Quantum Insight


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54 minutes ago, moralist said:

People can only generalize from their observations about how laws operate. Contrary to what your government told you, people have zero input on the design of those laws.

Greg

Uh. Uh.  First there particulars and from the come generalizations.  That is how laws are constructed from observations.  Of course these means a "law" might be erroneous.  For example Aristotle proposed a law that said heavier bodies  fall faster than less heavy bodies.   This is only true for bodies falling in viscous media.    It does not hold in a vacuum.  See 

Aristotle was wrong  (as usual.  His version of physics is a train wreck). 

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On ‎3‎/‎22‎/‎2016 at 1:31 PM, BaalChatzaf said:

Uh. Uh.  First there particulars and from the come generalizations.  That is how laws are constructed from observations.  

That's how descriptions of laws are constructed. A description is not the law itself. A description cannot create a law. A description cannot change a law.  A description has absolutely no effect upon a law. Only about the understanding of a law. It's just a bunch of words saying how a law might work which could either be correct or incorrect.

A description of a law does not create the law itself. It's just words about a law.

This is something which YOU DON'T KNOW.

Your government education cannot give you common sense, Bob... because you were taught by public union employees who were taught by public union employees who have the same lack of common sense you lack. For all of the time you spent sitting like an inert blob in school, you're still incapable of making the obvious distinction between your finger pointing at the Moon and the Moon itself.

Greg

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44 minutes ago, moralist said:

That's how descriptions of laws are constructed. A description is not the law itself. A description cannot create a law. A description cannot change a law.  A description has absolutely no effect upon a law. Only about the understanding of a law. It's just a bunch of words saying how a law might work which could either be correct or incorrect.

A description of a law does not create the law itself. It's just words about a law.

This is something which YOU DON'T KNOW.

Your government education cannot give you common sense, Bob... because you were taught by public union employees who were taught by public union employees who have the same lack of common sense you lack. For all of the time you spent sitting like an inert blob in school, you're still incapable of making the obvious distinction between your finger pointing at the Moon and the Moon itself.

Greg

Laws ARE descriptions.  All man made and intuited and inferred from collections of related experiences.  You are confusion the portrait with the subject.  The subject is how the world works.  The laws are well founded general descriptions derived from observation and measurement. Do you think Newton's Law of Gravitation is a fact of nature that exists independently?   No it isn't.  It is a generalization of many experiences with falling and propelled object.  It also happens not to be generally true.  For example the orbit of Mercury does not confirm to Newton's Law.

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8 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Laws ARE descriptions.

But the description does not create the law...

... because the law existed before anyone ever described it in words.

This is precisely what trips up government educated narcissists...

...who believe that there is nothing greater than their own fat head. :laugh:

Greg

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5 minutes ago, moralist said:

But the description does not create the law...

... because the law existed before anyone ever described it in words.

This is precisely what trips up government educated narcissists...

...who believe that there is nothing greater than their own fat head. :laugh:

Greg

The world existed long before people did.  Physical Laws are human accounts of how the world works.  The picture is not the thing pictured. The word is not the thing.  The story is not the event.  Most of our so-called physical laws will be falsified in due course when we learn new things about the world.

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1 hour ago, moralist said:

That's how descriptions of laws are constructed. A description is not the law itself. A description cannot create a law. A description cannot change a law.  A description has absolutely no effect upon a law. Only about the understanding of a law. It's just a bunch of words saying how a law might work which could either be correct or incorrect.

A description of a law does not create the law itself. It's just words about a law.

This is something which YOU DON'T KNOW.

Your government education cannot give you common sense, Bob... because you were taught by public union employees who were taught by public union employees who have the same lack of common sense you lack. For all of the time you spent sitting like an inert blob in school, you're still incapable of making the obvious distinction between your finger pointing at the Moon and the Moon itself.

Greg

The argument is semantical, not substantive. Pin the "law" on reality or pin reality on the "law." Reality doesn't care. The real question is whether they match up. Call it congruence.

--Brant

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5 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

The argument is semantical, not substantive. Pin the "law" on reality or pin reality on the "law." Reality doesn't care. The real question is whether they match up. Call it congruence.

--Brant

Well, that's been my point all along, Brant.

Bob believes his finger is the Moon... while I know my finger could only point at the Moon.

Greg

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I think that's your analogy. One level of abstraction too far making the illustration opaque. No one is arguing about reality, only labels. Both of you grate with the triteness of it all. Bob can't switch and you, of course, won't, so everybody endlessly repeats his catechism. (By switching I mean seeing each other is correct. And Bob, BTW, would never literally confuse his finger with the moon.)

--Brant

edit: Bob's post following this one is correct except for his non-sequitur last paragraph which implies Rand's metaphysics and epistemology are contra science

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7 hours ago, moralist said:

Well, that's been my point all along, Brant.

Bob believes his finger is the Moon... while I know my finger could only point at the Moon.

Greg

Wrong! The Moon is a quarter of a million miles away and my finger is only arm's length away.  Pointing to the moon is an indicator,  a descriptor of direction, not the thing pointed to. 

Remember:  The Word is not the Thing denoted by the Word.  The Portrait is not the Subject described by the Portrait.  The Report is not the Even reported. The Utterance is not the thing which the Utterance indicates.  The Idea is not the thing thought about. What happens inside one's head is not what happens outside one's head.

Just a  historical note here.  Many of you had Ayn Rand and Objectivism during your  young adulthood or adolescence.  I had Kortzybski and General Semantics during my adolescence. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics

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1 hour ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Just a  historical note here.  Many of you had Ayn Rand and Objectivism during your  young adulthood or adolescence.  I had Kortzybski and General Semantics during my adolescence. 

So one can't experience the world directly. Why? Because one is blocked by one's own state of matter, energy, and thoughts. But one can experience the world. One does, incessantly. Now, what's the value in Kortz aside from stating the not quite so obvious? He's referring to perception, of course, and that's about it. It's why we need thinkers and scientists to accumulate and evaluate data. Our bodies as such--not our minds--do experience the world directly and react to it without the involvement of our brains, except for the autonomic nervous system. Unless General Semantics inhabits more than this epistemological wilderness churning itself around and around and gets out into science, it's worthless by itself. That's what Rand did with her reason and reality formulations. None of this mind fucking.

--Brant

if you drop a rock onto another rock each rock directly experiences the other, meaning GS by itself is an implicit attack on the efficacy of cognitive consciousness, or even only consciousness, which is why academic disciplines need to be integrated, not just compartmentalized, each partially justifying themselves by the non-contradictory quality of the integration

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6 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

 

if you drop a rock onto another rock each rock directly experiences the other, meaning GS by itself is an implicit attack on the efficacy of cognitive consciousness, or even only consciousness, which is why academic disciplines need to be integrated, not just compartmentalized, each partially justifying themselves by the non-contradictory quality of the integration

all true.  But GS gives us the essential distinction between the descriptor,  the describer and the thing described.  All distinct but all part of the same process. When on confounds the word and the thing (and this happens quite frequently,. especially in political speeches and sermons)  on confusion and trouble emerge.

Rand got it  right. Reality is what -it- ( reality) is,  not what we wish it is  or what we want it to be.  Count K  separated the word and the thing.  Rand separated the objective and the subjective.  Both necessary separations and distinctions.

 

Ba'al Chatzaf  

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On ‎3‎/‎24‎/‎2016 at 6:30 AM, BaalChatzaf said:

Wrong! The Moon is a quarter of a million miles away and my finger is only arm's length away.  Pointing to the moon is an indicator,  a descriptor of direction, not the thing pointed to. 

 

It's a metaphor, Bob.

Remember:  The Word is not the Thing denoted by the Word.  The Portrait is not the Subject described by the Portrait.  The Report is not the Even reported. The Utterance is not the thing which the Utterance indicates.  The Idea is not the thing thought about. What happens inside one's head is not what happens outside one's head.

Well, that's what I've been saying all along, Bob... and you HAVEN'T. So I'm glad you finally came to your senses. :)

No man can create a law.

No man can alter a law.

No man can abolish a law.

He can only write words about the sublime order of laws that only God could have created.

Greg

 

 

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On ‎3‎/‎24‎/‎2016 at 6:30 AM, BaalChatzaf said:

 I had Kortzybski and General Semantics during my adolescence. 

You misspelled Korzybski... and he's an idiot... and you're an even bigger idiot to believe his crap. 

People can most certainly experience the world directly... but you never will because your liberal government indoctrinated intellect will forever be in your way. You might take another look at the second word of the title of this thread:

INSIGHT

You haven't the foggiest notion of what it is... for it is what you have cheated yourself out of by granting your sanction for your intellect to be imprinted by the dumbf**k government.

 

 

Greg

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12 hours ago, moralist said:

It's a metaphor, Bob.

 

Well, that's what I've been saying all along, Bob... and you HAVEN'T. So I'm glad you finally came to your senses. :)

No man can create a law.

No man can alter a law.

No man can abolish a law.

He can only write words about the sublime order of laws that only God could have created.

Greg

We can say a law is human made if by "made" we mean identified. For instance, Rand made her philosophy of Objectivism--that is, she made a bunch of identifications, put them into a pot and mixed them up logically and--viola!--Objectivism. So too with physics. Also, we cannot create reality, we can only take things in reality and move them around. The automobile, the airplane, the computer. People created these things out of real things and correct theories. They are manipulations of reality. In that sense life forms everywhere are manipulating reality. A coyote makes a den to protect and raise its young and humans walk on the moon.

--Brant

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13 hours ago, moralist said:

It's a metaphor, Bob.

 

 

Well, that's what I've been saying all along, Bob... and you HAVEN'T. So I'm glad you finally came to your senses. :)

No man can create a law.

No man can alter a law.

No man can abolish a law.

He can only write words about the sublime order of laws that only God could have created.

Greg

 

 

Wrong again.  So called Scientific Laws and human created abstractions.  Laws  regulating social behavior are created everyday of the year.  The nature of Nature is scarcely changed or disrupted by human activity.  

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16 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

We can say a law is human made if by "made" we mean identified.

Of course... as long as you're honest enough to admit that you cannot create, alter, or abolish those laws that you can only identify with words...

 

...because they are absolute, objective, and utterly impersonal.

Greg

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16 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Wrong again....  

You're wrong, Bob.

For all of your bloviating, you are utterly powerless to alter the physical laws governing the behavior of even ONE electron.

You've fallen back on repeating what a government public union employee told you in a government subsidized school, which renders you unfit for real world employment outside of a useless bureaucracy. But you can at least take comfort in the fact that your government loves people like you, because it needs people who are just like you to make it what it is today.

Those who can, do.

Those who can't, teach.

Greg

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4 hours ago, moralist said:

You're wrong, Bob.

For all of your bloviating, you are utterly powerless to alter the physical laws governing the behavior of even ONE electron.

You've fallen back on repeating what a government public union employee told you in a government subsidized school, which renders you unfit for real world employment outside of a useless bureaucracy. But you can at least take comfort in the fact that your government loves people like you, because it needs people who are just like you to make it what it is today.

Those who can, do.

Those who can't, teach.

Greg

Physical laws have been dropped, reformulated,  re-interpreted.  Why?  Because the -physical laws- are all human artifacts.  They are abstractions and generalizations based on experience, experiment, measurement.  The  underlying nature of Nature  is what is Real,  not our  human limited  ways of describing Nature.  Laws are descriptions.  What is real is what is being described.  The Portrait is NOT the Subject.  The Word is not the Thing.  

You seem to have a problem distinguishing what humans  do  from the underling reality of Nature.  Our senses are crude.  We will never quite get to Rock Bottom.  Our best theories  and our fanciest expensive instruments are fifteen orders of magnitude removed from Rock Bottom.  The best humans can do concerning Nature is to come up with an approximate human-effective  model for the Real Thing.  We are limited by our senses and there is only so much intelligence that can be gotten out of a three pound brain.  We have to live within our means.  

Only God can know the Real Thing.  We  humans can only approximate it. 

Why do you have so much trouble grasping this?????

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6 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Physical laws have been dropped, reformulated,  re-interpreted.

It's good to see your view change, Bob.

I do agree with the use of those particular words, especially reinterpreted, as they denote the total subjectivity of writing words about law which have no effect on objective laws themselves.

 

Greg

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8 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Physical laws have been dropped, reformulated,  re-interpreted.  Why?  Because the -physical laws- are all human artifacts.  They are abstractions and generalizations based on experience, experiment, measurement.  The  underlying nature of Nature  is what is Real,  not our  human limited  ways of describing Nature.  Laws are descriptions.  What is real is what is being described.  The Portrait is NOT the Subject.  The Word is not the Thing.  

You seem to have a problem distinguishing what humans  do  from the underling reality of Nature.  Our senses are crude.  We will never quite get to Rock Bottom.  Our best theories  and our fanciest expensive instruments are fifteen orders of magnitude removed from Rock Bottom.  The best humans can do concerning Nature is to come up with an approximate human-effective  model for the Real Thing.  We are limited by our senses and there is only so much intelligence that can be gotten out of a three pound brain.  We have to live within our means.  

Only God can know the Real Thing.  We  humans can only approximate it. 

Why do you have so much trouble grasping this?????

Anti-philosophy is also a type of philosophy. The certain knowledge of uncertain knowledge is skepticism (and self-refuting) Bob. You have demonstrated nicely how empiricism can lead to that dead end. All that's left is God's knowledge, you conclude, and predictably close the circle.

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5 hours ago, anthony said:

Anti-philosophy is also a type of philosophy. The certain knowledge of uncertain knowledge is skepticism (and self-refuting) Bob. You have demonstrated nicely how empiricism can lead to that dead end. All that's left is God's knowledge, you conclude, and predictably close the circle.

Next you will be telling me that illogic is logic.  Empiricism  is the beginning of science, not all of it.  All science must be rooted in experience. Inductive generalization is how we leap from a pile of facts to something we can use to predict what will happen and how we find out what works. 

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17 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Next you will be telling me that illogic is logic.  Empiricism  is the beginning of science, not all of it.  All science must be rooted in experience. Inductive generalization is how we leap from a pile of facts to something we can use to predict what will happen and how we find out what works. 

You are talking science knowledge, the recorded, accumulated and built-upon - in parts, refuted and discarded - corpus of knowledge from all the scientific thinkers who existed, while I'm obviously speaking of personal knowledge and the methodology towards it .. for the purpose of living a life. So, philosophy.

'Collected' knowledge and individual knowledge (no dichotomy) which in ethics has consequences in secular-collectivism -- or in rational selfishness.

Philosophy (particularly Objectivist) and the empirical method share the same epistemological root, but there they separate in their distinctive purposes. As I always ask of agnostic-empirical types: Is a man's life a scientific experiment? And, do you have the time in a single lifespan to await 'perfect', scientific knowledge and ultimate evidence? Frustrated by the realization, the empiricist often sees no answer but to fall back on to philosophical skepticism (as you showed in an earlier post) or sometimes onto the Deity and Revealed knowledge.

To skepticism (I often notice from you) Peikoff replied well: "Fallibility does not make knowledge impossible. Knowledge is what makes possible the discovery of fallibility".

The findings of one's senses and so one's observations and experiences are not infinite, but his induction is the means for an individual to amass vast amounts of data from which to distill his concepts -which go a long way to overcome his physical limitations of capacity and life time. Not your "pile of facts", but a logical integration and evaluation of facts into orderly concepts that serve oneself in the furtherance of one's life and values. Taking your thought about science, this valuable bank of "personal knowledge" is very much causally predictive too.

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15 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

 ...something we can use to predict what will happen... 

That's possible only if there is an understanding of the preexisting logical order of laws you didn't create.

 

Greg

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1 hour ago, anthony said:

You are talking science knowledge, the recorded, accumulated and built-upon - in parts, refuted and discarded - corpus of knowledge from all the scientific thinkers who existed, while I'm obviously speaking of personal knowledge and the methodology towards it .. for the purpose of living a life. So, philosophy.

'Collected' knowledge and individual knowledge (no dichotomy) which in ethics has consequences in secular-collectivism -- or in rational selfishness.

Philosophy (particularly Objectivist) and the empirical method share the same epistemological root, but there they separate in their distinctive purposes. As I always ask of agnostic-empirical types: Is a man's life a scientific experiment? Do you have the time in a single lifespan to await 'perfect', scientific knowledge and ultimate evidence? Frustrated by the realization, the empiricist often sees no answer but to fall back on to philosophical skepticism (as you showed in an earlier post) or sometimes onto the Deity and Revealed knowledge.

To skepticism (I often notice from you) Peikoff replied well: "Fallibility does not make knowledge impossible. Knowledge is what makes possible the discovery of fallibility".

The findings of one's senses and so one's observations and experiences are not infinite, but his induction is the means for an individual to amass vast amounts of data from which to distill his concepts -which go a long way to overcome his physical limitations of capacity and lifetime. Not your "pile of facts", but a logical integration and evaluation of facts into orderly concepts that serve oneself in the furtherance of one's life and values. Taking your scientific thought, this valuable bank of "personal knowledge" is very much causally predictive too.

The theorectical way to hypothesis is facts first. Then--an idea! But there are so many facts the idea is many times a better place to start. You have a construct, naturally based off some observations, then you go looking for supporting facts and then you might do replicable experiments. The best way to scientific--and other--creativity is to know the base subject in detail and the Aha! moment might be at 3:00 in the morning, which you might write down. It's a subconscious integration which might be bogus. The mere assemblage of facts to a logical conclusion consciously rendered is unlikely to create much of anything. The time for that--not always I'm sure--is thinking about the facts you've found to support your conclusion looking for logical fits. While this may result in tossing out the idea, next week you might awake at 4:00 in the morning with a seemingly better idea. Aha! Etc.

Deductive-inductive is a self re-enforcing circle. A dance. You can say inductive-deductive also. It doesn't matter. (de-in-in-de-de-de-de-in-in-in-de)

Without structure you can't even make a pile out of facts. You'll have facts belonging to biology and facts belonging to geology and won't know how to sort them out.

--Brant

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