You can definitely make the argument. Especially a science in the sense of quantitative analysis of objectively verifiable facts. Of course I think many insightful psychologists have always been aware of that, but there's an overwhelming tendency especially in the English-speaking world to deprecate the qualitative aspects of psychology as not been scientifically tractable.

all science owes Galileo for his radical rejection of theological scholasticism in favor of Pythagorean mathematical explorations of physics and astronomy. — magritte

I'm currently studying Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences which has many vital insights into the role of Galileo as one of the architects of modernity proper. It's too deep and involved a subject to give an account of in a forum post save to point to the seminal division Galileo makes between the 'primary', supposedly mind-independent, properties of bodies, which can be expressed precisely in mathematical form, and the so-called secondary qualities, apparently inhering in the subjective domain of mind. Thereby setting up the fundamental mind-matter dualism which ultimately gives rise to the 'Cartesian anxiety':

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".

Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. It has subsequently become the basis for much discussion.

Thanks! That is tremendously helpful.

ah, so the difference between empirical and a priori in physics is echoed by the difference between the theorists and the experimentalists (which is always a pretty major division in physics.)

Maybe you should try and get one. Might upgrade your input. :wink:

I'm interested in the fact that Kant acknowledges 'pure physics'.
— Wayfarer

He does? I don’t recall. Doesn’t seem quite right.

So I understand the idea of 'pure maths' but I'm finding the idea of 'pure physics' pretty hard to get my head around.....
— Wayfarer

“Pure” physics as a self-contained science is a misnomer, I think, at least without reference to a specific text. — Mww

@Mww - I don't know if you'll recall this discussion of a few weeks back - of whether, and why, Kant regarded physics as an a priori pure science. I've just been reading Dermot Moran on Husserl's Crisis of the Western Sciences and found this passage:

Galileo counters the Aristotelian approach not by performing experiments, but by showing that it [e.g. the mathematical fabric of space-time] must be so and not otherwise. In this sense, physics is made to be an a priori discipline of necessary truths. Koyré sums it up as follows: ‘The Galilean revolution can be boiled down … to the discovery of the fact that mathematics is the grammar of science. It is this discovery of the rational structure of Nature which gave the a priori foundations to the modern experimental science and made its constitution possible.

That, I think, is the source of Kant's conviction that physics can be an a priori science - that 'physics, like mathematics, is a body of necessary and universal truth.' Noble sentiment but hardly sustainable in respect of physics since Einstein, I would think.

(although, on the other hand, many of the most far-out theories of physics, strings and the like, a very much conducted on the basis of mathematical idealisations of empirical data......)

It's not about postmodernism, — frank

Forgive me, then. As your OP was called 'the post-modern state', I thought it might have been.

It seems a very narrow interpretation of what 'post-modern' means. That term has vast application, restricting it to this particular interpretation seems an illegitimate move to me.

Maybe it depends on how you assess Trump. Is he an anomaly? — frank

He is a creature of television appealing to those whose sole education comprises what they absorb through television. I think those French post-modernist critiques of 'the society of the spectacle' and the 'panopticon' are relevant to him. Of course such critiques will never be understood by those to whom they apply.

A). How would we “prove” gods existence if we could only observe it through collective faith?
B). Would money be our god or the thing we worship in that we all ascribe to the existence of this arbitrary paper value.
C). Is scientific method and the existence of god mutually irreconcilable in this case as science depends on objective measurement? — Benj96

All of these are very good questions. One way to approach the subject is to look at it through the perspective of the emergence of modern science and the corresponding idea of objectivity that began to become dominant in culture from the 17th Century.

Prior to this, in pre-modern cultures, humans had an instinctively 'I-you' relationship with the world around them. Because the world was understood as the expression of a will (God's will) or as the manifestation of karma (in Buddhism), the criterion for what ought to be considered true were not provided by objective means. In classical cultures the capacity to see things as they truly are was the mark of a sage. That was invariably interpreted as being able to see and act in accordance with the divine will - and this applied even to the stoics, who were purportedly atheistic with respect to the deities but who nevertheless accepted that the Logos directed the entire cosmos.

So with the advent of Galilelean and Newtonian science, a different mentality emerges, which aims to divest the world of all such 'vague and primitive' concepts such like wills, aims and purpose (telos) and instead provide an account resting solely on the measurable properties of objects and on reaching consensus in respect of those. The subjective, interior or intentional domain is banished to 'the past', or declared archaic. Newton still saw the need to God to set the cosmic machine in motion, but Laplace 'had no need of that hypotheses'. Thus begins what René Geunon calls 'the reign of quantity'. Within that overall paradigm, there is no way to accomodate God, or the numinous, or indeed any real idea of the transcendent. Welcome to modernity.

A thousand apologies if it's balderdash! — Agent Smith

It’s balderdash, and you don’t give a s***t that it is, so your apology means nothing, like most of what else you write.

You used to be ‘Themadfool’, right? You do sometimes come up with some actual insights, but the signal-to-noise ratio has been pretty terrible lately.

you're cluttering up the forum with a lot of nonsense. :angry:

WASHINGTON — Republicans have spent decades attacking the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide, but with the toppling of Roe v. Wade seemingly imminent, their leaders in Congress and around the country have grown suddenly quiet on the issue, part of a bid to avoid a backlash against their party ahead of the midterm elections.

As I said - if this happens it will go against the GOP in the Mids.

I’ve read that it would take 33 years to accelerate a vehicle containing humans to as near as you get to the speed of light - although being in a ship accelerating continuously for that long would present many challenges. It would also require more energy than that produced by the whole of industrial civilization so far. So, ain’t going to happen,

Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Starshot will attempt to send craft accelerated by lasers focused on sails to Alpha Centauri, 4.37 lya. But each ‘vehicle’ is a microchip weighing but a few grams. Nothing like big meaty air-breathing primate body.

Everyone can and does change one's mind from time to time. And one's reality changes accordingly. What difference does this make? There's no stable, static reality. — Alkis Piskas

There may not be a static reality, but some things will never change.

Recent video update from NASA

This thread seems to have died a month ago — noAxioms

Not really, but I will admit I haven't paid it much attention. But, hey, thanks for the update!

Then, a question arises: are things that are considered real only physical or are non-physical things also included? For example, if I think of a solution to a problem --which does not occur in space and is not of a physical nature-- it is real for me, and I can also prove it so that it becomes real to others too.

This, as you can see, brings in the quite common question: "Real for whom?" Because what is real for me might not be real for you and vice versa. — Alkis Piskas

But 'real for whom?' then raises the issue of subjectivism - that what is real is up to you or me. But it can't be that way - what if I change my mind? Does something that was real then become unreal? It can't be dependent on your or my say-so.

As for things that can be proven to others, this is one of the fundamental principles of scientific discovery. It's the whole purpose of replication and peer-review. But of course the difficulty is that scientists often start with the presumption that what is real must be validated in terms of what is observable or empirical - so here is the problem of the limitations of empiricism once again.

That is why I asked the question: what is the nature of intellectual objects, such as number, and scientific and logical principles? Mathematical platonists believe that numbers are real, in that they're the same for any observer, but they're not material, because they can only be grasped by a rational intellect.

Some scholars feel very strongly that mathematical truths are “out there,” waiting to be discovered—a position known as Platonism. It takes its name from the ancient Greek thinker Plato, who imagined that mathematical truths inhabit a world of their own—not a physical world, but rather a non-physical realm of unchanging perfection; a realm that exists outside of space and time. Roger Penrose, the renowned British mathematical physicist, is a staunch Platonist. In The Emperor’s New Mind, he wrote that there appears “to be some profound reality about these mathematical concepts, going quite beyond the mental deliberations of any particular mathematician. It is as though human thought is, instead, being guided towards some external truth—a truth which has a reality of its own...”

Many mathematicians seem to support this view. The things they’ve discovered over the centuries—that there is no highest prime number; that the square root of two is an irrational number; that the number pi, when expressed as a decimal, goes on forever—seem to be eternal truths, independent of the minds that found them. If we were to one day encounter intelligent aliens from another galaxy, they would not share our language or culture, but, the Platonist would argue, they might very well have made these same mathematical discoveries.

“I believe that the only way to make sense of mathematics is to believe that there are objective mathematical facts, and that they are discovered by mathematicians,” says James Robert Brown, a philosopher of science recently retired from the University of Toronto. “Working mathematicians overwhelmingly are Platonists. They don't always call themselves Platonists, but if you ask them relevant questions, it’s always the Platonistic answer that they give you.”

Other scholars—especially those working in other branches of science—view Platonism with skepticism. Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago. — What is Math?

That is the whole problem in a nutshell, although I don't expect that many will understand it.

See also God does not exist.
— Wayfarer

The last is of course questionable — Hillary

The post it was quoted from contained a link to God does not Exist, by Bishop Pierre Whalon, so the phrase ought not to be taken literally.

This thread has now descended into juvenilia so I'll leave it at that.

So it all has to do with how we use the word "exist". — Nickolasgaspar

The meaning of the word ‘to exist’ is the fundamental question of philosophy. You skated over a lot of very heavy subjects with a very brief reply there, lol. :meh:

Existence has termporal qualities by necessity. — Nickolasgaspar

So do numbers exist? Scientific principles? The law of the excluded middle?

I say no. In my lexicon, these are real, but they don’t exist, precisely because they don’t come into, or go out of, existence. Rather they belong to the realm of what must be so, in order for things to exist.

Consider that in quantum physics, the orbit of electrons have values that can only be defined in terms of integers. That is a fundamental constraint on the nature their existence. Yet the fact that it’s an integer can’t be said to be causal in any direct physical sense. It’s not as if integers ‘do’ something, like exert a force. It’s rather that they are indicative of a constraint, which the electron must conform to in order to exist.

A more prosaic analysis is made by Dermot Moran who traces the influence of Eriugena on the German idealists.

Reincarnation is a boo-word. Best to steer clear of it.

Just noticed this thread.

Question: if the Supreme Court of the USA really does overturn Roe v Wade, as seems highly likely, won't this undermine the Republican vote in the mid-term elections? I'm guessing that it will be an extremely unpopular decision with female voters in particular, who could quite feasibly express their ire by not voting Republican. I don't know, but I haven't read any commentary to that effect, and it would seem likely to me.

A penny for your thoughts. — Agent Smith

It's nihilism, pure and simple. Nothing has any real meaning.

I've also worked in computer sales and repair. I've witnessed the astounding progress of Moore's Law over the last 30 years since I first got into the technology business.

But this story does not stack up. The guy behind it is a Bay-area architect., it's not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. There's no substance to it, if you drill down, but he's obviously really good at getting favourable articles into the media.

The article (very interresting, thanks for the link) says that 18 million light years is the distance from us where space expands faster than the speed of light. — Magnus

The article explains that the expansion of space cannot be measured in terms of velocity, but of rate of increase. So it's not true to say that it's 'faster than' the speed of light.

The restriction that "nothing can move faster than light" only applies to the motion of objects through space. The rate at which space itself expands — this speed-per-unit-distance — has no physical bounds on its upper limit. — Ethan Siegel

Very tricky concept, I agree. I can't claim to understand all of it, but I think it falsifies your 'faster than' claim.

Done some more digging. The suspicion only increases. The sentence I edited out in the first post was ‘The project is now being overseen by Orbital Assembly Corporation, a space construction company that cut links with Gateway.’ Yeah, right. Here’s the LinkedIn profile for the principal. https://www.linkedin.com/in/timalatorre.

So the key phrase in the story is that launch is 2025 or 2027 depending on funding. So basically that story IS an advertisement for Orbital Corporation and should have been labelled accordingly.

2035, I would have thought, ‘hmmm. Interesting.’ But in three years? From a startup? ‘Scheduled to open’, and with a little over 1 million in capital raised? This has to be bullshit. What interests me is how a story like this can be planted on a site like CNN.

The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, if the speed limit for the universe was the speed of light, the size of the universe would be at most 27.6 light-years across. the observable universe is however 93 billion light-years across. — Magnus

There's a rationale in physics for this apparent paradox. The physics is pretty advanced, but physics writer Ethan Siegel has an article on it:

If we were to ask, from our perspective, what this means for the speed of this distant galaxy that we're only now observing, we'd conclude that this galaxy is receding from us well in excess of the speed of light. But in reality, not only is that galaxy not moving through the Universe at a relativistically impossible speed, but it's hardly moving at all! Instead of speeds exceeding 299,792 km/s (the speed of light in a vacuum), these galaxies are only moving through space at ~2% the speed of light or less.

But space itself is expanding, and that accounts for the overwhelming majority of the redshift we see. And space doesn't expand at a speed; it expands at a speed-per-unit-distance: a very different kind of rate. When you see numbers like 67 km/s/Mpc or 73 km/s/Mpc (the two most common values that cosmologists measure), these are speeds (km/s) per unit distance (Mpc, or about 3.3 million light-years).

The restriction that "nothing can move faster than light" only applies to the motion of objects through space. The rate at which space itself expands — this speed-per-unit-distance — has no physical bounds on its upper limit.

The Kalam cosmological argument may indeed be false, but not on those grounds.

What about life needs supporting anyways? — schopenhauer1

Just because you can't see any reason for existence doesn't mean that there isn't one.

From which:

Musk and my late colleague Stephen Hawking envisaged that the first “settlers” on Mars would be followed by literally millions of others. But this is a dangerous delusion. Coping with the climate crisis is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the top of Everest. There will be no “planet B” for most of us. But I still want to cheer on those pioneer “Martians” because they will have a pivotal role in shaping what happens in the 22nd century and beyond.

This is because the pioneer settlers – ill-adapted to their new habitats – will have a more compelling incentive than those of us on Earth to literally redesign themselves. They’ll harness the super-powerful genetic and cyborg technologies that will be developed in coming decades. These techniques will be, one hopes, heavily regulated on Earth – but those on Mars will be far beyond the clutches of the regulators. We should wish them luck in modifying their progeny to adapt to alien environments. This might be the first step towards divergence into a new species.

Man that gives me the chills. The idea of man becoming his own creator, altering the genetic code so as to 'survive'. I think it's a really dangerous delusion. Here's the one myth that makes sense: Spaceship Earth. We have a vehicle that could potentially support billions of people for perhaps tens of millions of years. It's dangerously over-heated and facing severe resource depletion. Preserving it is the only form of interstellar survival worth betting on in my view. Rees' idea is science fiction.

More germane to the theme - the Aeon essay I cited previously talks about the role of trance states in the origin of religions (and I suppose derivatively of prayer also). After mentioning the 'Big God' theories (punishing dieties model) and false agency models (that dieties provide explanations in the absence of understanding natural causes), Vernon says

there is a need for a new idea, and coming to the fore now is an old one revisited, revised and rendered more testable. It reaches back a century to the French sociologist Émile Durkheim who observed that social activities create a kind of buzz that he called effervescence. Effervescence is generated when humans come together to make music or perform rituals, an experience that lingers when the ceremonies are over. The suggestion, therefore, is that collective experiences that are religious or religious-like unify groups and create the energy to sustain them.

The explanation is resurfacing in what can be called the trance theory of religious origins, which proposes that our palaeolithic ancestors hit on effervescence upon finding that they could induce altered states of consciousness. Research to test and develop this idea is underway in a multidisciplinary team led by Dunbar at the University of Oxford. The approach appeals to him, in part, because it seems to capture a crucial aspect of religious phenomena missing in suggestions about punishing gods or dangerous spirits. ‘It is not about the fine details of theology,’ Dunbar told me, ‘but is about the raw feelings of experience, and that this raw-feelings element has a transcendental mystical component – something that is only fully experienced in trance states.’ He notes that this sense of transcendence and other worlds is present at some level in almost all forms of religious experience. (Early humans) started deliberately to make music, dance and sing. When the synchronised and collective nature of these practices became sufficiently intense, individuals likely entered trance states in which they experienced not only this-worldly splendour but otherworldly intrigue. They encountered ancestors, spirits and fantastic beasts, now known as therianthropes. These immersive journeys were extraordinarily compelling. What you might call religiosity was born.

The article goes on to discuss how this eventually gave rise to doctrinal religions, mentioning shamanism, early cave art, and other anthropological evidence. I find it a lot more credible than the usual 'sky gods making thunder' routine which is generally used to dismiss religion.

We could be juvenile chimps for all we know. — Agent Smith

Always thought you might be one of the million monkeys. How's Hamlet coming along?

Cause and effect are categories of events, but I would say they are not "primary" categories. — Janus

In that Closer to Truth video I linked Richard Swinburne says that causality is a primitive concept, meaning irreducible. I agree with him. If you ask ‘why’, any answer will begin with ‘because….’ - which proves his point!

You don’t generally encounter the term ‘objectivity’ in that context but I suppose you could say that is a property of samvrtisatya, conventional truth. But the domain of paramarthasatya is that of transcendental truth see this article https://www.britannica.com/topic/paramartha-satya

Wouldn’t say that. The first step on the eightfold path is indeed ‘samma ditth’ generally translated as ‘right view’ (although a big part of that is ‘not clinging to views’.)

This wikipedia article is not a bad starting point.

But the point is, inference cannot be derived from observation alone. Inference makes sense of observation. This is what Kant notices. He says, you can’t say that the mind is simply tabula rasa, an empty slate on which events record impressions. Instead the mind constructs your experience, and in order to do that, it has to draw on rules - without which inference would be impossible. And experience does not comprise a series of events with no connection. If we really experienced that, we couldn’t even speak. We’d be like a character in one of Oliver Sach’s books, ‘The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’. That’s what the brain does with its billions of connections. It creates a world.

So Hume’s claim that you can’t observe causal relationships, simply shows that Hume’s account of what ‘observation’ entails is insufficient. If he was consistent, he would just stop saying anything - perhaps return to the backgammon table, which is where he spent the best part of his later life.

In fact, there cannot be an ‘empirical inference’. Inference depends on an intuition of causal relations. If you really only accepted literally what the senses told you, then you would be able to infer nothing. Which is exactly what Kant proved, in several tens of thousands of words.

So much the worse for empiricism, then. I think Hume actually ‘plays dumb’. ‘You say there’s a causal relationship? Show it to me!’ You then set fire to his tie and say ‘see! The match caused that!’ ‘This time!’ he says, looking flustered whilst anxiously dunking his tie in his glass of water (thereby causing the fire to go out.)

Just found a splendid Robert Lawrence Kuhn video on exactly this point. And hey, personal connection - I sold one of the interviewees a Macintosh Computer, once.

Isn't that part of what was left in need of more work, and which brought him back for another go? — Banno

I don't know. I should do some more reading.

You desire to see something mysterious — Banno

So what was bugging Einstein when he said 'the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible', then?

What I'm questioning is the idea that logical necessity is not related at all to physical causation. Obviously it's possible to consider logic (and math) in the abstract as if they are not connected to any actual state of affairs. But the fact that nature is to some extent predictable, i.e. that logical inference and mathematical concepts can be used to gain insights into and influence over the course of events indicates that the supposed division between them is not absolute. So I would question this sequence of propositions:

5.133 All inference takes place a priori.
5.134 From an elementary proposition no other can be inferred.
5.135 In no way can an inference be made from the existence of one state of affairs to the existence of another entirely different from it.
5.136 There is no causal nexus which justifies such an inference.
5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present.
Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

Supersition, then, is the belief that things happen for a reason. Is that right? Am I on the right track here?