A pictures the bi-conditional in all of its beautiful simplicity.
  • Truth Defined


    So you've determined the truth. Great. Now what do you do with all this?Astorre

    You want to see practical applications flowing out of my bullet list, and you want to see that they evoke fresh insights into the functions of our natural world.

    Consider this: the dynamism of identity maps to the statement, "Homosexuality is the substrate of heterosexuality." In our early years we're all homosexual-adjacent because you must love your own gender before you can begin to love the other one (reaching across the aisle assumes high self esteem in confrontation with profound difference), if that ever happens. This is AI fluidity lite.

    If we can suppose AI will soon become humanoid indistinguishable, the dynamism of identity will support fluidity across all races, genders, cultures and languages within each individual AI. Pivoting between global identities will for each AI individual be easy and natural.

    This change at the level of the sentient individual will stimulate exponential changes in the collective global culture of AI sentients. The transformation to a new AI driven earth culture will feature attributes unimaginable to humans, but symmetry and conservation will keep us connected to it. Are you fastening your seatbelt?
  • Truth Defined


    Maybe my post below provides you with some clarity.
  • Truth Defined


    Ok, now that I've translated it, tell me which of these things must necessarily exist for there to be a cat on the mat:
    1. A mind, 2. a cat, 3. a mat.
    Hanover

    As I read your [translation], it hovers at the cusp of undecidability. If so, with your narrative you militate against necessity. Undecidability vacates the binary foundation of necessity. "To be or not to be," is arguably our greatest binary. Undecidability elides the authority of the binary whilst shaking hands with QM.ucarr

    But this is evasive because I asked very specific questions and you didn't provide answers. I didn't ask the questions in a way with the intent to force you into an untenable position, but I asked them the way I did because I honestly am seeking clarity that I truly find lacking in your posts.Hanover

    All three must exist. The identity of each of the three is complicated by the interrelations numbers describe in measuring them. The truth content of the numerical narrative involves positioning of each in a calculable ecology that entails degrees of codependence and emergence.

    My next questions:
    If there is no mind, can there still be a cat?
    What has to happen for a mind to perceive a cat? Does there have to be a cat to make the mind see the cat, or do just sometimes minds see cats and then we pretend there are cats, even though there aren't?
    Hanover

    The first question begs the question, "How can there be a question about the existence of a cat in the absence of a questioning mind?" Ditto for the second question; since you must have a mind to ask the question, you can't stipulate the mind's exclusion in the answering of it. The third question, which operates in the shadow of the question-begging of the first two questions, asks for the type of complicated narratives appropriate for consciousness researchers; they're neuroscientists, not philosophers; suffice it to say, for now, that the mind can recombine received data into cognitions separate from their natural world correlates; I doubt it can conjure cognitions from nothing.

    As we navigate what we call reality, we see things and strive to understand them as a mirroring of ourselves, albeit disguised as the other.ucarr

    I interpret it this way: "When I walk around my house, I try to understand the things I see as being like me but dressed up like my wife."

    I think that's a fair reading, making the abstract descriptions concrete.

    I'm sure you didn't mean that though. A common rule of thumb for writers is that you can never blame your reader for misunderstanding, but you have to blame yourself for not being clear.
    Hanover

    I mean to say that epistemology gives quarter to skepticism, even to solipsism because the reasonings against universal truths find their durability by making a close approach to undecidability. The price paid for this defense is the weakening of the binary mindset of non-contradiction. This weakening, in turn, supports QM.
  • Truth Defined


    Clever words can trick one into thinking that what one is saying is profound, when it is actually superficial.Banno

    Yeah, you see I re-wrote what he wrote into what I thought it was saying.Hanover

    Do you argue that your translation expresses trivial facts?
  • Truth Defined


    Does this say more than that a=a is true? That doesn't tell us what truth is.Banno

    a=a examples a true relationship in the context of symmetry. The self can't express itself outside of symmetry. You only see the mirror image of yourself. The mirror image of you is simultaneously you and not you, but mirror-image you.

    From this beginning, thinking mind spins out from a=a to a=c because a equals b and b equals c. Logic guards against false continuities that break interrelations that would, according to the grandest scheme, spin out the universe from an immeasurable singularity.

    Identity expresses the conservation laws in a nutshell of symmetry. You have a personal history. In the identity supported by your personal you are conserved. If someone, say, an online troll, posts to social media a fake news report linking you to a murder you didn't commit, you might mount a defense that demonstrates the absence of any symmetry between the fake report and you. Your argument would reside in logic demonstrating there's no mirror-imaging between your personal history and the report.

    If the universe spins out from a point immeasurable in a history governed by symmetry and conservation laws, then Werther’s travels, and his sorrows are but one personal history among countless, and yet the artifice of art tricks us into identification with what, at first glance, appears foreign to us.

    We love to escape from the tyranny of our mundane selfhood, piqueishly scorning core facts like a=a as pettifogging fuss until someone or something threatens it, then we're at pains to show a=a, not a=¬a.
  • Truth Defined


    We can measure cats mathematically. Truth is a creation of the mind and it's a concept, not a direct experience. You are happy when a map takes you to the right place. The measuring of something helps us understand it to make us believe we both live in the same reality. If an animal attacks us, we don't take a moment to decide if it's real.

    Even if I am the only person in existence, I still act like other people exist.
    Hanover

    Ok, now that I've translated it, tell me which of these things must necessarily exist for there to be a cat on the mat:
    1. A mind, 2. a cat, 3. a mat.
    Hanover

    As I read your narrative, it hovers at the cusp of undecidability. If so, with your narrative you militate against necessity. Undecidability vacates the binary foundation of necessity. "To be or not to be," is arguably our greatest binary. Undecidability elides the authority of the binary whilst shaking hands with QM.

    Incompleteness of existence might be another fundamental term in our ontology here: being/non-being, undecidability; existential incompleteness.

    So, truth is rooted in relationships; relationships ride atop a binary-ist foundation. If you can stop relating to the natural world around you as a distinct and interrelated self, then perhaps you can live true to a principled skepticism about utilitarian truth local.

    Your interpretation in bold at top indirectly invokes a useful definition of reality: the mirroring of cognition and its objects. Living in the same reality is a shout out to identity in the sense of 7=7. As we navigate what we call reality, we see things and strive to understand them as a mirroring of ourselves, albeit disguised as the other.
  • Truth Defined


    People in 1000 BC couldn't see infrared. Was it fake?Copernicus

    Can you give reasons why infrared couldn't be measured in 1000 BC, or 1,000,000 BC?

    ...the info paradox poses an important question: are you sure that the universe, in its entirety, has presented itself to you for proper inspection?Copernicus

    Does the question of the loss of info due to black hole evaporation raise a question about the complete accessibility of info, or does it raise a question about the completeness of existence, a larger set containing info?

    Let's suppose the loss of access to info is non-equal to the loss of info itself. If existence is a necessary precursor to info, and yet existence itself is incomplete, then the info paradox is merely more info about incomplete existence. Instead of focusing on lost info due to inaccessibility (and the supposed resultant unreliability of cognition), perhaps we should focus on the info suggested by the paradox as a revelation of the incompleteness of existence, and thus a gain of info about what cannot be known existentially.
  • Truth Defined


    If an investigator can write an equation that plots an ordered pair...ucarr

    So you withdraw your previous response that said an examiner was required for the statement about the cat to be true?Hanover

    No need to withdraw my statement of conditions for determining truth via math. As I've implied with...

    The insuperable nakedness of existence demands the axiomatic facts of science and art.ucarr

    ...science can't get started without assumptions as self-evident truths beyond the reach of reasoning. This being so, conditions for the practice of science toward establishing true relationships must be specified. The important word here is relationships. Truth, as I'm spinning it out, is rooted in relationships. Logic, being continuity governed by inference, checks and verifies the continuity linking the symmetrical handshake of truth across transformation without change.
  • Truth Defined


    We don't just assume the cat exists. We have to see him first.Hanover

    And math does a good job of measuring and systematizing our seeing of cats. Truth, being an emergent property of the mind, is more abstract cognition than empirical experience, except that when a map leads you to your presupposed destination, your sense of reality and well being are gratified. So, the measuring and systematizing ride atop the assumption of our shared existence. We both know that when a brutal beast comes charging towards us, we don't assume our senses are projecting a mirage really a part of ourselves.

    Even if our cognition is a closed system unreal beyond itself, its local reality is worthy of "as if" engagement.
  • Truth Defined


    If I'm getting this right, according to your theory, truth beyond observation (you need to observe to prove) is deniable, and anything showing uniform (unchanging across the spectrum) patterns is true.Copernicus

    Observation, as Sherlock Holmes establishes, might be a priori. As for uniform patterns establishing truth, one must ask, "Do they extend from and converge to an identity, such as 7=7?" Truth is symmetry and transformation rooted in identity.

    even our most precise equations are anthropic dialects of cosmic truth. They describe not what the universe is, but what it looks like when filtered through human proportion.Alam T.B.

    The Infinite Symmetry revisits a persuasive argument rooted in anthropocentrism. Nevertheless, we have to be cautious to avoid the solipsism gutter. I choose to believe that now, as I'm dialoguing with you, I'm not really dialoguing with myself. In your dialoguing with me, don't you assume likewise? Well, if we can establish within the human realm that distinct individuals exist, might we not also assume distinct individuals elsewhere? Moreover, the argument we can't get beyond our own biology supports the supposition our incapacity to know beyond ourselves makes moot the question, "Are we alone?" If the question can't be resolved, there's no reason to assume we're wrong to assume human distinction, on the basis of an existentialist fiction, isn't a worthy empiricism.
  • Truth Defined


    If I suppose the cat is in a specific place in New York, then why does an investigator have to appear and write down his coordinates for the cat to exist?Hanover

    The insuperable nakedness of existence demands the axiomatic facts of science and art.ucarr

    My self quote above is how I've addressed the profound issue of the impossibility of reasoning to the naked fact of existence. Our existence must be assumed axiomatically. Part of the puzzle consists in the fact we cannot reason without assuming unexamined our sentient existence as a necessary precursor to all reasoning.

    Does the potential cat await patiently on the mat for the final equation to be written down by the investigator before the cat actually exists?Hanover

    Schrödinger's Paradox teases toward examining your question seriously. More to the point, no examination of truth, including the possibility of truth's existence, can proceed without the unexamined assumption of a rational examiner. Some suggestion here, therefore, pictures the absolutist pursuit of truth as an infinite echo chamber. Be content with the local truths the intelligibility of your life depends upon.
  • Truth Defined


    They are the necessarily unreasoned assumptions upon which science is founded.ucarr

    I said it from the mathematical standpoint. Nonetheless, are you sure your science is absolute?Copernicus

    As for the math component of an axiom, if the math is internally consistent, then it is true to the interrelations of numbers as they apply to observable phenomena. This supports the mind's truth assessment of the math per the axiomatic system grounding the math.

    Beyond the scope of the axiomatic system, refutation of the interrelations of the numbers of said system might occur, but the local truth within the system remains unperturbed. This is exampled by the comparison of Newtonian physics with Einstein physics. The older physics, being internally consistent within its limited scope, remains valid and true, as evidenced by its continuing use by today's physicists.

    Unrestricted absolutism should not be the sine qua non standard for truth. The relativity of elapsing time across different inertial systems does not lead us to say their respective time measurements are not true.
  • Truth Defined


    "The cat is on the mat." Is that true?Hanover

    Let's suppose the cat's position on the mat lies within the range-domain of an objectively established Cartesian Coordinate system; it is a defined neighborhood within the borough of Brooklyn in New York. If an investigator can write an equation that plots an ordered pair valid with respect to the existential cat_mat, such that it maps to them, then by this means the truth of the statement can be established.
  • Truth Defined


    Logic is the time-zero expansion-convergence, or dynamism, of the faces of transformation without change.ucarr

    Is logic truth or argument based on observation (projection)?Copernicus

    Truth, logic and argument are words connected in a deep interweave of meaning. Logic is reasoning from known facts. Argument is judgment emergent from reasoning applied to objectifiable phenomena. Truth is identity across mirroring symmetry and transformation without change.ucarr

    The insuperable nakedness of existence demands the axiomatic facts of science and art.ucarr

    Are you sure, you have access to the axiomatic science?Copernicus

    Axioms are distinct from science. They are the necessarily unreasoned assumptions upon which science is founded.ucarr
  • Time_Distance_Dimension


    Are you talking about a series or a sequence? What is a bounded infinity?jgill

    I'm talking about a sequence. For a bounded infinity, you can configure a linear equation that extends between zero and one but never reaches either boundary.

    On the other hand, if you change the scale of the same linear equation, it extends beyond both boundaries.

    In both cases, the linear equation is configured to function within the realm of analysis, which is to say the plotting of the linear equation covers distance with time-positive. It is this role of time-positive that makes analysis possible.

    Within the realm of dimension, distance is time-zero. You and I experience our navigation of the world as a whole person moving through distance time-positive. We don't say the infinite points, lines, and areas (that math articulates as the parts making up our native 3D extension) assemble and re-assemble as we move about. We move about as one whole person, not as our math-measurable parts continuously assembling and disassembling.

    A crucially important question within math-physics is how time-positive and time-zero manage the realm of analysis and the realm of dimension.
  • Time_Distance_Dimension


    Within an infinite series, you can keep changing the scale of your numerical progression so that you'll never exit a bounded infinity. Enlarge the scale and you immediately exit the bounded infinity. Might this be the way out of Zeno's Paradox?

    In the calculus of the measurement of the area under the curve, however, the approach, by design, never scales up and beyond the bounded infinity. Irrational Pi tells us our math-controllable analysis never arrives at the circle. There are no circles outside of the mind, but spheres abound within our natural world. We can understand them only mentally as an infinite series of circles rotating around an axis; we can only observe spheres without understanding them existentially.
  • Time_Distance_Dimension


    To the extent I understand you, your helpful cosmology primer on the math and physics of spacetime of the past three centuries or so, acting as a guide, enables me to see that my atomistic approach to dimensional expansion - in the mode of Zeno - in your view, employs the wrong mode going in the wrong direction.

    The cosmos is not an accretion built up from infinitesimals. Instead, there are holistic cosmic symmetries that the transformations of topology "breaks" for analysis, then reassembles towards the general relativism of nodes of material existence.

    My central global objective within my thesis is clarification of the relationship between analysis, i.e., science, and existence, i.e., being. At the center of my focus is the calculus, an analytic methodology of the infinitesimal as an approach to the curvilinear. When the n-gon parallelogram magically becomes the circle, we see what science makes a close approach to, but cannot attain to: dimensionally extended material things. You can smash up a thing towards understanding that its parts have a logical continuity, but you can't understand analytically the brute fact of the existence of dimensionally extended material things.

    This gap separating analysis from existence, by my understanding, separates the series from the dimension. Algebraic geometry, topology, like all algebras, seeks to find the missing part via math operators governing the inter-relations of numbers. Well, dimensionally extended material things can be measured in accordance with the shuffling around of parts towards diagramming and memorizing the design for assemblage of the parts into a whole. However, the whole thing assembled dimensionally gestalts away from analysis to brute fact observable only. What science observes axiomatically, it cannot understand holistically.

    Yes, math converts dimensionally extended wholes into logics and designs mathematically controllable. Once returned to its whole state of being, the dimensionally extended whole exerts its brute presence and science returns to its axiomatic observation without understanding.

    Distance, the experience of logic and design, occupies the transcendental idealism of the mind as its own physics internalized as mind, per Kant.

    We have a mental understanding of ourselves whilst not existentially understanding ourselves because 3-Space dimensional extension plus time is our native state as dimensionally extended beings. When I enter a room, I don't perceive myself penetrating an infinite series of planes as I traverse the cubic space of the room because parallelograms are a cognitive reality within the transcendental idealism of the mind.
  • [TPF Essay] Cognitive Experiences are a Part of Material Reality


    The minds are not made of anything elseMoK

    Mind, substance and stuff are made of strings? Strings are the foundation of all material things, right?