Aren't you simply defining temporal passage into existence? — Luke

This is not me defining anything. This is the definition of velocity in classical kinematics. This is what I mean when I say: if you insist on no motion in the block, necessarily you insist on a new or obscure definition of motion.

Or you can reintroduce the terminology "change in time" uncontroversially by imagining clocks at Event A and Event B.

It probably helps not to call it "change in position" or "change in time". If you're happy flipping between 4D and 3D + time representations, that's perfectly sensible, but it's clear the word "change" implies a passage of time to some. The correct word would be "distance" in 4D.

A point object appears in the block as a continuous wiggly line such that, at each time t in the block, the other coordinates of the object are defined. A point on this wiggly line is an event, Event A. Another is Event B. If the spatial coordinates at B differ from A, then between A and B the line has a gradient in those spatial coordinates with respect to time. That gradient is called velocity.

You seem keen to saddle me with Presentist assumptions. I have not mentioned an objective present moment or a second time dimension. I am using the same definition of motion as you. — Luke

But that's the problem, you're clearly not. Motion is a gradient of position over time. Position exists in the block. Time exists in the block. As long as objects are a) continuous and b) not parallel to the time axis of the block, you get motion from that and that alone. There's nothing else needed, it's there in the geometry of the object. The fact that when you represent this block the line doesn't move within it is irrelevant because that's not what motion is. Motion in 4D is exactly the same thing as motion in 3D + time, not a 4D + time version of it.

To state that kinematics is impossible in the block, do one of the following:
1. Demonstrate that spatial positions do not exist in the block (the numerator)
2. Demonstrate that temporal positions do not exist in the block (the denominator)
3. Demonstrate that the block contains no continuous worldlines (requirement of continuity).
If any if those are true, then yes, motion cannot exist in the block. But if any of those were true, you wouldn't be talking about the block.

While relativistic laws are reference frame invariant (up to coordinate transformation), the same cannot be said about those things that the laws do not fix, such as the distribution of matter and radiation in the universe. — SophistiCat

Right, only insofar as they are denoted by us as functions of coordinates, e.g. as fields, so that we can deal with them.

If we take those other things into account, we can identify reference frames that are special in some way, such as the frame in which the cosmic microwave background radiation has the same energy profile in all directions. — SophistiCat

I am no astronomer, but to my knowledge, the distribution is a uniform, isotropic black body spectrum. Statistically, for every photon red-shifted by change from one frame to another, there is a photon blue-shifted the other way. Since the point of relativistic physics is that phenomena are invariant even if the way we denote them is wrt coordinate systems, it's difficult to imagine what special universal features might be yielded simply by judicious choice of inertial frame. Moving to non-inertial frames, if, say, the universe was found to have net spin, you could call the frame it which it doesn't 'special'. A very novel physics explaining pseudoforces would be required.

All the same,the need for a privileged frame is not fatal to presentism, although as you point out, no observation can help us identify this frame. — SophistiCat

I suppose if we discovered some kind of cosmic pole, that would do it, but yeah I'm not sure how we'd recognise it. I agree, it's not fatal, but it's not justifiable either. All it explains is how much the idea relies on seemingly nonreal things. Other than a fear of a slippery slope back to eternalism, what recommends a single privileged frame over everything having its own 'now', like the spotlight theory? At least those frames aren't special, so need no justification.

Ah, here's the preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.07207.pdf

Lots of maths, but check out Fig. 3. Unless you like maths, in which case I'm a douche because I basically just said: "You don't need to read it if it's too hard, just look at the pretty pictures". Damned either way, I guess :rofl:

What would the experiences of the people be? — RogueAI

There was a paper recently that was quite interesting, I'll see if I can dig it out (no joy so far). In QM, we're used to thinking of something like an electron being in a superposition of states in a lab setup like the double-slit experiment that is in a well-defined state (i.e. the position of the slits and screen being well-defined, because they're macroscopic). The paper basically asked, as applied to this context, what does the slit-and-screen setup "look like" from the electron's "point of view"? Iirc this gist is that there should be some transformation you can make that takes you from superposed-electron/defined-lab to frame with a well defined electron state, e.g. a well-defined electron position. What does the lab setup look like in this frame?

It would look pretty crazy. The positions of everything in the lab would be put into the converse superposition. So the electron would find that no slit had yet reached us, a slit had already passed us but the screen had not, and the screen had already hit us, all with associated probabilities prior to the lab's wavefunction collapse. The position of the screen that it hit would be smudged out in a banded way, which takes some working through, but is due to the fact that any point on the screen (i.e. relative to one corner) is a) already in a superposition and b) can only be hit with the moderating probability of both slits already having passed behind the electron. All of this will have happened, be happening, and be yet to happen because our well-defined electron position has made a nonsense of momentum. Then something unknown happens and the lab collapses to a single well-defined position with one point on the screen at the origin

Or: blur, blur, blur, hit by a screen.

But with the education system, we get an educated villain, but also an intuitively moral person with even better perspective on their moral intuition. — Christoffer

But not necessarily the requisite qualification to stand for election. That's the issue: it holds academic achievement, albeit in a particular and apt domain, above other qualities that the electorate may discern.

For me, philosophy is probably the least corruptable within academia. The reason being that one primary goal of it is to be skeptical of the knowledge you learn within it. While scientific educations may look unbiased, they can be corrupted. So philosophy is a great way to force people to see past their biases and if the praxis within the job they have educated towards feature a focus on philosophical unbiased rationality, it's even harder to maintain a bias. — Christoffer

Yes, this is the philosophy degree -> better politician determinism I asked about before. You've obviously derived this ab initio from the superiority of philosophy that you perceive, and I don't deny that philosophy teaches good things like scepticism. I do deny that the output of that is good sceptics or good politicians, in the same way that a medical degree is not a thing that generally yields good gynaecologists.

I'm clearly not here to piss on philosophy, I love philosophy, and you're obviously in good company. I'm sure most philosophy students, graduates, and pedagogues are equally convinced of philosophy's superiority in producing superior people fit for politics. But a) that's what I mean when I say: "according to a philosopher" -- communists will see the superior value in what communism teaches, for instance -- and b) to me that counts against you. I personally don't see it. I see that the potential for it is there in what you learn in philosophy, but I do not see the determinism in producing such people. It does not accord with my experience, and a failure to address that makes me suspicious.

But we can cover that over and agree that some passing grade in some yet-to-be-perfected curriculum could be a requirement for wanting to stand for election. I would say that, if this produces 'good' (moral and capable) politicians and not just people good at winning at politics, it would be a good thing to teach everyone at school. I feel this would solve a much larger class of problems.

If he’d made it just another few years, he might have been the one to notice tossing an object out the window of his railcar didn’t appear anywhere near the same to him as it did to his manservant watching him ride away. The guy was a peer-reviewed scientist after all, even if his legacy is philosophy. — Mww

This was well known from Gallileo's Two New Sciences two hundred years before Kant. Although not on a train, obviously.

Epistemic Democracy is in its simplest form a request for better parliamentary praxis and educational baseline for all at those power positions. To represent the people shouldn't be to represent stupidity, it should be to represent by interpreting the will of the people through rational thought rather than populism. — Christoffer

Yeah, I do like the idea, but we have to acknowledge its limitations and vulnerabilities. It is still a kind of meritocracy and suffers the same flaws as that. An intuitively moral person who could make a difference in a vote but lacks the academic skill to get a degree will be disqualified, while an academically gifted villain will not.

A universal baseline education seems easy to corrupt to me, more so than the current melting pot approach. I'm not sure how it would respond to progress. Philosophy, for instance, is very slow-moving; psychology is new and rapidly evolving. Have you given any thought to how one might stop would-be politicians all being taught the same wrong or immoral thing? That said, we're at a time in the UK where everyone had more or less the same childhood education. I hope that hasn't contributed to the failure of our politics :D

You still seem to be presuming that an object can change its temporal position (i.e. move through time). Eternalism rejects this. — Luke

Yes and no. The no first. Imagine we never heard of the block or spacetime or relativity, and we're stuck with old-fashioned Gallilean kinematics. A thing is, in my frame of reference, stationary if I measure it's positional coordinates r=(x,y,z) over time t and they don't change. A thing is sometimes moving if I measure r over t and they sometimes change. A bouncing ball's height changes over time. I can describe its position at any given time as r(t) = some value.

I can calculate its velocity at all times from these measurements of position. v(t) = some change in r(t) / some corresponding change in t. Allow the change in t to become infinitely small, you get calculus and kinematics. You do not object to the standard kinematic definition of motion.

Now it turns out we've been living in a block universe the whole time. The ball in the block appears as a wiggly line. Sometimes (at some times) that wiggly line is parallel to the time axis of the block, sometimes not. For simplicity, at each time t, the wiggly line has only one positional coordinate, so r(t) still fully describes the path of the ball. (In quantum mechanics, this is not true, and we have to switch from calculus to vector calculus to describe velocities.) The velocity of the ball is still v(t) = some change in r(t) / some corresponding change in t.

"change in t" does not mean "some passage of some objective present moment from the first value of t to the last". Duration is just a length in the block. If you're happy with the idea that a mountain surface's altitude increases closer to its summit, you're happy with the idea that altitude is a functional of radius from the summit, and that you have a gradient: a change in altitude(radius) / a corresponding change in radius. There is no logical exception then to a change in position(time) / a corresponding change in time. We do not ask, "but what is moving toward the summit such the radius can vary?" That would be meaningless. It's equally meaningless to ask "but what is moving through time such that the time can vary?"

The yes: When we say something is "moving through time", they're speaking of a worldline with a nonzero length that is not at right angles to the time axis of the block. Everything real "moves through time", i.e. it exists for more than one value of t and is continuous. That does not mean that the worldline itself, which we may write as a function of (z,y,z,t) is moving with respect to some other time t2. And whatever meaning one might derived from: "how does a path over space and time move through time?" is equivalent to that derived from: "how does a ruler of 12" length move from one end to the other?"

Well, you don't seem to need my help; you've single-handedly come up with a near-scientific hypothesis on the issue. I appreciate your effort and ingenuity but, if you must know, I'd let time be the judge. I guess it's going to be a long wait... — TheMadFool

Yeah, I apologise for the ridiculous tone of the questions. In my defense, they are logical questions to ask given the assumption they ridiculed.

I would say, and I don't think this is something you'll accept: time is judging already. The very assumption -- that a woman wears e.g. a miniskirt because she wants men to sexually solicit her -- that gives rise to these mysteries is, quite rightly, putting some of its extreme proponents in prison or firing them from their jobs. There will be a time when every police officer who laughs off a miniskirted woman complaining about sexual assault will be sacked, maybe even a time when they couldn't get hired in the first place. Society has inherited such individuals and the protectionism around them from a more primitive time in which straight white men had the power to out-group just about everybody. It doesn't tolerate them though, that is the trend already. Time has judged, is judging, and will judge us further in retrospect.That's a third grounds you have to reject your own assumption.

Having said that, a woman should be free to show some skin without being held responsible for ‘sending the wrong signals’ to men in whom she has no interest. If you hit on a woman and she brushes you off, the humiliation you might feel is not her fault for ‘putting it out there’. Even if her intention is to be noticed, she’s just as free to be choosy as if she had dressed modestly. — Possibility

Further, if three of your mates have hit on a woman and she's brushed them off with diminishing temper, don't be a dick by trying your luck. There's a very strong signal she's sending out: leave me alone! Pointing at her plunging neckline and pretending that's the only signal that matters is not a defence. You know what you're doing, and you know your rationalisation is BS.

That is, everything exists at all times. — Luke

Caveat to follow, but: everything exists at all times, but not necessarily at the same place at all times. This variance of position with time is motion.

(Caveat: in reality, not everything necessarily exists at all times.)

The block universe in this case is not a model along which you can trace time with your finger — Luke

As I said:

To anticipate the follow-up question, or the similarity of what I'm suggesting to the spotlight, it is not necessary to do this for the "change" with time to be there. It's merely a means of illustrating that the change is already encoded in the worldline. — Kenosha Kid

The block universe in this case is ... the actual universe in which nothing changes its spatiotemporal location. — Luke

I was speaking of things in the universe, not the universe itself, but that does work too. Imagine a 3D universe consisting only of an eternal stationary ball. In the block universe depiction, this is a straight line parallel to the time axis. Now boost to a frame of reference in which the straight line now has a gradient. i.e. is no longer parallel to the time axis. There's your motion: I just moved the whole universe for you, Luke, and you're still not happy!!! :grin:

You cannot unambiguously say the ball "is moving" because that's present tense and there is no present: just a straight line through the block at some angle from the time axis. The ball has motion, though. In that sense (the kinematic sense) the ball is moving, i.e. if instead the worldline of the ball is sometimes parallel to the time axis and sometimes not, I could say "the ball is sometimes moving" and you'd understand me, right?

this kind of behavior is aimed specifically at a certain range of "clients" - men whom they desire and wish to forge a relationship with — TheMadFool

So this is a firmer statement of intent than the original question, which asked to resolve a perceived discrepancy between how women describe their clothing choices and how some of those clothing choices suggest a more universal intent.

Out of interest, is this a binary phenomenon in your mind? When a woman wears a miniskirt to a bar, she's definitely straight and looking to get hit on by a man, correct? And if she wears a microskirt, same is surely true. If she wears a floor-length skirt, she wants to be left alone? What about a knee-length skirt? Is that still a deliberate provocation as it was to Cole Porter, or does that put her in the leave-me-alone category? Or is it a continuum: the shorter the skirt, the more the woman wants to be hit on, so a knee-length skirt denotes being open to a little flirtation with a small chance of sex, while a microskirt denotes an anybody-anytime-right-here-on-the-counter intent?

Yes, I came at this with a kinematic idea of 'motion' and a geometric approach to the block universe. The latter seems justified given the video link you posted, which also presented a geometric picture of the block. I don't have any understanding of a non-kinematic definition of motion tbh, which is my ignorance.

Is 'motion' in the sense that you use defined to rely on the existence of a passing 'present', i.e. is this something different from a conventional kinematic definition of 'motion'? If so, then it's a truism that motion does not exist in a universe without such a present, so long as 'motion' in that sense is not then confused with 'motion' as in the movement of bodies over time generally, which requires no present. I see then the use of re-introducing such a present by means of something like the spotlight.

My preference would be to not add ontological features to satisfy strange definitions. Such a definition would be a presentist definition applicable to presentist descriptions. Time exists in the block (as an axis). Motion is conventionally defined as change in position wrt time (which also works for presentism). Motion exists in the block (if anything exists whose spatial position changes as its time position changes). The answer is inevitably geometric, since the block universe is geometric, and inevitably kinematic given the (imo only sensible) kinematic definition of motion.

Do you mean simply tracing out a path on a map — Luke

Yes, just this. It would be easier if I could draw it, or write equations. But if you can imagine it, groovy. The question is: what changes (other than the time coordinate) as you follow the path of the helix? The answer is the spatial coordinate of the helix.

To anticipate the follow-up question, or the similarity of what I'm suggesting to the spotlight, it is not necessary to do this for the "change" with time to be there. It's merely a means of illustrating that the change is already encoded in the worldline. You can look at the helix as a whole and see that it is changing in space and time together, i.e. as one coordinate changes, so does the other.

According to the principle of relativity, laws of physics don't privilege any reference frame. But that doesn't mean that a reference frame cannot be privileged in some other sense - like in the sense of indicating the absolute now. The absolute now would not be part of the known laws of physics if it existed; it would come as an extra fact about the world. But that's old news - it was as true for Galileo and Newton as it is for Einstein. — SophistiCat

Taking the broader point, I agree that the existence of things that cannot even be indirectly observed is possible. I'm less convinced that it's meaningful to talk about them. Which I guess is what I was saying earlier: what is the explanatory power of the spotlight? If we accept that a) it is a privileged frame, not shared by all of us, and b) makes no difference to observable phenomena, it can't explain, say, the psychological passage of time, which is subjective, i.e. relative.

Taking the point further, there is nothing to say that a privileged frame mightn't be necessary in future physics, although I think that would have to entail an abandonment of much of relativity, replaced by something that predicts the verified phenomena relativity predicts plus some additional stuff.

An "absolute now" is not a concept that makes sense to me though. "Now" now is not "now" exactly a year ago: it is not absolute. But a privileged moment (e.g. 13.7 billion years ago) wrt which "now" can be referred and seen to change would be absolute and sensible, even if it has no obvious descriptive power.

I presented the MST mainly for comparison with the block universe. Perhaps that was an error on my part. — Luke

Well, it was a good one then, I'd never heard of it. I'm just playing catch-up.

Does this imply that you acknowledge and find it unproblematic that Eternalism (i.e. the block universe) has no passage of time? — Luke

In the sense of a 'now' that moves through time? Yes, I find that unproblematic. There are questions about how we account for experience, but those questions don't arise out of the block universe picture.

If so, then how do you answer my question of what it is that changes position over time if 4D objects (and/or their subdivided 3D parts) remain fixed at their spatiotemporal locations according to Eternalism? — Luke

When you say "changes... over time", in the block universe that means "what changes in the rest of the worldline as we move along the time axis in a particular direction". It's probably easiest to convey diagrammatically. If we just consider one spatial and one temporal dimension for the moment, imagine a helix oscillating about a line parallel to the time axis. This could represent a given spatial coordinate in a given frame as the Earth orbits the Sun. Pick a random point on that helix, then follow its path. As the time coordinate increases, the spatial coordinate changes. That is motion as we mean motion to be, which is a 3D + time concept, everyday experience if you like. The "change" is the gradient of the worldline. An unchanging thing would be a straight line parallel to the time axis.

I had in mind the "new atheist" thing and counter-thing, which seemed to generate some pissing. — darthbarracuda

That's quite a recent thing, though, isn't it. The dislike seems older than that. And it's a pro-science rather than intra-physics thing. They quote Bertrand Russell a lot too. :grin:

If it's the atheism generally of science that's responsible, that wouldn't surprise me at all. Gregor's beef isn't obviously a religious one in the normal sense, though the idea that science might be wrong not in any pragmatic sense but because it's based on the wrong book (Kantism rather than Humism) is very familiar.

They say "we just need to change the math a little on that one", admitting that they are changing, not describing, nature, which may be indescribable — Gregory

That really is too silly. Of course scientists don't believe they're changing reality by changing its models. They're improving their models to better predict real phenomena. It's a self-correcting discipline.

I think both Kant and Hawking would object to the notion that the models of science get us direct access to reality itself. Scientific models are good in so far as they allow us to make predictions. That does not allow us to say that science gives us an entirely, complete, adequate or satisfactory model of all of our experience of the world or of reality itself. — prothero

:up:

MST is a hybrid of Presentism and Eternalism. Presentism does indeed entail a "privileged history". However, I'm not here to defend Presentism, but to point out the nature of the (block) universe according to (B-theory) Eternalism, which, by definition, contains no temporal passage. — Luke

Yes, I watched the video you linked (thanks) and realised you seem to lean toward the pure eternalism it discussed. But you are presenting MST for consideration. My point was that there is no concept of absolute simultaneity. There is no "now" that you and I share, unless we're co-moving. So I was wondering how a spotlight illuminates "now" across many bodies moving at different speeds. Is there a basis for choosing?

I'm not sure whether that's the "whole point of spacetime", but the laws of physics are considered to be invariant in spacetime, yes. — Luke

It absolutely is. (I used to teach this stuff at uni, so I'm not totally pulling this out of the air.) The point was to come up with a way of doing mechanics that dealt with invariants rather than frame-dependents. In spacetime, the invariant is the interval, the 4D equivalent of distance/displacement/duration.

That only makes sense if there is a passage of time. — Luke

Yes, that's the problem. The MST seems to reintroduce a passage of time, not for worldlines but for the spotlight tracing them. I think we're as one on this, that just wasn't clear to me at the start.

Now I'm caught up (thanks for waiting)...

when does motion occur according to Eternalism? — Luke

Simplest of kinematics is velocity: change in position / change in time. This, and all higher orders of motion, are retained in four dimensions. It's just that "change in time" is not special. Let's say you're due south of the summit of a mountain. As you move toward the summit, you're moving north. But you're also moving upwards as you ascend. There's a relationship there: the gradient change in altitude / change in latitude. "Motion" in the usual 3D+1 way of thinking is now just equivalent to that.

A few scientists have a big dick and like to show it off. — darthbarracuda

That does make sense, mine is enormous :rofl: Seriously though, was that a thing I missed? I remember the Science Wars back in the early pomo days, and that kind of went weird. A scientist definitely started that one with a (tiny) dick move, but it seemed to get forgiven and forgotten pretty quickly. Bruno Latour gave us a kicking and everyone seems to think we're butthurt over it, but we totally incorporated that stuff. The science/philosophy pissing contest I'm not aware of.

It could be God or anything the human imagination can think of pulling the strings. Scientist think they understand matter, but can't prove that. Kant tried to defend regularities but it all fails. I think consciousness effects matter more than we know. Heidegger implies as much. This could explain how scientist make things. There i s no relation between sciences model and reality. They are wrong to think they can model reality anyway. Their statistics are flawed too. Something as basic as whether space-time push us into the chair, pulls us, or opens up to let it rest are still debated by scientists. Your senses can't feel the laws of nature, so there I no access to them even in they exist — Gregory

I'm not even sure any of that is coherent, and I'm even less convinced it's a case for actually disliking a group of people. Personally I find consciousness overrated, but we have an interpretation of 50% of the theoretical keystones of modern physics that puts way too much emphasis on the importance of consciousness. Sounds like you'd be in your element. "[N]o relation between sciences model and reality"? Really? If a model 100% of the time in 100% of circumstances predicts what a real thing does, there's no relation? You sure? And what does curved spacetime have to do with statistics?

I'm in no way claiming "they had it coming" but I'm bothered by how women dress in ways that seem to attract all the wrong kind of attention to themselves and then seem offended by it. — TheMadFool

Actually, a crowbar separation needs to be made between two distinct things, although I think creativesoul covered it. When women complain about sexual objectification, they usual mean all of the time, in every situation. I don't think they typically mean e.g. "during the lapdance I was giving".

However, I did have a fascinating conversation with a feminist once who explained that men should never hit on women, that it was misogynistic. I pointed out the obvious effect this would have on the survival of the species, so she conceded that it would be fine if a man she fancied hit on her, but "ugly" men should not. I asked how either man could know if she fancied them without approaching her. Her response was: "They should just know."

Now that woman was a nutcase, but there are plenty of nutcases, maybe enough that what you're talking about is a woman dressing sexually provocatively but calling out men she doesn't like on looking at her as a sexual object there and then?

The problem here is that men tend to think it must be about them. And yes maybe the first woman to wear a miniskirt wanted to be noticed in that way, but then miniskirts became fashionable, and women who are guided by fashion were apt to wear them. It's not a "Can you guess what I've got up here", it's just fitting in. There's also one-upmanship to consider as well. If revealing clothes become fashionable, then more revealing clothes become higher status.

Btw none of that really explained why there's such a widespread disdain for physicists among philosophers. I mean, even if science had massively underachieved, is that sufficient cause for hate? You say we're too Kantian? But Kant and Kantian philosophers don't bother you?

By what standard do you say science is successful. — Gregory

I already stated that: on its own terms. Science proceeds from building models of reality and succeeds by testing those models. The more accurate the prediction, the more successful the model. The more phenomena it can predict or explain, the more successful the model. Science's predictive power outclasses anything else we know of. Those are science's terms, because that's what science is. If you want anything else, use a different tool.

Who's to say it's successful enough — Gregory

Scientific standards. Kind of covered by "on their own terms" yet again.

that there aren't alternate reasons for how they created what they did? — Gregory

Irrelevant. If you postulate a god, for instance, who is making all observations fit with theories that have previously and consistently made other excellent predictions (also via the god), it's still working. It's just working via a god.

A woman can walk around naked and not want to be treated as just a sex object, partner, or what have you.

You are not realizing that someone can want to look appealing and want to be viewed as that AND so much more. — creativesoul

This, a billion times. Imagine a guy's potential on every matter in his life being reduced to the sexiness of his chest because he once wore an open shirt on holiday. Once someone's caught your eye, surely you talk to them and stuff, get to know them, know their likes and dislikes, their skills and hobbies, their politics, the kinds of music they like, decide if you like them as a person. It seems weird to me that so many men seem to continue, after all that, to think of a particular woman as little more than "the tits I'm currently interested in."

But I think the stuff I enumerated... guys like that, it washes over them somehow. They probably don't ever really get to know the woman they like. Sucks to be them, really.

You can have morally sound politicians, great economists, great debaters, great diplomats, great lawyers, the works, and that melting point of experience and achievement would far outdo an identikit political education. — Kenosha Kid

On which, it seems dangerous to have a curriculum for representation. I suspect such a thing would end up being representative of the educators, not the electorate.

In fairness to God, He never came up with eternal damnation thing for sinners; it's a punishment limited to the diabolical trinity of Satan, the Anti-Christ, and the false prophet. Mortal sins are punished by the final destruction of body and soul; this is called the second death.

I asked a Catholic friend of mine why the church preaches one thing when the Bible says another. She referred to some theological jiggery pokery whilst maintaining that the truth is clear in the Bible, as shown by said small library of theological texts to prove that it's clear.

Physicists with fat heads are saying this year that mathematics now can prove causation and not simply correlation. — Gregory

I've never really understood this widespread detestation of physicists among philosophers. I've seen it in every philosophy forum I've been in. Whether you're interested in it or not, it's been extremely successful on its own terms. Complaining it doesn't operate differently seems no more sane to me than berating a spoon for not being a hammer.

I feel like everything I do is insignificant, so small, my life is meaningless, in the grandest scheme of everything. So why should I live? Why should I keep living, if it’s all meaningless, futile, and pointless? Why should I just “accept reality” ? — niki wonoto

Have you read Camus' Myth of Sisyphus? This is his question: if there's no absolute meaning to my life, why don't I commit suicide? (Spoiler: he finds an answer.)

What did you think before you realised your cosmic insignificance? Did you think someone or something was going to validate your life? Genuine question. I've never had any difficulty accepting my insignificance, recall no moment of realisation, and have pretty thoroughly enjoyed my insignificant existence, so I don't have a comparable experience.

There's lots of satisfying things to do. They don't have to have any significance beyond that satisfaction. You can write a book out of joy of writing, without getting it graded at the end of the universe or whatnot.

If you can't imagine doing anything fulfilling or satisfying or enjoyable, it might be worth consulting a doctor as you could be suffering from depression.

I think you view philosophy in another way than I do within the context of epistemic democracy. I focus on the practice of dialectical scrutiny, the focus on strong premised, unbiased arguments together with an understanding of moral theories, deeper ideological understanding as well as how the praxis of philosophical debate erases all populistic behaviors in parliament. — Christoffer

No, I do dig it. It keeps coming back to a belief that seems unjustified to me. I wonder if your experience of others really verifies that this brew of education has so consistently churned out top drawer politicians.

My point is that this is not necessary. Your plan requires a separate qualification for ministerial posts, which presumably means that, to occupy such a post, a politician must fulfil two distinct educational criteria. Why? Does an economist who might become a minister not have a sounder basis to debate economics, even if nothing else? I think what she brings to the table is more valuable and more conducive to eradicating incompetence than better general debating skills, etc.

Yes, she's maybe not going to be able to debate foreign policy as well as someone with a general political education, but no matter, since she is one of hundreds.

Also, I think the idea of requiring further specialism in addition to general philosophy, etc. is moving away from the philosopher king idea, since it is the executive that creates law: the representatives debate and vote.

Overall, I'm not opposed to a general grounding in salient fields as a requisite. But I think a broader meritocracy covers that. You can have morally sound politicians, great economists, great debaters, great diplomats, great lawyers, the works, and that melting point of experience and achievement would far outdo an identikit political education.

I think we should accept JacobPhilosophy’s premise for this thread and assume that both obligations and virtuous acts exist. — Congau

You misunderstand. It was precisely because Jacob suggested he could refer to an unconventional system of ethics in order to promote a virtue into an obligation that I made the above point. I'm not in favour of such trickery. Your response---to assume that both virtues and obligations exist---is precisely what Jacob is questioning, so I think you misunderstand him also.

This is likely my ignorance, but the MST seems to imply a privileged history. The whole point of spacetime is that it is invariant. The passage of time for a woman flying to a neighbouring solar system at 0.1c is not that of her Earthbound twin, and no objective duration for comparison is necessary or possible. So either the MS adds nothing, or it adds something that makes a nonsense of the world around us. Or does every observer have her own spotlight?

I'm not sure how it could possibly make sense to have a spotlight "moving" through spacetime either. Or, to put it another way, what is the worldline of the spotlight?

Those times when you get the feeling you're being watched. Or when you enter a property and a cold and unsettling chill goes down your back. Or when you meet a new person and though seemingly normal something just doesnt quite sit right with you about them. Or a disturbing notion that danger is imminent or that a friend is in trouble despite any reason to believe so. — Benj96

I don't think an intuition that danger is imminent despite no sensory data to suggest this -- likely the human brain making correlations between uncorrelated events -- has much to do with 'intuition' that something about someone isn't quite right, which is the brain performing analysis on behaviour that the conscious mind doesn't understand.

I suppose the point of comparison is selection criteria. We have some understanding of why humans are inclined to draw correlations between uncorrelated events, and we have a lot of understanding of why humans need to make quick assessment, unhampered by slow consciousness, of a person's body language. Both are good survival traits, even if both are horrendously error-prone.

As which other cognitive functions, such as empathy, there's a difference between having the capacity to do something (nature) versus the particular learned implementations of that capacity (nurture). For example, you and I both assess the body language of a stranger unconsciously, but whereas my brain has learned to give weight to people whose eyes are too close together, yours has learned to give weight to people whose eyes dart around too much, with neither criteria necessarily consciously known of. (Examples ad rectum, don't read too much into them.)

It is not necessary to know anything about noumena in order to do science. Science is limited to making predictions about observable phenomena. It does this by using theoretical models of reality, of noumena. Good theories have good models that make verified predictions. Bad theories have bad models that make false predictions.

There is always the temptation -- many if not most scientists do this -- to identify models as the noumena themselves. This is not to be confused with people who refer to models as if they were noumena as a shorthand. But some people believe that the theoretical models known as quantum mechanical wavefunctions are as they would be if we had direct knowledge of the noumena themselves.

Sometimes this is fairly justifiable. If we have direct knowledge of the phenomena of the noumena, such as atoms, DNA, etc., then it's reasonable to proceed on the basis that this regular, scientific universe is not so much of a trickster as to make the noumena vastly different from the models. Sometimes the theory itself is so compelling (e.g. the special theory of relativity) that one is inclined to bet that it is a good match for underlying reality.

But, generally, identifying models as noumena is a failure of scientific thinking. Science provides insight about phenomena. It is up to philosophy whether the models are accurate depictions, and it is a matter for science to determine whether the models give accurate predictions.

I have seen alot of people go by like you in my life, some of them ended up in prison, and some of them were shot by their friends. If I had a reason to wish you luck I would — ernestm

Well thanks for at least considering not wishing me dead. That was probably about as fair-minded as I could expect.

I am one of the people who similarly had their property destroyed by a black gang, in my case, because I was white and in their way. They also tried to kill me. — ernestm

I am sorry to hear that, that must have been terrifying, especially if you already had a fear of black people. I don't condone violence at all but, as with Wendy's and Target, one can at least try to understand the reasons for violence. Surely a philosophy Master, even one on the downward trajectory of life, can reason that it is both irrational and immoral to a) hold all black people in judgement for this one misdeed or b) hold no violent white racist in judgement for their misdeeds, to the extent of weighing the recent unemployment of one white man more heavily than the 88 dead black men killed by racist white cops this year, a conservative context for the George Floyd murder?

This has been without doubt the most random and weird conversation I've ever had. I sense you're not done yet, but, my morbid curiosity notwithstanding, I think the right thing for me to do is to not encourage you further down this trajectory. I'm sure I speak for most when I say I don't like where this is going. Remember: Be safe. Don't kill anyone. And for the love of God don't join the Neighbourhood Watch.

you cant answer direct questions either. If you cant answer direct questions, you will have to live with the injustice you create and not understand why you are responsible. It will be a crushing blow when the realization hits you one day, if you live that long. — ernestm

Yes, that happens whenever I don't tell some random weirdo on the internet my age, I'm used to it by now. I appreciate that, according to you, my withholding my age did create injustice, and that might include systemic racism, but I still feel we're going way off piste. Have a safe life, Ernest. Don't kill anyone.

how old are you, and what education do you have? — ernestm

The answer to both questions is: enough to know that a white man out of a job is not more important than a eighty-eight dead black men this year.

Why do you ask? It seems irrelevant. Do I smell an ill-advised ad hominem on the horizon?

I had a recent conversation wherein the responses I was getting were just weird, random-seeming, unassociated to anything I was saying, which made me wonder...

If many humans cannot pass the Turing test, is it really a good test?

There is no law then, except what you approve of. — ernestm

This is your conclusion from the observation that "prioritising the lesser concerns of the white Wendy's owner over the greater concerns of black people dying at the hands of racist white cops is a niche way of thinking"? Care to show your working?