Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 06/12/2024 09:09, D wrote:

  On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

On 12/5/24 4:36 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 05/12/2024 09:31, D wrote:

There is great good and great evil in man. That's what makes him so fascinating and why fighting is such a necessary sport to give an outlet for all that aggression.

 Only man creates the categories of good and evil.
Science does not include them

  The Real World exists. What any of that MEANS,
 entirely our own inventions.
  And those inventions tend to CHANGE over time.
  Yea, kinda Nietzsche-esque ...
 

 Don't even go there. Natural and I had very lively discussions on that theme. ;) But yes, I'm in the camp of the people who accept the real world as a fact, and that without humans, there's no ethics, math, true or false.

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Its not that the real world is not at some level most usefully regarded as a fact, it is that the more subtle question is whether what we *perceive* is in fact the real world *at all*. Or simply a construction in our own minds that maps what is *actually* there (maybe a probabilistic entangled quantum soup) into a recognisable world of objects and events linked in space time by natural law and causality.

I'd say it is an obvious fact and not a subtle question if we look at the
limited spectrum of our senses, and our limited compute resources. I think in terms of reality, it can be seen as a spectrum of probabilities about
things in the world. Many clever people cling to this, and think it means that no world exists, or that nothing can be proven. I reverse that, and say that any proposed alternatives to the real world should be proven, and if they are not, the real world is a perfectly reasonable default assumption.

Kant's objection to that view (what you see is what is there), which formed the basis for classical science, has been ignored until the early 20th century, when it began to re-emerge in the philosophy of science. Karl Popper's view that science was not the discovery of natural laws of fact, but rather the invention of testable theories that *fitted the facts*, was a direct response to Einstein and the quantum boys.
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In that context Kant's views are of course a construction in their own right. As unprovable as the laws of science. But, like science, "it works, bitches"
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And philosophy and physics are really coming together at last, with very smart people trying to come up with structures that work, that look nothing whatsoever like the ordinary world of our perceptions.
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Science is of course a mere branch of philosophy - 'Natural philosophy'.
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