Comments

  • Introducing Karen Barad’s New Materialism
    Shallow analysis:

    When a group convenes and creates an "object", let's say a social movement, in the process of intra-acting, there is entanglement plus creation.

    When two players rack the billiards and play a game of pool, there is intra-acting and entanglement, but the eight ball is the same old eight ball.
  • The von Neumann–Wigner interpretation and the Fine Tuning Problem
    I think the notion of ‘cause’ in ‘what causes wave collapse’ is problematical. The wave function is not physical, either, it’s simply a distribution of probabilities. It gives the answer to ‘where is the particle’ prior to it being measured in terms of probabilities. When the measurement is taken, it’s not longer a matter of probabilities but a certainty. That’s the ‘collapse’.Wayfarer

    :up:
  • Kripke's skeptical challenge
    I wrote a simple program for my computer, following the rules of arithmetic originating with the principle of succession from set theory. When I ask the program to add two numbers it follows the rule I have instilled.

    New rule: replace an a with an i.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    Science is just superstition and religion glorified with the so called "scientific methods" i.e. hypotheses, experiments and observations.Corvus

    What more needs be said?
  • Why do some of us want to be nomads, and is it a better life?
    you'd probably not have to pay a dimeØ implies everything

    Not directly, of course. But the money has to come from somewhere. Income taxes, etc. or if you happen to have a group medical policy, its spread out over many. Good to know you are thinking ahead.

    Otherwise, how will you finance your odyssey?
  • M&M experiment (discussion with Pierre Normand )
    On the other hand, the monoclastic neutrinal differentiation . . .alan1000

    Sokol prize winner.
  • What is Logic?
    Quotidian or whatever didn't do the job? Wayfarer is far more wistfully wise.
  • Government responsibility
    Far too much wealth in far too few hands.
  • Solution to the Gettier problem
    Inductive logic would simply (possibly incorrectly) guess that it is a duck.PL Olcott

    :up: :cool:
  • Solution to the Gettier problem
    My old saying is if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck lays
    eggs and everything else just like a duck it could be a space
    alien perfectly disguised as a duck.
    PL Olcott

    Here inductive logic works wonders.
  • Kripke's skeptical challenge
    You and Kripke may be excused. Return to dinner when you have stopped playing your little games.
  • Reading "The Laws of Form", by George Spencer-Brown.


    From MathType. Place math and /math, enclosed by square brackets on either end and try: \left. {\overline {\, a \,}}\! \right|
  • Solution to the Gettier problem
    Gettier cases prove that a reasonable approximation of knowledge
    sometimes diverges from actual knowledge
    PL Olcott

    I drive down a forest road and see a bear beside it in the distance. No, as I approach it I see it is merely a small tree. What is so profound about this sort of thing?
  • Socialism vs capitalism
    what is the motivation by which a capitalist society would transform itself into a Democratic Socialist society?Leontiskos

    Perhaps purity of thought :roll: , or the attraction of living on the dole. :smile:
  • Reading "The Laws of Form", by George Spencer-Brown.
    Most mathematicians brush aside the Russell Paradox and its circumvention by classes. For me, this book would be a challenging read. I went part way into it and bailed.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    Does philosophy still contribute?Pantagruel

    . . . gauge whether the philosophy being conducted is any good or not . . .Tom Storm

    Depends upon how "any good or not" is interpreted. Clearly, Derr - a professor in the philosophy department at Clark - has done some good for humanity in his consulting. But if you mean just a philosopher arguing a point made by Aristotle for the umpteenth time, perhaps not.

    Derr proves that the answer to "Is Philosophy still Relevant?" is yes. At least some philosophy.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    Except that this doesn't seem to gauge whether the philosophy being conducted is any good or not, whether it is systematic or not, whether it builds purposefully on established traditions or not, whether it has learned from mistakes or not.Tom Storm

    I know the brother of this gentleman: Patrick Derr is an academic philosopher who has definitely contributed to society. He is relevant.

    Professor Derr received a B.A. from Seattle University in 1972 and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 1976. He has been at Clark since that time. He is a research professor with the George Perkins Marsh Institute and with the programs in Ethics and Public Policy, Environmental Science and Policy(ES&P) and Peace Studies. In 2007, Derr was awarded Clark’s Senior Faculty Fellowship for excellence in teaching and research.
    Current Research and Teaching

    Derr’s research interests are in the areas of medical ethics and health policy, philosophy of science, and environmental ethics and policy. As a member of the CENTED Hazards Group, he has been involved in interdisciplinary studies of radioactive waste management, occupational hazards, environmental hazard management and hazardous technology transfer.

    Much of Derr’s work is directed to the explication and analysis of ethical issues, particularly issues of justice or equity. Derr’s current writing focuses on ethical issues related to the conduct of biomedical research on human subjects in less developed countries, on questions of justice related to national energy policy, and on the application of emerging veterinary reproductive technologies to human beings. Derr teaches the graduate course on Philosophy of Science which may be selected by ES&P M.A. students. Derr has been a mentor to several ES&P graduate students and has served as an advisor for MA theses. Derr is also available for graduate level reading courses on ethical issues.
  • Why do some of us want to be nomads, and is it a better life?
    My advice is to do that. Run free. See what happens. Life is all about picking your adventure.Hanover

    If you do this, please have health insurance. Don't expect society to give you a free ride. If you have an expensive medical procedure and can't pay, the rest of us have to pick up the tab one way or another.
  • How to Determine If You’re Full of Shit
    “Apes don’t read PHILOSOPHY!”Mikie

    They could if they were not rabid about typing Shakespeare.
  • A Method to start at philosophy
    1. Read a philosophy text and attempt to understand it.Moliere

    According to my philosophy prof many years ago this is entirely the wrong approach. Read commentaries first, then the originals. You Kant fail.
  • What is truth?
    Truth in the context of an axiomatic system is that which follows logically from that system.
  • Entangled Direct Realist Perspectivism


    Saw the film some time ago but don't remember much about it - something about crawling through cabinets.
  • Entangled Direct Realist Perspectivism
    Sounds amazing and maybe scaryplaque flag

    Not at all. Powerful and illuminating. Highly recommended. :cool:
  • Time and Boundaries
    You are claiming a line through space is and isn't the effect of a cause?ucarr

    As a Platonic object it exists. It is describable by a contour function. Word babble IMO.
  • Time and Boundaries


    A line through space is continuous in the common sense of the word and exists without causality. But I can interpret the line as a contour "caused by" a function f(t).
  • Entangled Direct Realist Perspectivism
    We have internal perspective foundations, influenced by beliefs, that give us "feelings" about reality and are continuously refreshed by interacting with the physical and emotional world. But across the landscape of time these can be misleading. Try to imagine an event that occurred, say, a century ago. Do your best to place yourself in the context of the time, but it can never happen, no matter how carefully you surround yourself with the accoutrements of that period.

    I have seen this in the world of climbing when a few modern day climbers attempt to replicate an ascent having taken place in the late 19th century, using the equipment of that period. It's never even close to reliving the original experience.

    I practiced forms of meditation over the years, and once, not too long ago, had the astounding adventure of inadvertently slipping into the consciousness of another person, very briefly. Instead of an old man in Colorado, I found "myself" in the mind of a woman living in a cabin in Ireland. The experience goes beyond words to express, and it lasted only a few brief moments. "I" looked out the window onto rolling green hills and everything was changed for me - I saw through another's eyes what I would not see through mine.

    My conclusion: There are no common internal perspective foundations. Even common beliefs vary from person to person.

    Two cents worth.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    I am questioning the notion that philosophy has a distinctiveness that holds throughout its changes. What may be true of one philosopher may not be true of another.Fooloso4

    Not being presumptuous, but perhaps that gives it vitality to survive. Academic incestuousness diminished.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    Odd that you don’t remember the warnings about global warming from back then. Talk about selective memoryMikie

    I'll answer this. There were so many other things happening during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, it must have slipped right past me. I do remember the oil embargo. Maybe you can pull up some of those articles from those eras, warning of global warming. I'm curious.
  • Joe Biden (+General Biden/Harris Administration)
    Likely impeachments will be the new norm for US administrations. You already have the theater of the debt ceiling, hence what could be more useful than have impeachment hearings every then and now?ssu

    Well, we do seem to be more and more a Banana Republic, like some of our fellow South American countries. So Trump could go briefly to prison then be elected president.
  • Time and Boundaries
    For example, one point in space can be represented as being continuous with anotherItIsWhatItIs

    I'm curious how you can do that. :chin:
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    I had thought that Descartes’ discovery of algebraic geometry - the idea of dimensional co-ordinates - was of absolutely fundamental importance in the ‘new sciences’Quixodian

    Analytic geometry. Algebraic geometry is fairly recent and difficult to digest.
  • Does the future affect the past?
    In a way the future does affect the past, or our knowledge of the past. As time passes we lose information that exists at that point in time. No matter how carefully we document an occurrence bits and pieces fall away, swept by the relentless river of time. We then try to reconstruct the past, but we live in the present in a different environment, social and otherwise, than those from the past.

    "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there" {The Go Between)
  • Why do some of us want to be nomads, and is it a better life?
    a more contemporary way of thinking about the real (intra-action that creates material phenomena rather than interaction between pre-existing objects) that has made its way from philosophy into the social sciences. — Joshs

    I hope that will satisfy an adolescent's wanderlust.
    Vera Mont

    :clap: :rofl:

    If you want to go off on your own and be a nomad, either on the road with the physical thrills thereupon, or in your apartment thinking great thoughts, be sure you can support yourself. As an ancient on this forum I've seen it all, especially in the world of mountain and rock climbing, where being a "dirtbag" is revered in some quarters - a little like a divine incarnation.

    And then something happens and you run up a hospital bill in six figures and need a GoFundMe to survive.

    And I have seen the twists and turns life makes, in one instance a friend who lived on fifty cents a day in 1960 and is a billionaire today. And another who started the same and died in a run-down shack, poverty stricken. So, if you want to be a nomad, don't expect society (while it's busy adjusting to intra-action excitement) to come to your rescue.
  • There Is a Base Reality But No One Will Ever Know it
    Scientific realism seems able to say things like: "fundamental particles don't really exist, they are just mathematical descriptions of standing waves, and it's the mathematical structure that is most real,"Count Timothy von Icarus

    I don't believe that is the consensus among physicists. Such particles exist but a predictive mathematical description of their behavior overrides any sort of ontological speculation. Virtual particles are another issue.
  • Does the future affect the past?
    It's my understanding that retrocausality is only a speculative interpretation of certain things observed at the quantum scale, where cause and effect concepts either don't exist or are muddled. So, in every instance where reversal in time might offer an explanation, other explanations exist.

    In math all one has to do is put a negative sign before a time variable to go "backwards".

    As a high school student in 1954 I wrote a short paper for my physics class on the interpretation of a positron being an electron moving backward in time, a concept Feynman and a few others entertained for a while. Of course, I hadn't a clue, but I loved science fiction.

    I've mentioned before a mathematical structure in which one observes at present time the result of an experiment, only to discover going backward step by step in a causal chain that the further one looks into the past the less significant a specific "starting" point seems, until in the distant past almost anything would have triggered the result at present. A dynamical system not so otherworldly as one might suspect.
  • Science as Metaphysics
    But that is precisely what has been called into question by experiments . . .Quixodian

    A lot depends upon the idea of "superposition", which has a simple mathematical interpretation. I remain unconvinced, and Wigner himself criticized "Wigner's Friend". I refuse to succumb to the woo surrounding this - but that's just me and I don't have a physics background.
  • Science as Metaphysics
    I think the difficulty here is the red herring of independence of physics and its objects from any particular embodied physicistplaque flag

    A group of physicists devise an experiment, including a device to measure the outcome. They perform the experiment, then cluster around the computer screen to read the result - they all agree they see the same thing. The experiment is replicated numerous times, with the same result. How is this "dependence" upon a particular "embodied" scientist?

    Perhaps I'm not interpreting what you say properly.
  • Southern pride?
    I grew up in an educated family in the Deep South, and was taught to be polite and respect others. No Southern Pride.