Thanks for the link. Puzzling, isn't it? Beyond my pay grade even though I'm a math person.

As for the opposite extreme, the existence of a volume of space in which there is no change of any kind is probably equally unlikely. Even emptiness seems to be flooded with fields of various kinds.

When I look at the spacetime metric it appears that where there is no (Euclidean) movement it is possible for there to be no time elapsed. But my understanding of this is shallow, even though I taught a course in metric spaces years ago.

The way in which this symmetry breaks is kind of the goal of my investigations into this subject. — punos

@apokrisis could assist you in this. He enjoys breaking symmetries. :smile:

So Hillary climbed a set of subjective experiences — Banno

The pertinent question then is, did Tenzing Norgay share that ineffable experience? Could they talk about it, making it effable?

Is there any similar survey of mathematicians? The comparison might be amusing.. — Banno

I'm not aware of any, but there may be. I've never associated with a fellow mathematician who had more than a passing curiosity about the CH. Set theory and transfinites in particular were not applicable to our studies in complex analysis. From what I've seen on arXiv.org there's not a lot of current interest in this subject.

Determinate? Well, you can tack it on as another axiom to ZFC I suppose.

A new survey of 1785 English-speaking philosophers — Banno

Why is the year 1785 considered special? :chin:

:cool:

When might time come to a halt? A photon moving at light speed experiences no passage of time due to complete dilation, and a hypothetical environment in which there are absolutely no physical changes. So, complete stillness and complete speed = no time. Forget seasonal changes that suggest "circular" time or any such geometrical analogies.

If we do not infer a person is conscious of him or herself, then we assume that person is sleeping. — Manuel

Anyone immersed in a demanding activity, like an athlete performing, loses much if not most awareness of themselves.

One person reference the pyramids as to why our future gives us the technology to create the pyramids? — TiredThinker

Well, he's a limo driver and not a scientist !

Thought you'd like to see a host of "ideas" :cool:

What you describe is not experimental philosophy, it is science - psychology or maybe sociology. I think when science broke off from philosophy, it took all the empirical stuff with it — T Clark

:100: :party: :clap:

↪jgill
My dad was in diapers when he was 20? — Hanover

Is that a question? I hope he wasn't. But he could be now, being about my age!

The visitor may not have the same skill as the gymnast in performing a gymnastic routine, but they can share in the experience. — RussellA

Is empathy the same as effability ? No. Even then the spectator can only partially "identify" with the performer. When Alex Honnold climbed El Cap in Yosemite a few years ago without a rope the world got an opportunity to indulge in a fantasy of the imagination while watching the Oscar winning film, Free Solo. But as a long time climber I could "feel" his moves with a depth not available to a casual spectator. You probably have had similar experiences watching something you have intimate knowledge of.

A long line of Hanovers went to UGA. One's now in Colorado. Son, is that you? — Hanover

Not me, dad. I flew off the campus into the USAF back in 1958, when your daddy was in diapers. :smile:

I need to go vote in a few days. It's between Warnock and Walker. It's a difficult choice. I sort of like the idea of a pro-life candidate who has paid for a few of his girlfriends' abortions. Something just rings true about that. — Hanover

Yes, a form of demonstrated honesty about the nature of politics. I wonder how many ex-professional athletes have served in congress in the last few years? Walker is from my alma mater. :sad:

From Wikipedia, an interesting note:

Daniel Dennett identifies four properties that are commonly ascribed to qualia.[2] According to these, qualia are:
1. ineffable – they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any means other than direct experience.
2. intrinsic – they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience's relation to other things.
3. private – all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
4. directly or immediately apprehensible by consciousness – to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.

Human form B does not need to express their private subjective experiences in words for me to have an almost absolute belief that their private subjective experiences are the same as mine. — RussellA

Amazing how you can share the experience of a complicated gymnastic routine just by watching. Eons ago if I had only known that I needn't actually do the gymnastics to experience the flow and other sensations that gymnasts have; I could have saved myself a lot of muscle aches and bruises by just mind melding with an actual athlete.

And to think this thread took flight from what I wrote as a joke. :roll:

:clap:

Are books still considered accurate sources of knowledge? Wikipedia seems to think so. And I find this amusing having been involved with numerous new books on a particular subject (not math) and having seen multiple mistakes that were not caught and removed by editors and reviewers. Just because something appears in a book is no guarantee it is trustable. But I suppose the search for accuracy has to end somewhere.

Does anyone buy hard cover encyclopedias? Do they still exist? Is Encyclopaedia Britannica more accurate than Wikipedia? It doesn't seem so.

Is any of this thread relevant to teenagers on social media or playing video games? Telling them not to read a book is whistling in the wind.

it could also be said that "actions are words", in which case putting our private subjective experiences into actions is a form of language, and therefore not ineffable — RussellA

Raging out and attacking someone or something? (just joking)

Actions constitute much of what is ineffable. Ice skaters, gymnasts, climbers, . . . An acquaintance of mine, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, from many years ago studied flow as a psychologist. Expressing this condition among participants of these sports is done as shared experiences, not words.

Love the way ineffable is being picked apart by forumites !

What paradigms have been broken, altered, or introduced by philosophers in that time period? No fair citing physicists or other scientists who have speculated about their subjects, just philosophers known for their contributions, those ideas familiar to the general public. — jgill

A century ago, the Newtonian/Euclidean conception of the universe was shattered. And set theory finally enabled us to be certain that 1 + 1 = 2. Doesn't get much more fundamental. — alan1000

Nice try. :cool: Set theory for the general public is arranging dinner plates and counting silverware.

Unfortunate for the Repubs that Trump appointed those conservatives on the Supreme Court. The progression is clear now, with Roe vs Wade overturned and members of the party jumping on a bandwagon of repression like that of the Taliban. Oh, wait, the Taliban are less restrictive than many Republicans, giving a woman 17 weeks to make up her mind.

The Grand Old Party needs to pull itself out of the middle ages.

Yes, but even uber-logical mathematicians work on the basis of a metaphysical worldview, implicitly assuming the existence (being qua being) of non-physical mathematical objects, that they mentally manipulate as-if real things — Gnomon

True enough. Many ideas pop out of the subconscious before the "uber-logical" aspect comes into play.

I've long considered mathematics a metaphysical realm with varying degrees of reality. Rates of change, derivatives, are close to physical reality, whereas infinitesimals are out there towards the other end of the spectrum.

not specific inert lumps of Objective Matter. :smile: — Gnomon

I try to stay away from that odious clump. :cool:

. . . parasites! All of them are bloodsuckers. No more! — 0 thru 9

Do I detect a note of sarcasm? :roll:

that motivated frustrated Feynman to argue that physicists should not play the role of feckless philosophers ; instead, just "shut up and calculate" — Gnomon

I thought it was Feynman, also, but it wasn't: David Mermin

But scientists are human beings, whose reasoning may sometimes be used in service to emotions, including comfortable prior beliefs & paradigms. So they can't help having feelings about their facts. And it's those ineffable Feelings that . . . — Gnomon

It's tough being a leading edge physicist these days. At least mathematicians get to create their weirdnesses and don't have to attempt to interpret what nature throws at them. :chin:

Escaping the cave is no longer a metaphor, the cave is urbanism, suburbanism, institutional. — introbert

To return to an existence as wild animals? To live on a commune in tranquility with nature? Even that is institutional. An escape from rationality into chaos? What are you suggesting? Is your OP a deep philosophical message or just a pleasing analogy?

Ineffable concepts are usually expressed indirectly by metaphors & analogies. — Gnomon

Yes, but doing so has the drawback of inferring false information while attempting to make an arcane subject accessible to the average person. Here are two examples of existing realities that are difficult to convey with words, hence a bit ineffable, where popularization by science writers is misleading. However, no harm is done.

Virtual "particles"

"Curved" space

So, it's left to Philosophy to dabble in the ineffable & mental (metaphysical) features of reality. — Gnomon

It's not easy to talk about something that can't be expressed in words. Good luck.

you are not entitled to anything by virtue of being in this world — introbert

Universal basic income provided by the state? Is this part of the "truth"?

Logical positivism was put into question by the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy — Joshs

Thanks for your answers. I've been reading about LP, finding I knew very little about it.

What paradigms have been broken, altered, or introduced by philosophers in that time period? No fair citing physicists or other scientists who have speculated about their subjects, just philosophers known for their contributions, those ideas familiar to the general public.

But, place a whole bunch of philosophers knowledgeable of science and scientists knowledgeable of philosophy in the same room, and one might stand a chance — javra

:up:

Because it is due to physicists that we hold our modern notions of causality and identity on which modern physics is contingent? — javra

I think physicists are struggling with that issue right now. Where best to look to look for progress, philosophers arguing the definition of words? Do you really think that whether the universe is deterministic or not can be solved by philosophers - not scientists - debating?

The various interpretations of QM are metaphysics by physicists. String theory is metaphysical until such time it is suitably altered to prove or disprove, at which time it becomes physics.

As an empirical science, physics will always make use of foundational metaphysical concepts - and so will always be grounded in metaphysics in general. — javra

As practiced by physicists, themselves. Without a lot of help from metaphysicians outside the science. Or at least that's how I see it.

Nice discussion of the physics related to time. Thanks. :cool:

Interesting. I noted the mention of a "computational metaphysics"... apparently an attempt at a "formal ontology" — Banno

At least the people at Stanford are attempting to put a little meat on this bone:

Computational metaphysics

Can they be productive in the way that debates among competing approaches within the economic, political or psychological sciences are productive without producing a clear ‘winner’, expect perhaps in the eye of the beholder? — Joshs

Good question. Discussing politics - beyond the tribal aspect - can have significant social consequences in that it may cause others to rethink their positions, although no clear winner. So perhaps tribal politics analogizes metaphysics. Just a passing thought.

When they're [scientists] explaining their theories, sure. But they're also comparing their just-so stories with each other and providing experiments which support the stories in a way which is very appealing to the critical mind. Do metaphysicians have anything comparable? — coolazice

The Stanford Metaphysics Lab attempts to put an element of solidity into the study of metaphysics, a topic of endless and entirely non-productive discussions.

The theory of abstract objects is a metaphysical theory. Whereas physics attempts a systematic description of fundamental and complex concrete objects, metaphysics attempts a systematic description of fundamental and complex abstract objects.

(Stanford Metaphysics Lab)

This article describes the famous debate about time between Bergson and Einstein in 1922.

Most important, then began the period when the relevance of philosophy declined in the face of the rising influence of science.

(Canales)

Instead, let us imagine an infinitely small piece of elastic, contracted, if that were possible, to a mathematical point. Let us draw it out gradually in such a way as to bring out of the point a line which will grow progressively longer. Let us fix our attention not on the line as line, but on the action which traces it. Let us consider that this action, in spite of its duration, is indivisible if one supposes that it goes on without stopping; that, if we intercalate a stop in it, we make two actions of it instead of one and that each of these actions will then be the indivisible of which we speak; that it is not the moving act itself which is never indivisible, but the motionless line it lays down beneath it like a track in space. Let us take our mind off the space subtending the movement and concentrate solely on the movement itself, on the act of tension or extension, in short, on pure mobility. This time we shall have a more exact image of our development in duration.

(Bergson)

For Bergson the concept of "duration" - inadequately defined - speaks to the continuity of time, similar to the continuity of the real line vs the line as an uncountable collection of dimensionless points (though mathematically, "separable" - having a countable dense subset).

:clap: :cool:

The derivative dy/dx does not in itself involve a time variable. However, that's just putting off the argument whether time must pass for change to occur. The change in x, dx, may or may not involve time. I've been dabbling in generalities of dynamical systems for a long time, and step by step time is there as variables change.

The computer screen example I gave is really all about how something has changed, rather than change itself.

Your thought experiment read simply, but the instructions were not that clear to me — Watchmaker

Sorry for presenting it. :sad: