perpendicular pronoun — Banno

I was not familiar with this term. I will store it in my library for future use. Thanks.

This is a well-written and thought through post. It's a good idea for a discussion.

On the other hand, I have beaten my ideas on metaphysics to pulp in previous discussions throughout my time on the forumm. The thought of getting involved in a new one gives me the purple flurps. @tim wood and I share some understanding on this issue. I'll let him speak for me.

This is just a repeated assertion of your position without any accompanying argument fro that position. — Janus

Do you agree that the scientific method is made up of the rules by which science is practiced? Do you agree that the provisions of the scientific method have no truth value? Are not true or false? Do you agree that the scientific method is metaphysics?

Are you claiming that the assertions in the quoted example are neither true nor false? — Janus

Yes. They are presented without justification or proof in Einstein's paper. He calls them a "conjecture."

Each of us "narrates" by internally characterising, contextualising, narrativising, emphasising and interpreting the content of one's observation of and interaction with one's environment. — Judaka

Just to clarify, when you say "narration" I assume you mean speaking actual words to ourselves in our minds. You don't mean just our temperament, attitude, or outlook. Is that correct? I certainly experience that. I'm a very verbal person. I have trouble stopping the voice in my head. On the other hand, during most of my waking hours there is no narration of that sort at all. It pops up intermittently when I need it, as when I need to get my thoughts together or talk to someone, or when I don't need it, as when I worry or fantasize.

Am I talking about the same thing you are?

Science is pragmatics, not metaphysics — Janus

As I indicated, the scientific method is metaphysics. It establishes the rules by which science is performed. Science is the systematic study of the world following procedures consistent with the scientific method.

Can you give an example of a coherent metaphysical statement that is not truth-apt? — Janus

Einstein's principle of relativity from his first paper on Special Relativity is a good example:

Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good.1 We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”)

No, you've avoided it and you don't get to do that. If you make an accusation, you need to justify it, or retract or it is presumed unfounded. If someone starts a thread accusing you of racist language, you'll be done the same honour. — Baden

I'm not going to justify my statements further. I'm also not going to retract them.

Again, I haven't accused anyone of using racist language. "Racist" is not a word I use.

Then don't call. Your thread was initially tilled "is racist language acceptable". — skyblack

I was wondering about that. I guess the title was changed without my knowledge. I think the original language was "Is this racial language acceptable." "Racial" and "racist" are not the same thing.

Justify your presumption that this language was exclusively about whites or stop repeating the accusation and retract. Those are your choices. — Baden

I've had my say about that in my previous responses to your posts.

On a philosophy forum, it should go without saying that people would do their due dilligence and check with the potentially offensive poster as to what they really mean, before accusing them of racism. — baker

As I noted. I have not accused anyone of racism. All my comments are about the text. I didn't even call it racist. I just asked if it was acceptable as a description of white people.

Maybe it's not. Go change the world instead of expecting others to change it for you if it's that important to you. Man "some people" are lazy af. Think everyone is just created to do things for them. — Outlander

I don't understand what this has to do with this thread.

We can talk about white people in various ways, and we need to be able to, to make sense of history, of the whole colonial story of which the slave trade and colonisation of the Americas was a large part, and the troubles social and psychological that we inherit on all sides. We need to make sense of it and take steps to ameliorate the ongoing damage. — unenlightened

This answer makes sense to me, although I don't agree. This is the question I was trying to get at.

I think there are two questions here 1) Do different rules apply to white people because of historical conditions and 2) Is the derogatory, contemptuous language used in the post acceptable.

As for 1) - If I thought that criticizing white people for current and historic wrongs would help solve racial problems or make things better for racial minorities, I would probably support it. It is clear to me that that type of criticism makes things worse rather than better. Calling people "racist" doesn't make things better for anyone.

And 2) - The contemptuous language in the post won't help solve any problems. It just makes the poster feel better but makes everything else worse. Beyond that, as I pointed out, I think this type of disparaging language would only be allowed about white people. I think that is a mistake.

That's the thing, by the plain language alone, it would only be about some white people, not all. — James Riley

I don't understand. What difference does it make whether it refers to all white people or just some? It definitely doesn't refer to me. I'm a northern white liberal

Finally, when a heritage that you choose to venerate and hang on to is one of treason, slavery, racism, confederation, and anti-intellectualism, then you get to play the enemy of America. You probably don't want or need T Clark to come to your defense. Let the hate rain. — James Riley

This is the issue I had hoped to discuss. It looks like the thread won't go in that direction though.

I don't think what the language describes is a "heritage." Actually, I think that was the posters point - he was describing what he considers to be the heritage of white southerners.

You're again falsely accusing another poster of being racist — Baden

For the record, I didn't call the poster a racist. He's not. I like and respect him and he and I agree on a lot. I didn't say anything about him. I only asked about the post he wrote.

Now, please answer my question: — Baden

I don't intend to answer your question. In my opinion, the language clearly refers to white people. I don't feel any need to justify that. If other people agree with you, this thread will peter out quickly.

You're again falsely accusing another poster of being racist with no evidence whatsoever when you've been informed on several occasions there is no evidence. Having no leg to stand on, you again present this in a misleading way and try a trial by poll. There's nothing civil about that at all. Either show me the exact racist quote or retract the accusation. — Baden

I think I've set up this discussion in a clear and fair way. If, as a moderator, you disagree, and if you think that the thread is unacceptable, I am not going to raise a ruckus if you remove it.

You have no right to inject your own racist inferences into other posters' posts. — Baden

Of course I do, or, when you say "you have no right" do you mean that as a moderator you won't allow? If so, just stop the thread now. As I said, I plan to keep my input civil and low key.

There's no mention of race in the quoted post. There's only a reference to "white-Jesusism" which is the racist idea that Jesus was white. — Baden

Yes, that's what the poster claimed. As I noted, I think that is disingenuous. Rather than arguing about that I'll just ask - if I text were about white people, would it be acceptable.

For Strawson "metaphysics" is about the nature of the world, but part of it is a-priori. But as he says, some a-priori facts are facts about reality, just as much as empirical demonstrations are matters of fact. But not everything in metaphysics can be settled, far from it. — Manuel

As I said, in my understanding metaphysical statements cannot be true or false. They are useful or not useful in a particular situation. Here are a list of issues I think are metaphysical:

• As you noted - monism, pluralism, dualism, idealism, physicalism and so on
• Free will vs. determinism
• The existence of objective reality
• The mind/body problem

It is not my intention to go into these subjects any deeper here. I think they are off-topic a bit.

Well yes, that's true actually. What I should have said is that I don't think that science is the whole of metaphysics. I'm using science extremely narrowly here meaning physics basically. — Manuel

I've spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the differences between science and metaphysics. I think it's an important distinction that is sometimes hard to keep straight. I sometimes have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to these types of discussions. I think I jumped on you a bit.

I think what I wrote is important, but it does go both ways. I strongly resist the idea that quantum mechanics has any metaphysical implications. It's physics. That's hard for me to maintain sometimes, given how much it has changed the way people think about the world. It's probably true that keeping the distinctions clear and definite has become something of an ideology for me. I probably need to work on that.

In my understanding, scientific statements have truth values, they are either true or false, while metaphysical statements do not. I get a lot of my thinking on this subject from Collingwood's "Essay on Metaphysics." If we let the distinction between physics and metaphysics become too porous, we get the unending arguments about the nature of reality we have here.

But I think the whole of science includes much more than physics. One such domain where we know very little is in psychology which includes our conception of the world, our perceptions too. These latter aspects can be called "philosophical", without too much controversy I'd think, although parts of perception and common-sense conceptions can be studied empirically. — Manuel

I agree. I find this frustrating in discussions of consciousness. That's another place where the distinction between science and philosophy can get lost. On the forum we see a lot of seems-to-me theories about consciousness that don't take the results of lots of fairly recent work into consideration.

Then there's the topic of monism, pluralism, dualism, idealism, physicalism and so on. At this point we just call these topics "metaphysical" ones, because I don't think these can be settled by empirical demonstrations. — Manuel

I don't think they can be settled at all in any global sense. My party line on metaphysical conceptions is that they are not true or false, they are more or less useful in different situations.

you might want to take a look at his An Outline of Philosophy — Manuel

I haven't had much luck with Russell in the past. I'll take another look.

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. — Wayfarer

The relationship between science and mathematics is one that perplexes me. This is an interesting quote. It has set me thinking.

it's never been to clear to me how much science should play a role, say, in metaphysics — Manuel

It's the other way around - metaphysics plays a role in science. It sets the ground rules. The scientific method is metaphysics. The Principle of Relativity we've been talking about is metaphysics.

They would kill. — SimpleUser

Yes. Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Spill her blood!

The anxiety over contingency is nonetheless a valid anxiety because without some necessary being - such as God - the drive towards the intelligibility of the universe, which is the foundational drive of science, hits a brick wall with existence itself, which remains radically unintelligible, without explanation, unless it is related in some way to necessary being. — Neil Ormerod, The Metaphysical Muddle of Lawrence Krauss

This is exactly right - the universe is ultimately radically unintelligible and without explanation. I'm cool with that.

That's not obvious. It sounds like your more a skeptic than I am — Gregory

This whole idea has been around for a long time. I didn't come up with it. The idea of God changing our memories has always been part of it.

The one we live IN. That is key. Do you appreciate how old 14 billions years is and how big trillions of light years of space is? There are things that are too old and too big for us to know anything about. That's my view and I think i have a good intuition of time and how causality can change over epochs. There are few things that I can say I know them for sure, but other writers on this forum think cosmology as understood nowadays is very highly reliable. I'm not convinced that is the case. One billion years can erase billions of traces of the casual series — Gregory

Whatever you believe, however skeptical you are, no matter how much you don't like it, science is explicitly and definitively built on the foundation of the Principle of Relativity. Those of us who accept and use the scientific method are fish swimming in the water of relativity. Perhaps you are the wise fisherman on the shore watching us in amusement as we swim around in our wrong-headedness.

Unless we're in a black hole. — frank

Or a bowl of Frosted Flakes. Or Silvester Stallone's back pocket. Or Kankakee Illinois.

They speculate anyway. Watch more PBS Space Time on the YouTube. — frank

Whether or not something exists outside our local space-time continuum, everything I've said about the Principle of Relativity relates this one here. The one where we live. If other continua exist outside this one, they may have very different laws and parameters.

When they talk about where the big bang came from, they're expanding the meaning of "universe". — frank

From the point of view of the Principle of Relativity, the universe we are talking about is the expanding space in which we live. It was created, according to widely accepted theory, during a big bang that happened about 14 billion years ago. We cannot, and may never be able to, know if there is anything beyond those limits.

He wrote that causality applies within the universe but not necessarily to the universe as a whole. — Gregory

I was mistaken. Since we had been talking about Hume's problem of induction, I assumed that's what you were referring.

Also, God could not have created the universe 3 seconds ago because I infallibly remember the universe existing since as far back as my memories go (age 3). So the universe from my perspective has certainly existed for 32 years, and possibly for much longer — Gregory

The obvious answer is that God could have created your memories along with all the rest of the universe.

Principles that must apply to things on earth (such that we can rewind causes to find an origin) don't apply to the universe at large. Aka, Hume's theory — Gregory

First off, your statement has nothing to do with the Problem of Induction as described by Hume.

What you have described is the Reverse Principle of Relativity - we can never know anything because everything changes everywhere and always. As I noted, you're welcome to that assumption, but it takes you outside of science. You have to play the science game by the science rules. As in the common example, God could have created the universe complete as we find it three seconds ago. In order to go about our business in the world, we assume that didn't happen.

Ok, I understand that foundational value of assuming the reliability of of certain laws of physics. Like axioms but so far infallibly reliable.
Does science actually operate under the assumption that the laws of physics will always be the same everywhere and always though? — DingoJones

This is from Einstein's original paper on Special Relativity:

Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good.1 We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”)

I thought that science would be open to them changing or operating differently somewhere in the universe, wherever the method takes them. Are you saying that it is necessary for science to assume that anything contradicting those foundational assumptions is erroneous and they should try and find data that supports those foundational assumptions? — DingoJones

Identified scientific laws have changed over the years as we've gained more knowledge. New laws are generated, e.g. the old Laws of Conservation of Matter and Conservation of Energy had to be revised following Special Relativity, which showed that matter and energy are the same thing. It became Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy. That has always happened and will continue. The Principle of Relativity doesn't say that laws won't change. It says that whatever new laws are developed, they will apply everywhere.

I mentioned quantum mechanics because our understanding of physics breaks down the quantum level, and perhaps naively I thought of the quantum level as somewhere in the universe as well. That would contradict the portions I quoted of yours wouldn’t it? — DingoJones

I don't think this has anything to do with quantum mechanics. QM is just one more of those laws that apply everywhere.

I'd class the Principle of Relativity as a grammatical rule; that is, if we find a violation, then that means we've made a mistake - like finding both bishops on Black squares. — Banno

I'm not sure if that's different from what I'm saying or not.

What is the speed of light outside the universe? — Gregory

I don't know what, if anything, is going on outside our universe. My formulation of the Principle of Relativity specifically indicated it deals with what is going on in this universe. The one where we live that started expanding about 14 billion years ago.

if the universe turns inside out the speed of light changes. So the laws may not be the same for future eternity. — Gregory

I don't know what "the universe turns inside out" means.

I’m not sure that’s the case...”everywhere in the universe”? ”will be the same forever”?

Aren’t both of those disproven by quantum mechanics? How does science account for variables of what is surely a vast amount of knowledge we do NOT posses about the way the laws of physics work? — DingoJones

I'll respond without trying to fool you even once. As I said, this is an assumption. It underlies all of science. It hasn't been proven and can't really be. You skepticism is an instance of Hume's problem of induction. How do we know that induction is valid? We know it inductively by observing it's effectiveness. Ditto with the Principle of Relativity. We know it because that's how it's worked so far.

Coincidentally, I've just started reading a science fiction book, "The Three Body Problem." In it, physicists discover a violation of the principle. That's as far as I've gotten so far. Please - no spoilers.

I do have a specific point and have not changed my views. We know certain elements have specific effects but other things can have this as well. So we can know "so-and-so causes cancer" but not what happened millions of years ago because other things (call it a dragon, exotic matters, parallel worlds, God, or whatever) could have caused the effect ("now") other than the causes they assign to it — Gregory

It is a fundamental assumption of all science that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in our universe, have been the same since the universe began, and will be the same forever. This is no secret, it has been stated explicitly time and again. You are calling that into question. That's fine as far as it goes. Problem is, it seems to be working pretty well so far.

If you take this fundamental assumption away, you are no longer talking science. People aren't going to give you any credence unless you provide some reason to take your skepticism seriously - some reason that the assumption is wrong. I doubt you can do that.

You know what's really funny? The predictable reactionary posts, when the focus shifts from the topic to the person. It's the first sign of a failure of intelligence and the taking over of emotional hissies, as can be seen in your laced posts. But then finger pointing doesn't interest me so carry on. — skyblack

Your OP and subsequent posts are really condescending. Given that, you should expect unsympathetic responses.

In his constant effort to fix his problems by looking into the solutions proposed by the various brokers (Secular or Religious), it is clear the human has descended into a pattern of conformity, thus making the mind and the heart dull, insensitive, sluggish, blind, unresponsive, almost lifeless. A second hand machine at best, that constantly breaks down. — skyblack

This is from the Tao Te Ching, Verse 20, Stephen Mitchell's translation.

Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
What difference between success and failure?
Must you value what others value,
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!

Other people are excited,
as though they were at a parade.
I alone don't care,
I alone am expressionless,
like an infant before it can smile.

Other people have what they need;
I alone possess nothing.
I alone drift about,
like someone without a home.
I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.

Other people are bright;
I alone am dark.
Other people are sharper;
I alone am dull.
Other people have a purpose;
I alone don't know.
I drift like a wave on the ocean,
I blow as aimless as the wind.

I think the sentiment here is similar to the one you expressing. The difference is that Lao Tzu feels compassion for the people he describes. You seem to feel contempt. You don't seem to like people very much.

At least this verse shows that the "conformity" you're talking about has been around for at least 2,500 years. More likely it's been around since before humans evolved. Some level of submission to a hierarchical system is probably necessary for large groups of people to live together.

The Tao Te Ching and other spiritual/religious paths offer the possibility of a more authentic approach to life. I think it's also possible for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and find it for themselves.

How can such a burdened human ever be free to meet a new unknown moment. How will such a weighed consciousness penetrate the tenuous workings of their own mind, and that of the universe. — skyblack

How are you dealing with this problem for yourself?

That'll be because I haven't replied — Banno

Are you going to?

You're going to have to engage with the science, though, if you wish to have an opinion on anything from climate change through to viruses. Deliberately ignoring any science with political import would be absurd. — Banno

When we're trying to use science to develop policy, especially in an urgent situation like the pandemic, there comes a time when you have to make a decision. When that happens, the right choice is generally to follow the scientific consensus, even if it is imperfect.

I suppose there could be religious people who really, genuinely believe what they say. I just haven't met any. — baker

I have met many. Just because someone isn't as self-aware of their beliefs as you think they should be, I don't hold that against them. @Tom Storm wrote previously, most people don't really examine their beliefs and the consequences of them.

@Banno is wonderful. [irony]I don't care what everybody anybody says.[/irony]

You wrote this:

Would you guys please get back on topic? There's plenty of places to discuss race and god; this is a thread about science. At least make some attempt to relate the discussion to the OP, perhaps? — Banno

I responded this:

I don't understand. My posts have been all about science including the response to the pandemic in particular. I don't see how that is off topic at all. I went back and checked all my posts in this thread for the last 3 days and couldn't find anything about race or god. Did I miss one? — T Clark

I haven't seen a reply from you yet.