What would nature do in our absence, could there possibly be any conditions for either determinism or free will? — magritte
In this case I merely paraphrased Wikipedia! :lol: — Agent Smith

No matter. :cool: I just posed a question to think about. Philosophy is all about missing questions not 'truth'. It's aporia.

Einstein didn't believe in free will or at least had doubts? I thought he was a religion person talking about "God not playing dice" and what not. — TiredThinker

Einstein's God was Nature, or the logical creator of nature, like Plato's God was the god of logic Zeus.

free will as indicated by the experimenters' liberty to choose what to measure, which experiments to perform — Agent Smith

That sounds about right to me. Scientists freely determine the bounds and setup of controlled observation and analysis. In between, the experiment proceeds in the physical world in real time independent of humans. Experimental details are indeterminate to start until analysis succeeds in sifting planned or fortuitous often statistical information from the data. So the simplified question becomes what small part of nature can be described by any logic.

What would nature do in our absence, could there possibly be any conditions for either determinism or free will?

Of course. Time is just the most obvious variable. — Pie

Yet the most simple and obvious can have the deepest implications. PI, e, -1 are only simple numbers. But over millennia additional meanings were developed which led to surprising relations to be discovered suggesting an ancient original hidden symmetry. But only after mastery of the details will that simplicity of the whole be seen as obvious.

Those of us who are not mathematicians never master the details of any of the branches of math. Each branch invents necessary precise terms, for private understanding and also for public insider communicability so that proofs can be developed and verified.

Philosophy does not have any exact terms therefore understanding of any sort is an art and reliable communication can only be had by specialists of the subject with historical and sociocultural perspective. Which makes it very difficult for professionals to not talk past each other all while using a common language.

social constructs aren't rigid and eternal. Meanings can drift. — Pie

Time is not the only variable. Social constructs are not universal. That would be too simplistic. Social or professional groups of insiders create meaning for themselves. These groups can be plural making for ambiguity, and be larger or smaller for wider or narrower understanding. That's one reason we need linguists to sort out the details.

"accepted answer"
That's amusing. Accepted implies that there is an authority who has the capacity and power (dynamis) to accept and to make accepted. In philosophy that should be an automatic non sequitur.

Nothing is stable at L2 — noAxioms

Ah thanks, I was confusing the gravitational hillocks at L1-L3 with the vales at L4-L5.

Anything caught in that low spot would be moving very slowly, else it would not be in that low spot. This object was not caught there, nor is the spot particularly attractive to random objects. It could have happened anywhere. — noAxioms

Relatively speaking, how slow is slow and how fast is fast?

Something hadta go wrong! :groan: — Agent Smith

They could be parked in a convenient but busy location. There's a lot of tiny debris that gets caught and swirls about in those gravitational low spots.

When thinking of objects or mechanisms consciousness forms a gestalt of them, that is a object or a mechanism is a whole with parts or properties. Simple, right? But what about events. — Josh Alfred

Parts would be too simple. That might do for something material that already had defined parts, but that would make the question of events moot from the start. What are the parts of a billiard game or football match, or love, beauty, a thought, a bicycle ride, or just a simple encounter with someone?

To look for parts, other than parallel streams, whether point particles or bound segments in time, is already a reductionist approach that will work for the pragmatist or scientist to the extent or precision required for practical ends. Is that engineer's approach sufficient for philosophy?

oxygenation of the atmosphere about 2 billion years ago. — unenlightened

Which means that before about 2 billion years ago iron rust was green but after that it became reddish. Should that colors be called greed or redeen?

The climate swings back and forth between long glacial periods and short interglacials. — Tate

I think you are taking the chart for granted without examining some of its detail. First, all statistics represent some view of the past, and the past does not in any way guarantee the future. That is because an assumption of necessary continuity is speculative on your part and is without either logical or scientific support. To see this, one must realize that one or more causative factors for the behavior of that chart could abruptly come into being, disappear, or change without prior notice, as for example by a large asteroid strike.

Second, we must look at the time scale on the horizontal line. In the long run it may continue fluctuating, but on shorter term we will not be around to check where the chart is headed.

The relevant changed causative factor for the present appears to be the alarming uncontrolled spread of limited intelligence monkey relatives all over earth whose powerful political leadership is unable to see the negative side of rapidly increasing technology which is about to destroy their niche for survival on this planet. The environment can be very fragile -- that chart has and will possibly change very rapidly again. What is does say is that if an ice age is coming it will happen shockingly rapidly, perhaps a decade or less, due to run-away circumstances, like that large asteroid strike.

Global warming has become obviously real in the past decades. The Earth might not mind a few more degrees. But we will all die of starvation if not by nuclear wars or rapid unchecked pandemics.

That chart shows the past in the absence of human interference, and it will resume its gyrations after all humans are gone. In other words, it may be great science but it could be totally irrelevant to our present concerns.

Let's hope it will be over 95°F in West Virginia every day until this bill passes.

My systems science approach is predicated on global constraints that produce local stability. So fixed points emerge due to top-down acting constraints on possibility.

The tricky bit is then that the local degrees of freedom thus created have to be of the right kind to rebuild the whole that is creating them. It is a cybernetic loop where the system maintains its structure in a positive feedback fashion.

So fixed points are important as the emergently stable invariances of a physical system. The symmetries that anchor the structure of the self-reconstituting whole. — apokrisis

This is a mathematically formal approach that seeks to find data points of a model of a physical path?
Or does the model apply to a swirling (nominally static) 'hurricane' at the center of a great storm moving over the landscape as dictated by low air pressure sheared by troughs transferring heat from the tropics to moderate zones?
To me, the difference is that the first is a platonic model, the second is a Heraclitean process.

For comparison, here is Hubble's image of the same galaxy M74 in Pisces
The two pictures show somewhat different views and need to be digitally overlapped for an even more spectacular image if that is possible.
https://esahubble.org/images/heic0719a/

Your polity is fucked up, it's the best democracy money can buy. Corporations rule you. That's in essence why we're all doomed. — Olivier5

That's a little myopic. ... A technological shift put us here. That's what it will take to stop it. — Tate

Due to cost of catastrophic failures of several early design nuclear facilities that destroyed their surrounding communities for at least 50 years to come nuclear energy companies (the "corporations") have retrenched from developing safer more efficient facilities. If you ran one of those companies you would also be obliged to be sure to avoid another Chernobyl or Fukushima of your making. The savior fusion reactor research has so far proven to be too impractical and has fallen out of realistic consideration.

If whatever technology was ripe the "corporations" would jump at the opportunity to grab it.

Now if only American politicians would care, they could try and apply these solutions and save civilization as we know it. — Olivier5

As you all said, the "corporations" rule America.

Thank you for bringing Rouse's book to attention. A see that a review is available at NDPR.

Do you also have a short abstract of the article?

I tried to run this by a physics forum but they aren't keen on hypotheticals and thought experiments.

What if we had a space ship that received its fuel through a magical portal that goes to a large tank on earth that is stationary. The portal on the ship moves with the ship and continues to fuel the engines. Neither the fuel or the tank on earth count as part of the ships' mass. Lets even say the fuel mass is many times greater than the ship it propels as it goes faster and faster. How close to light speed could this ship go? Or perhaps it would eventually convert into energy ceasing to be the ship in order to travel at light speed? — TiredThinker

Take it as a compliment. Imaginative thinking is not the strength of most physics forums. Not only is your idea interesting but it is sound without the need for any magic. In planetary missions the gravitational force of the planets has been used to speed up and to redirect planetary probes to their next target. For your rocket, the portal can be substituted for by black holes and neutron stars which are plentiful and can be used indefinitely to propel your rocket, though the trip might take hundreds of million years. Just don't get too close to any of the black holes or stars or the rocket will revert into pure energy.

By “rule”, I mean “a regulating principle”. Within the context of my derivation in the example, 1 and 1 being identical but not indiscernible was the superordinate rule guiding my conclusion that 1 = 1 (in part); in other words, a regulative principle determining the course of my derivation. — Bob Ross

It is true that 1=1 in the world defined by the definitions and rules of mathematics. The rest of us just accept this truth on blind faith based on the accomplishments and power of mathematics to be useful in the sciences.

I have brought up the pitfalls of 'true' in metaphysical reasoning. For metaphysics akin to mathematical reasoning, True is a binary value for evaluating dichotomies, any other use of truth is common but can be shown to be invalid or unsound. Since '1' is just like any other concept, it can not be true that '1' and '1' is anything other than '1'. Just as 'orange' and 'orange' are 'orange' and nothing else. However, instantiations of 'orange' are countable. 1 orange +1 orange = 2 oranges. And 1 apple +1 orange = 2 fruit.

* I have edited this comment *

And over 800 thousand years:
graph-co2-temp-nasa.gif?ssl=1 — Xtrix

Absolutely, But according to that graphic, CO2 level and temperature are cyclical covariates steady over the past 800,000 years

Hi Bob,
In your reply to Cuthbert's germane remarks you seem to me to have replied, (and pardon my extraction thereof what might appeal to me)

It is simply an inquiry into how the process of derivation operates as opposed to critique of a derivation itself. ...
... I think that its usefulness is found in after it is found to be true ...
For example, albeit outside the scope of the essay, I think that the principle of derivation ..., once it is affirmed, proves the relativist nature of any particular derivation. — Bob Ross

My impression is that by reducing the process to what is 'true' you have already relinquished your quest in favor of strictly realist binary meta-possibilities. For example, there is no truth in science! In science true is replaced by correct or more likely or most likely the case. In most aspects of personal life the only truth is death (and not even life according to our faithful judges). If this is so given that the process is not the same as its derivations, then you might limit yourself to closed objective identity and the PNC everywhere. Since I am a radical metaphysical pluralist I hope I am wrong in this.

For comparison, here's the Hubble Deep Field image.
The increase in density and resolution with tremendous detail will add, after spectral analysis, another deep layer to the observed astronomical universe

all the universal vastness may only be able to claim any significance through us! — universeness

and only for us?

:strong: :up:

As they say,

The image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it

.
The objects which appear the deepest red are likely the furthest and oldest.
Though I would prefer if eventually some of those distracting bright Milky Way stars in the image foreground could be photoshopped out of my sight.

There are things the existence of which one can doubt --and sometimes one should-- and things one cannot be certain about or even answer at all. But not things that have been answered eons ago and their existence is beyond reasonable doubt. And the existence of an external world is one them! — Alkis Piskas

The existence of an external world may be without doubt but its nature can and should be doubted by all philosophers. Just because common sense makes it obvious, patting itself on the back, that we know the external world to be of objects exactly as we say doesn't make it so.

In the Sophist Plato makes this simple case for a world of objects about which truth and falsity can be told. But he doesn't tell us that these external entities are in fact identical to their appearance. To tell the truth about what seems to me does not prove that what seems to me is objectively the same for everyone else, and further that what seems is exactly as it appears to be. Modern philosophy still insists on this stretched presumption. This is where progress ends.

I then came to a synthesis: they can work together in different ways and certain situations need one more than the other. — musicpianoaccordion

I'm the worst person to ask for a comment on this because I believe that what you're proposing is ultimately illogical. Not that people haven't suggested that already, but that the combination of two unlike approaches to make positive progress is haphazard, anything whatsoever other than the original two can follow. In order to make it work, a third method is always required to relate or link the first two, and this third method is entirely creative, subjective, and open ended.

Heraclitus proceeds top down from a dynamic whole to its parts that make the whole possible. This is hypothetical, but it does work empirically after the fact.

Plato's synthesis puts all the pieces of then existent philosophy together like a jigsaw puzzle and then he adds some missing pieces of his own to make them fit.

But to go from the bottom up from parts to whole denies all known logic because beyond the parts anything goes. If I give you a stick and a string what do you have, a buggy whip, a cat toy, a child's bow, and much else.

The point is, why not follow up on where you read about it. — Jackson

And a good point it is.
The word dialectic has taken flight in many contexts each with its own aims and methods both in philosophy and in other fields. Most people imagine dialectic has something to do with dialog and resolving unresolvable differences of views by talking them out.

For beginners, "forty million Frenchmen can't be wrong !?"

For Kant,

Kant believes that Aristotle’s logic of the syllogism captures the logic employed by reason. The resulting mistakes from the inevitable conflict between sensibility and reason reflect the logic of Aristotle’s syllogism. Corresponding to the three basic kinds of syllogism are three dialectic mistakes or illusions of transcendent knowledge that cannot be real. Kant’s discussion of these three classes of mistakes are contained in the Paralogisms, the Antinomies, and the Ideals of Reason. The Dialectic explains the illusions of reason in these sections. — Matt McCormick for IEP

For Plato,

Plato uses the term dialectic throughout his works to refer to whatever method he happens to be recommending as the vehicle of philosophy. — Britannica

People need to learn the worth of life and property — baker

Miles to go before I sleep

Coming from JWST,

“My hope is that JWST will provide firm detections of numerous terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres along with a census of a few key molecules,” — Planetary Society

and

whether the planets TRAPPIST-1b, c, g, and h have an atmosphere or not, and to do that, we will try to detect features of molecules such as carbon dioxide, water, and ozone in the transit spectra of those planets.” — Planetary Society

one little local improvement you can make is to eliminate the power of those corporations and in turn do away with incessant drive for war and global genocide — Streetlight

Those are two things. War and genocide is in the blood of the species. What we should hope for there is limited curtailment of this drive in favor of cooperation, an example of which is the European Union.

The power of the corporations is distributed as in a pyramid. Supermarket chains have more power the local green grocer or bakery. Starting at the top of the pyramid, braking up of mega corporations in the name of maintaining national capitalist competitive goals has been done in the past. Would you settle for that?

The 'stakes' being US hegemony — Streetlight

I'm open to improvement. What do you suggest? Russian-Chinese hegemony, or perhaps free-for-all regional conflicts throughout the planet, either of which destroying and subjugating all weaker nations including yours?

Maybe something like: is there justice in this world? Is there even room for hope in this matter? Is some sort of just world peace worth aiming for, and on what basis, or is history destined to be an absurd tragedy without rhyme nor reason? — Olivier5

Looked at that way, we'd be approaching reality in a dangerously sober manner. The fighting and killing is over whose truth/lies justice/barbarism becomes history.

What is the difference between Cratylus's and Wittgenstein's logically 2-valued silence and Nagarjuna's 4-valued silence? How is Nagarjuna's silence wiser?

If I asked seriously, How many angels, or neutrinos for nonbelievers, can dance on the head of a pin? What kind of answer would I expect? Could calculus help me?

The truth, if it could be called that, lies somewhere between p and ~p (the madhyamaka aka the middle path) for any proposition p. — Agent Smith

Or maybe propositions don't apply to life? This seems to remind me of Parmenides and the logically deductive One of the gods and the uncertainties of the many random appearances in the world of opinion of people. Any connection? :chin:

I now offer experimental proof of nothing:
After a few drinks nothing tastes good.
QED

But is simply space nothing? Well, space may be simply immaterial. But that is not nothing but no-thing. — val p miranda

Jan Westerhoff's The Non-Existence of the Real World, recently published, emphasizes this point from both Buddhist (Madhyamaka) and Western perspectives.

That's a good idea. Daily scrapes and cuts on my hands heal due to inherited self-correcting mechanisms that regenerate my skin automatically. Perhaps some future space telescope will grow new golden skin as needed.