How is this not the 4D object moving wrt the 4D universe (an idea you reject)? The temporal axis is the fourth dimension. — Luke

But moving wrt the 4D universe would be moving wrt a fifth dimension. The 3D (2+1) representation I posted from Huw Price's talk would, if the 4D object moved wrt the 4D block, be an animation, i.e. changing with a time that wasn't already in the picture.

Is it a 3D or a 4D object that moves? — Luke

They're the same object and it's the same motion, just different representations. The 3D object changes position with time: this is our everyday experience of motion. The 4D object changes shape with time: motion in 4D is geometry. They're not describing two different things but the same thing as two different representations.

Of course, factors like the circumstance, our appetite, and our reason, all influence the will towards a decision; but they cannot compel the will to the decision if the will is truly free — Samuel Lacrampe

It is you that does the compelling on the basis of them. This is why abstraction, i.e. ignoring what the will does and how it works, is unhelpful. 'Truly free' in this context can only mean 'act against one's own intentions' or 'act randomly' or such, which are far more deleterious to the concept of free will than 'can only decide once'.

No more so than notions of objective reality, which you support in your support of natural science. — Pfhorrest

In both, objective reality is inferred from human activity. In science, the existence of objective reality is the simplest possible explanation for why the universe behaves as if it does, i.e. it appears to be a top-down. In morality, not so much. We know why morality is in some ways universal and others not, and it's a bottom-up structure, not a top-down one. (We'll end up making every thread about this before the week is out.)

Okay, so you meant capital-R "Rationalism" as in the anti-empirical philosophical movement containing people like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, not just common-noun rationalism as in asking for reasons to (dis)believe things and not just obeying orthodoxy on faith. No disagreement there then. — Pfhorrest

Aye, the principals of the Enlightenment, and therefore the principles of the Enlightenment. Pomo places an emphasis on lived experience rather than abstraction-wrangling.

I'm willing to stipulate that Susskind and others (Penrose for sure) have theories positing and endless sequence of universes before the big bang. — fishfry

Big crunch sequence? Rather ruled out by the evidence.

"Past eternal but not bounded?" Sorry that doesn't make a lot of sense. — fishfry

It makes as much sense as an infinite but bounded universe, which is hardly a foreign idea in cosmology.

Sorry, I missed this.

You have said that the 4D object does "sometimes move". Since you reject "the idea that the 4D object moves wrt the 4D universe", then with respect to what universe (3D? 5D?) does the 4D object "sometimes move"? — Luke

Its own temporal axis. The ground sometimes grades up. Up with respect to what? Some fixed plane that doesn't. Likewise, motion in 4D is manifest as a deviation from, say, a purely cylindrical shape (for the case of a 3D ball).

If the objects at t and t' are different, then you are no longer talking about the motion of a single object from t to t'. — Luke

This is, again, a presentist notion with no business in eternalism .

2 + 2 is definitely equal to 4 — tilda-psychist

With respect to chosen mathematical axioms. I can give you an axiomatic mathematics in which 2+2=4 is unjustified.

1. There does not exist an empty set 0={}.
2. Etc.

You'll have to provide a link for the absurd (and false) claim that there is a reputable theory of physics positing an infinite past. — fishfry

A rather histrionic request, but okay. Susskind is the obvious, such as in:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.5385

You can check Guth's 2007 review where he also discusses inflation fields that are past eternal but bounded.

nationalism, moral objectivity, populism, anthropocentrism, rationalism, religion, and political ideology.
— Kenosha Kid

Two of these things are not like the others. — Pfhorrest

I saw this, then lost it, now found it again. They are all different, and there a few ways of breaking them down, but the main characteristic is they are centred. Nationalism centres around the nation-state you were accidentally born into, moral objectivity about an objective set of moral truths, populism (in a broad sense, not just anti-elitism) around majority opinions, anthropocentrism around human primacy, rationalism around objective reality as discoverable by thinking really hard about it, and political ideologies around particular needs and wants. Religion falls under several of these (but definitely not rationalism).

I listed them as targets of postmodernism which tends to decentre, particularly in its early incorporation of hyperreality, championing of multiculturalism and pluralism, its post-anthropocentrist environmental philosophy, and scepticism to claims of objective truth.

The obvious one I omitted is science, for a few reasons. First, science absorbed pomo criticism rather well. Second, modern science contributed to rather than defended itself against decentering ideas, and is well aware of its relationship to objective reality. And third, it's difficult to find anti-scientific postmodernism that isn't actually a competing ideology wanting to use pomo scepticism to forward its own metanarrative. From Wikipedia:

In Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1994), the scientists Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt accused postmodernists of anti-intellectualism, presented the shortcomings of relativism, and suggested that postmodernists knew little about the scientific theories they criticized and practiced poor scholarship for political reasons. The authors insist that the "science critics" misunderstood the theoretical approaches they criticized, given their "caricature, misreading, and condescension, [rather] than argument".

which accords with my evaluation of anti-science agendas that continue to this day: a selective incredulity toward metanarratives. Major players like Lyotard, Derrida, Kellman and eventually Latour himself did not see scientific evidence as no better or worse than religious dogma a la Feyerabend but did see it as fair game for study, which it was, and that was good. But the tactical and populist appeal of anti-science by what Latour rightly calls "extremists" was set in, and now pomo is more associated with rejection of science (esp. by the conservative wing of the scientific community) than anything else.

This seems to me qualitatively different from the rejection of metanarratives, but that might be my bias.

:up:

These are technicalities and I cannot get into them because it is not my field, but I can only say I did a research and I haven't found flaws with pilot wave. I did find many with GR though. My point is that there are many different opinions, but at the end of the day common-sense and logic will prevail. GR or probabilistic QM are very against common-sense and logic. — Eugen

We are evolved to model everyday, human-scale phenomena. Limiting nature to be common sense is itself illogical. It is perfectly normal for scientific theories to evolves, spawn, die, succeed, etc. But common sense has nothing to do with it.

Scepticism, empiricism, pragmatism, and (I agree, ) Occam's razor, which I include under scepticism.

In metaphysics and epistemology, I accept that the existence of a real, regular external world is the simplest explanation for the appearance of a real, regular subjective world by taking into account not only my experience of it but also my experience of consensus within it. Alternative explanations add complexity but no explanatory power, so I am sceptical.

In ontology, I accept that the precise nature of our models of the external world will be imperfect, but believe that those that correspond the most regularly with phenomena, including the phenomena of seeming consensus, are more accurate and thus justifiable via pragmatism than those with weaker correspondence or lesser seeming consensus.

In ethics, this is a biological (nat. sel.) basis for moral capacity, a sociohistorical theory of moral origins, an existential footing for moral decision-making, and a scepticism toward contrary top-down moral systems that do not follow from selected-for moral capacity.

The common "error" I encounter is ignoring how things actually seem in preference for abstraction behind definitions that don't necessarily correlate to any phenomena. The free will question is a perfect case in point, unless someone has ever actually observed someone "do otherwise". These sidestep empiricism and pragmatism, and derive from definitions one ought to be sceptical of.

It did. And of course a thing cannot be in 2 places at once and it doesn't "care" about being observed or not. — Eugen

Well, yes, it did. It predicted a sizeable electric dipole moment for hydrogen. This wasn't found, so Bohm went back and put the charge distribution inside the pilot wave instead of the particle, completely undermining the whole point of his own theory.

Pilot wave has no empirical flaws and it contradicts both GR and probabilistic QM. — Eugen

It's not relativistic by design btw. It is mathematically equivalent to non-relativistic quantum mechanics (i.e. the Schrödinger equation), which is an approximation to relativistic quantum mechanics (i.e. the Dirac equation).

Pilot wave has no empirical flaws and it contradicts both GR and probabilistic QM. — Eugen

Then it ought to yield testable predictions.

I think it is unfair to say that postmodernism resulted in a new Grand Narrative, but rather comprises a whole slew of critiques of the modern narrative. — Adam's Off Ox

Well, it did, but not because of pomo. "Everything is a social construct" is a grand narrative that grew out of pomo, but it wasn't pomo. Pomo would dictate that such a system of knowledge ought to be treated with scepticism and deconstructed like any other language-based. Unfortunately pomo is associated with the former more than the latter.

Welcome to the forum! Good first post imo!

:rofl:

Hi Doppy!

In answer to the first question, it's a case-by-case basis. Descartes' proof relied on, among other things, dubious personally testimony (I can conceive of an infinite, perfect being!). Aquinus relied on jumping to conclusions. There aren't actually that many logical proofs of God; they are mostly variants of one another. Hidden circularity is a common trait though.

As for your second question, no. I'm an atheist because I wasn't raised to believe one way or another. My parents were theologically sloppy and wanted me to make up my own mind. Having my own mind, I found it surprising that people entertained the idea with so little apparent reason.

Most believers are taught to believe by their believer parents. Most atheists afaik are not. There's a little movement in between which, in testimonies I've seen, are either due consideration of evidence (both ways) or vulnerability in circumstances. (There is a reason why religions favour the vulnerable. Scientology, for instance, preys heavily on alcoholics, drug addicts, and people with mental problems. In the UK, it was usual to have chaplains as counsellors in prisons.)

Generally I don't think the Bible, theology, or philosophy of religion enter into people's theism or atheism very much.

I am sure it is a case where many mistakes bring you to the correct answer. It is simply illogic and against common sense and reality cannot be like this. — Eugen

It is an exceedingly simple theory, derived exactly from two postulates:
1. The empirically-verified observer-independence of the speed of light;
2. The empirically-verified invariability of physical law to inertial motion.
Without finding a flaw in its postulates or its derivation, it is illogical to dismiss its conclusions.

Our tastes are our own, but taste is not a scientific criterion. The universe has no obligation to be intuitive; she may have her own rules as long as she sticks to them.

GR is based on the idealistic thought that the universe revolves around the observer. — Eugen

GR is based on the Equivalence Principle (gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable) and special relativity (SR) which decentres the observer and claims there are no special frames of reference. Quite the opposite to what you said.

GR is so illogic. E.g. if you live on Mars and work in London, if you wanna travel by the speed of light (in order to arrive earlier) you have to leave home earlier, which is contrary to all daily empirical tests. So this is an empirical counter-argument. GR is false! — Eugen

This is SR. If you wish to travel for 5 minutes to get to Mars for 9 am, you have to leave before 8:55 Martian time because of time dilation. Moving clocks run slow, as has been demonstrated by the velocity-dependence of particle decays.

I am not a sciebtist, but I have seen different plausible variants. You can check on YT. But even if we didn't have alternatives, I don't think believing in absurd things like time curvature is a good way to do science. Time is like probabilities - just a human tool. — Eugen

A good way to do science is to test your hypotheses. Belief is always optional :)

There are many ways in which you could reach the same result. — Eugen

They have to be proposed and tested. Tmk no testable theory contests GR. A testable theory must a) explain everything Newtonian gravity explained, b) explain everything Einsteinian gravity explained, c) explain something unexplained by GR. When we have that, GR is dead. Science in a nutshell!

Scientists have to accept that Einsten was at best a cool dude, but not a god, and he was simply wrong. — Eugen

I think they need a stronger reason to than distaste. Relativity's predictions are numerous and empirically verified (black holes, gravity waves, Mercury's orbit...) and science is empirical. And it's not like they're not considering other options (string theory, for instance).

It’s terrible right! And, I’m still a sucker for it esp. if it’s found in somewhere generally respectable like the Guardian or NYTimes. I think nutritional science has to be the most frustrating when journalism gets a hold of it. The verdict on eggs, alcohol, coffee, etc switches every 6 months to two years often in the same newspaper or website but when you go to the original source the difference in the findings are not so stark. Scientific articles really need to be made public (ie not be put behind a paywall). — Kmaca

WAS EINSTEIN WRONG?
<insert 4000 words here>
No.

I find it quite stupid and dishonest myself. — Kenosha Kid

Emergency clarification: I mean Nagel's review, not anyone here! Phew!

Dennett really does deny that the first-person nature of lived experience is real. What he says it is, is the consequence of billons of unconscious cellular interactions that give rise to the illusion of first-person consciousness, which is ultimately devoid of anything personal, as such. Only molecules are real, and we are the consequence of the collective action of their ‘unconscious competence’.

It is, as Nagel says in that review, preposterous. In fact, if Dennett has done a service to philosophy, it is in ably demonstrating, across the span of an entire career, what a preposterous claim ‘eliminativism’ amounts to. — Wayfarer

If you equate 'real' with 'elementary', your error is understandable. But then translating that more reasonable language, we have:

"
What he says it is, is the consequence of billons of unconscious cellular interactions that give rise to the emergence of first-person consciousness, which is ultimately devoid of anything personal, as such. Only molecules are elementary, and we are the consequence of the collective action of their ‘unconscious competence’.
"

which is less obviously wrong. But in fact that's not what Nagel is saying either. He can take no issue with the idea that the brain unconsciously preprocesses data, so he instead casts aspersions on Dennett's motives and dismisses the logical conclusion ad hominem.

I guess how compelling that is depends on how inclined you'd be toward Nagel's own biases before the fact. I find it quite stupid and dishonest myself.

I have the same problem when I’m reading a science article in a newspaper or general website. The journalists covering science usually covers a finding in a much more interesting, controversial way to generate clicks than the original finding. — Kmaca

This x 10,000

Velocity generally is an unhelpful concept in modern physics. It is little-used in quantum mechanics for instance. Momentum is the useful quantity of motion. But any concept generalised to 4D is the same. If you accept time as a dimension different from but analogous to space, any temporal component of a four-vector will be likewise different from but analogous to the spatial components. The mixing of these components in frame transformations is testament to the validity of this interpretation. When you transform from a rest frame to a non-rest one, the result is a rotation of a 4D property from purely temporal into partially spatial. And vice versa.

Does that mean the PoMo movement has resulted in driving the political Left and Right farther apart? I hadn't thought of the cynical "fake news" notion as a reaction to Postmodern pushing from the Left. :chin: — Gnomon

In a sense. This is my historical perspective, others may think pomo played a lesser role, but it seems to me that more positive pomo criticisms and scepticisms of systems of knowledge such as feminism laid the groundwork for a 'truth egalitarianism'.

The invalid idea synonymous with postmodernism that science is untrustworthy comes from perfectly valid points made by people like Popper, Kuhn and Latour that science is not some kind of deterministic, culture-independent accumulation of facts and formulation of fact-driven theories that can be proven. There is an anchoring to popular ideas (i.e. a politics) that eventually cannot be sustained, leading to paradigm shifts. This is certainly true. It is generally necessary to embed new work within well-accepted frameworks. Funding plays a big role too, which is also political to an extent.

TL;DR version, the occurrence of paradigm shifts suggests that, at any given time, there exist other possible and very different scientific explanations for phenomena that aren't considered... yet!

The incorrect reading of this is that one theory has no more value than another. Creationism becomes the equal of cosmology, intelligent design the equal of natural selection, unknown non-human factors the equal of manmade climate change. This is not rigorous thinking but relies on non-scientific ideas: selective evidence, unjustified assumptions, suspension of the falsification criterion.

A good example is the advent of social psychology. The idea of social psychology is sound, but the mode of social psychology is to set up a false dichotomy between nature and nurture. Any evidence of natural factors (evolution) in human behaviour is instantly seized on and reinterpreted through a nurture-only lens, without evidence, logic, or any solid theoretical framework of its own. Evolutionary psychology does not assume a nature-only stance, but social psychology's raison d'etre is to undermine any possible natural factor to forward its political exploitation of postmodern scepticism: that truth is a social construct. Social psychology, dangerously, is accepted as science while being utterly anti- and unscientific, to the extent that, a few years ago, a social psychologist won an award from the Royal Society for a book which included the belief that "gonads are a social construct".

It is not postmodernism's fault particularly. It put forward valid methodologies to identify errors in systems of knowledge. To my knowledge, no one has a rebuttal. The egalitarian hypothesis came separately, from people within pomo (like Feyerabend, and Latour himself) and without, particularly the church, feminism, and capitalism. (The original investors in climate change research were Shell and Exxon. Huge investors in criticism of the science of that research were later Shell and Exxon.) The parity of systems of knowledge does not derive from scepticism or deconstruction: it derives from deliberate political decisions to push certain metanarratives while pretending to be merely rigorous about others.

Thanks, though from looking at the opinions of other physicists on the matter these past few hours, it doesn't seem like the whole concept of "speed through spacetime" is a popular way of describing things, with alot of people blaming Brian Greene for the concept. — Mr Bee

It's older than that. The natural reaction to special relativity was to figure out what the invariant properties of objects were. Four-velocity is one of those invariants. It has good explanatory power, for instance in demonstrating why a reference frame change is a rotation and in simply describing time dilation. It encodes a lot of relativity. Beyond that, yeah, not a very useful quantity to work with.

Objectivity is just the absence of bias, as subjectivity is bias. If the two of you have shared experiences to refer to, then that is all you need for objectivity enough for the two of you. And total objectivity is just the limit of that process: what accounting for more and more sharable experiences converges toward. We can’t ever finish that process, but there being an objective truth just means that that process converges toward something. — Pfhorrest

Yes, with the caveat that, just because there is apparent convergence, it doesn't follow that there is some mind-independent truth at that limit. Convergence can be dependent on starting values.

Things like mortgages? — Banno

Well yeah, value generally. I had theology in mind.

Can you clarify what "movement" means here? Certainly can't mean change in spatial location with respect to time since we are talking about "motion" through time. Of course one can define it in terms of a fifth dimension which objects move with respect to, but there are none beyond those of spacetime that I am aware. It seems like you're using it in a different sense than is normally used. — Mr Bee

4D velocity is defined with respect to a different measure of time, rather than a different dimension. Within any given reference frame, a body's four-velocity is its rate of change of 4D position (x, y, z, t) with respect to the proper time of the body (t') which is time in that body's rest frame.

Like other physical four-vectors, this velocity is frame-independent even though its vector components are not. (In the body's rest frame or a comoving frame, all of the velocity is in the time component; in any other frame, some of it is spatial, i.e. the body is seen to move.) The magnitude of all 4D velocities is c, the speed of light.

It's the view eviscerated in the first part of Philosophical Investigations. — Banno

Funnily enough, I didn't actually have Wittgenstein in mind because I wasn't thinking specifically of philosophical problems. I was coming more ftom a structuralist angle, but yes... more succinctly, words do not need objective meaning to be used successfully in language. What we do need is feedback from others that suggests consistency in language use, e.g. someone handing me an apple while saying "Have an apple!" As long as everything is consistent, we proceed as if objective truth were forthcoming. But it isn't.

It is apparently simple to hijack this system to get people talking about things with no objective reality, with no means of establishing or querying objective truth, and with apparent consistency.

What does this mean?

Are you saying that when you look at the quote above, you are not seeing the same thing as I see? But there is a clear sens ein which wht I quoted above is what you wrote, so how could that be? — Banno

No, I don't accept it in the sense that they are compatible. The process itself is deterministic.

The above has nothing to do with what what you wrote and, maybe, for a moment, you wondered how to understand it or whether you had been understood. It is precisely because this current paragraph seems to you relevant and meaningful to your post that you know that in fact we probably understand each other at least well enough to proceed. We have a seeming two-person consensus of the ideas under discussion that will remain in place until something comes to light to disprove it.

This is how meaning is assumed to be conveyed linguistically, pending proof of irreconcilability. It's much the same way that theoretical scientific models are assumed true if they seem to work until disproven. Like science, we have no direct knowledge of any objective truths that do not arise other than subjectively and via consensus. But so long as our conversation seems to be working, it's as if we're guided by the angel of objectivity. But we're not. :smile:

This is not to say that consensus itself can't be formed in part by underlying objectivity. But it's always good imo to ask the question: if we removed the objective bit, would all this still hang together by itself? Laws of physics... seems unlikely. Morality... seems highly likely.

I think one can act out one's philosophy. — unenlightened

So long as you don't tell anyone about it :rofl: Although it's interesting to wonder how well we could even put together one's own philosophy without language.

Postmodernism interests me, in part because of its scepticism and relativism, in part because of its contribution to literature and architecture, but also because it's odd that something that has so many elements that have entered a mainstream that also roundly denounces it, which is a measure of just how shit the shit parts were.

I think pomo tends to get delineated in philosophy to the science wars and religious opportunism, with maybe a sneering nod toward Derrida. I see it as part of a broader change in thinking starting with Kant, going through Darwin, through relativity and quantum mechanics, through the phenomonologists and existentialists, through Popper, Wittgenstein and Derrida, to a healthy scepticism or even antagonism toward nationalism, moral objectivity, populism, anthropocentrism, rationalism, religion, and political ideology.

I think, similar to the existentialists, the big problem with postmodernists was that, once they'd established a scepticism toward grand narratives, they promptly constructed a grand narrative around it. Another similarity with existentialism was that, even if you accepted it, there's not much else you can do with it.

And what people did do with it was bad. Scepticism got replaced by selective scepticism, grand narratives rearing their heads on the basis that science, the figurehead system of knowledge of modernism, could provide no more insight than anything else. The humanities queued to tear it down, leaving a distrust that hasn't really shifted. Feminism found systems of power even in office air conditioning.

Truth became up for grabs, alternative facts entered the right-wing political mainstream, and now we're post-truth altogether, with nationalism, moral objectivity, and populism getting by on "What's truth anyway?" Which is a shame, because the whole point of pomo was to call bullshit out.

:smile: Thanks

Do you actually though? I don't mean to say you have a standard philosophical position on the matter, but don't you have conceptual insight/imagination that you apply to the thing to interpret it? Like an imaginative background of the calculation. — fdrake

Shut-up-and-calculate is a sort of atheistic position on the interpretation of QM as a whole, which describes me well. There are some I find intriguing, some just plain wrong, but I think I have good reason to not adopt a premature position. The ball-rolling of interpreting QM comes from a time when there were only a few simple many-body states we could calculate, and yet intelligent people started generalising to cats rigged to particle detectors. My research group tended to be open to the idea that the maths would sort itself out and give us answers, which, to a limited extent, it has done. Experiment has also pointed in quite a different direction again. These have been far more insightful than adopting a position.

Concerning specific methods used, it is sometimes helpful to picture things as meaning something physical when you're learning, but beyond that short-term utility, it's more misleading than anything. Besides, these things tend to get their own terminology that's abstracted from any interpretation beyond "The Feynman diagram looks like a ladder/bubble/whatever." My particular research tended to live in quite abstract domains.

It's the results that are important. Those are what demand interpretation. I don't particularly question the underlying meaning of a hammer when putting pictures on my wall :rofl:

These guys are anti-materialists. The problem is those who deny consciousness are materialists. — Eugen

It would be less surprising to me if 24% philosophers were anti-materialists.

This is probably a good explanation of the problem. A guy spends half an hour talking about a naturalistic explanation for consciousness and some douchebag in marketing titles it "The Illusion of Consciousness".

:rofl: