81–90 of 147 posts
Every instrument we use to "measure" time involves movement: pendulum, sandglass, rotation of Earth, translation of Earth around the Sun, vibration of atoms, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not quite sure if it works for blue and red or only certain color combinations, but it's possible to create images where an item in the scene is obviously one color, yet the light hitting the eye is another color. The brain automatically adjusts for "that's what a red object would look like in that environment," when the light coming from the photograph is actually blue. In that way you can have a picture that's…
That is interesting, but it is also an answer to a different question. The question is "are there any blue reds?" not "can we see in some circumstances reds as blue?".
Edit: This isn't as clear as it could be if I was better with GIMP, but it should illustrate the idea. https://imgur.com/a/cRWhdTJ
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"a question like "is there life after death?" is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death." You're not being charitable to the questioner by interpreting it as a paradox. Clearly, what most people intend to ask by that question is whether one can exist in some form (as a "spirit" or as "soul", or maybe come out of the VR that is the world, or in heaven even in a body like the present one or a more perfect…
Not so clear, because you see, that is another question. This is why we need to define things very explicitly and then accept the implications of those definitions or we’ll never get anywhere. Now that you accepted that there is a paradox in the original question (“is there life after death?”) you reformulated it in a way the paradox is no longer present and your meaning is less ambiguous: “Is there something not phy…
P: "Is there life after death?"
Q: "Is X the same as not-X?"
Then you could argue that question P (and all "metaphysical" questions) amounts to or really has the structure of something like question Q, and that it's therefore paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting because the answer is obviously "no" ("by definition", as you point out).
I would disagree for the following reasons:
First, if you interrogate people who ask question P what they mean by it, you're likely to find out that they're not asking anything like question Q, but rather something like the following question:
R: "Can one continue to exist in some form after your physical body stops functioning?"
Now, it's true that question P and R are different on the surface, but when most people ask P what they mean by that question is R. So underneath the surface, at the meaning level, they intend to ask R. Question R is not paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting, and it has no obvious answer that could be arrived at "by definition".
Second, I believe even trivial-seeming questions and paradoxes are frequently much deeper and more interesting than they appear. Careful study and analysis of them could yield profound insights and areas of future research. Witness all the progress in logic from studying paradoxes and other "trivial" corner cases (like the Liar's Paradox[1], Russell's Paradox[2], etc). From such study you get things like Paraconsistent logics[3] and dialetheism,[4] which can fruitfully deal with contradictions.
Third, even things that are "true by definition" can be useful and interesting. Wittgenstein argued that all logical truths are tautologies. Well, if so, they're still worthy of study and have proven to be interesting and useful.
Finally, I am not convinced that all, most, or even many "metaphysical" questions can be charitably reduced to paradoxes, nor that they are trivially answerable "by definition".
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_paradox
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox
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The crisis in physics is due to Kant. As long as physicists are disdainful of philosophy the crisis and deterioration will continue. They are Kantians and don't even know it. Ayn Rand identified Kant's error in his Critique of Pure Reason and destroyed his program, she rejected Hume's rank skepticism (which Kant was answering) and showed Descartes how to validate reason (i.e. to be certain) without being omniscient.…
I agree that Descartes, Hume, and Kant were wrong. However, modern scientists are not influenced by them. Their own views are much closer to Pragmatism (which is not surprising given that two of the three founders of Pragmatism, namely Peirce and James, were professional scientists).
Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists . Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any im…
"I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli..." If you mean by "real scientist" that they are doing real work that advances the field, some of them are and, yes, some of them aren't. I don't mean that as a criticism, because there is real value in being a PR person for science. (Some danger if they do it poorly, but a lot of value, too.) Hawking, for instanc…
When a large fraction of the population has frankly anti-scientific beliefs and when funding for continued scientific endeavor depends on votes, science needs to continually justify and promote itself in the public eye.
Are there dangers to that? Yes. But it's worse than holing up in the ivory tower to only quietly do research.
Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists . Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any im…
This has been said for thousands of years. Socrates/Plato was complaining about how writing weakens the human memory.
We need to accept that human minds are limited and technology is meant to extend them. Science has advanced considerably due to computers despite the appearances.
The way out of the current “impasse” is through even more technology. We might not be able to solve all the mysteries of the universe without intelligence augmentation or superintelligent AI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that Descartes, Hume, and Kant were wrong. However, modern scientists are not influenced by them. Their own views are much closer to Pragmatism (which is not surprising given that two of the three founders of Pragmatism, namely Peirce and James, were professional scientists).
Popper/Kuhn are both derivatives of Kant and very popular in physics when physicists grasp for a philosophy to justify their epistemology. Mach, also a Kantian, was Einstein's pole star but to Einstein's credit defended realism contra Mach's ideas.
Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists . Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any im…
> Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it This has been said for thousands of years. Socrates/Plato was complaining about how writing weakens the human memory. We need to accept that human minds are limited and technology is meant to extend them. Science has advanced considerably due to computers despite the appearances. The way out of the current “impasse” is through even more technology. We might no…
Time does not exist. It is an abstraction based on the movement of matter. We use time to compare the relative motions of things. Every instrument we use to "measure" time involves movement: pendulum, sandglass, rotation of Earth, translation of Earth around the Sun, vibration of atoms, etc.
Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists . Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any im…
The crisis in physics is due to Kant. As long as physicists are disdainful of philosophy the crisis and deterioration will continue. They are Kantians and don't even know it. Ayn Rand identified Kant's error in his Critique of Pure Reason and destroyed his program, she rejected Hume's rank skepticism (which Kant was answering) and showed Descartes how to validate reason (i.e. to be certain) without being omniscient.…