The Last Word

[Bazza]

This forum gets funnier each day. 

[Bazza]

Normal left us in 2019. Now we are culturally & socially shell-shocked ie suffering cumulative PTSD. 

[Cancer]

It is not clear to me that normal ever had a strong attendance record here.

[Bazza]

Oh... it did, but mostly left...

[Bazza]

Now the left-normal is the new normal. 

[Bazza]

And reality is abnormal.

[Cancer]

The real numbers make a line, and you can construct a normal to that line (actually many normals ... hmm ... perhaps an Archimedes spiral expanding away from the real line.

[Bazza]

Metaphilosophy/metametaphysics/Posterior Analytics/Epistemology question: is a model intrinsic to reality, or derived from reality. 

[Cancer]

The way I think of models, definitely "derived from", usually in the sense of including only a few selected aspects of a situation.

 

This may be a statement about how I use the word "model", though.

[Bazza]

What about “constructed”? 

[Cancer]

Also applicable.  Probably more commonly used jargon than "derived from" when talking abotu a model.

[Pariah]

Models are inherently limited representations of some facet of reality. No model perfectly represents the thing it is supposed to, though incrementally better models tend to appear over time. (The evolving model of the atom from Democritus to Dalton to Thompson to Rutherford to Bohr to quantum mechanics is a great example of this.) Hence the saying attributed to English mathematician George E.P. Box, "All models are wrong, but some are useful."

 

Or, as I like to tell my students, don't eat the menu.

[Bazza]

Oh, I must come back to this. Sorry guys. 

[Bazza]

Bummer. 

[Cancer]

Been playing this?

[Bazza]

Not yet...  

[Bazza]

Okay, continuing the discussion, above (which was at the beginning of the month) asking the scientists: what is your understanding of this phrase: "real existence"?

[Cancer]

Use of the phrase makes my internal alarms go off, and not (purely) because of you.  Lots of the out-and-out drivel spam from loony whackjobs that comes to people in physics departments about said loony whackjob's "theory" uses that phrase or ones similar to it.

[Bazza]

So existence is not real and/or, reality does not exist? If so, we're in trouble. 

[Cancer]

Thing is, all too often those who try to bring a discussion about that either have an agenda and (whether they admit it or not) are trying to win converts (or at least momentary submission) to their way of thinking, or they are having an extended solipsism syndrome crisis which the layman is properly more worried about being sucked into it and joining a lost-amid-the-chaos miasma than resolving the other fellow's issue.  Frankly, the former is slightly more probable in ftf encounters, and orders of magnitude more probable in internet encounters, and that has a major influence on my cynical attitude about such topics.  The social contexts in which I have experienced such discussions far overshadow the content of the discussions themselves.

 

It rapidly devolves into whether you believe in reported experiences of others, and whose reasoning you accept, and whether you are merely interested in browbeating the other over intellectual territory which is well-worn for you but barely familiar by name only to many others.  The latter is little more than a form of trap.

 

Would the Universe exist if there were no sophonts in it to reflect upon what they perceive?  Alternately, do there exist wholly uninhabited universes?  Is our Universe inhabited by more than a single mind, and all the others are illusions?  Damfino; it is not clear to me that such questions are resolvable, except by the authoritarian means of eliminating all those respond with answers other than the favored one.  Then there is the complicating issue that there exist personality types which cannot admit the possibility that they are not in the right, and any discussion devolves into (again) forcing others to bow to their will.

[Bazza]

Thank your for your reply. It is not at all what I was expecting. My “agenda” is to verify two postulates/axioms of realistic philosophy which are: (1) There is a world of real existence which humans have not made or constructed, (2) This real existence can be known the human mind. This has been taken from John Wild, Introduction to Realistic Philosophy, page 6. For completeness, the third axiom is “(3) Such knowledge is the only reliable guide to human conduct, individual and social."

 

Historically, this is the intellectual environment that grew out of Plato, Aristotle, to the Arabs, to the Schoolmen who passed it to the onwards which formed the environment for the creation of modern science(*). Modern science, obviously constructs and uses mathematical models as quantifiable descriptions of reality (realness & existence). (*)Can suggest books and lectures if required.

 

And, I’ve read that psychologist James Gibson’s ecological approach of visual perception verifies scientifically that the external world has realness, and existence. But, as of yet, have not verified this from a second source, particularly James Gibson (as his book is over $100 AUD). But I might have to. 

 

[Cancer]

Well, the physical science viewpoint requires the first postulate as an axiom, I think, though that gets more complicated when you start discussing quantum mechanics and phenomena at the atomic/molecular scale and smaller.  The second postulate remains a postulate because you need to make something like that assumption to grant that a progression in understanding is possible in principle.  Possibly one can think of it as an ansatz, a postulate which in principle will be testable some time further down the development.

 

Diving into my institution's library system, Gibson's The ecological approach to visual perception seems to be available online, but whether it's available because the university has paid for access somehow, or otherwise qualifies for free access (e.g., it might be accessible that way only within the US) is not specified by the catalog.  (The library here also has his three major works in paper copies, but that doesn't help you.)

[Cancer]

On 7/4/2021 at 6:37 PM, Pariah said:

Models are inherently limited representations of some facet of reality. ...

 

I have seen models which were not intended to be representations of reality, but rather explorations of what follows from certain assumptions, usually ones that the authors doubt are real.  Same sort of tool, obviously.

[Bazza]

 

[Bazza]

On 7/1/2021 at 10:10 AM, Bazza said:

This forum gets funnier each day. 

Well sometimes. Other times it is a sad reflection.