I have found that it always succinctly and clearly presents an accurate view of
every technical subject that I have ever referenced as measured by its correspondence
with many other sources. — PL Olcott

I imagine that that happens because you learn from there. I find nonsense there all the time. The people who run it are oligophrenic. So I avoid it like a plague.

Gross.

a good amount of caution is warranted when referencing Wikipedia. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Huge amount.

To summarise this post:

How do we know whether quality or quantity is fundamental? Or rather two sides of the same coin? Does a quality, to exist, need not to show quantity too, being either one or many, zero being not existing?

The idea of the mathematical universe is not that quantity or quality are fundamental, but that all the properties that there are are mathematical. There are no non-mathematical properties, science seems to support this.

The mathematical universe does not address matters such as solipsism, différance, phenomenology or idealism. It takes our perception of things as they are and goes from there, just like science does. Just like the correspondence theory of truth assumes there exists an outside world to which beliefs would correspond to.

https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mathematical.html

Given that most other mammals have a keener sense of smell than we do, I by this then infer that smell is generally directional, and, hence, spatial, in most lifeforms that are equipped with this physiological sense. — javra

I was also thinking about smell and sound being directional. But I think that touch goes even beyond. When we hear something at our left or our right, we simply hear it, and that sound invokes the idea of left or right, the experience does feel like it is happening within your brain; but when it comes to touch, we can tell the actual experience is not in our brain but all over our body. Maybe that makes sense.

you are thinking when you are just speaking naturally and going with the flow. Are you not thinking in language? — Patterner

To be honest, I don't think I am when I am just talking naturally, which is how, I think, that I end up saying dumb s**t in public. But if I am thinking, it is at a very low level.

I have a vague memory from decades ago that a study was done that said people could not think easily when their vocal chords were numbed. Wish I could find that study. — Patterner

I don't doubt that study exists. Not only that, but I recall reading a few years ago that most people read by subvocalising, and by managing to stop the subvocalisation you can read much faster.

Fascinating. — Arne

I appreciate the compliment, though it does make me feel autistic.

for me thinking in language is also literally picturing the written word/sentence in the mind's eye, I typically do that when I need to plan a sentence between uttering or writing it, as opposed to just speaking naturally and going with the flow — Lionino

See the parts I underlined? — Philosopher19

That is cute that you highlighted half of a sentence to make it seem it says something that it does not. Let me fix it:

Because it exists in B, it is a member of B. — Lionino

You are having trouble figuring out the difference between a locative sentence and an explanatory one. I will leave you to it.

In B, A is not a member of anything.
In B, A is a member of B. — Philosopher19

That is not what I said, which is why you typed that out instead of quoting me.

how is it a member of B in B? — Philosopher19

It is not. That means nothing in mathematics.

Do you see how you have contradicted yourself? — Philosopher19

I have not because those two are different sentences.

“original” seems unimportant — Arbü1237

If you are not original, you are not creating.

Creative seems like a quality or some possession that attributes unusual and original actions. Creativity is like the bulb and the work is the light it produces. — Arbü1237

Creative and creativity are the same word but with different morphological classifications, like beautiful and beautifully, wind and windy.

Look what showed up on my fyp:



Though the title isn't really what he talks about.

My two cents: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/creativity

Doesnt quantity require quality but not the reverse? — Joshs

Is it? I think it starts wherever depending on your pressupositions are, or perhaps they are intrinsic to each other? Tegmark seems to be of the idea that it is mathematics that rules all. Whether we want to equate mathematics with quantity is perhaps the root of the issue.

Can there be a quantity without a quality, category, whole, entity, species to be counted? — Joshs

And can there be quality if it is not instantiated and thus exemplifies the number 1? If a quality does not instantiate itself, and thus show itself countable (being 1 if limitless or many if limited), does that quality even exist?
Very importantly, as a matter of empirical fact, we have not found anything in the universe yet that cannot be reduced to numbers. "If you accept the idea that both space itself, and all the stuff in space, have no properties at all except mathematical properties," then the idea that everything is mathematical "starts to sound a little bit less insane."

From the quote above by Tegmark we start to see that it is less about quantity being fundamental and more about whatever qualities there being quantifiable.

Put differently, when Tegmark says mass, electric charge, isospin, weak hypercharge, spin, lepton are numbers, don’t we have to ask what it is that continues to be the same again and again ( number) in these entities, qualities , categories, properties? — Joshs

If we find a preon or a string, isn't everything in the world different numbers of this repeated fundamental quality that is preonness or stringness? The numbers through which something is quantified are "alloted" to a certain "slot" that will be our quality. But then I pose the same question, how can we determine preonness to be more fundamental than quantity if, for preonness to exist, it must first show itself quantifiable, which is to exist in a number of 1, 2, 3? What even is preonness? What is that quality? To pose that question is also to ask what it is made of, and that question will stumble upon quantification at some point. Whatever it is, we might as well call it 'pure existence', and it gives rise to the world through its repetition.

such as Karen Barad, which are allowing physics to catch up with the thinking that has been available within philosophy and psychology for a while now. For a long time, physicists, including Hawking, denied the relevance of time for the understanding of physical phenomena. But Lee Smolen and others, thanks to their embrace of ideas from biology and philosophy, are showing the absolutely central importance of time for understanding physics — Joshs

Many people say many things. Time will tell them wrong or right.

philosophy to cognitive psychology — Joshs

This one I didn't say.

our naive naturalistic attitude ( which physics remains stuck within) — Joshs

Anyone would be hard-pressed to prove that physics, or natural sciences, is better off without naïve realism.

One form of progress relies on repetition of identity. Another form of progress relies on showing how the repetition of identity is derivative from differences upon differences. — Joshs

Of course, la différance. My point is that the subject that the mathematical universe approaches is not about human cognition, it takes that for granted, but about what we perceive as a naïve realism. It is a philosophy of real world, not of mind or phenomenology, so it does not wrestle with those latter two.
The mathematical universe goes beyond enumeration, it is not just about repetition of something which we denote with natural numbers, but that there are possibly infinitely many universes that manifest different mathematical structures. Isn't a 2x2 matrix different from a 4-vector only in quality? The mathematical universe does not deal with that question.

Ok, but let's say all is not a Spinozean God... — Lionino

Let's say there are things, we observe those things through the senses, here is how they work.
Should we submit structural engineering to différance too? What do we stand to gain there? Anyone would be hard-pressed to prove that engineering is better off without naïve realism.

Your point is that these considerations are true, mine is that here it doesn't matter whether they are true.

1) In which list does L list itself? — Philosopher19

This is the same tautological nonsense as before:

I said, in A, A is a member of A/itself, and in B, A is a member of B/other-than-itself — Philosopher19

Same thing:

It does not mean anything in mathematics.
In B, A is not a member of anything, A simply exists. Because it exists in B, it is a member of B. But that has no bearing on Russell's paradox. It is a semantic point. — Lionino

Thoughts on Saramago? — javi2541997

Maybe I read some of him a long time ago, I can't remember anything nowadays however. But he was a laureate of the Camões prize, which is really big.

Sniff but not smell? Eat but not taste?

See, hear, feel, smell and taste. Look, listen, touch... sniff and eat? — Banno

Those are possible analogies surely. I was thinking in the terms of touching being the physical act that generates the experience of feeling, while there are no words in English (or most languages) for the physical act of... molecules interacting with our taste buds and smell receptors, or light going through our retina. As a curiosity, some languages have a word that is kinda like brighten, as in, shine light on something for me to see it, to use Spanish as an example which should be a familiar language to most here, they might say "Alúmbrame X" to shine light on the side of X that is facing me, but even that is not quite there.

The crowning of Holy Mary in heaven, in tapestry, Strassbourg cathedral. Picture by me.

I'm mainly antagonistic to the Cartesian take on "res extensa" being utterly severed from mind stuff due to the former having extension in space but not the latter. — javra

And do smells necessarily have extension in space? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The question raised here is an interesting one, and I also take trouble with the split of res extensa and res cogitans. Here is my take on it from another thread if you are interested:

the simple fact that we can tell where we are being touched just by feeling it hints that our mind has extensionality (it is not a substance without dimensions, 0D). It is not just that the mind has the idea of extension within it and that some interaction with our organs causes some idea of spatial localisation¹, but that experience itself can be located with coordinates x,y,z — we can isolate sight and smell and hearing to operations or projections of our 0D mind, but we can't do that with touch. Our mind would not just be a point of volume 0 in our "pineal gland", but extend everywhere where there is sense perception, from our scalp to the tip of our toes. — Lionino

Can one imagine a sound without any volume or pitch? Can we imagine a smell without odor? — Count Timothy von Icarus

In the topic of Descartes and thus Scholastics, volume and pitch would be attributes of the substance sound (and I might be abusing the term substance here), through which the mind can come to know sound, without which it cannot know sound. Odor however is synonymous with smell.

Is there something similar for smell or hearing? — Banno

I doubt in English or any natural European language, as we only understood the mechanisms of smell or hearing very recently, while the mechanism of feeling (touch) was always very obvious.
Maybe in some constructed languages there is a distinction for smell and hearing.

I always assumed everyone did both — Jamal

I can also do "both", but for me thinking in language is also literally picturing the written word/sentence in the mind's eye, I typically do that when I need to plan a sentence between uttering or writing it, as opposed to just speaking naturally and going with the flow. I suspect that what people with "aphantasia" do is in fact subvocalise.

A short compilation of ChatGPT screwing up pathetically:
https://chat.openai.com/share/a3c86a67-ff27-4ec9-8ffa-ebc8fb95e01c
https://chat.openai.com/share/96378835-0a94-43ce-a25b-f05e5646ec40
https://chat.openai.com/share/b5241b53-e4d8-4cab-9a81-87fa73d740ad
https://chat.openai.com/share/f924090e-a7eb-4b67-9e62-389db1f6c87b
https://chat.openai.com/share/025521ed-ac2b-4156-bd15-e74053f66cba
https://chatgpt.com/share/239b3d25-6ec1-4268-af0b-609a47c25d2c

On a less related note,
I, for one, don't think in language but in images. I can't imagine what it is like to think in language, if someone tells me to imagine a golden mountain, I picture a mountain coloured over in bright yellow.


On a more related note, Chomsky says that language is "a mode of creating and interpreting thought, it is a system of thought basically, it can be used to communicate". What thoughts are we interpreting? Our own thoughts? Do we need to do that? Perhaps language can be an effective way to connect our image of "cat" with all the real world examples of "cat" we have in our memory.
He goes on to say that the communicative efficiency is sacrificed in favour of the "efficient biological design of language", no clue what the latter would mean.

On an unrelated note, the sound is so goddamn low, I put the sound on a speaker and blasted it at 100% and I still could barely hear him.

I am enjoying this channel.

But the translation mistakenly implies some (Eastern) Roman Emperor was the cousin of a French king, which wasn't the case. The lyrics instead say "Emperaire, vos o aujatz, e·l reys de Frans'e sos cozis, e·l reys engles, coms peitavis: qu'al rey d'Espanha secorratz!" (King of France and his cousin English King), referring to Saint Louis the 9th of France and King Henry the 3rd of Angevin England.

In the first place, what must be assumed about a phenomenon such that a number can be assigned to it? The phenomenon must be assumed to have a qualitative core that remains the same while we count increments of change within it — Joshs

For my understanding of a mathematical universe, the qualitative is emergent from the quantitative when a mind interprets it, baggage, which the human mind is full of. Numbers are not assigned to things, but they are all that things are, and our scientific theories seem to support this to a certain extent. Fundamental particles are in fact a collection of numbers, among which mass, electric charge, isospin, weak hypercharge, spin, lepton number. You may say these are the qualitative core(s), but that is a simple rebuttal that suffers from the same gaps as just stopping at the fact that they are quantitative.

But what if the quality we label as ‘this ball’ never persisted from one moment to the next as the same qualitative thing? — Joshs

Ball would be a human label (baggage) emerging from a collection of things (atoms and such). It is always changing as everytime it bounces it loses atoms off its surface, but then we end up not in metaphysics but in a discussion of semantics — what is a chair?

What poststructuralist authors argue is that it is only by abstracting away, that is, by not noticing, the continual qualitative changes in the substrates of our counting that we end up with a universe of objects which appear to behave mathematically. — Joshs

Π: I imagine what poststructuralists think we are not noticing qualitatively about electrons or photons specifically.

The most insidious manner of forgetting is the progressive "repetition" of the same. One says the same with a constantly new indifference; the mode of saying and interpreting changes.

Everytime we think about A, A is different from the previously thought A. A only exists as it is different from B. These are useful ways of thinking about our cognition. But a lot of philosophy relies on the validity of the idea of repetition and of identity. We can throw those out at a very fundamental level, but at some point we will have to grant them if we want to progress.
There is no such thing as tissues, just a collection of cells that are made of molecules. Yes, but we can't derive biological laws from chemical laws due to the sheer complexity and also to possible emergent features. We must grant that there is such a thing as tissues if we want to come up with medicine.

a behavior the requires a non-numeric language in order to understand it. The need for this language, and its advantages over mathematical forms of description become more clear in the social sciences than in the natural sciences. This is not because we understand these phenomena less well than we do the physical realm. — Joshs

A very big issue with that view is that you could say sociology comes from psychology, which comes from neurology, which... from physics. But you can't say the converse, that physics comes from biology or that chemistry from neurology. The more derivative a field is, the more baggage it has, specifically because it goes away from the foundations of the universe. Another issue is that sociology and psychology are very unreliable (papers have very low reproducibility) while physics is almost always reliable.

You likely will not agree with any of this, but at least it may give you a better sense of why postmodernists have a bug up their ass about the mathematical grounding of science, truth as correctness and propositional logic. — Joshs

Oh no, I acquiesce to almost all of it, I just think that lots of it is playing the ultimate skeptic without providing a better framework to operate with; which is fair, but it does not stop us from making theories about the world around us. There is no such thing as qualities or quantities, as objects or science, as balls or speed, it is all derivative of the great Monad™ that is the Spinozean God, of which my solipsistic experience is a mode. Voilà, science is fake, and so are late Picasso's ugly paintings. Ok, but let's say all is not a Spinozean God...
The poststructuralist can claim all he wants ("every change in degree is simultaneously a difference in kind"), but until he proves Π, I can just ignore him on this topic because it has explanatory power for me to do so. Mathematical universe is a theory about the universe, it takes our perceptions as they are, without doubting our modes of cognition as they appear, without taking phenomenology into account.

Intentionality, however, is a widely accepted property possessed by conscious beings. The property of being directed towards something, as in behavior or speech about something. — jkop

Being conscious implies having subjective experience, which is related but different from having intentionality. Intentionality is typically defined as a certain type of conscious mental state, so intentionality requires consciousness either way.

As in “This bacterium is alive”? — Joshs

It seems that the statement "Consciousness dictates life" implies that only the things that are conscious are alive, which is wrong as many things are alive and not conscious. If the latter is denied, he is then saying that everything that is alive is conscious, which I refuted here:

Contrary to some posts, reaction to the environment as mediated by metabolism (chemistry) is not consciousness. That is at best called responsiveness. After all, throw water on a pile of salt. The salt is (chemically) responding to its environment by disappearing!
Consciousness is a cognitive process, so while it is debatable whether some beings with really primitive nervous systems such as worms are conscious, single-celled organism and even sponges are surely not conscious — we are not panpsychists, are we? — Lionino

It stands that, unless we admit of computers being conscious or souls or the like, the only relationship between being alive and consciousness is that the former is a necessary condition for the latter — a counterfactual if you will.

Derrida's post-structuralism certainly has nothing to do with critical race theory. — L'éléphant

Pretty much.

In a narrow sense, “Critical Theory” (often denoted with capital letters) refers to the work of several generations of philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. — SEP

In another, third sense, “critical theory” or sometimes just “Theory” is used to refer to work by theorists associated with psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (see these separate entries as well as the entry on postmodernism).

The confusion comes from the polysemy of terms such as "postmodernism", "critical", and "deconstructivist". Standard deconstructivists deconstruct. The intersectionalists deconstruct to build anew. Their methods may be alike (though surely not identical) but the goals are different.

CRT does not seem to talk about metaphysics, phenomenology or language, barely about existentialism. It does talk about power structures, about subversion, about oppression. In that sense it is clear that CRT has little to nothing to do with Derrida or Deleuze, but everything to do with the Frankfurt school.

Truth as correctness comes from comparing a model of the phenomenon to the phenomenon. If they correspond then the model is ‘true’ to the observed phenomenon. — Joshs

We can go with that.

abstraction may be involved in treating the model and the phenomenon as self-identical during the comparing process — Joshs

I can't know exactly what you are referring to here, as there is no concrete example of what 'abstraction' would mean; but it seems to be connected to Tegmark's concept of baggage, explained in the link — biology has more of it than physics, sociology has more than biology. The way we explain a physical theory in English is an abstraction of the phenomenon, while the mathematics of the phenomenon is pretty much the phenomenon itself lato sensu — when a neutron decays into a proton and an electron, the only things happening are numbers changing.

The question is whether we can come to a more fundamental understanding of modeler and phenomenon, subject and object than that which begins from the assumption that both hold still during the comparing process. Such an understanding does not invalidate mathematical truths, it shows them to be derivative and opens up new possibilities for understanding the world and ourselves — Joshs

I don't understand this.

But it is a simple argument that, if we redefine the word mind, solipsism in our vocabulary can be immediately tagged as 'false' as soon as a quick introspection shows there are things in my mind whose origin I don't know — Lionino

Now after some reflection, this argument appears to have a weakpoint that is what it means for ideas to have an "origin". By origin it would mean how the contents of my mind come to be, their cause that is. If I take a snapshot of my mind at a given moment, I cannot establish what the causes of {the ideas there} are without looking at a past snapshot, but then, the classic Humean question: what is the necessary connection between the idea at time t and at time t-1? Why can I trace the thought "I am hungry" to the subjective experience of hunger, but I can't trace the perception of a laptop to the experience of hunger, beyond a mere regularity?

I wasn't expecting that.

Boxian Skepticism — Gary Venter

Never heard of it.

all models are subject to replacement or revision — Gary Venter

Hardly an original idea.

Almost all heavy left-leaners like A.C Grayling, Justin Weinberg, Carrie Jenkins, Helena Cruz etc... largely, the 'culture war' related philosophers in my experience. — AmadeusD

I proud myself in replying "Never heard of it" when someone asks me something internet-people-related, so I will extend that to this cybersubspace too.

You have probably stepped on the ant equivalent of Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato. — Agree-to-Disagree

Good.

The universe isn’t math unless the ‘same thing different time’ applies to natural phenomena rather than our pretending to hold it still so as to calculate it. — Joshs

The universe is not math unless the regularity of the laws of physics is true? I have not read "Our Mathematical Universe" but I am convinced Tegmark addresses that.

This summary of Tegmark's mathematical universe is interesting:

Also.

That's going to depend — Bob Ross

Isn't it your position that morality is objective? So how does it depend? If morality refers to a verifiable fact outside of the mind (meaning of objective), surely it does not depend on opinion, ¿no?
It seems sufficiently transparent to me that either both nuking Germans and running a plane into the twin towers is moral (under this hypothetical), or neither are moral, or morality is not objective.

More abstractly — Bob Ross

Strange that to make an abstract point you had to use the industrial mass murder of Europeans as an example, instead of something like euthanising serial killers or castrating rapists.

I am a supporter of the US (by-at-large) — Bob Ross

I wonder why. Perhaps the same reason why such a moral perversion as the hypothetical and historical nuking of civilians is relativised. I said strange but I was not shocked at all; the longer I live the better I see what Evola meant with racial soul.

Yes, because so far you’ve proven yourself credible to make such a judgment. :roll: — Mikie

"Et tu?" Yes, more than any of you here who want to suspend society. You all have shown not to know basic statistics and physics as I have shown before several times (do I have to go quote all those times?), yet you want to talk about "the science™" as if such a phrase is not the utmost insult for centuries of development of natural philosophy. I, at the very least, still remember Bhaskara.

Why not go troll somewhere else. — Mikie

Sorry, I did not know this was a safe space for the religious. With this realisation I will now leave.

maybe bombing the Nazis pans out as a good action — Bob Ross

Considering the destruction of the Middle East and Southeast Asia by Yankees for decades and the political destabilisation of several American countries, bombing the twin towers and the Pentagon pans out as a good action too, insofar as it hit the financial and logistical center of those operations, thus working towards a universal harmony?

It would be also whimsical if you would celebrate on Valentine's day your love for suspiciously young looking girls. Another questionable love by every way.

Except for some idiot perverts, that is: