Jon has the best description I have seen in a while by the way of wave/particle duality. It is not so much that is IS wave/particle at the same time. It can theoretically BE a wave/particle at the same time, but the act of observation dictates which form it takes. And in our macro view of the universe, it most often appears (as in almost always) as a particle.
To be fair, I stumbled across it here. It’s one of the more cogent explanations I’ve seen. Not an entirely unusual place to find it I guess, considering the book in question.
do you see what you are getting at, z? this is THE all encompassing question we are dealing with here, this is absolutely key. are we searching for truth or are we searching for rationality? you are asking me what the true nature of reality is with that question, and i am saying that it is not rationalizable, ie, beyond comprehension, ie, any answer you give me will just be a conceptual model, not the “TRUTH.” if you think you can solve the great metaphysical question that has plagued philosophers for thousands of years then i’m all ears. this is why everything you bring in to interpret the data has to be brought in as assumptions, it is an admission of the inevitability of human artificiality when modeling reality.
also, shape is not incomprensible, shape is objective and comprehensible, and it is used every time to interpret quantities and measurements. it is brought in as an assumption, as a definition for existence so that one can even attempt to interpret the data.
this is exactly why i keep saying that theories are made up of assumptions, and so they aren’t “proved” through experiments, they aren’t confirmed or disconfirmed. they are all models, and so all of them are “false.” the only relevant questions are, 1. are they rational?, and 2. which one best explains observed events?
Well, you believe what you want then. If nothing can ever be proven, why do science at all? It’s just going to be what some guy made up…
What I’m trying to say is, objective truth does not require conscious acknowledgement to retain it’s veracity. And the question “is it rational” is irrelevant. Who’s to say what is rational? Reason is a subjective concept.
There’s a tribe in Africa (i think, maybe called the Yananami.. idk, I’ve had to learn about a lot of different tribes) that every once in a while picks a another clan in the tribe, slaughters them, and smashes all their goods. They don’t do this out of hate, it’s just a social thing they do. They find it entirely reasonable to do so.
Until 30 minutes ago I was under the impression that Physics and exact sciences in general were (mostly) free from intellectual corruption.
I just became a bit more cynical about the world - again.
“If nothing can ever be proven, why do science at all?”
This doesn’t bar us from discovering rational explanations for observations, it just means that explanations are deduced from assumptions. You can’t prove an assumption, but you can at least argue for a certain set of assumptions based upon how well the explanations fit the observed world.
and as for wave-particle duality…
again, i’m not saying i completely agree with gaede, but he at least shows that a rational explanation is possible:
“What I’m trying to say is, objective truth does not require conscious acknowledgement to retain it’s veracity.”
Are you saying the world is the way it is whether or not our minds are there to comprehend it? I wouldn’t deny that. But if an attempt is going to be made to formulate explanations, then you are necessarily trying to model reality in some way. Rationality is objective b/c you are dealing with a clear cut identity, which enables logical analysis. I can build for you a physical model, point to it, and say THIS is EXACTLY what I am referring to when i use this word. Measurements and experiments are subjective because there are different possible interpretations. If you lay out the hypothesis and theory beforehand, ie, the shape of the objects involved, how they relate to one another, the definitions, and the rules of behavior, then you are being objective and consistent in your interpretation of the measurements and experiments.
“There’s a tribe in Africa (i think, maybe called the Yananami.. idk, I’ve had to learn about a lot of different tribes) that every once in a while picks a another clan in the tribe, slaughters them, and smashes all their goods. They don’t do this out of hate, it’s just a social thing they do. They find it entirely reasonable to do so.”
This is not the type of rationality i am talking about. Austrian economics is the only rational school of thought in that it is the only one that lays out the concept of deliberate human action clearly, and stays consistent with it. That’s what I mean by rationality. But “rationality” is also used to refer to people’s rationale for their actions. What one person considers “reasonable” may not be for another person, but, as mises pointed out, all action is “rational” in that it involves the employment of means and ends. There is no objective disctinction to be made between “rational” and “irrational” actions, but there are such distinctions when dealing with rational or irrational scientific theories, or else they could not be differentiated from religious explanations.
Well, the buden of proof is on him. Physicists have thousands of real-world observations, based on expiriments with controls. I see one observation here based off a simple, non-controlled experiment.
This non-controlled experiment is also based off of a false assumption, that the light source isn’t bigger than the interference object. Too bad it is. I doubt this “experiment” would hold up to any kind of scientific scrutiny.
Okay, that’s fine, my only point in bringing it up is to point out that there are possible rational explanations for Young’s experiment.
“If you lay out the hypothesis and theory beforehand, ie, the shape of the objects involved, how they relate to one another, the definitions, and the rules of behavior, then you are being objective and consistent in your interpretation of the measurements and experiments.”
Provide me a source that says science makes the theory, then finds the data… that is the exact opposite of how science should operate. You CAN start with a hypothesis (this is not neccesary), then You find the data, and make the theory based off of it.
If I lay out for you all the data on the planets and the sun, there is only one conclusion you can come to that fits the data; that the sun rests at the center, and the planets rotate around it in elliptical paths. There is no other consistent explanation to fit the data.
I also fail to see how thoeries can be deliberate actors. I think there needs to be a new term for Mises’ concept of reason, as it doesn’t exactly jive with the established definition.
Edit: to say that I have not yet read Human Action, and perhaps I am wrong in Mises’ definition of reason. This is just the general feeling I get on the forums.
unlapped_dog in reply to z1235:
“this is THE all encompassing question we are dealing with here, this is absolutely key. are we searching for truth or are we searching for rationality? you are asking me what the true nature of reality is with that question, and i am saying that it is not rationalizable, ie, beyond comprehension, ie, any answer you give me will just be a conceptual model, not the “TRUTH.” if you think you can solve the great metaphysical question that has plagued philosophers for thousands of years then i’m all ears.”
The popular notions of “truth” are varied, yet all of them but one are ultimately incoherent or trivial. The coherent and non-trivial one is, what is “true” for a person P is what follows from the premises of P’s model. Likewise, what is “false” for P is what does not follow from the premises of P’s model. (To be even more strict, I would ditch the whole “person P” thing and just refer to my own self, as that would be completely bracketing the statement.)
I expect this to be highly controversial, for just about everyone, for a million reasons. Before replying, please note that I am saying this is the only coherent meaning for the word “truth”; I am NOT saying that what you mean by the word is actually tantamount to the above definition. Strictly speaking, I am making a statement about language, not (directly) about reality.
In other words, it doesn’t even make sense at a deep level of analysis to speak of “truth” or “falsehood” - they’re only useful as casual terms of convenience. When precision matters, I recommend using “follows from the premises” or “follows from the premises of my model” or similar. It’s also interesting to note that the so-called logical paradoxes, such as the Liar Paradox, Curry’s Paradox, and Moore’s Paradox, cease to be paradoxes given my assertion above. (I know I still need to substantiate it, but in the mean time - if this actually interests anyone - I hope you’ll think it out for yourself.)
Honestly, I have no idea what you (or your bad toupe-ed hero) are trying to say.
You revived this thread claiming…
Then you offered “shapes” as an alternative (solution?). When I asked you “Shapes of what?”, you had no idea. “Incomprehensible.”
How is this superior to whatever it’s supposedly replacing/critiquing?
Z.
@Z
Well then let me spell it out as clearly as i can, and you can judge for yourself whether you think there is a point being made or not.
Would you agree that any attempt to understand or explain aspects of reality requires the creation of a model? When I say the ultimate nature of reality is incomprehensible, i am just saying that any attempt to “understand” or “explain” will entail modeling reality in some way, and so your question of “shape of what?” will apply endlessly. No matter what I give you, you could always ask, “well what is THAT made of?” When you try to grasp at the “True Nature of Reality” you end up going in circles forever. Since models are inevitable i am saying it only make sense to bring them in as assumptions and stay consistent. Then you can avoid the question of “Truth,” ie, trying to find a solution to metaphysics, and focus on just being rational.
All of physics employs physical modeling in some way when it comes to assigning meaning to quantities. Shape is used as if it is applicable to reality, it is used to assign meaning to every quantity in physics. Every variable used in mathematical physics represents a quantity, which requires physical modeling in order to have any meaning beyond just a number, so what i am saying is not way out of left field here. You define existence as part of the hypothesis, and i like gaede’s definition, “that with shape and location.”
But regardless of how you feel about the definitions, take the first thing in that list you quoted, bending of space. what do these words point to besides a loose collection of vague ideas with some shapes mixed in? if space can be “bent,” that implies shape, right? in einstein’s GR they actually use shape to give a physical explanation in their “helper explanation.” they show you the gravity well around the sun, and show how the bent space pushes on the earth to keep it in orbit. that is implicitly a physical explanation, showing you shapes, and then you take for granted that the shapes push off one another, and that is what causes the earth to go around the sun. but that is not supposed to be a real explanation, that is the “helper” b/c no one knows what “bending of space” or “4D space-time” actually means. The answer isn’t in the math, b/c the quantities require modeling to make sense out of, so where is the model for these things? what do they actually mean? even the helper explanation fails because there is no way to account for the surface of the grid; what countours it if it is all just continuous space? and if there is no surface, then there is nothing to push on the earth. bent implies shape, yet no one can tell you the shape of bent space.
so we’ve “proved” that space can “warp” but no one on the planet can tell you what it is that has been proved.
“or your bad toupe-ed hero”
i wouldn’t exactly call him my hero, can’t say i’m a huge fan. but i do think he makes a lot of great points.
Well, I wouldn’t use Hawking as an example. Richard Dawkins is the Paul Krugman of evolutionary biology though. In more than one way though. And keeping with the metaphor, Howard Bloom is the Bloomberg of evolutionary biology.
unlapped_dog in reply to z1235: “Would you agree that any attempt to understand or explain aspects of reality requires the creation of a model?”
All reasoning is creating models (which consist of sets of assumptions) and deducing what logically follows from them.
@misguided
I don’t know very much about evolutionary biology at all, how is Dawkins the Krugman of it? now THAT i would be very interested in seeing! got any links?
Idk how he relates to Krugman. But I do know that Dawkins is a brilliant but pompous ideologue. I would rather anyone else in the world represent evolutionary biology than this self-righteous jackass. Him and Ms. Garrison…
He may have changed his theories recently but quite a lot of what he says on group evolution is just bizarre.
I wasn’t joking, btw. You could accurately say that the Earth revolves around the Sun if you use the Sun as reference and you could accurately say that the universe revolves around the Earth if you use the Earth as reference. Is the Earth spinning inside the universe or is the universe spinning around the Earth? It’s the same thing.