I saw another thread discussing what time is not, and now I am curious about what you guys might think about this one.

In my case, I think God is not me.

So, what is it that God is not, in your opinion? — Daniel

A point has length 0 — Devans99

So a point cannot have zero length. — Devans99

1 and 2 - I feel these are addressed in the OP?

3 and 4 - Seem to relate more to the meaning of death than life?

5 - There appears to be a link between morality and information, see: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/363177

6 - By which you mean a theory that extends QM to include gravity? QM seems to me to be about information (particles) and our ability to measure information (uncertainty principle).

7 - Consciousness seems to be the processing of information as opposed to unconsciousness which is the complete lack of processing of information - the senses (information sources) are deactivated and the mind (information processor) is inactive.

8 - I feel that DNA is information, so the concept of information and the origins of life are intertwined. — Devans99

The question is why the observed quantities of the macro world are unaffected by the unpredictability of quantum particles. — GeorgeTheThird

So there you go - produce and consume a large amount of information for a happy, long, life - my take on the meaning of life. What do folks think? — Devans99

The BB suggests that space maybe finite - space has been expanding at a finite rate for a finite time since the BB - so that suggests finite space (finite spacetime too). What lies beyond is pure nothing - there is no space and no time beyond the boundaries so nothing can exist. — Devans99

But nothing can exist forever in time, so it must have a start. See for example the argument I gave in this OP: — Devans99

A point has length 0, say the line segment is length 1, then the number of points on it is 1/0=UNDEFINED. It is not infinite or unbounded, it is just UNDEFINED. It's not surprising considering a point is defined to have length 0 - so cannot exist - something with all dimensions set to zero clearly does not exist - so the question can be rephrased as 'how many non-existent things can you fit on a line segment' - an answer of UNDEFINED is exactly what you'd expect. — Devans99

Again: What causes a collection of completely unpredictable particles to exhibit highly predictable behavior? — GeorgeTheThird

My question is - can the idea of irreducible complexity be interesting philosophically?

And also, philosophically speaking, can there be anything that is truly irreducibly complex? — Wheatley

Do you really think Bart is talking about supertasks? I still think he is talking about simple sequences. — Banno

you can't have actual infinities. — Bartricks

(This will be funny...) — Banno

That's obviously question begging. You can't have actual infinities, so time is 'not' a dimension.

The same applies to space. You don't solve one problem by showing how it arises for other things.

Because we can't have actual infinities of anything, we need to rethink time and space - we 'must' be thinking about them in the wrong way. I am focussing here on time. Bringing space in - given that it raises many of the same problems - is unhelpful.

Time - time - is not a stuff, not a dimension. Why? Because thinking of it that way means it would instantiate actual infinities. That's sufficient to establish that it is not a stuff, not a dimension. But additionally, there would be no intrinsic difference between future, past and present (yet clearly these are radically different). — Bartricks

So making art viz. truths via fictions is always "immoral" because it violates the CI prohibition on "telling untruths"? :chin: Does K ever really square this circle ... How can we square it using K's "inconsequentialist" deontology? — 180 Proof

Er, no. It is the impossibility of an actual infinity that makes an infinite task impossible!!

Numbers aren't things. There aren't an actual infinity of numbers, rather they constitute a potential infinity. — Bartricks

No, why is an infinite regress a problem? It is a problem because you can't have an actual infinity of anything.

For example, consider the first cause argument. Anything that has come into being needs a cause of its being. Positing another being that has come into being as the cause of those beings that have come into being starts one on an infinite regress. Why is that a problem? Why can't it be 'turtles all the way down'? Because you can't have an actual infinity of anything, be that causes, objects, actions. — Bartricks

I just don't like the language used here. By this language a triangle is meaningless amd cannot be understood — khaled

Space, line, point and triangle are all primal. — khaled

You can usually tell if a word represents one of these "primal concepts" by how hard it is to define — khaled

Hmm, I still don't see a difference: if time is a stuff, then there is an infinite amount of past earlier than now, and an infinite amount of future later than now. If space is a stuff, then there is an infinite amount of it behind me and an infinite amount of it in front of me.

The problem with infinite regresses is the 'infinite' bit. So, that we recognise an infinite regress to be a problem just underlines that actual infinities are problems - for an infinite regress just is an actual infinity. — Bartricks

The famous twin paradox of special relativity involves a scenario where one twin (he) rockets away from the home twin (her), coasts to a far-away turnpoint, reverses course, coasts back, and comes to a halt when they are reunited. At the reunion, both twins agree (by inspection) that she is older than he is.

There is no dispute about the outcome at the reunion. But physicists DO differ about what HE concludes about HER current age DURING his trip. One school of thought is that he says that she is ageing more slowly than he is, on both the outbound leg and on the inbound leg, but that he concludes that she instantaneously ages by a large amount during the instantaneous turnaround. But that conclusion can be shown to imply that he will have to conclude that it is possible for her to instantaneously get YOUNGER when he changes speed in certain other ways. THAT result is abhorrent to many (maybe most) physicists. The most extreme reaction is to conclude that simultaneity at a distance is simply a meaningless concept. Other physicists react by embracing alternative simultaneity methods, that don't result in instantaneous ageing (either positive or negative).

So what does the above have to do with philosophy? For many physicists, there is no place for philosophy in special relativity. Philosophical arguments are usually banned on physics forums. But philosophy has always played a role in my thinking on the subject, even though I'm a physicist, not a philosopher (and I have only a VERY limited knowledge of philosophy). Philosophy has entered into my thinking about the twin paradox in this way: when some physicists contend that simultaneity at a distance is meaningless, I have a philosophical problem with that. IF I were that traveler, I don't think I would be able to believe that she no longer EXISTS whenever I am not co-located with her. (And I doubt that many other physicists believe that either). BUT many physicists DO believe that she doesn't have a well-defined current AGE when he is separated from her (at least if he has accelerated recently). THAT'S the conclusion that I can't accept philosophically: it seems to me that if she currently EXISTS right now, she must be DOING something right now, and if she is DOING something right now, she must be some specific AGE right now. So I conclude that her current age, according to him, can't be a meaningless concept. That puts me at odds with many other physicists.

What say the philosophers on this forum? — Mike Fontenot

It 'does' lead to an infinite regress.

It's true that there's at least one additional reason to think that time is not a substance (a reason to do with the intrinsic difference between past, present and future), but when it comes to the problem of actual infinities, the problem is the same. Space and time go the same way.

Time, if it is a substance, would have to extend infinitely because otherwise it would not be possible for an event to become ever more past for infinity. And that's manifestly absurd - no substance can extend infinitely.

But exactly the same is true of space as well. Space has to extend infinitely - how could it have a boundary? Whatever is outside the boundary would also be space.

And any region of space is going to be infinitely divisible.

One can just insist that this is not so - that is, one could, as Devans99 seems to be doing - reason that as no actual infinities can exist (correct), space must be reducible to discrete portions or atoms of space. But the problem with that is that it doesn't recognise that the problem is with space per se - any portion of space is going, by its very nature, to be divisible. I mean, try and imagine a portion of space that isn't divisible - it's impossible.

What we must conclude, on pain of simply refusing to face up to what reason is telling us, is that we are thinking about space and time incorrectly. — Bartricks

Cognitive load theory assumes that, for example, critical thinking is biologically primary and so unteachable. We all are able to think critically if we have sufficient knowledge stored in long-term memory in the area of interest.

A car mechanic can think critically about repairing a car. I, and I dare say most of you reading cannot. Teaching us critical thinking strategies instead of car mechanics is likely to be useless.
— John Sweller

"We need to teach kids how to think critically!" - a common call.

One result is perhaps the number of threads here that tell us how physics or mathematics has it wrong, while demonstrating a lack of knowledge of either physics or mathematics.

Critical thinking without context is dangerous. — Banno

"We need to teach kids how to think critically!" - a common call.

One result is perhaps the number of threads here that tell us how physics or mathematics has it wrong, while demonstrating a lack of knowledge of either physics or mathematics.

Critical thinking without context is dangerous. — Banno

Yes, causality is just the simplest form of linear connection. Same thing with Complex Adaptive Systems and chaotic attractors. That's why it's called 'non-linear dynamics'. The relationships exist, they just aren't straightforward. — Pantagruel

I've no idea of what you are saying. — Banno

Immanuel Kant has categorically declared that all lies are unethical.

He said that in an era of absolutism. It's either black or white, no shades of gray; it's either good, or evil, no shades of nuances. Either male of female, no shades of gender realization. Either mature or immature, no shades of the Autism spectrum.

That's why I thought of lies, lying, today. Have been thinking about it, for a while, actually. My girlfriend often tell me lies. But they are not upsetting. Despite my having come from a home where my mother had tried to instill only three life lessons into us, her children: don't lie, don't steal, don't engage in fights.

Well.

There are different types of lies, depending on the types of act it achieves for the teller and for the listener.

1. Malicious lie, to hurt the listener; to vindicate the teller.
2. Malicious lie, to hurt the listener, but leave the teller neutral.
3. Benign lie, to leave the listener unharmed, but to vindicate the teller.
4. Benign lie, to leave the listener unharmed, but to help the teller cut a long story shorter.
5. Benign lie, to make the listener be worried, and to make the teller happy, when the teller tells the listener that this was a lie, and, releived, the listener laughs with the teller.

Please note that 6. and 7. are missing: listener maltreated or left unharmed, and the teller maltreated. Nobody lies to harm their own causes.
Please note that 8. is missing: Benign lie, to leave the listener unharmed, but leave the teller neutral. Lying for lying's sake with no detectable difference in reaction between truth and lie is done only by pathological liars.

Sometimes there is an appearance of teller getting harmed; for instance, a kid kills a teacher, and the father confesses wrongly to the crime, and gets locked up or the chair. This seems like the father lied to harm himself; but for the father, it is less hurt to be locked up in penitentiary or get hanged than to see his son be locked up there or executed.

My girlfriend notoriously uses 3. if she is late for a date, and 4.

For those interested, they can create a table of sorts, with rows and columns, and add a third variable: a third party gets unharmed or malicious wronged by a lie, for all cases possible of the teller and the listener being unharmed or maliciously wronged.

If you were Immanuel Kant, and you were presented the above structure, what would you say about the ethical value of lying? Is lying moral, immoral, and which is when, under what arrangement of malice / vindication for the teller and the listener? — god must be atheist

Yes. If you disregard physics, anything is possible. — StreetlightX

Some people do object - spacetime looks like a creation (see the BB). It's impossible to create anything infinite in size, so therefore spacetime should be finite. — Devans99

The absence of causality does not refute materialism. It refutes the proposition that knowledge of natural causes refutes theism. — GeorgeTheThird

The path to hell is paved with 'positive ethics'. — ovdtogt

What follows is a logical argument that science offers no support for scientific materialism.

Scientific materialism rests on this proposition:
It is possible, in principle, to demonstrate by experiment a natural cause for every event, thus scientifically eliminating God as the cause of any event.

At the macro scale, and at smaller scales down to the statistical aggregate of quantum particle events, causes are readily identifiable for a broad range of events. It appears that the gaps in human knowledge are closing.

Every high level event in the universe is the sum of many individual particle events. (Gravity can be ignored in this discussion because there will be no gravity events without massive particles, and massive particles are the result of quantum events.)

Science knows of no cause for the outcome of any individual particle event. So, any given high-level event that has a known cause is the sum of many individual particle events, not one of which has a known cause. (Or has no cause at all, if the prevailing theory of quantum mechanics is correct.)

As a matter of logic, the proposition of scientific materialism fails completely, because no cause can be identified for any event in the universe.

Moreover, the operation of the universe is not comprehended. (And is incomprehensible if the prevailing theory of quantum mechanics is correct.) No one has the least idea how the order and beauty observed in the universe arises out of the chaos of individual particle interactions.

The goal of scientific materialism is to increase our knowledge of the natural world, reducing the gaps, eventually eliminating God as the cause of any event.

As things stand, it's all gap. — GeorgeTheThird

In some ways I may be making this as difficult as possible so that we have to dig deeper. Yes there is only one factor to consider, the quality of her existence. Which is unknown and cannot be taken back once committed to.

I understand that there are people who overcome the pain and live a life as best they can. I don’t know how many find it intolerable or end up taking their life.

Just to dig a little deeper. A mother’s love for her child is unconditional, not always but generally. A husband’s love for his wife is not nearly so unconditional. It’s conditional on a number of things, one being that she love him back. Would he still love her the same way if she said she did not love him and loved another and was going to live with that man?

Can the mother of the victim be sure the husband will commit himself to his wife whatever the circumstances or how long they went on for? Would he be prepared to put himself second the way mothers do with their children? Dos he understand the sort of commitment made by mothers, which is what would be required from him? I don’t know what it’s like to give birth to a child and watch it grow. That’s something that perhaps is impossible to be explained to me. So the depth of feeling for a mother about the suffering of her child may be something that is beyond the law. — Brett

Reading much of the newer metaphysics and epistemology posts (especially Bartricks') I find they go around in circles forever.

What is A
A is when you put B and C together
What are B and C
B is a D E and C is a slightly F G
Etc

Seems to be how arguments progress there. It got me wondering how we can ever even have well defined concepts in a language when every word is supposedly replaceable by a combination of other words. At what point do we cease defining and start understanding.

"Philosophy in the flesh" (great book imo) and my recent reading of Eastern philosophy gave me a new perspective which is "chunks of sense". I believe there are certain concepts we're born knowing such as: time, space, shape, etc. Even if you didn't know the word for those you'd understand them. You can usually tell if a word represents one of these "primal concepts" by how hard it is to define. Example: Try to define shape. That's the hardest one I've found so far and I've utterly failed to define shape without just using a synonym. Google defines it as the "outline" of an object but is literally just a synonym

While there are other words such as "Horse" which you cannot hope to conceptualize before seeing one. You aren't born knowing what a horse is and a horse can be defined in other ways such as "The furless four legged animal with hooves that humans usually ride on" (not a perfect definition but one can reach a perfect definition at least). Notice how nothing resembling a synonym of horse appears in the description. Additionally, all the things that do are "non primal words" such as hooves, fur, humans, ride, etc.

I noticed that most of the time "primal" and "non primal" words act as groups (in set theory) where non primal words can only be defined by other non primal words and primal words can only be defined by primal words.

Example: triangle: the space between 3 lines intersecting at 3 points

Space, line, point and triangle are all primal. You can know what all of them are without any sensory evidence (you know them when you're born)

So my hypothesis is: non primal words can only be defined by other non primal words and primal words can only be defined by primal words.
What do you think? — khaled

Imagine this; a woman of 40 years is severely injured in an accident, so severely that if she recovers then her life will be hell.

Her parents want her taken off life support to be allowed to die. Her husband wants her kept on life support until she recovers.

Setting aside legal positions, who should have the final decision? — Brett

When someone clearly acts through conscious consideration, we say to him: "Stop acting, be yourself!", as if conscious consideration couldn't be a part of what someone truly is. Most politicians try to give the impression that they and their ideas are simple and honest. And Lynyrd Skynyrd is singing about how a simple man is someone you can trust and understand.

There is an evolutionary reason we distrust intelligence. Of course intelligence could be used for inventions and adaptation to the environment even in prehistory. But on social level, the main new thing intelligence brought to the table was that dirty, dirty scheming and lying. You had to be always on your toes when someone was particularly intelligent... any suggestion he made could be for good reasons. But it could also be just to get rid of competition or to get to fuck every woman in the tribe behind your backs.

And this was a good reason to distrust the intelligentsia for millenia. But then came many new things that changed the game. One of them was science - a practical system which had a built in system against lying and corruption and which became the most trustworthy system on the whole planet because of that. And then most of the honest intelligent people became quite the fans of science and they started to loudly declare how scientific they were. They didn't realize that the primitive intuitions of people simply saw arrogant people boasting about their intelligence. And so the intuitions shouted: "Red alert! People saying complicated things hard to understand! Do not trust them! Trust those people who say intuitively simple things!" without realizing that the intuitively simple things they trusted were specifically chosen for them by dishonest intelligent manipulators.

And so we get the modern world: where the scientists and engineers give everyone almost all the resources they have, but where the leaders rarely represent science or engineering.

ps. Everything in the text is oversimplified and too extreme. It's pretty much a rant, but it makes a coherent point. Any thoughts? — Qmeri

For instance, can something exist that is infinitely extended? Well, no. For instance, when a position is shown to generate an infinite regress, we consider that a damning indictment of the view. Why? Because we - most of us - recognise that actual infinities cannot exist. — Bartricks

It is not, I think, a kind of stuff or dimension. This is for numerous reasons. Conceived of as a stuff (or dimension, if dimensions are not stuff), it would be infinitely divisible, yet nothing that is infinitely divisible can exist in reality (yet time does exist, thus it is not a stuff/dimension).

Note too that the past is potentially infinite, as is the future. But if time is a kind of stuff or dimension, then it - the stuff itself - would have to extend infinitely otherwise how could any event in it recede potentially infinitely into the past? Yet nothing that is actually infinite can exist in reality (yet time does exist, thus time is not a stuff).

Finally - and I am not suggesting these exhaust the problems - there would be no fundamental difference between past, present and future. Indeed, there would not really be such properties, only early than and later than and simultaneous-with. But future past and present are essential to time - they 'are' the fundamental temporal properties - and they are radically distinct from each other (thus, time is not a stuff).

Time, then, is not a stuff, not a dimension. — Bartricks

Context means everything:

(1) a=a+1 (no finite solution. In complex analysis a would be the point at infinity - corresponding to an actual point at the north pole of the Riemann sphere)

(2) a=0
for k=1 to 100
a=a+1
next
(now what is a?)

I'm still mulling over "bad habits" in math. Sloppiness; jumping over points in a proof assuming they are true; assuming a hypothesis and then proving it; muddling a proof so badly other mathematicians can't verify it; etc. Using infinity or infinitesimals are the least of our concerns. :nerd: — John Gill

As for my non-orthodox view, on one level, all sound deductive logic will require true premises. The truth of premises will in all cases require some reality that is conformed to. The conformity to the referenced reality will be less than infallible. Hence, all sound deductive reasoning is less than infallible in its conclusions. — javra

logic cannot be used to substantiate the credibility of logic, for so attempting presumes the very conclusion one is attempting to arrive at from the very get go - this irrespective of the specific instantiation of logic used — javra

Since God gives himself the credit of creating me (without my consent), he decides to also give himself the ultimate authority over my being. I do not see this as moral. — chromechris

If I could, I would prefer to believe in a benevolent God. — ovdtogt