Don't you see a problem with that? — magritte — Metaphysician Undercover

You're taking that out of its context. It was only meant to help unravel an attempt at a correct subjectivist philosophy. Not only psychology but also some physics can only be seen that way. But how?

I’m using physics definitions. — noAxioms

Don't you see a problem with that?

Physical definitions don't have to have any meaning either in conversational or in a philosophical sentence. Even in physics meaning is convenient but superfluous as long as the formulas invented/derived describe to a point of prediction of possible phenomena. Physical definitions relate hypothetical mathematical objects of pure intellect. When explored philosophically, which is really unnecessary except to aid students in bridging to a physical mode of thinking, physical objects, such as energy and so on become Platonic conditional abstractions.

What the claim that man is the measure means is still a matter of dispute. — Fooloso4

Plato himself made the 'man is the measure' doctrine sufficiently clear in the Theaetetus. “just as each thing appears to me, so too it is for me, and just as it appears to you, so too again for you” (Theaetetus 152a) The meaning of 'appears' was and still is ambiguous because the ancients couldn't have a clear distinction between sensation, psychological perception or insight, and logical judgment based on memories of personal experience. Plato suggested all of these for Protagoras (157d, 170a–171a). Mathematics and today's public scientific facts are not in the scope of subjective philosophy.

Plato argues against the claim that the man, that is, each person is the measure, and thus is able to refute it. — Fooloso4

No he is not able to do any such thing. A refutation would need to show that Protagorean premises are inconsistent or absurd and Plato can't do that, nor can anyone else because it is logically impossible. It then comes down to looking for the flaws or fallacies in Plato's arguments as presented with an eye on the list of ancient sophistical refutations. Typically, Plato saddles his opponents with one or more absurd premises just for the purpose.

Socrates describes his "second sailing" (Pheado 99d-100a). Rather than looking at things themselves:
~~So I thought I must take refuge in discussions and investigate the truth of beings by means of accounts [logoi] … On each occasion I put down as hypothesis whatever account I judge to be mightiest; and whatever seems to me to be consonant with this, I put down as being true, both about cause and about all the rest, while what isn’t, I put down as not true~~.” — Fooloso4

Fabulous, isn't it? Unfortunately this scientific method in search of forms, occupying an intermediate position between knowledge and ignorance, does not come up in the Theaetetus.

:up: Thank you for these posts.

The Forms are excluded in order that we may see how we can get on without them; and the negative conclusion of the whole discussion means that, as Plato had taught ever since the discovery of the Forms, without them there is no knowledge at all. — F.M. Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge, page 28

Cornford's epochal work still had shadows of Kant, especially in being mindful of the unknowable noumenal universe and its original in Plato. What can be known is limited by our senses. rational resources, plus what humanity brought into the world. For Plato that is the objectively real Ideas that guide us. Without this guidance we are lost.
As you say,

Theaetetus ... shows the need for an intelligible world not possible through the relativity of Protagoras or Heraclitus. It is done without recourse to Anamnesis and the separate realm of Forms — Paine

Therefore, Theaetetus, neither perception nor true opinion, nor even an articulation that’s become attached to a true opinion would be knowledge. — Plato. Theaetetus 129b, translated by Joe Sachs

That is, it would not be Platonic knowledge. If Protagoras had been allowed into the argument at this point he would have thanked Plato for properly developing Protagorian subjective knowledge. The difference is that subjectively I can always be certain of my knowledge of this moment and this moment alone.

The puzzle arises because modern Aristotelians and materialists take JTB for granted as the sound definition of knowledge and are shocked to discover that Plato demonstrated that this cannot be. What could be the difference? Cornford suggests that according to Plato, only the Forms can be known unconditionally. If we dismiss the Forms as abstract nonsense then which way should we look for an answer?

In ... epistemology we can't know if quarks exist. Fine. I would probably agree with you on that issue — Bylaw

The problem is not with the mathematical physics of quarks but with the licentious use of exist and know which should not be allowed to seep into physics.

Can any animals be described as morally worse, or morally better? — Wayfarer

Yes, according to my personal decree of morality, subject to revision but absolute for each judgment of course. Like the baseball umpire's call of balls and strikes. Pigeons that roost on the head of the Teddy Roosevelt statue, and gulls and starlings that aim for pedestrians in a mall have low morals, but male sparrows that throw chicks out of the nest of a competing sparrow are despicable.

You think it's easy becoming top meerkat in a mob or alpha wolf in a pack? — Vera Mont

I suppose not. Can it be more hopeless than the millions of bank and insurance company clerks working years for a promotion to assistant supervisory manager?

I don't see how human law can be compared favourably with natural law. — Vera Mont

Although I don't think you can demonstrate either a universal natural law of animal behavior nor that the laws in your country are the same as in mine, I agree with the gist of your point about people being morally worse than many other social animals when it comes to the treatment of their own kind. One major factor making for the difference is the shift from a fight for survival in animals to competition for higher social standing for people. We are competing for power, money, or prestige in the eyes of other people.

in combining them, 1 + 1 = 2 (the sum) plus the addition of a new emergent conferred from the act of combination. — Benj96

Fitting regular hexagons together in a circle makes 6 hexagons plus 1 more emergent in the middle making 7 hexagons. But on the surface of a soccer ball 5 hexagons make 5 hexagons + 1 pentagon. It would appear that you are not entirely either right or wrong. Emergence seems to require at least one additional outside factor to guide a convergent or divergent process.

If philosophical analysis is not concerned with matters of empiricism, such as whether the morning star and the evening star are really just the same thing, then why is there so little attention paid to the analysis of logical form? — Shawn

Because analysis of propositions without content is empty and empirical content without formalism is blind?

Mathematical probabilities are calculated. Empirical probabilities can at times be theoretically estimated based on looking at the actual world. Probabilities of fictional events are meaningless.

One issue with empirical theoretical estimates is that they require biased philosophical presuppositions prior to any personal experience or possible futuristic scientific observations. Another is that cosmological speculations require cosmological presuppositions, not fictional ones.

To my estimate, even if there ever was any extraterrestrial intelligence, their signals will never cross our timelines, therefore whether there are or ever were aliens out there we remain thankfully alone and free forever.

With AI the issue of creativity pokes a hole in the narrative of an extreme material-mind dichotomy. The intelligence of the machines improve gradually to eventually surpass human limitations.

Query ~ Please write a haiku about a walk in snowy woods

Snowy woods, so still
Silent footsteps crunch and crunch
Winter's peaceful thrill
~ ChatGPT

Query ~ What is creativity and how is ChatGPT creative?

Creativity is the ability to generate new and original ideas or things, often in the form of artistic or intellectual works. It involves using imagination, originality, and innovation to produce something that is novel and valuable.
ChatGPT is a machine learning model that is trained on a large dataset of human language and can generate human-like text. It is not inherently creative in the same way that a human is, but it can be used to produce text that appears creative to some extent. This is because ChatGPT has the ability to generate a wide range of responses to a given prompt and can produce novel combinations of words and ideas. However, it is important to note that ChatGPT's responses are based on patterns it has learned from the data it was trained on, rather than on its own original thoughts or ideas.
~ ChatGPT

Statistically speaking,
All sheep are black (based on a sample of 1 of course)
All people have straight black hair
Shakespeare is alive and well in China (most people who ever lived are alive today)

The process of bringing forth creative ideas may be like digging in the ground. But some seem to have got it down to a fine art. To some extent it may be possible to improve by practice but it does seem that some are so much better naturally — Jack Cummins

Creativity is just a word for a platonic abstraction of a mind process we share with all living animals of bringing to action or to words hidden meaning arising from deep forms of thought not directly available to conscious awareness. The creative process is autonomous until we choose to exercise it by force, digging directed with purpose and intent for extended periods. My wife fixed up a poetry closet for herself to shut out the world while she mulled over, wrote, revised and rewrote. A friend walks in the park in the mornings telling children's tales to a voice recorder. My best ideas pop into awareness out of the abyss when I lie in bed in the middle of the night seeking to get back to sleep.

performance is measured according to standards and is also an act of communication — Jack Cummins

Creation is a struggle to bring to light ideas that might emerge from the formless depths of one's mind. Some ideas are merely new rearrangement of cultural memes and these can be judged according to some odd standards. Ideas that truly brake new ground will not be judged.

For a photon, which has no mass and always travels at the speed of light, distance and time only exist from the perspective of the observer: to a photon there is no such thing as distance and time, once it's emitted, it reaches its destination instantly in zero time. — staticphoton

For the photon without distance and time how can there be speed of any kind? Is the photon everywhere at once?

↪jorndoe
Thanks for the maps.

Reuters give some more detail: they cannot supply Kherson well enough for its defence; they are afraid to lose too many men for nowt.

"Russia abandons Ukrainian city of Kherson in major retreat ~~ By Mark Trevelyan LONDON, Nov 9 (Reuters) — Olivier5

According to the maps, the Zaporizhzhia high dam which has a hydroelectric plant and supplies water to Crimea is now in the Ukrainian controlled area. Nevertheless, either side is capable of blowing up this dam at any time. The immediate result would be a wall of water carrying debris cascading down the Dnipro valley washing everything in its path into the Black Sea.

The Russian withdrawal to the South could be a recognition of a stalemate along the river caused by the presence of this threat, as neither side can occupy Kherson without incurring the possibility of great loss of men and equipment at any time.

(2.) We know our action in an unfiltered way. — KantDane21

(2) equivocates "our" in meaning. Not all action can be known. My action may or may not be filtered to me but other actions are always filtered.

In other news, A surprisingly near black hole about 10 times more massive than our Sun has been found just 1,560 light-years from Earth, which is about as far as the Orion Nebula. Gaia BH1, is part of a binary star system whose other member is a Sun-sized star about as far from its companion black hole as Mars is from the Sun.

^^^
It's for real. :(

That's an interesting perspective you have there. — Agent Smith

It's the perspective of most scientists, if you ask them.

The JWST hasn't made any startling new discoveries. :groan: I expected a paradigm shift event to occur. Looks like the JWST is nothing more than an upgraded HST. All that Sturm und Drang, for nothing! Maybe it's too early to comment ... astronomical data take time & money to process. Gotta be optimistic! Oui mes amies? — Agent Smith

theory ... is just a set of rules and equations ... [however] a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. ― Stephen Hawking — noAxioms

Scientists are sometimes quick to leap to hyperbole when singing the praises of their megabucks projects even if results can only be seen in comparative charts or new equations. But the JWST goes far to appease the astronomical amateur community by taking telescope time to give enthusiasts just what they've aimed to see in decades of stargazing on cold silent dark moonless mountain tops.

The universe was here first. We're just visiting for a short while seeing what we can see. Science is a tour guide pointing here and there. Most people are too busy with just staying alive or seeking daily comforts to notice. But then what's life for?

that's one way to think about the multiverse I guess — ssu

The multiple universe models are driven by mathematical logic as extensions of cosmological theories. The parameters of those theories turn out to be just numbers that happen to work for us, but are they necessary or just lucky? Could they have been some other way? Of course, any other way we would not be here to ask, but the numbers and the implied universes (read logical realities) that might have been simply wouldn't care. Does our presence bias our views on the matter so that reality boils down only to that which makes it possible for me to type this sentence?

If we can model our reality better with multiverse models than without, then why wouldn't it be science?
Everybody ought to understand that it's a model of reality, not reality itself. — ssu

There is a reality for each and every model, as implied and expressed by the models. Not the other way around. Choosing to call one of these realities 'reality itself' or 'really really real' is a personal choice no matter how many people are convinced otherwise.

This BBC article pushes some of the same facts, but much of it is still speculative due to the paucity of legitimate military sources.

Hopefully Putin gets a day older each day until he doesn't.

In February, Putin met with Xi in Beijing. Now, Xi will meet Putin somewhere in Central Asia just a month before Xi is poised to cement his place as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.

Meaning what?

Fair enough, and so is everyone else. :brow:

Something coming from nothing doesn't make sense.
And the idea of this world of space and time always having existed also doesn't make sense.
If anything, this world existing is self-contradictory.
"When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the case." — Yohan

After eliminating the possibility that the world 'exists', however you take that word, something else must be the case. No?

May not be as hot as airport infrared body images :gasp: but this link gets into how they might be spotting the earliest high-redshift galaxies with near-infrared observations of originally ultraviolet light.

With my view many paradoxes (Zeno, Dartboard, Liar's, etc) are easily resolved — keystone

I take it you must mean dis-solved?

There are physicists who believe the universe is infinite — T Clark

With circular reasoning. Perhaps a label for endless but not quite infinite in a physical sense ?

Never could a continuum be decomposed into points — keystone

For physics, isn't that the driving force behind quanta, to put a stopper into space leaking out ?

Hubble and Webb will work together to showcase the universe across multiple wavelengths of light.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1567204230464684033

Thoughts? — Kuro

Is my wastebasket a set ?

Sounds about right because the world of all that exists should not be a mathematically flat set ?

It seems unlikely that the fundamental nature of snow changes with the light. — RussellA

Yes. Realism demands that objects have fixed properties just so lack of contradiction can distinguish truth from falsity. This is etched in stone. Appearances can be true or false subjectively and they can change therefore are unreliable, but can be classified and named as are the colors of the rainbow. When there are many rather than just one then the logic of contrariety takes the place of contradiction. This means if not this one then any one of the others without contradiction. This, I think, is a useful logical test and proof for properties.

Based on this thinking, white is not a property but just the most commonly seen appearance of snow. The truth of the alternative colorless or translucent snow is based elsewhere in the stronger language of some applied branch of science. Unfortunately this leads away from the OP topic which presumes truth for T-sentences.

Tarski in "snow is white" is using "is" to mean "has the property", in which case "snow is white" is analytic.
To say "snow is black on a dark night" is a synthetic proposition, as it can be expanded to "snow which has the property of being white appears black on a dark night" — RussellA

Analytic-synthetic judgment comes with logical difference. Snow is black shocks because it is contradictory to white and thus supposedly logically impossible. Since black is not impossible white cannot be an analytic property of snow. Now if snow is translucent and cannot logically be otherwise then 'snow is translucent' is analytic. Translucent is a real property of snow while all natural appearances of snow color are only contrary within a range and are synthetic. This cuts through the confusion caused by Tarski's example. Tarski's theory might or might not work but this example undermines his intentions and questions his understanding of Kant. (or else I'm blowing bubbles ?)

So yes, the T-sentences are not a theory of truth, at least in that they do not tell us which sentences are true and which false, but which sentences have the same truth value. — Banno

A one-to-one translation from object language to another language then gets us nowhere, truth value remains unaffected, and a truth maker ϕ is still to be sought. What else could constitute a truth maker for any proposition of an object language?

You brought up the metaphor of a Russian doll with each layer being more inclusive thereby more physically powerful. And you mentioned the idea of logical power. I think metaphysical power might give for those T-sentences material adequacy. What do you think?

Tarski himself used an analytic proposition "snow is white" — RussellA

How is this an analytic proposition? Because if it is taken to be analytic then it is circular at best and shows nothing. However, if it is synthetic then its truth is under-determined because whenever observed by whatever method snow is hardly ever white.

EDIT: I should add that I see the problem of circularity in the IFF. I don't think the arrow can go both ways. It only shows redundancy in the method, schnee is not needed.
EDIT:I notice that if the example was 'snow is colorless' or 'translucent' my objection would fail. Adding white to snow is a synthetic addition to my more modern understanding because on a dark night snow could be black instead.

I think she is just has learnt that the old rules apply and are useful. — ssu

I gather most of us confuse the higher moral expectations of Scandinavians with our own looser standards? If Sanna Marin is ousted as PM would you think that she will come back and be elected by popular vote as President a year from now?

What's the difference between seeing the sheet and seeing the sheet-as-sheet? — creativesoul

Sheet-as-sheet is stronger :strong: