Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 07/12/2024 07:41, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

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

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

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.

 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 ...

 More Kant-ian.
 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.
 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.
 (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.
 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? )
 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.

 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.
 

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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Well I don't apply the term materialistic as strictly to that kind of view.
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Although he is still stuck with 'objects and events in space time linked by causality' .
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He hasn't really changed his metaphysics at all, merely made it increasingly remote with yet more dimensions to explain why it seems to be the way it seems to be.
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(Epicycles versus heliocentrism. You CAN do it all with epicycles, but sticking the sun in the middle is a co-ordinate transform that really makes it less shitty to calculate, as the Church accepted. What they didn't like was Galileo claiming it was 'true'. Because it isn't. It just works.)
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And hasn't gone as far as seeing that all of the above are in fact emergent properties of the consciousness that uses them as foundations for its thinking to map what really is, into a digestible form.
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Or rather that is in fact a far simpler way to arrive at a metaphysics that *works*.
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Bohm did all that with his theory on an 'implicate order' behind quantum physics. Showing that if you postulated another realm, quantum effects could be the emergent properties of that.
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And then testing the Bell inequality showed that at least that couldn't be the case for *local* variables.
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Physicists and mathematicians have all been trying to 'save materialism' from the onslaught of the Quantum world. Until recently are they beginning to think 'let's say we scrap materialism and think of it as an emergent property...what then could be the underlying reality and why do we see it as other than it probably is'?
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They are slowly getting there.
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I can't find a very interesting talk held in an annex before a big physical society conference on you tube any more . I suspect it simply hasn't had enough you tube views because no one understood it. I almost did. Enough to stay the course.
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Suffice to say the three participants were starting to think outside the materialistic box to find a solution to 'what quantum physics has to mean' etc.
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Also Sean Carroll is a very good presenter of ideas in this area. Worth a listen to.
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I think we are probably sue for a Kuhnian 'paradigm shift'

The thing is... there's always the "shut up and calculate" interpretation. At the end of the day, the pragmatic effects in the world is all we can relate to. Formulas point to nrs, those nrs we then try to "reverse engineer" into verbal descriptions. Since we are dealing with levels and phenomena so far from our ordinary experience, we gets many wonderful and/or nonsensical interpretation such as the many worlds one, and many others.
The thing is... should we ever prove any of it, which is not done, it will all just be added to our concept of the "material world" (caveat emptor, and definitions aside) and expand it and enrich our model of it.