Because it’s not clear that such things are possible. — Pfhorrest

Indeed. As I said myself:

It's difficult if not impossible to conceive of a Universe that isn't mathematical. — Kenosha Kid

But that only seems to me to put a tick in the physicalism box.

That said, consider a universe in which the dimensions are infinite in scope (and can be spatial, temporal or other) and random in number at any one time, the lengths of which are random at any one time, and contained fields of infinite kinds whose numbers are random at any one time and whose excitations are random at any one time. One could not describe that universe in particular mathematically; one could at best model an infinity of them stochastically.

My feeling is that no such universes exist, likely through physical constraints (the above would not conserve any quantity: information, energy, any kind of charge, any kind of momentum... everything would be discontinuous). Those physical constraints correspond to groups: mathematical objects with decorative physical constants, but there are many more such groups possible in maths than are realised in our universe.

Four possibilities:

1) This is the only possible universe: This would seem to me to give primacy to physics. Our language for describing physics is more ambiguous than physics itself, and that ambiguity is collapsed on the basis of what is physically possible. (A variation: there are many such universes and they are different, but each realises a physically possible mathematics.)

2) All possible universes are real: In a multiverse theory, all such groups might be realised in one universe or another, in which case the distinction between ideal and concrete vanishes.

3) There are infinitely many possible universes, but only this one is realised: This would seem the best fit for a mathematicism, where what is physical is contingent on what is possible, not the other way around. (A variation: there are finite many universes.)

4) Simulcra theory*: Like simulation theory, but there's no original to copy, just an infinite regression of mathematical models. There is no concrete, just the appearance of physical law arises from mathematical axioms. The question this raises now is why only this maths, given that mathematics is much more ambiguous than physics. Why should this be so limited at all?

*I coined it. It's mine.

It's meaningful to talk about free will. — icosahedron

Yes. This is the clincher. Usual arguments against free will or compatibilism that I've seen implicitly or explicitly assume a definition of free will designed to fail or conflict that bears no resemblance to what we mean in an everyday sense when we say free will.

It is more sensible to start by modelling what we mean as free will as we experience it, then determine if it is illusory or real.

Answering the Sam Harris objection about predicting our choices before we become aware of them. — icosahedron

I think this is an interesting element, but not terminal. The unconscious part of the brain is a superb pattern recognition program. It is not divorced from the rational part. If you've ever walked to school or driven to work and realised you have no memory of making that last left turn, you've experienced your brain's ability to turn algorithmic problems into pattern recognition ones. But:

A) That part can be trained, as in the above example, based on repeated rational decisions
B) The outputs of such reactions are inputs to rational ones. We may automatically decide something based on past experience, and we probably will ratify that decision consciously because it's mostly trustworthy, but we can still say, No, in this case it's better to do X, not Y.
C) Free will is not, in any meaningful sense, unconstrained anyway. We can, for instance, only choose from options that occur to us. It is sufficient to have some rational input for free will to be real. It doesn't have to do everything for us.

Likewise, if your response to any push-back is that you are obviously right and there's no value to a different view, then it is very easy to come up with ad hominem excuses for why the opponent can be dismissed outright. For example, psychoanalyze them and conclude that the only reason they are contradicting you is that they are "craving the Gotcha Game experience." After that you don't have to listen to anything they say and you can still feel good and smug. — SophistiCat

Contrary to the subject of this thread, and me being disagreeable by nature, I completely agree. Damn.

The amount of humans required to do a simple task is quite a large amount. — Yozhura

This is odd. The amount of humans required to do any task is surely shrinking.

If deaths or prison sentences would have no racial bias, then the total offenses charged would be a good indicator in telling how many go to jail or how many are killed by the police. — ssu

And yet they're not. And even if they were, that would not be evidence of no racial bias. Black people are more often pulled over in stop and search, and black communities are much more heavily policed. You are far more likely to get charged with possession of marijuana if you're black, for instance. The statistics are rather damning, and it's difficult to squint the sufficient amount for them to come out even.

Based on statistics, the incarceration rates of blacks is the statistic that isn't in line. — ssu

Please explain how that third statistic is in line.

Talking with someone who insists we know with confidence what inertia is, it is what is produced by the Higgs field, makes boring conversation, in my opinion — Metaphysician Undercover

And yet your entire objection was that inertia is not accepted as what you insist it is, namely an inherent property of the body in question. And while you may find science boring, I assure you that more people are bored by ignorant recourse to scientific ideas to promote anti-scientific hogwash. So if you expect me to be moved by your intolerance toward facts, you're doubly deluded.

So why the former? — ssu

For reasons already given but seemingly ignored. This isn't the 80s anymore. You can't just ignore evidence and claim it's a mystery/non-issue.

And also twice as likely to be arrested, even more likely to be incarcerated... — ssu

You do realise that those murdered on the streets don't end up incarcerated. That's not an overlap, that's an additional injustice.

Is it really aimed? You really think that this isn't a problem in very poor white communities in the US? — ssu

This is making the exact same fallacious remark again. Because it also happens to white people, it isn't systematically happening to black people twice as much. But it is, so...

So is this really an issue of police brutality being aimed at somebody or the police using excessive force generally when arresting people? — ssu

Factually, the former. White people die in police custody too. But black people particularly so. They are twice as likely to be killed than white people. We also have plenty of documentary evidence of deliberate killing of black people that goes beyond heavy-handedness. Even someone as dumb as a cop has seen enough to know that choking someone for a solid 8 minutes is a good way to kill them. The 'heavy-handed' defense when it is quite clear that these murders go well beyond heavy-handedness (e.g. shooting someone in the back and planting a gun on them) really does suggest that racists will say literally anything to deny there is a problem.

Then we had 10years of austerity imposed by the same establishment that was blamed for allowing and benefitting from the conditions which caused the crisis. — Punshhh

And, knowing all this, the electorate handed the Tories in their most ridiculous incarnation a landslide victory, all because they hate brown-skinned people. I don't think the spell has broken, rather, in order to survive, it has had to divorce itself entirely from reality.

Btw obvs the OP is comparing Platonism, nominalism and mathematician, not physicalism. I agree with the OP that mathematician makes more sense. The fact that axiomatic mathematics is possible multiple ways ought to make the notion of essential triangles, say, less attractive.

Then why not simply police brutality and what we do about it? — ssu

Which actually is named after George Floyd. It is confusing.

which is right next to 50 George Square — ssu

Is your suggestion here that if police brutality is disproportionately aimed at black people specifically and other minorities generally, the correct thing to do is pretend it is aimed at white people equally? Is it so hard to see why that is racist?

That conclusion seems unwarranted along with the psychologizing of, at the very least, people like the person you are quoting. The word 'agreed' by Hippyhead was in response to — Coben

I think the context is sufficient to see that the word 'agreed' was not what I was taking issue with.

There are three possible viewpoints:

1. I think my argument should be criticised
2. I don't care if my argument is criticised.
3. I don't think my argument should be criticised

By all means explain to me how the OP is in any way consistent with (1) or (2) and I will cede the point merrily.

Inertia and gravity are supposed to be properties of all material things. So are you suggesting that there are "bits" of reality which are immaterial, and this is why the theories of gravitation are incompatible with the theories of inertia? Or do you think that there are inconsistencies in our conceptions of space and time, as BC implied in the op? — Metaphysician Undercover

Neither, rather that inertia is one of the 'bits' we didn't used to know and now know with some degree of confidence through experimental verification. What we 'know' might yet be shown to reduce to something else, or be an approximation to something else that held well in historical experiments but fails in edge cases, like Newton's laws RE Mercury or Maxwell's equations RE atoms. But the experimental evidence to date suggests that massive particles gain their inertial mass by being subject to external fields.

All of those other mathematical structures that are not this one, nor parts of this one, still "exist" abstractly on this account, but not concretely, since "exists concretely" just means "is part of the same abstract structure that we are a part of", on this account. — Pfhorrest

Fair enough, a sort of abstract multiverse (itself a theory of abstraction). But why stop at mathematical universe's? Why not consider a much larger infinity of amathematical universes we cannot comprehend, of which a subset us regular and describable, of which one is ours? Does it have to be turtles all the way down?

Maybe for illustration, imagine a nested set of simulated universes, each full of simulated people who built the next simulation down... — Pfhorrest

Simulations are an inefficient way of building universes. On a classical computer, for instance, the amount of matter required to encode the wavefunction of a single electron is many orders of magnitude larger than an electron. Future computers will do better, but the easiest way to represent any system is always going to be to build it, not to describe it. Even if we discover that, say, the holographic principle means that all information about the universe can be encoded on its 2D boundary, it would be more efficient to build a 2D surface to house a real universe than to simulate one. And this holds for any 'The stars are illusions' arguments.

I didn't have this in mind, but it's a push for me in the direction of physicalism. Mathematics is symbolic and symbolism is not as efficient as simply being.

Except that it wasn't a point of view, but a question. Gotcha! :-) — Hippyhead

There's a lot of evidence in the OP that argument doesn't sit so well. That's the point of view I refer to, the one which gave rise to the question and its implicit assumption, not the question itself. So... that's a straw man, right? Gotcha! :D

It's difficult if not impossible to conceive of a Universe that isn't mathematical. It would have to be one in which quantity was meaningless, that had no regularity, no symmetry, no fixed number of dimensions... just sheer randomness or nothingness. Obviously intelligent life could not evolve in such a universe: we can only find that mathematics describes the universe perfectly in a perfectly mathematical universe.

I like your thread on building a human, maybe even culture, from axiomatic maths, but ZFC I think is linguistic, not physical: it is the least we can insist upon to describe the most. There is, for instance, so much charge in the universe and such facts as the countability of charges is more fundamental to the mathematical nature of the universe than the fact that we can represent zero as an empty set and build the natural numbers and integers and rationals, etc., by adding small numbers of axioms as we go.

There are ambiguities in mathematics and that is likely one. There are other axiomatic maths, there may be others in future. There are also ambiguities in how we apply mathematics to physics. Is it waves or matrices? They are physically equivalent but mathematically distinct. There is also a lot of mathematics that is not useful in physics or, if useful, is so for humans to approximate or iterate solutions to physical equations and unlikely to be part of nature's toolkit. If correspondence to physical law is an argument for mathematical realism, what to make of the rest of mathematics? What of the infinity of laws we could write down but have no apparent reality?

is it surprising that fear of death is subservient to money — Jack Cummins

That's fear of someone else's death, though. Different kettle of fish. Rather money is the anti-death insofar as those who have the most live the longest as a rule, but while it wins many battles, it always loses the war.

Death may be quickened through poverty and homelessness. — Jack Cummins

It certainly is.

However, while I think that euthanasia is an extreme but with some exceptions, such as with terminally I'll people who are suffering and wish to die — Jack Cummins

To be clear, I'm not pro-Euthenising ones least favourite child. Just that no one should be imprisoned for mercy, decency, love and compassion.

That is that life should be extended at all costs and this predominantly our current care system. Personally, I don't want to be kept alive on pots full of medication if I can barely remember my own name, cannot walk or even use the toilet myself. — Jack Cummins

Agreed. I mean, if you have private health care I guess do what you want. But this idea that it is better to live at all than to live well is, I agree, symptomatic of an unhealthy fear of death, and we shouldn't pander to it.

I am not saying that it is going to be business as usual. I am saying that all sides play politics of fear and affect: there is almost no place for reasoned positions built around rational interests. — Number2018

Well, that's true. Media thrives on fear and politics, and politicians thrive on media. But when you have a POTUS who is vocally attempting to subvert democracy, that does seem to be a reasonable thing to panic about.

I don't know if this is possible but if it is, does this qualify as a positron transforming/changing into a proton? — TheMadFool

I'm afraid not, for a few reasons. First, particles are defined by their rest masses, not frame-dependent masses, and as magnitudes of four-momenta which do not change with velocity.

Another issue is that positrons and protons have other properties beyond mass and charge. Protons are baryons and preserve something called baryon number in interactions. Positrons are leptons and preserve lepton number. (Not all the time, actually.)

In terms of discerning them, the positron would have to be moving close to the speed of light to have the mass of a proton at rest. So that would be a clue. It would be the one whooshing past :p

I fear death. I just fear dementia and infirmity more. I'm pro-Euthenasia, both politically and personally. Actually I'm pro-Euthenasia about quite a few people.

It is common to blame Trump in undermining the trust in the integrity of the upcoming elections, and, consequently, destroying democracy. It is impossible to deny that Trump plays politics of fear and replaces rational political conviction by the appeal to inchoate feelings and emotions. Yet , we must admit that another side shares equal responsibility. Thus, Hillary Clinton called Biden not to concede ‘under any circumstances'. Also, on August 3rd, TIP, primarily pro-Biden institute, published report. — Number2018

What are you saying here? That when the POTUS declares he will contest the election if he loses, he intends to discount votes that don't tend to go the desired way, he even incites his own voters to commit voter fraud, everyone else has to pretend that it's going to be business as usual?

There are numerous reasons to dismiss this theory as ridiculous, beginning with the inability to establish a necessary relationship between gravity and mass, as required by observation. — Metaphysician Undercover

The theory has been verified by observation already, fulfilling the criteria of good science. 'The way I'd like things to be' does not. It is not necessary to have a ToE to have good theories of bits of everything. The Industrial Revolution and the Digital Revolution did not apparently require a ToE to hold good.

This is known as the incompatibility between general relativity (by which gravity is explained) and the Standard Model (by which mass is explained). — Metaphysician Undercover

It's amazing how quickly you went from citing the Standard Model when you thought it supported your argument to dismissing it as inconsistent with GR now you think it doesn't. While much progress has been made in formulating QFT in a GR framework, pragmatically the calculations are intractable and the expansions plagued with infinities, which is a problem for us, not nature. Our technological inability to calculate exact solutions to difficult equations should not be confused with the universe's inability to cope with the same equations. Both theories have been experimentally verified countless times to high precision. The Universe appears quite happy with both.

Agreed. But still curious. A bit suspicious. Even skeptical. Why are we so interested in engaging in an activity built upon exposing flaws articulated by others? Why did we choose this hobby instead of say, playing the piano? — Hippyhead

This point of view only makes sense if you believe YOU ARE RIGHT and that anyone who points out an error IS ATTACKING YOU. It's that millennial mentality that says you have the right to go unchallenged in life.

From a more academic standpoint, the whole point of putting forward an argument is to invite criticism so you can defend it. Where you can, win! Where you can't, you amend and strengthen your argument accordingly, win! And where your argument cannot be strengthened, you've been saved a lifetime of being totally wrong, win!

A Republican acquaintance thinks the GOP will be looking for technicalities that were overlooked in years past. She will vote in person because she wants to "make sure they get my vote." I think a conservative SC would steer clear of the bigger picture and focus on minutiae. — frank

I wonder how they'll rationalise fending off any challenge to Trump's election, which would be the obvious response. The use and misuse of voting machines in 2016 was astounding.

from a physicalist point if view, we do not have brain function *and* mind; they're the same thing.
— Kenosha Kid
If mind and brain are one and the same then how can you say that you need one to have the other? — Harry Hindu

I'm looking for the phrase... Oh yes!

You don't read people's posts, do you? — Harry Hindu

So if Republicans didnt do anything else, they have already succeeded in creating fear and confusion which works in their favor. They have given some the impression that it's either risk getting covid (which will be death for some) or don't bother voting. As Hanover points out, it's politics. — frank

I agree with this. Casting doubt on the election result at all prior to the election constitutes election meddling. And Trump is a fascist, that is clear.

But is the concern here that smart Democrat voters will be safe and vote by mail knowing this is precisely what will be under attack, while stupid Republican voters will be dumb and vote in person? And that the SC will vote to institute fascism using this and a claim from the most unreliable and overtly criminal President in history as a basis, forgetting their entire careers just to make a delusional manbaby happy?

I don't buy it. If the postal vote is more significant this year, I think that makes it much less likely that the SC will dismiss it.

But worse case scenario there's 4 more years because of this. At least 100,000 dead Republicans won't be voting ever again.

It is wrong to attribute inertia to the field rather than to the particle. And, the Standard Model indicates that the causal relationship between the field and the particle is unknown. So it is more ridiculous to claim that the particle's inertia comes from outside the particle (what is known to be wrong), than it is to claim that it comes from the will of God (what may or may not be wrong). — Metaphysician Undercover

Inertia in the Standard Model has always arisen from the external influence of the Higgs field, from way before the existence of the Higgs was experimentally verified. The nature of the interaction has also been extremely well understood for decades. The difficulty in finding the Higgs boson had nothing to do with unknowns in the interactions between massive particles and the field, but between excitations of the field and the field itself.

Well, there's more than one problem then. Whether people are stupid is a different concern from encroaching fascism and the risk of it. — fdrake

We had a similar thing in the UK with Brexit. The leavers won 51:49%. Because David Gammeron was too thickly cut to consider the possibility that the majority might be comparable to the sort of result variance that would be time-averaged out, we were stuck unable to contest what ought to have been a highly contestable result.

But this is a very goal-centric view. Ultimately, half the country wants to self-destruct in the name of a white Britain. That's the real problem, not the one percent either way. Same with Trump. I don't see much difference, in terms of the pulse of the populus, between him losing by 1 state and successfully contesting the result and him winning by one state, and I don't see even Republican judges voting outright for fascism by overturning the result of state after state. The root problem is you have half of the population who do not believe that their President need be lawful, moral, intelligent, competent or effective, that such imperviousness to outcomes might be relied upon by those with fascist inclinations like Trump.

The system could be better, but I think it protects against outright fascism, although it's easy to see how that can be inverted over time. If and when fascism properly takes hold, it won't be some dark coup: the people will vote it in. That's what I'd bet on were I betting man.

The narrative seems to be that mail in ballots "rig the election" in a close call, so that launders support for the Republicans making that anti-democratic power play. — fdrake

I don't doubt a close call election can be stolen; it seems to me that's already happened. But who cares? If Trump loses by 1%, that's still an electorate too stupid not to deserve Trump since despite all evidence that he is a moron and a criminal:

in person voting is deemed to skew in favour of Republicans — fdrake

who've been on a race to the bottom for decades (Reagan, Bush Jr, Trump... next up, a lump of crusty mucus). If he loses by 10%, there's no way you can turn a loss into win. Republican judges are still judges. If the evidence says that Trump lost and there's no wiggle room for interpretation, Trump lost.

The problem is an electorate that can see what's happening and still vote him into a position where he can contest an election and the SC potential could read the result as a win for Trump.

Again, ticks all the boxes for me. I think you're confusing ' an argument that yields a conclusion I dislike' with 'an invalid argument'.

I nominate this for consideration as the most ridiculous line ever posted to TPF. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's called the Higgs field. Most people have heard of it.

No worries. It would be cool though. — creativesoul

I don't agree. George Floyd has no relationship with Edinburgh University and them using his name would be exploitative of his death imo. He was a victim of a particularly American cultural problem. The people who need to see their sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters grow up in a place that honours George Floyd are people like NOS. And may it break their cold hearts.

Can you see what is wrong with this argument? — Yohan

Nope, seems pretty solid. If you accept premises 1 and 2, 4 follows. 1 is, as I say, the neuroscientific definition of the mind. 2 is self-evident.

It's not true?

Well, shit. I thought it was cool that they would do so... — creativesoul

Sorry, it's not. That might be a bit much. There's a broader movement in the UK away from celebrating persons involved in the slave trade. Hume, it is claimed, is such a person. The university has temporarily removed his moniker pending review, and is now known simply by its address: 40 George Square.

a university in Scotland renamed the David Hume building to George Floyd. — NOS4A2

Well that certainly proves you read right-wing trash. Not that there was doubt.

I nominate this for consideration as the most ridiculous line ever posted to TPF. — tim wood

Seconded. The OP is astounding too.



As far as I understand your rhetoric, you claim there is a contradiction between the idea that the intrinsic properties of the stone can give it inertia and the idea that the it is the properties of another, external body -- the Earth -- that give it movement.

This is apparently "absurd". And yet the cup remains at rest on my desk (inertia) until I push it with my hand (external force). Is this mundane phenomenon that everyone is familiar with absurd?

One point of correction. Newton had another law, the second law of motion. It is erroneous to say that the Earth attracts the stone and not vice versa. However the Earth is extremely heavy and the stone extremely light. The force exerted on the Earth is negligibly small, but it is not zero.

It is certainly true that the stone has properties that result in its inertia, but the inertia itself does not lie within the stone. You may recall a few years ago a famous physical experiment and a few Nobel prizes for precisely this fact. Inertia, like gravity, comes from the outside. Naturally this is not in Newton's theory, but then one cannot quarrel with Newton for the sake of dismissing a broader principle.

Disengaging from a moron is hardly self-destruction. — StreetlightX

That's certainly true. Bye.

Humans are porkers. We are grown for the sole reason of money. Money makes evolution faster, that is why everything is based around money. Those who have the most wealth, those are the ones who will matter the most in the history of human kind. We are creating past, because we don't know when the future ends. — Yozhura

Have you read much on memetics? The idea that replicable information drives the evolution of human culture has been around for a few decades now.