Which sort of moral realism do you advocate for? Are you more a fan of Nussbaum and Pereboom’s blame skepticism (deterministically-based forward-looking blame) or P.F. Strawson (free will desert-based moral blame)? — Joshs

I am a moral intuitionist, and the issue is metaethics.

What is the anatomy of an ethical act? There are aspects that are not really ethical, which are facts. It is a fact that I borrowed the ax, and a fact that its owner is now drunk and bent on revenge, and so on. In themselves, none of these presents the essence of what makes an affair ethical. Facts have no ethical dimension. To see this, one has to turn to value, the strangest thing in existence.

I could go on, but only if you are interested.

Are you just regurgitating Kant here?
an hour ago — Joshs

An intuitive givenness. This comes for Husserl and his progeny. Reading Ideas one is invited to look closely at the reduction and what it is about. There is, in this intuitive apprehension of the world, something foundational. It doesn't matter if the predelineated time event of conscious awareness never "stops" for presence, so to speak. Not does it matter if 'time' is a contextual term, contingent and impossible be anything but what its embeddedness in thought allows.
What can I say, Kant opened doors.

Let’s be clear about the “two things” intraontology is talking about. It is the noetic and the noematic , the subjective and objective poles of experience. They are not separable, don’t appear individually and thus don’t form a synthesis or merger. But without these poles there could be no differential ,and without a differential there could be no time. — Joshs

So a differential is what is there, but simply the way we talk about what is there. Originally, it is all just "of a piece". Rorty I think would say yes to this. All talk is an abstraction from what is not talk at all. I think this is right.

But you wonder about my comment on time, and I see that this will not go well. It is a unique issue between me and Kierkegaard and the Prajnaparamita. Put baldly, I think time is the generative source of what divides the world. There is this constant precipice of anticipation, anxiety laden. Put aside Kierkegaard's religious thinking; put in place the actual practice of kriya yoga and ask, what kind of affair is this if not the annihilation of the burden of time.

Analytically, this kind of thinking is abysmal. It is born out in a manner that is revelatory. For me, when the reductive method is engaged, there is a "stilling" of the world in a way that theory does not touch. Here, Śāriputra, all things have the characteristic of emptiness,

I never read Husserl talking like this. He seemed surprised when students were becoming religious converts. Rorty fled philosophy because he felt it had reached its end. Half right. It reached its end centuries ago.

Is that so difficult to explain? Why? The world is constantly projected into our brain. Except when we sleep or are absent in thought or pondering. The brain is the receiver and creator at once. — EugeneW

This is almost willfully naïve (apologies). Do you really think a brain is a mirror to nature? Have you ever seen a mirror that looked like an opaque brain? Patently absurd.

If you know about virtual particles you would know that they laid the basis for thermodynamic time. They go back in forth in time. They were all that resided on the central singularity and the surroundings of that singularity set inflation off. There are infinite serial big bangs. Each has its own beginning of thermodynamic time. So the creation of the universe, with its infinity of big bangs, is not a temporal process. — EugeneW

But you don't seem to know about the presuppositional time, prior to anything a physicist might inquire about. Foundational time, call it: Prior to any quantum thought occurring the head of a physicist, or any thought at all, there is the foundational temporal construction that is there in the first place, "through which" thought passes and in which existence and its genesis can be examined. This is the level of assumptions we are dealing with. Causality, as with time, is a term that is foundational, not derivative (though it is always important to know that no knowledge claim is unassailable. The question here goes to, what level of inquiry is making determinations). The term is derivative, no doubt, and the way we understand it certainly is derivative, that is, contingent upon the language contexts it is brought to light in. But this "pure intuition" of causality is not derivative.
As someone who reads science, then assumes there is in this a foundation for all things, what you say is rather typical. You don't realize that what physicists do rests upon an intuitional givenness.

Exactly. Having not read widely in his oeuvre, I have sometimes wondered how Rorty justified his strong social justice beliefs. He one said the the meaning of life is 'to make the world better for our descendants'. Do you have a sense of how he arrived at this logically? — Tom Storm

He is often attacked for this, because on one can see how one can be so bound to the contingency of knowledge and truth, and hold that there is some moral imperative that fits into this. Simon Critchley:

The obvious (if banal) question to be raised here is how such a
committment to universality can be consistent with Rorty’s anti-foundational
‘relativism’(between quotation marks, for I take it that relativism would be the
name of a pseudo-problem for Rorty)

And then

Rorty just adds the caveat that an ironist
’Cannot be a “progressive” and ”dynamic” liberal’ (Rorty 1989, p. 91) and
cannot display the same degree of social hope as the liberal metaphysician. But
isn’t this just to suggest that the liberal ironist is regressive, sedentary and
hopeless- and what good is that sort of liberal?

You see, Rorty wants to have his cake and eat it too,. But you really can't do this. You find no metaphysical grounding that can secure a moralist position out of irony and contingency, and out of this the best that can be gotten is a weakened stand on affirming that "cruelty is the worst a person can do."

To me, wherever you go, you run into Dostoevsky's Ivan: no God, no morality. Metaphysics is the only thing that can save morality, which is why I argue a support for moral realism. Not everything is a "language game".

The universe was created. Still, it was not physically caused.

The motion of the ball on the Norton dome is not caused. — EugeneW

I don't know what the universe being created means. Causality is far more accessible and intuitive. And if you are going to support a motion uncaused, then you have what I would call a radical paradox on your hands. Radical in that it is bat shit crazy, and I don't mean this insultingly. Keep in mind that intuition is what drives the rational process that gives rise to problems like the Norton Dome. The denial of movement ex nihilo is the strongest intuitive insistence the mind can make. I am aware that there are equations and contrived thinking that have rigor and lead to counterintuitive conclusions. But when this happens, it is not a matter of resolution, but one of endless head scratching until it is resolved.

I think so. Rorty's neo-pragmatism is postmodernism and less mystical that Witty. Rorty's anti-foundationalist project seems primarily (and I only have general understanding of his work) to be opposed to what he sees are remnants of Greek philosophy - notions of idealism and absolute truth 'out there'. In Rorty's view humans are able to justify claims but can say nothing about Truth. — Tom Storm

Truth as something discovered and this discovery lays itself before one's eyes as a discovered object, event; he would say no to this. Knowledge, truth, the real, being, and so on, is to be pragmatically conceived, but he accepts this world of science as the only wheel that rolls, so he is willing talk as if this world had the objective standing scientists take it to have. Wittgenstein was the same, working in the Kantian tradition that the world is an empirical world and there is no sense beyond this. I think this kind of thinking gave rise to positivism and the decades of analytic philosophy.
Yes, to what you say about justification and truth and Witt. But this does leave knowledge claims hanging out there. Frankly, one is driven to wonder why there is such disagreement about this, these two sides of Kant: the metaphysical idealist (because as much as Kant wanted to deny metaphysics, the very notion of transcendental idealism says otherwise) vs the empirical realist. I think it comes down to the way we are put together. Some have metaphysics built into their faculties?
The foundation for Rorty is pragmatism, and like all good hermeneuticists, this too is indeterminate.

Not sure why you bring this up. Isn't it clear that the point of light projected by a rotating laser on the inside of a huge sphere doesnt actually travel at all? — EugeneW

Whenever you find yourself concluding something like a spontaneous effect or a contradiction built into the structure of logic, then you are going to find the assumption that this must be cleared up somehow. A true paradox is never allowed to stand. The law of causality is absolutely coercive to the understanding regardless of any and all to the contrary. (Just try it). This is NOT to say, that as a law, it is perfectly conceived, free of elucidative possibilities or, as I believe, not something else entirely. I think it is something else entirely because this is world is foundationally metaphysical (notwithstanding what I say elsewhere. In fact, I do not believe in foundational dualities of any kind. The perceived duality lies with a mistake, and the mistake is time. I do know how this sounds, but I believe it comes to this).

“Now, an intra-ontology of embodiment has momentous implications for how we conceive knowledge. In the framework of a standard ontology, we strive to acquire
knowledge about what is given out there, and this non-committal knowledge can be encoded intellectually. But in the framework of an intra-ontology, non-committal knowledge appears as a non-sense. According to a Merleau-Pontian phenomenologist, knowledge affects the two sides that arise from the self-splitting of what there is (namely of embodied experience). In other terms, knowledge of something arises concomitantly with a mutation of ourselves qua knowers. And this mutation of ourselves qua knowers manifests as a mutation of (our) experience that cannot be encoded intellectually, since the very processes and conclusions of the intellect depend on it.

Such intra-ontological pattern of knowledge is universal. It may look superfluous or contrived in the field of a classical science of nature, where the objectification of a
limited set of appearances is so complete that everything happens as if the objects of knowledge were completely separate from the act of knowing. But it becomes unavoidable in many other situations where this separation is in principle unattainable, such as the human sciences or quantum mechanics.

This is why Varela considered that a purely intellectual operation (“a change in our understanding” about some object) is not enough to solve the mind-body problem, and even less the “hard problem” of the origin of phenomenal consciousness, namely of lived experience. For these problems are archetypal cases in which the inseparability between subject and object of knowledge is impossible to ignore. What is needed to overcome them, according to the lesson of the intra-ontological view of knowledge, is nothing less than “a change in experience (being)” (Varela 1976: 67). Addressing properly the problem of lived experience is tantamount to undergo a change in experience.”(Michel Bitbol) — Joshs

intraontology. Is this another name for hermeneutics? Or intentionality? But the idea seems clear enough, bluntly put, you look at it and your gaze is part and parcel of the object observed. I go further than this, though fully aware that few will go with me. I like to take the very popular "high-flying thought" that says what we receive and give out in our sciences is what is there independently of our perceptual contribution, and proceed with this assumption to see how far epistemology can be taken. And, as predicted, it instantly turns against itself: Rorty stated, "no one has ever been able to explain how anything out there to can get in here (pointing to his head)." The analytic philosopher Rorty of course talks as if there is no problem with this (as I read through parts of his Mirror of Nature); but all of this, he insists, in the light of "truth is made, not discovered." He just thinks like Wittgenstein that there is no point is trying to speak about the unspeakable, for there is no unspeakable to speak of. I like the way Slovaj Zizek put it: it is like a software program that has no mountains in the distance of it visual setting. It is not that there is anything IN the program that does not show up, if one were in the program. It would be an absence the presence of which would neither fill a void nor redeem or anything else, for any "void" is just a mistake fashioned out of what we already have. I think Rorty thinks like this. So there is no merging, no intraontology, for this would imply the merging of two things, speaking roughly, when there are no two things. A fabricated metaphysics of two. Or: for there to be a synthesis, there has to be two identifiables on each side, but this cannot be shown, for neither side makes a appearance.
I

The world shows itself as it is. We dont invent things to assimilate this. Gods, good and evil, bent space, they are real things. Bent space is made visible by the the masses in it. — EugeneW

That is an interesting statement. I wonder what it means. The world shows itself as it is? I actually agree with this, but surely you don't mean when we speak of the world, we have revealed the way the world "shows itself"?

Spontaneous cause is possible. Read about the Norton dome. I don't see why it is nonsense. You can bend space with a stick in it even! If the universe grows older, a stick in it will get torn apart by expanding space. I would agree if you said you can't cut space in pieces. — EugeneW

An entirely abstract concept, along the lines of showing how the speed of light can be exceeded given that two beams of light whose paths converge when directed toward each other askew, and the point at which the they merge moves along the line of convergence at a rate faster than the velocities of each. This is not far afield from Russell, really, for when we conceive of a thing, we wind up in a explanatory system, leaving off the thing to be explained entirely. We make discursive castles in the air, which rather goes to the point that explanatory matrices of any kind never do explain "the world" conceived as an "actuality" (and double inverted commas are the inevitable consequence of this kind of talk). The world stands apart from this. Of course, what about eidetic ontology? Are ideas real? Yes and no.

I have always been mystified that adding one-half plus one-quarter plus one-eighth plus one-sixteenth etc adds up to one, in that adding together an infinite number of things results in a finite thing.

I can explain this paradox by understanding that relations are foundational to the logic we use, in that 5 plus 8 equals 13, etc, yet relations, as illustrated by FH Bradley, have no ontological existence in the world.

It is therefore hardly surprising then that paradoxes will arrive when comparing two things that are fundamentally different, ie, our logic and the world. — RussellA

The surprise I have in mind is usually just ignored. Paradoxes like Zeno's should be telling us that geometry and reality are very different, and geometry is just an expression of intuitive logical thinking. The surprise is that structural contradictions indicates not just that logic is quirky in the world that is not logical, but that this illogical world is altogether not logic. And so our thoughts about it do not "represent" it.
What do they do? They solve problems in time. Dicing up the world into particulars, what reason does, among other things, does not hand us the world; it does give us a means to manage and deal with the world, but the world altogether is not logical; it is alogical, apart from logic, qualitatively different, and language is mostly self referential, as are logical proofs. So when a scientist tells you the planet Jupiter has a mass and a trajectory round the sun, and is a distance D at time T, and so on, what is s/he talking about? It is about relations WE have with that planet, not the thing out there.

Does language have an ontological dimension at all? Yes and no. If you ask an ontological question, and don't simply ignore it, then answers can get interesting. The point is that, if you will, we don't really live in "the world" when it comes to knowledge claims. We live in epistemology. The world before us apart from this is utterly metaphysical.

We must be remember that when paradoxes do arrive, that this will be an inevitable consequence of the nature of logic, rather than indicative of anything strange happening in the world.

The fact that logic will inevitably lead to paradox explains why metaphor is such an important part of language, so much so, that a case may be made that "language is metaphor". — RussellA

Strange happening in the world? Not the way to word it. The world is not strange, which is a borrowed term from familiar strange things, life's ironies. No, this is far more egregious. Intelligibility itself is completely Other than "the world" (as it is being considered here). You and I and everyone else are NOT the logical categories we are fit into when we talk and write.

.At any rate, shouldn't you be walking a dog somewhere? I imagine it suits you. — Constance

Sorry about that. My back is not well, nor my disposition as a result.

Not sure what you are arguing. We can bend space like a stick. If you rotate a heavy object, space is bend in the direction of rotation. Frame dragging. — EugeneW

Then you have an issue with intuition and I cannot help you there. Someone argued that causality was debatable because Bertrand Russell wrote a paper saying so. Russell was actually waying we can't make sense of causality, but he was not contradicting the basic intuition that a spontaneous cause is impossible. I wonder how this went with him. Does he understand that a spontaneous cause is apodictically impossible. I wonder this regarding your thoughts: do you not see that space cannot bend, not because Einstein was wrong, but because the c0oncept is nonsense.

Space probably IS just a metaphor in this context. Physicists are not talking about actual bending anymore than they are talking about actual strings in string theory. Bending is simply a term borrowed to describe the effect witnessed observing gravitational pull. It LOOKS like bending when looking at a geometrical presentation of gravity's strength vis a vis mass and distance. We have all seen the images of the warping of space around amass like a planet.

But it does further illustrate the point that when we face the world, we impose a familiar image or idea to assimilate it. We invent problems like God and evil, arrows and the like defying logic, and the rest. Space bending
.At any rate, shouldn't you be walking a dog somewhere? I imagine it suits you.

No. What "bends" is spacetime, — jgill

Yes, and??

No. What "bends" is spacetime, which does not have the Euclidean metric in R^4. The Euclidean metric is how we normally measure spacial dimensions. We need Kenosha Kid (PhD physics) to return and explain this stuff. :chin: — jgill

No, it's not the physics. It is the apriori impossibility of space bending. Space presupposes space, and you can't have something as its own presupposition unless it is an absolute of some kind. Space doesn't bend; things bend IN space.

There is curved space - a type of geometry, and there is spacetime curvature, a way to interpret general relativity.

Empty space doesn't bend, IMO. :chin: — jgill

It doesn't bend unless there is a mass to bend it. I see this, but of course, space bending at all is an issue for the aforementioned reasons. And obviously, I think the science is fine, I mean, I am not arguing about that.

A building contains far more materials than the "blueprints, scaffolding and tools" (logic) used to build it. If your point is that, by analogy, "a map of the territory" (concept) does not exhaust the territory (object), I agree; but that does not mean that the latter is occluded or "falsified" by the former, only that one is (narrowly) interested in the latter (object) at a given moment in terms consistent with the former (concept). An astronomer, as you mention, does not project his "observational protocols and astronomical models" onto the stars anymore than wearing glasses with corrective lenses "corrects" whatever lies in the wearer's visual field. Logic, IME, is simply a way of seeing, so to speak, commensurable (to varying degrees) with the ways nature shows itself to itself (e.g. its 'intelligent' participants); this is so because, it seems, whatever else nature is, it is also logical (i.e. structurally consistent ~ computable (though, I think, not 'totalizable')). — 180 Proof

It depends on what you mean by the object. Really, the fur of this cat shares something with a principle of organization (concept) that is used to talk and think about it? You think there is a "territory" that is qualitatively shared with the concepts used to refer to it? Nature " shows itself to itself" through logic?

These are pretty strong claims and i don't think any of them are right. I would have ask, how is it that a natural object reveals itself through logic? What do you mean by "natural"? Obviously, what you say does depend on this. Nature?

And that narrative is? And it is true because?

Which two? Alien territory and the familiar? — EugeneW

God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages
and
how sensible thinking can find where the two meet

Why not? — EugeneW

Well then, you seem willing to drop what is familiar and venture into alien territory when it comes to talking about God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages, and how sensible thinking can find where the two meet. How would you do this?

Casually yes. Non-casually, after deep contemplation ("out yonder, is this huge world, which exists, independently of us human beings, and which stands before us, like a great eternal riddle; the contemplation of beckons, like a liberation"), no. — EugeneW

Well then, you seem willing to drop what is familiar and venture into alien territory when it comes to talking about God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages, and how sensible thinking can find where the two meet. How would you do this?

Space dont move. Only the objects in it. It can expand or contract but has no speed. The metric is the just the metric of GR. — EugeneW

No, it can't expand or contract. Expansion is a spatial term; it presupposes space.

Is bending curving? Space can have curvature. The metric can change. — EugeneW

Bending, curving, arching, swaying, leaning, accelerating, moving, and on and on. Things move IN space, e.g., space cannot move unless it moves In something else.
The metric? you mean the standard of measurement. But this doesn't enter into tit. It is bending as such.

That's a questionable assumption... — EugeneW

But you have to see the whole idea presented. I am not way the gods do not exist, or did not. I am saying a comprehensive understanding of what this could be cannot be done thinking about divine creation nor human imagination. It issues from both, but looking into this requires a good deal of compromise. Much, no, most that we casually understand has to be dismissed.

You can't bend space like a stick. You bend it with mass. — EugeneW

It is not about how something is bent. It is about bending as such.

In 1912, Bertrand Russell wrote "On the Notion of Cause" in which he makes the argument that causation is not a useful way of thinking about the world. In 1943, R.G. Collingwood wrote "An Essay on Metaphysics" in which he wrote something similar. My point? It is not "absurdity" to deny the principle of causality. — T Clark

Read that Russell essay and you will find Russel, in good analytic fashion, is complaining about how well causality can be explained using available means to do so. To utter a definition at all is to bring the wrath of analytic clarity upon you, and this applies to your cat and your sofa, as well. But this is not how we take causality, as a concept with an unproblematic analytic profile. It is an apodictic intuition: one cannot imagine a spontaneous effect. And that is all.It is not that this can be laid out in language that can be equally coercive to the understanding. Language is at best interpretative. But to just sit an imagine an object moving by itself, in good faith, it is clear as anything can be: impossible. A coercive to the understanding as modus ponens.

To know at all is to take up the world AS this knowledge claim is expressed. Taken APART from the knowledge claim, pure metaphysics. The cup on the table, e.g. is qua cup, a cup, but qua a palpable presence not a cup at all.
— Constance

I don't know what this means. More evidence you and I do not have the language to talk to each other about this. — T Clark

Sorry about that. It simply means that language and the sensuous intuitions that it is about are qualitatively distinct. The former cannot be about the latter for they are separated by a chasm of difference.

Well, they made the universe, with all life evolving in it. I don't think we made them.
You mean it's a conspiracy that both the gods and life are involved in? — EugeneW

I mean the term 'gods' was certainly an invention, a fiction created by humans long ago; but it is not the case that this means there are no gods if it can be shown that such a term is necessitated by conditions of actuality. In other words, while we did an awful lot of invented, narrating, imagining through the ages, there are actual material conditions of your being human beings that are that from which our narratives find their meaning. Metaphysics is not a myth. We are it.

Of course. But we also have to condition the subject, i.e, us. There is no such thing as "an observation". Thats already a theoretical claim. How and what we observe is not theory-laden but a theory, a story on its own. Space can have an objective existence, like the bending of it. A bend space(time) is a physical reality. The GW hunters at LIGO don't wanna chase metaphysical ghosts! — EugeneW

But this is just what I say space cannot have. Try to conceive of something bending without a medium in which something can bend. All possible examples of bending require a stable foundation of space as an assumption such that bending can be understood relative to this stability. If I bend a stick or a piece of paper how is this bending determined? By identifying spatial changes in position. This is how all change, movement is measured and determined, vis a vis something that does not change or move. If it is posited that space itself changes or moves or bends, then this in turn requires the same stabilizing setting.
So to say space bends requires yet an additional medium in which space is, for all bending requires this in order for 'bending" to make sense.
This is certainly not to say another space is therefore to be posited. It is to say that our geometrical ways of stabilizing the space of the world are just projections onto an otherwise impossible presence. Reason, logic, language are utilities, only thrown, if you will, unto a world that otherwise has nothing of this "utility". This plays out across the board in every and all attempts understand in all the sciences, for these attempts are propositional, categorical, and the world is nothing like this. Science does not speak to us about the world; it speaks what we need to say about it in order to deal with it.
The world? Utterly metaphysical.

I dont think we are the gods. I think they made us. They had good reason. There are as many gods as creatures in the universe. We just play the game they played already eternally. From virus gods to hominid gods. The god story will be revealed shortly... Exclusively herd on Peee Eees Eeeef! — EugeneW

I will be listening for the god story, looking for a clue to something profound. Hint: I don't think they made us. Nor did we make them. It is a conspiracy and we are both in on it.

People used to think that there must be a luminiferous aether because they thought that electromagnetic waves had to have a medium to propagate through. Turns out they were wrong. I don't see how your inability to conceive of space bending without any outside space to bend in is any different. — T Clark

Think of it as an apriori problem, not an empirical one. What if someone theorized in a way that violated the principle of causality? Putting aside that someone has in fact done this, ask your self how well this sits with your understanding. It is a blatant absurdity, apodictically impossible. Rejecting the aether theory of light propagation was not like this at all since aether had no apriori status.

I don't think that any reputable physicist doubts quantum mechanics at all. They may argue about the interpretation, but I think that is a metaphysical argument, not a scientific one. Fact is, it works. As they say, shut up and calculate. It doesn't make any difference if you can understand why. Science isn't about understanding why things happen, it's about understanding how things happen. Your "...yet" is a bit too cute for my taste. Most physicists don't think further study will make QM any less counterintuitive. The world is not obligated to arrange itself in a way that fits into your way of thinking about it. You can't change the world, but you can change your thinking. — T Clark

Richard Feynman: "I think I can say that nobody understands QM." Not that I am fond of quoting authority to argue a point, but in my own limited exposure to this idea, I can say with confidence that it is not something people understand. When I say "doubt" I mean just this. They don't doubt the repeatability of the evidence; they doubt it can be understood. A bit like understanding rockets go up, escape the atmosphere and so on, but not having a clue as to how. How that cat can both dead and alive. Unless you have something I never heard of.

But as to, "The world is not obligated to arrange itself in a way that fits into your way of thinking about it." If you think the world is so "radically contingent" that anything could happen because nothing constrained by the "laws" of physics, I think you are right. There are no laws like this sitting out there among things. This is our doing, and it sounds like you agree with this. But are you willing to agree with the what follows from this? It is not the indeterminacy of a handful of problematic ideas. It is all that comes before us: To know at all is to take up the world AS this knowledge claim is expressed. Taken APART from the knowledge claim, pure metaphysics. The cup on the table, e.g. is qua cup, a cup, but qua a palpable presence not a cup at all.

It's a physical concept. Our perception of space is like it really is. We can move in it. Objects can move in it. It's the sauce between matter. It's the stuff objects can move in. — EugeneW

Of course it is, that is, until you get to the part where it is bending. Then you have to explain this. When you reach an explanatory threshold like this, you have to concede that though the idea works to explain one thing, it creates a problem that also needs explaining, like a rug's wrinkle that is flattened out here, but rises up again over there. In this case the wrinkle is a metaphysical one.

The real problem? This lies not in the world, but in the conditions of its observation. To observe at all is to condition the object. Language and logic are not these "transparencies" that record the conditions of the world around us. They are "opacities" if you will, that are an independent existence.

This, however, wasn't/isn't possible with the dichotomy paradox. Logic clearly demonstrates motion is impossible; observation, to our dismay, shows that motion is not only possible but actual (ambulando solvitur).

As you can see, a pre-Zeno reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism is impossible. We have to make a choice: believe our minds or believe our legs, but not both! We all know Zeno's preference: motion, in the Parmenidean umiverse, is an illusion. I guess this means Zeno, Parmenideans, were true blue rationalists. — Agent Smith

Bring Parmenides and Heraclitus together and you have Plato, essentially. It seems Parmenides won the argument in Plato, the latter insisting the what what truly real was the idea, not the palpable phenomenon. By my thinking, Heraclitus wins out, though it gets pretty complicated, because while the desire to yield to an ontology of a palpable world over what is merely a conception of it, concepts are in their own way, just as palpable: No concepts, no singularities.

Slippery. The trick is, obviously, to reconcile the conceptuality with the irrational yet imposing and really impossible world (impossible because it is not contained categorically. It qualitatively "exceeds" categorical thinking. Sui generis).

Zeno's arrow proves spacetime is continuous. The problem with discrete spacetime is particles moving in it and time advancing. Spacetime can't be broken up though and the nature of space remains a mystery.
Einstein's theory of spacetime showed we can actually bend space by mass. How mass informs space remains a mystery in GR.
The gods created spacetime. The reasons for their grounds remain a mystery.

That's a triplet mysteries. Performative contradiction, like I'm dead, are no mystery though. — EugeneW

Well, just note that you had to bring god into it. If you do your explaining of something with this kind of talk, then you must realize you have gone metaphysical. Is space time a metaphysical concept? It is. Of course, measurements of speed, mass, relative values for these and so on, this is not metaphysical at all. Very clear ( I have read how it is clear, that is. Not the actual physics). But space time IS. For in order for it to make sense one must posit something entirely inconceivable: that IN which space bends.

the gods created spacetime? No, I think not. We created it in a system of pragmatic utility to "deal with" what the "gods made". Quantitative measurement is a logical function. If you think we are the gods, then fine. Maybe we are.

But at last, I agree, it is a mystery. But the mystery has consequences. How about acceleration as a concept? Acceleration occurs in spacetime, and this is the mystery. How about any quantification AT ALL vis a vis the empirical world?

Science is all about finding out situations where our intuition is wrong. Intuition doesn't come from the great beyond, it can be changed by experience and understanding. Do you also doubt special relativity and quantum mechanics? Those theories are certainly counter-intuitive. — T Clark

I think quantum physicists "doubt" quantum mechanics, meaning they really don't understand it because it itself is not clear...yet. By counterintuitive is simply mean that space bending makes no sense as a logical concept. It is apriori nonsense: One cannot even imagine something bending without a medium in which it bends. I said space is real, and I mean space is not an abstract concept. I wave my hand through ???? It is not nothing. The physical concept of nothing requires space to be nothing IN. This is how it is with bending, or curving, arching, rounding out, and so on: these are spatial terms. They presuppose space. Space bending is like saying logic implying: to imply is to USE logic. It cannot be its own presupposition.

Is it wrong to think empirical science dis really not about the actualities lie before us. After all, the actual world is not a quantified presence; language and logic make it so;
— Constance

If this is true, and I think it is, why can't spacetime bend?

isn't science's claims about being about the world a hidden reification of logic?
— Constance

Everything put into language is a reification of something. Every word is reification. Reification and metaphor, that's all there is. I guess reification is the same thing as metaphor. — T Clark

As I see it, to bend absolutely requires a medium in which a thing can bend. Bending is a contingent idea.
Reification is the same thing as metaphor? An intriguing idea. How so?

Space is real, and I don't think space bending is a metaphor.
— Constance

Seems to me, most ideas refer back, or at least originally referred back, to something at human scale. That certainly makes sense with "space." Of course, there's always been space - the three-dimensional volume in a room, etc. I wonder if the development of the idea of space was changed by the development of Cartesian geometry. It certainly seems like it would have been as people learned that there were long distances between those bright things up in the sky. Science and science fiction probably changed the meaning of the word even more. General relatively just continued those changes and added another dimension. So, no. Space is not real, if by that you mean that it hasn't changed and can't change again.

And of course space bending is a metaphor. People can bend a tree branch or a piece of metal, but you can't bend air. Until, suddenly, you can. — T Clark

The idea of wind bending certainly seems unproblematic. It is not like bending something solid, but it is as determinate quantity of something, the kind of thing such that it curving here, arching there makes sense. If one can conceive of a material substance that is so hard it breaks before is bends at all, then one can still conceive of it bending given some alteration in the conditions of it doing so. That is, it is still logically possible that it can bend. The point I would make is that if the posting space "bending" is a metaphor only and not meant to be taken literally, then what IS the "literal" side of this?

Cartesian geometry had an impact on the way things were conceived and measured, I know. Important is the the basic assumption that objects are in space res extensa at all! Extension in space requires the a conceptual framework to conceive of it. The concept "extension" is a quantitative measure: to extend something has to extend to a certain degree, length, depth; and if the extension is deemed indeterminate, it is implied that determined quantifications would be possible if one knew them. The question here is, Is the world a quantified presence that when encountered we "read off" from its presence what it already has. Or, is the world altogether without quantification, and the quantifying is done by us in our efforts to systematically make use of it?

... isn't science's claims about being about the world a hidden reification of logic?
— Constance
I don't think so, I don't see how, especially insofar as logic consists of syntact translations of tautologies and function like scaffolding for building mathematical models of physical systems. — 180 Proof

Yeah, it works, and very well at that. But the actual "things of the world" are actualities that are not the logical forms assigned them when trying to make things work. So when the astronomer analyzes a light spectrum, the logicality of the analysis is what s/he contributes and not the visible phenomenon. This latter has nothing at all of the logicality in the description, yet science is generally confident that its work is essentially connected to the objects of its quantifications, that is, logicality (logic being essentially a quantifying utility).

Agreed that it can't make the case that it's rational to be rational on pain of circulus in probando. I'm telling you, I'm speaking the truth! How can you prove that, we ask? Well, I vouch for myself, I guarantee that I don't/never lie! WTFery!

The paradox is this: logic is the gold standard for proof but it can't prove itself without committing a fallacy, begging the question. I can't be trusted. Does this get an A for honesty and an F for intelligence? Logic, as it turns out, paradoxically, is a fool! The whole point to its creation and development was to build trust in a system that would always deliver the goods when it comes to truth. Yet, here we are, logic can't justify itself. — Agent Smith

Unless, on the other hand, the question begged leads to a finality that IS a finality. Put it this way, if logic were to conceive of its own generative foundation, that too would be suspect. Indeed, to question logic in this way is simply nonsense, for the asking of the question is self contradictory since the question possesses the logic form of an interrogative (and implicit assertions, negations, and so on). We only get put out because we expect logic to be something it is not. It exists, like a chair or a piano, and talk about the generative source of anything at all is nonsense.
Just to point out, logic has no point. Unless you think it is part of a divine plan, or the like. Also, when we use logic to lie, it is not logic's fault, but its use. This is different from "I am lying" or "this sentence is false." These are fashioned out of logic itself.

Usually this expression is used in reference to spacetime and depends on a certain metric. Objects, however, become distorted by gravity and speed. Length contraction, etc. — jgill

Yes, so account for distortions, what is the most elegant theory? The curvature of space. Is this an idea that makes sense, not as it is theorized about, but as a singular concept? What do you do with theory that explains things well, but is radically counterintuitive? Space bending is, as Wittgenstein put it, "an argument place" meaning it must first, to make sense at all, pass through the logic that is deployed to explain it and bring it into being, and space bending presupposes yet another space IN WHICH bending may occur, but this leads to an infinite regression of spaces. Maybe. Not clear on how positing this "second" space would make the same demands the first is subject to (that it bends, of course). At any rate, clearly, this second space would be eternity (keep in mind, we do not "see" eternity when looking up in the ight sky. This is because we are not seeing this second order of spatial existence. Interesting to note: When you do gaze into the night sky, there is this unsettling weirdness of at once facing infinity, yet not comprehending it at all. this is because what you are observing is the inside of your cranium).

On the contrary, misrecognized misuses (e.g. reification) of logic, or grammar, generates "paradoxes". — 180 Proof

Yes. But then, the very structure of the performative contradiction, "this sentence is false" is very curious. It is not really a misuse, but a simple logical construction that is self contradictory, that generates contradiction where only tautologies should be allowed.
And with the others, I think there are important problems that are ignored, generally. What is God, if one ditches the Christian "misuse"? Is it wrong to think empirical science dis really not about the actualities lie before us. After all, the actual world is not a quantified presence; language and logic make it so; isn't science's claims about being about the world a hidden reification of logic?