Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On 07/12/2024 10:52, D wrote:

  On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

On 12/6/24 12:12 PM, D wrote:

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On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
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On 06/12/2024 06:48, 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.

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

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

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More Kant-ian.
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His metaphysics draws a clear distinction between the 'world-in-itself' and how we perceive it. His point being that the objects we reify it into are not actually there as discrete entities, they are simply how we describe it to ourselves and to others.
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Which immediately solves the 'Theseus' ship' paradox*, as such a ship doesn't exist, it is merely how we refer to a collection of rotting bits of wood.
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(The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox and a common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.
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In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical king of the city of Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the Minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus were replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship? )
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Modern philosophers still get their knickers in a twist over this. If you are a died in the wool realist and materialist it is a problem because you believe there exists such a thing as 'Theseus' Ship' in reality.

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I would argue that the ones who most certainly do not have a problem with this are materialists. It's a bunch of atoms, and we can then make up labels. The problem guys are the platonists with their ideal heavens, concepts etc. which are forever beyond proof. The ding an sich is an absurd konzept an sich. If you postulate something which can never be known, it is kind of useless. It goes the same way as god, or a postulated first mover etc.
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Kantians say that it's just a label: Distinct from the object that it refers to. Meta data. A pointer.

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 Kant ?
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 Try Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" tome.
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 OK ... you'll go brain-dead after just a few
 chapters ..... and it's like 1000 pages ......
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 BUT, he kinda DID prove that our "physics" can be
 an emergent property of ultra-zillions of 'strings'
 humming along with simple interaction rules -
 cellular automata math.
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 Ultimately, all 'materialistic'.
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 But what WE make of it all, how we LIVE in it all ...
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 If he proved it, how come there has been so little talk about him in scientific circles?

Read 186282@ud0s4.net's exact words.
"prove that our "physics" *can* be"...
...Anything.
It's a bit like 'With enough terms in a polynomial I can draw an elephant'. True, but moderately useless.
The first point that is relevant is the linkage between facts, and theories.  Science *presupposes* that invisible eternal and immutable Laws of Nature (more digestible than Gods Demons or Elohim) guide events to inevitable conclusions, given the exact starting points. And the business of science is to 'discover' what those laws are.
Or at least that was roughly the Newtonian worldview.
It came under attack beginning with a clearer exposition of a logical flaw in how we arrived at these theories.
Hume expressed it as the 'problem of induction' .  That is the inability to derive general rules from specific instances. The sun rose today. It always has, but does that mean it always will?
And we can extend that uncertainty into general rules of inference by stating categorically that in the case of certain events happening, there are both an infinite number of *possible* 'causes' as well as an infinite number of *impossible* ones.
And science is a collection of possible ones. Not as most people think, of *facts*.
And what is deemed possible is subjective. To some people the idea of injecting microchips into your brain to control your thinking is plausible.
So the fact that some one 'proved something' *could* be *possible*, means absolutely nothing.
If the something is vague enough and untestable it's basically pseudo scientific bullshit.
What a theory has to do is to explain something in a testable way that differs from how it was explained before, and is more accurate in describing the world.
Then scientists get interested. Einstein's theories accounted for gravity as we then understood it but gave corrections to things we had measured that didn't quite fit, as well. It worked better than Newtonian but it was radically and shockingly different.
And a great loosening of the conviction that theories uncovered truths, to an understanding that they were *plausible constructions that worked*, only.
And a better understanding of Occam in that the simplest idea no longer represented the truth, it was just that , in an infinity of possibilities, inventing complicated ones where simple ones were just as good, was mere posturing and intellectual flatulence.
And that is the problem with string theory. It could be right but it brings nothing to the party. So why bother?
--
There’s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons that sound good.
Burton Hillis (William Vaughn, American columnist)