Comments

  • The fabric of our universe
    The argument essentially boils down to the idea that nested sequences made up of one or multiple platonic solids embody the structure or fabric of space. Maybe the fabric of space is flexible and these sacred platonic solids can be flexed or bent out of shape to respond high energy physics experiments for example. Dr. Robert Moon and Laurence Hecht are behind the proposal. — Paul S

    https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1987/eirv14n43-19871030/eirv14n43-19871030_026-new_hypothesis_shows_geometry_of.pdf
    Issue of EIR Volume 14, Number 43, October 30, 1987     — Paul S

    The linked article is about a "geometrical model of the atomic nucleus for the periodic table and the arrangement of extranuclear electrons." It doesn't talk about the structure of space.

    What do you think of this theory? Do you think space has structure or is simply a void?

    Well, what is there to think about? There is no theory, at least none in what you wrote. Yes, some theorists are working on theories of quantized space, but in order to discuss those one would need to actually understand them. And that understanding won't come from a few trippy pictures.
  • Infinite Speeds
    ↪fishfry
    By "any amount" I do not mean zero, of course - I thought that would be obvious.
  • Infinite Speeds
    To move infinite amount of spaces, infinite amount of time is required. — elucid

    Not if you are moving infinitely fast. If your speed is infinite over any amount of time, then you will have moved an infinite distance.

    Which is allowed in Newtonian mechanics, for example. You can "always already" move at an infinite speed, or you can accelerate discontinuously, or you can start at rest and continuously accelerate to infinity (in infinite time, of course). The math can bear it, the physics - not so much. By the way, the time-reverse of the latter scenario is one of the ways in which determinism can be violated in a Newtonian universe.
  • How to compare truth conductive property of coherentism and foundationalism?
    ↪Outlander
    Coherentism
  • Morality is overrated and evolutionarily disadvantageous
    ↪baker
    Frankly, the only reason I responded is that I saw your posts before and you didn't strike me as a fool. So I wonder what's going on. Is this thread some kind of social experiment? Are you not feeling well?
  • Morality is overrated and evolutionarily disadvantageous
    ↪baker
    No, thanks. I have my share of unpleasantness in my own life, as do we all. Get over yourself.
  • Morality is overrated and evolutionarily disadvantageous
    Given this state of facts, the only conclusion is that morality is overrated and evolutionarily disadvantageous.
    Why bother about other people, their lives and their property, when you can get away with endangering and damaging it.

    I dare you to prove this wrong.     — baker

    Frankly, this is such a dumb non sequitur, I wonder why anyone would bother. You make a sweeping, simplistic statement about a complex issue that has been a subject of research for more than a century in several scientific fields - all on the basis of one anecdote of some petty neighbor squabble? Really?
  • intersubjectivity
    It seems to suppose that the preexisting aspect is represented in words and matched up against another preexisting aspect in another subjective consciousness.

    Why shouldn't the sharing bring the aspect into being, as it where - the child learns the aspect in the process of learning to talk in a certain way. A child does not have a notion of "four" in its mind that it learns to match up with the word "four"; it learns what four is by moving beads, colouring squares and using the word.

    My supposition, following Wittgenstein, is that what we call "concepts" are not things in the mind to which we attach words, but learned ways of manipulating the world, including using words.     — Banno

    If you only care about that which can be put into words, then of course you have no place for anything else. This is a rather facile conclusion though, already implied by the linguistic framing. But what is left outside the frame?

    I recently read an article about taste and smell - the neglected senses that suddenly came into prominence during the pandemic. In most "civilized" cultures we have frustratingly limited ways of describing what something tastes or smells like. Once we have exhausted primary tastes - sweet, sour, bitter - and a few vague adjectives for odors, the best we can do is compare to a known example ("tastes like chicken"). Specialists and enthusiasts, such as sommeliers, develop their own vocabularies for describing tastes and smells that are specific to their interests. And it has been noted that there is a causal connection between an expanded vocabulary and an enhanced awareness. That is to say, having a word for something makes you more attentive to that thing. But this linguistic connection only goes so far. No one would deny that we can resolve more than the few smells and tastes that we can more-or-less awkwardly name; in fact, experiments that capitalize on detecting small differences show that our sense of smell is far more acute than we usually give it credit for.

    "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent" is a truism. But what about all those things that we can't or won't talk about?
  • The relationship between descriptive and prescriptive domains
    where people fall in their views on the relationship between these two domains. — Pfhorrest

    Facts are what prompts and couches our moral responses. In my experience, most people don't care about the alleged gap between the two, because in their minds they are linked by firmly held intuitions and moral theories. So things - events, situations, people, anything towards which we can have a moral attitude - may as well have inherent moral properties. I am not sure where that would fit in your classification, but it's considered to be a form of moral realism.
  • Universals as signs of ignorance
    ↪frank
    The character of William in Eco's novel is said to be based on or inspired by William of Occam, "the father of nominalism," so it makes sense that he would take a dim view of universals as a deficient, degraded knowledge of the singular.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    ↪Joshs
    That's what you think you were doing? OK.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    ↪Joshs
    Uh, maybe try this again when you are sober? Otherwise I think we are done here.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    For Kelly, sense making is inherently in the direction of the greater good in that it entails our acting not only in our own best interest in situations but also in the best interest of other as far as we understand their intent , motive, point of view and needs. — Joshs

    Can you explain? The way it sounds to me is that every individual always seeks to accommodate everyone else around them to the best of their understanding and ability. But that can't be true.

    I understand that we are constantly construing the world in order to make sense of it. And since our world includes other people, we include them into our construals. This is indeed where ethics comes into play.

    So from Kelly’s vantage , the other can’t do wrong morally. Every situation is like that of the bear mauling. Our blaming the other is just our failure to understand his actions from his own point of view. — Joshs

    Kelly wouldn’t label the act as ‘wrong’, ‘criminal’ because he would believe that from the robbers’ perspective the act WAS sufffused with a sense of ethical primacy. — Joshs

    This doesn't make sense to me. The preposterous notion that everyone at all times is "suffused with a sense of ethical primacy" isn't even the worst of it - let's grant that for the sake of an argument. The most confusing part is what I pointed out earlier: an attempt to construe moral valuation as an objective, deperspectivized view from nowhere. One is supposed to evaluate a situation from everyone's perspective, not just their own. If you disapprove of someone's actions, but that person (being "suffused with a sense of ethical primacy") takes the opposite stance, then your two positions cancel out and no one is either right or wrong! Whose construct is this? What does it have to do with how people actually think?

    "The damned thing about life is that everybody has their reasons," said a character in Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game." True enough, and understanding other people's reasons certainly affects our judgement of their actions. But understanding, when it happens, doesn't displace moral valuation, much less replace one's valuation with someone else's.

    You say that in a moral act , “whether the act was objectively, universally wrong is simply beside the point”. But objectivity, and universality do come into play in our very definition of wrongdoing and blamefulness. For instance, in your example of the robbers, your assessment that what they did was wrong pre-supposed not only that the robbers did the act , but that they intentionally meant to cause harm and to steal what wasn’t theirs. So your definition of wrong implies intent. Many older tribal cultures did not include intent in their definition of moral wrong because their psychological understanding did not grasp the concept of intent. It is a more recent empirical discovery . So a certain culturally and scientifically informed notion of wrong as requiring psychological intent is not beside the point in your example, but an important part of your definition of blameworthiness. — Joshs

    Let's take this in parts. How much does intent matter in assessing culpability? I am rather skeptical of your claim that some cultures don't grasp the concept of intent; or rather, I am skeptical of the relevance of this claim. Attributing intent is such a basic cognitive skill that it is not even specific to the human species. Whether one can articulate a concept of intent doesn't matter; what matters is being able to read it and act on it. But I take your point that the role of intent in assigning blame can vary, and that culture has a part in this.

    Now, how does this observation relate to what I said?

    I hold the perpetrators morally responsible for what they did, because (a) they did it, and (b) what they did was wrong. Whether the act was objectively, universally wrong is simply beside the point; all that matters, as far as me holding people morally responsible, is how I relate to the incident. — SophistiCat

    There is a fact of the matter that I am holding someone responsible for an action. How I came to this conclusion is no longer relevant - it already happened. Whether someone else in my place would have come to the same conclusion doesn't matter either. I am me, not someone else. I don't need to integrate over every mind in the history of the world before I conclude anything.

    So there is a wide range of viewpoints on what constitutes moral wrong — Joshs

    This isn't remotely controversial. So what? A modest conclusion that such diversity of opinion may suggest, in the absence of any generally recognized moral truthmakers, is that there are no objective moral facts - only facts about moral attitudes. But that isn't an argument against anyone's moral attitude.

    Given the fact that in an important sense, Gergen , Foucault and a host of other postmodern thinkers do believe that all acts of criminality are performed by actors with a sense of ethical primacy, and you clearly disagree with that position — Joshs

    Well, yes, it's a ridiculous position. But even in an imaginary world in which this was true, I don't see what difference this would make to the matter of assigning blame.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    How don’t we save a little time here and you just tell me as succinctly as possible what philosophical position on morality you hold. — Joshs

    You are kidding, right?

    To simplify , let’s just say that you reject postmodern philosophies in general , to the extent that they all claim to go beyond morality — Joshs

    No, let's not. I see you aren't really interested in the conversation. That's fine, the thread has been derailed anyway.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    What I’m talking about , what the whole
    point of the OP is, is that how people ground their claims in terms of what ‘is’ has everything to
    do with how violently and punitively they treat other who violate their standards of what ought to be . What a person assumes ‘is’ in terms of an ontology of nature , the physical or the human, is profoundly connected with how they formulate their ‘oughts’ and the level
    of tolerance , the violent and punitive character of the enforcement of those oughts.     — Joshs

    Oughts provide motivation for action - for carrying out their imperatives. Either you have moral beliefs and thus have these motivations, or you are amoral - there is no other way. Tolerance towards moral transgressions, the will to punish transgressors, the methods of enforcement - these depend on temperament and politics, not on the nature of morality.

    Gergen’s version of social constructivism does away with the ‘fuel’ forviolent retribution and punishment , for righteous indignation , by removing the ability to believe that another’s choices were a deviation from a correct path. There is no ‘ought’ for Gergen for the same reason that there is no factual realism. — Joshs

    Right, the only way to remove fuel - not just for violent retribution, but for any moral action, good or bad - is to renounce moral beliefs altogether. But, except for a few psychopaths, no one is actually willing to do that, whatever theories they espouse in public.

    We have a moral realism if we , like Sophisticat, are a moral realist. — Joshs

    I am curious, if you are actually reading my responses, what in what I wrote made you think that I am a moral realist?

    What is common among PC culture is what Gergen is accusing it of , a blameful moralism based on a belief in a normative standard that is claimed to be superior or preferred to standards of other normative cultures. — Joshs

    This is confused. A belief, whatever its nature, origin and grounding, is always held to be superior to alternatives, however tentatively or transiently. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be a belief. (One can take a pluralistic stance on some issue, but then any isolated strand within that pluralistic web would not be an accurate representation of the whole.)
  • Which philosopher deals with conflicting world views and develops a heterogenous solution?
    ↪Trachtender
    In English-language literature a good keyword to search for would be pluralism. I don't know if there is an all-encompassing meta-meta theory of the sort that you outline, but there certainly are pluralistic positions in more specific areas - epistemic pluralism, ontological pluralism, pluralist theories of causation and so forth.

    Here is one example: Epistemic Pluralism, Annalisa Coliva & Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (eds.), Palgrave Macmillan 2017. Some of the papers in this collection are available on the web.


    Ohh and I would not advice listening to counter punch — Tobias

    And yet here you are doing just that...
  • Do probabilities avoid both cause and explanation?
    ↪Caldwell
    Gravitating many-body systems are chaotic in the technical sense.
  • Do probabilities avoid both cause and explanation?
    Chaos theory isn't really about disorder. Chaotic systems are completely deterministic, but extremely sensitive to their initial state and any perturbations. If gravity, for instance, was chaotic, an object of 1 gram might happily rest on the surface of the earth while one of .99999999 gram might be catapulted toward the sun. — Kenosha Kid

    Gravity is chaotic!
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    ↪Joshs
    Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. — Gergen

    Getting back to the topic, it's interesting to note that the constructionist, according to Gergen, is an objectivist despite herself, inasmuch as she grounds morality not in her subjective judgements of right and wrong, but in a social construct, because a subjective social construct would be an oxymoron. "Transcendental" or not, social norms exist out in the world for anyone to observe.

    And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition. — Gergen

    And if morality was grounded in some other foundation, then what? The complaint would be the same, only replace "traditions" with whatever moral foundation Gergen thinks would be more satisfactory.

    This is the problem with so-called objective morality: if moral responsibility rests on the moral foundation and that foundation is located outside the individual, then the individual doesn't bear any moral responsibility - she is just a passive receiver of norms, not a moral agent.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    That's what I thought, and what I was talking about. When you're not making a moral assessment, but just an assessment about something like ice cream flavors, you don't judge others as wrong just because they disagree with you. — Pfhorrest

    Because they don't disagree with me. Look, this is a silly argument and it doesn't have much to do with the topic, as far as I can see.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    ↪Pfhorrest
    No.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    Do you agree that moral claims cannot justify themselves to the extent that they attempt to ground themselves on the basis of anything outside of contingent normative practices? — Joshs

    This is a classic naturalistic fallacy, an instance of is/ought confusion. The natural origin of morality is not the same as the grounding for moral claims. A constructivist may believe (rightly or wrongly) that normative beliefs come about as a result of social construction. But that is neither here nor there as far as what that same constructivist believes ought to be the case.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    I would consider other people's assessments incorrect if and only if they are different from mine. — SophistiCat

    The point is that you don’t do that for all assessments about all things — Pfhorrest

    You are confused. Of course I do - how could I not? Assuming, of course, that they are assessments of the same thing.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    But whether you think that its wrongness is objective/universal, rather than just a matter of opinion, is a part of how you relate to it.

    I don't like strawberries. But I understand that liking strawberries or not is just a matter of opinion; I don't think anybody is incorrect in their assessment of strawberries just because they like them while I don't. But if someone asserts that your friend being beaten and robbed was perfectly fine and not wrong at all, you wouldn't just take that like you would take a disagreement in food tastes, right?     — Pfhorrest

    This example is a red herring. The contrast here is between moral and amoral (morally neutral) actions, not between moral simpliciter and objectively/universally moral (whatever that might mean).

    You would think their assessment of the morality of that situation is incorrect, not just different from yours, no? — Pfhorrest

    I would consider other people's assessments incorrect if and only if they are different from mine. This is a trivial tautology; you can't base any argument on it.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    Give me an example of what it could mean to hold someone morally responsible without a commitment to moral objectivism. — Joshs

    I will humor you with an example, if you insist. Someone I know was beaten and robbed in the street. That person suffered a concussion and a broken bone as a result. I hold the perpetrators morally responsible for what they did, because (a) they did it, and (b) what they did was wrong. Whether the act was objectively, universally wrong is simply beside the point; all that matters, as far as me holding people morally responsible, is how I relate to the incident.

    Once I have given a moral assessment of an act, it would simply be incoherent for me to then say that no one is morally responsible for it. An act can only be morally charged if it is performed by a moral actor, and a moral actor is morally responsible by definition. No one would be morally responsible if the person in my example was mauled by a bear instead of being assaulted by hoodlums. But that is why we wouldn't qualify that as a moral act - it would be an accident.

    More specifically , give me an example of what it would mean to hold someone morally accountable if we follow Gergen’s perspective:

    is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy?     — Joshs

    I intentionally led with an example that was not of this sort (I think we can all agree that violent street criminals are not "suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.") I can supply another, but my interpretation won't be much different. What matters is that someone did something blameworthy in my assessment. The actor may have a different take on it. You or Gergen may have a different take on it. But moral valuation is not a view from nowhere - it is personal. So you ask me and I give you mine; it can't be someone else's.

    Can we hold someone morally accountable if we believe that they acted with the best and most noble intentions , and that their ‘failing’ was not one of bad intent but rather of a limitation in their worldview that they couldn’t have been expected to recognize? This is Gergen’s perspective and one I agree with. Do you agree with it? — Joshs

    To some extent. Moral valuation is not a simple function of the facts of the case. Knowing the background of an act and the actors, sympathizing with their circumstances and empathizing with their feelings can influence how we assess culpability. What I don't agree with is that moral vision must be aperspectival, that as long as someone else sees things differently than me, I am not entitled to my own point of view.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    Could you elaborate on why it is a strained comparison? The point I am trying to make is that in order to assess moral blame one must have a justification for correctness that goes beyond mere local consensus.That is , one must believe local norma are rooted in something more universal. — Joshs

    I don't want to digress into philosophy of science and falsificationism. I think you made your point clearly as it is. What I don't understand is why you think that holding someone morally responsible requires a commitment to moral objectivism. I haven't picked up any clues from what you've said here.

    I really want to know how YOU make use of moral valuation in your own life to assess blame. Give me an example of a moral claim that you have made recently concerning some issue of significance and how you ground that claim. That will give us something concrete to go on in the discussion. — Joshs

    I am puzzled by this request. How would it help the discussion? The common ground for both moral valuation and attribution of agency is me. I may or may not perform some moral reasoning in arriving at the conclusion in any given scenario, but as long as some conclusion is reached on both counts, I just don't see how I could go on to deny that someone did something praiseworthy or blameworthy.
  • Is there such a thing as luck?
    Umm.... Gattier problems do not seem to suggest that coming to believe the truth by sheer luck is incompatible with knowing. For example, I believe that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and I believe this only because I was lucky enough to be taught that in school. — TheHedoMinimalist

    Well, of course, if you search far and wide you'll find some luck being involved in some way in anything that ever happened in your life, but when people are talking about "epistemic luck" they specifically mean luck as a proximate and significant factor in acquiring a belief that seems to undermine its legitimacy. Like in Gettier cases.

    Anyway, I wasn't going to get into the discussion of Gettier - just pointing to what is probably the best known discourse concerning epistemic luck.
  • Can God do anything?
    ↪jamalrob
    Wouldn't have this problem if someone didn't unban this idiot.
  • Is there such a thing as luck?
    A platitude in epistemology is that coming to believe the truth by sheer luck is incompatible with knowing. — IEP

    I don’t think I’ve ever heard that sort of view being articulated before. — TheHedoMinimalist

    Gettier Problems
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    Yes, but the issue here is how such notions as responsibility and agency are to be understood from a social constructionist perspective. — Joshs

    Is it really? You disclaimed that you are not a social constructionist; I understood your post as an invitation to comment on a specific thesis that you did endorse, not on social constructionist position as a whole.

    By contrast , social constructionism abandons the notion of correctness as conformity to empirical objectivity. — Joshs

    Well, my response didn't assume or imply empirically objective moral standards, so I am not sure how this is relevant. As I said, all that is required for assigning praise and blame is (a) moral valuation and (b) personal responsibility. This should be compatible with most positions on the nature of morality.

    A useful comparison would be in the realm of philosophy of science. — Joshs

    Frankly, I find this to be a strained comparison, and I am not sure what point you are trying to make here with respect to blameworthiness.
  • Do probabilities avoid both cause and explanation?
    I don't deny this, and the use of probabilities in applied science is well known even in schools. They cover scenarios where events happen in uncontrolled conditions, but they still use Laws which I understood to be formulated on a deterministic basis.... which is why the senior scientists that I have heard lecturing default to a deterministic viewpoint, even if they acknowledge the experimental results show multiple outcomes for the factors they are monitoring. — Gary Enfield

    Historically, Law nomenclature has been used to refer to important regularities that can be formulated in a single statement or equation. You will find such laws both in fundamental physics and in applied sciences. And within that context a law can express a fundamental feature of a theory (e.g. Newton's laws of motion) or a phenomenological relationship (e.g. Hooke's law). Laws can be either deterministic (Maxwell's laws) or probabilistic (Boltzmann's distribution law).
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    Constructivism claims that all assertions of supposed facts are in actuality just social constructs, ways of thinking about things put forth merely in an attempt to shape the behavior of other people to some end, in effect reducing all purportedly factual claims to normative ones. — Pfhorrest

    Well, one can be a social constructionist about some specific area of human life, such as morality; it doesn't have to be a slippery slope. Being a constructionist about games, for example, wouldn't even be particularly controversial.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    ↪Joshs
    Blame is tightly linked to moral judgement, and this is not at all specific to identity politics. For the purposes of making a distinction, we can identity two stages of moral judgement: first, judging some action as praiseworthy or blameworthy (or neutral), and then assigning praise or blame to those responsible, where appropriate. One may argue that the second stage is not moral as such, and that it is detachable from the first. One can pass the judgement but withhold the blame.

    In reality though, the two stages - judging and assigning praise or blame - often bleed into one another (for better or for worth). More importantly, withholding praise and blame implies not holding people responsible for their actions, and that is a dubious position*. By not holding people responsible for their actions we rob them of their agency, dehumanize them.

    * I should emphasize that withholding blame, for example, is not the same as forgiving: only the guilty can be forgiven.
  • Do probabilities avoid both cause and explanation?
    I was beginning to get worried that this subject, which is a fundamental underpinning to most philosophical debates, would not be taken seriously. — Gary Enfield

    To be honest, your post is rife with misconceptions. Right from the start:

    The Laws of Physics and Chemistry are formulated through the use of traditional mathematics that provide only one specific outcome for any precise starting point/cause. — Gary Enfield

    One can perhaps get such an impression from high school science classes, but that is because they cover very basic material, and probability is taught little if at all at that stage. In reality there are plenty of probabilistic relationships and equations in physics, chemistry and other sciences.

    Yet in recent years younger scientists have tried to argue that true randomness does exist in the world due to the findings of Quantum Mechanics. — Gary Enfield

    Uh, younger scientists? You mean like Heisenberg and Bohr? Just how old are you? :lol:

    Seriously though, fundamental physicists do seem to favor determinism. Take so-called black hole information paradox: the reason it is thought of as a paradox is that loss of information implies indeterminism - the kind of indeterminism that doesn't go away in a suitable interpretation of quantum mechanics, because it violates QM's fundamental unitarity.

    But I am not sure that that attitude generalizes across sciences - even across all of physics, of which fundamental physics is a rather small niche.


    For philosophers who have tackled causality and explanation, probability is not necessarily problematic. Indeed, some theories of causation are explicitly probabilistic: the basic idea is that causes raise the probability of their effects. One well-known modern development of that idea with practical applications is causal Bayesian network.
  • Gender rates in this forum
    Yes, I agree, it would not be a result of any scientific value but I find it interesting at least to see if my prejudices and assumptions are correct. This is to say that I'm expecting that more than 90% of people attracted by philosophy are men. — Raul

    A quick Google found me this:

    Gender Distribution of Degrees in Philosophy: "In 2014, 31% of philosophy degree completers at the bachelors and doctorate levels were women, and 28% of master’s degree recipients were women"

    For comparison, Gender Distribution of Degrees in English Language and Literature: "Women have earned a majority of English language and literature degrees at the bachelor’s and master’s degree levels at least since the late 1960s, and reached a majority among doctoral degree recipients in 1981."

    (These stats are for US colleges.)

    As I said, if you want and can delete it go ahead. — Raul

    Don't mind him, he is not a mod.
  • Gender rates in this forum
    This could trigger a good discussion on: are man more attracted to philosophy than woman, the other way around? — Raul

    The population that posts on an internet forum is not representative of the global population in a number of ways, including gender. Besides, a dozen data points do not a statistics make.
  • A Technical Definition of Time
    My assumption is that temporality "is" something, that it exists as somehow instantiated in substance, not an empty, null set concept, and hence not any more "circular" than matter. — Enrique

    I am OK with the idea that time is immanent in the physical world, whether we think of it as fundamental or (as some hypothesize) emergent. But that doesn't avoid the issue of circularity, which refers to attempts to define time in terms of other, non-temporal concepts. It seems that all such concepts through which we try to define or explicate time are already entangled with temporality in our understanding: clock, process, change, rate, periodicity, simultaneity,synchronization (obviously), coordination.
  • A Technical Definition of Time
    All definitions are tautologously circular — Enrique

    You are misusing both words. "Ps are Qs" is a definition, it is not a tautology (it isn't true by definition), and it is not circular (it does not rely on the meaning of the definiendum). A definition reduces a concept to one or more independently known concepts. The problem with defining time (real, physical time, not a mathematical abstraction) is that any other concepts to which you attempt to reduce it already depend on time for their understanding. So the best you can do is contextualize time, connect it to related concepts. It won't be a definition though. But then why do you need to define time anyway?

    my definition's strong point is that it is maximally generalized — Enrique

    Your definition is incomprehensible. I guess you started with an idea of a clock and then tried to compress it into something that sounds like fancy academic-speak.
  • A Technical Definition of Time
    Time: systems primarily sculpted towards the role of coordinating systems that are divergent enough to be deficient in self-coordination. — Enrique

    Given your subsequent elaboration, I guess what this horrible mess is trying to get at is a notion of a clock, in its most general sense. In other words, time is what clocks measure. This isn't wrong, but like all other attempts at bootstrapping the notion of time, it does not escape circularity.
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    Name calling isn't helpful. — Book273

    Yeah no, it's totally appropriate.

    Here is cumulative COVID death rate in Sweden and its neighbors:
    Sweden:  1:942
Finland: 1:8734
Norway:  1:9835
Denmark: 1:3050
    Same for USA and Canada:
    USA:    1:804
Canada: 1:2031

    Of course, Book273 has already made it known that he's totally fine with there being more death and suffering, so this appeal to statistics is not only dishonest but hypocritical as well.
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