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WBraun
climber
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Dec 22, 2017 - 04:00pm PT
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Yep, the gross materialists like the aspect of this thread as long as they get to leave out all the truths and only deal with theories and mental speculations.
Their whole modus operandi is licking the outside of the jar.
That is the conclusion of all their dry lifeless data and knowledge .....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 22, 2017 - 04:04pm PT
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Yep, the gross materialists
Yep. That would be an aspect of me. However, I never licked the outside of the jar. Much more Winnie-ther-Pooh, for me.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 22, 2017 - 06:47pm PT
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Healyje: I suspect time is like gravity, free will, god, etc. - endlessly studied and speculated upon which is great and interesting in some global scope, but a case where life goes on oblivious to whether we have a definitive answer for them.
Agreed.
It *is* possible that these terms (gravity, free will, etc.) are simply ways of talking, of expressing ourselves. “I love you,” “I’m going to get an education,” “I was a bad boy,” “it’s 93 degrees outside,” “let’s have pork and beans for dinner” are all expressions that we use to communicate reality to each other, but in some sense (it seems to me), we don’t really know exactly what we’re talking about. One could look at those terms and declarations as placeholders for indescribable, infinitely open-ended experiences whose richness cannot be plumbed. That is, we don’t know what they mean. All we know are our experiences, and THAT'S what we're really pointing to. ”
All of this points back to mind, IMO. How can it not?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 22, 2017 - 08:11pm PT
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n some sense (it seems to me), we don’t really know exactly what we’re talking about
Yet you use the word "exactly." Are you quite sure about what that word means?
Are you putting, "Let's have pork and beans for dinner," on the same level as
In mathematics, the representation theory of the Poincaré group is an example of the representation theory of a Lie group that is neither a compact group nor a semi-simple group. It is fundamental in theoretical physics.
?
That seems wrong to me.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 22, 2017 - 09:14pm PT
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MikeL: One could look at those terms and declarations as placeholders for indescribable, infinitely open-ended experiences whose richness cannot be plumbed
"Let's have pork and beans for dinner?"
Really?
My god, man, you need to get out more.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Dec 23, 2017 - 04:06am PT
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Jgill,
thanks for the overview of infinitesimals. I am not sure I know the all the math of infinitesimals. I think I overstepped the realm of physics & Lynd by incorporating infinitesimals into an application of a physics description in a previous post. The idea of infinitesimals is math and its description may not apply to the physics of this universe as the smallest time may be of some finite size and not an infinitesimal. ??
Planck time is not necessarily the smallest time step but by theory the smallest time we could measure.
from google:
The Planck time is the time it would take a photon traveling at the speed of light to cross a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the �quantum of time�, the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10-43 seconds.
They say. 'that has any meaning'.
Certainly, Jenann Ismael does not feel each jolt of Planck time.
Of course per MikeL, " we don’t really know exactly what we’re talking about....
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 23, 2017 - 06:58am PT
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Largo asks: So Ed, what would be involved in developing Lund's idea a little further?
the first thing involved is the commitment of time to actually try to understand what Lynds is trying to do, that time would be considerable and the decision to try to understand would have to be stacked up against other things that require time. One asks oneself: having understood this, was it worth the effort?
We never know for sure, but in this case it seem rather unlikely that it would.
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I'm on the fence with this one, probably because I doubt the verity brand new ideas, but more tangibly, because Lunds paper was far more of a conversational piece then a well structured, well written document. He needed to flesh out most of his ideas. As is the piece feels short handed and half-baked.
But I would be interested in hearing Ed say what, specifically, was Lund presenting or seeming to present that struck Ed as being "unlikely" to bear fruit.
My sense of this is that what Lund is really driving at is the age old question of the One and the Many. He apparently had an insight from pondering Xeno's Paradoxes. I suspect that Bergson was working off the same general terrain. Lund looked to quantum mechanics and math to undate Xeno's paradoxes but probably lacked the technical acumen to make his arguments convincing. Bergson certainly did. What earmarked greatness for Einstein (who was working an office job as well at one time) was that he DID have the technique to frame his insight in scientific terms so it might not have been the genius of the insight alone, but also his ability to frame it in terms that science could wrangle and work up into predictions.
Worth nothing is that one of Einstein's most influential profs was big on making the students visualize what it was they were working on. Stands to reason that Einstein saw the world a certain way, could sufficiently visualize it and had the math chops to bring it to fruition. In the subjective adventures this process of working from insight to something solid is signified by an open circle. There is always a gap between the insight to cogent presentation. Einstein was able to close the circle.
Anyhow, I'm jet lagged like crazy but yesterday on the 12 hour flight to Zurich I read a bunch of stuff on Xeno's Paradox and the paper in question and some stuff on Bergson and it seemed all connected to the one and the many question and the indivisibility-of-the-whole insight, which people experience many ways. Obviously we CAN divide the whole or I wouldn't able to write stories and math would be impossible, so it's silly to deny this basic fact. But I suspect there is something to the whole wholeism insight that undercuts our tendency, based on our basic makeup and way of organizing reality, that makes us prone to see reality as fundamentally one or many, as all physical or all unseen, and more importantly to stake the farm on one perspective as being "correct" because the "evidence" says so.
I remember having my own insight along those lines when I was working full time in film and TV production, and was also doing a bunch of Zazen marathons, where we'd gather at 6 and grind it till evening. During that time I was attempting to to discriminate and actually catch the moment that a thought would arise in my mind and the moment that I went from being awake to falling asleep. I never could, of course, because experience is indivisible in terms of being able to isolate out in clock time where one "thing" begins and another "thing" or state stops. It left me questioning the actual discreteness of the apparent things or states in my experience.
Somewhere in there I was camped in the edit bay trying to edit another boring Discovery Channel show, going frame by frame though the video and realizing that recording "reality" the only way we could do so was by artificially stopping the flow or tide of experience by way of freezing it basically 60 times a second, taking a still frame image of the subject, then playing back this sequence of frozen moments in a way that it SEEMED to flow like reality, giving the impression that we were SEEING reality by way of these static, arrested moments. So I started wondering what kind of technology would be able to record the unbroken stream of "time," or the stream of reality over which a metric of time was imposed, WITHOUT having to stop the stream to capture - 60 times a second - a succession of frozen images.
No one in the edit bay could get their head around what I was asking, and when one finally did, he couldn't start to imagine what mind of camera could capture what never stopped moving.
Just rambling here, jet lagged as I am, but fun stuff to mull over as Santa's dropping down your chimney...
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 23, 2017 - 08:09am PT
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Jogill: Really?
Sure, John. It’s just a question of degree, math or beans.
When you’ve said, “Let’s have pork and beans for dinner,” what were you thinking and feeling?
Write all of it down here for me. EVERYTHING.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Dec 23, 2017 - 09:03am PT
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MikeL,
When you’ve said, “Let’s have pork and beans for dinner,” what were you thinking and feeling?
Write all of it down here for me. EVERYTHING.
I would hope in that set of EVERYTHING is the sentence, “Let’s have pork and beans for dinner”.
When MikeL gets out of that superficial meditation stupor he is likely to again understand what it means to say, “Let’s have pork and beans for dinner”.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 23, 2017 - 09:16am PT
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re: varieties of freedom
eeyonkee and I, as fans of deterministic systems and thinking in relation to volition (will) and responsibility, are currently at rest a bit before Round #2... but I am moved to submit a consideration I had last night while watching the film, Lincoln.
I submit here as food for thought, some intellectual h' ordeuvre... before Round #2 perhaps?
Lincoln says,
"If we submit ourselves to law, Alex, even submit to losing freedoms, the freedom to oppress for instance, we may discover other freedoms previously unknown to us." timestamp: 2h07m
Such an excellent insight. So much, so profound, it could bear consideration and re-consideration 10 or 20 times over, imo.
Compare,
If we submit ourselves to the Laws of Causation and Determinism, Captain Kirk, even submit to LOSING FREEDOMS, the freedom to choose in the greatest, highest sense for instance, we may discover OTHER FREEDOMS previously unknown (UNCONCEIVED) to us.
Also worthy of careful consideration, imo, as a reconcilist. ;)
Thanks, Abe! :)
....
PSA:
This post is really directed toward folks already keen on causation, determinism, volition (will), role of responsibility in a deterministic ecology. So if you have no interest, let alone background, in this subject matter and your only inclination is to sh#t-post nonsense (in anger, perhaps, at such talk as we anthropes being automata) please exercise control and don't. I am really NOT interested in parlaying with anyone NOT sincerely interested in the subject matter. Thanks.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 23, 2017 - 09:47am PT
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Dingus, rather than try and frame Mike in your own vantage (superficial meditation stupor), why not make an attempt to understand what he is actually saying. My sense is you are totally clueless at what he is driving at, based on your own experiences with introspection, which apparently have been both superficial and trance like.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 23, 2017 - 09:51am PT
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Largo, you enable the shitposters here with your flippancy towards others which the shitposters then feed from. You might have some good insights once in awhile in this subject matter but until you change your style you're not worth responding to, it's just not worth it.
Yeah, I know you're not your brothers keeper, but still there are ways you could help clean up the place and help raise the level of discourse here.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 23, 2017 - 09:55am PT
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I push on MikeL not because I disagree with some of his musings here, but because I believe it a convenient excuse to abandon intellectual rigor. The claim that it is all "a narrative" is correct, but we choose between competing narratives, and in science, the choice is deliberate, and often rather elaborate, and structured using a formal logical system (which often has to be extended and sometimes invented).
How is science narrative, if by narrative we mean those conversations we have "everyday?" As MikeL points out, this narration is often communicated to others, to wit, I'm hungry and thinking about what to eat, maybe I'd ask Debbie “Let’s have tofu chorizo stir fry with pearl couscous for dinner” which starts a rather elaborate discussion regarding when we last had it (at the FaceLift), Stephanie introducing it to us, whether or not she would want it too, where would you get the ingredients, and various other side conversations that might just jog down some magical-realism like pathway.
In the end we get the desired calories.
Science does the exact same thing, though we expect more from the 'narrative' then just a good idea (or a novel idea, or radical idea...). Dingus McGee talks about the time it takes light to travel a "Planck's scale length" as a measure of the "smallest" unit of time. But that is also a narrative device. First, why invoke any particular length? For our experience wouldn't it be sufficient to say that it takes light a nanosecond to travel 1 foot, a nanosecond is as good a measure of an instant in time for most people as any.
If we contemplate physics at the Planck scale we run into all sorts of problems, perhaps the most problematic is that light doesn't exactly "travel" in that setting. If the universe was bound up at the Planck scale mass there are no light world lines that escape it, even at the subatomic level. Imagining the world (universe) at that level runs into all sorts of problems, some of which are interesting to work out, we use our narrative skills to tell the story, in science the narrative can help organize our thinking and lead to the outline of a physical argument that might expand our understanding.
For instance, I'm recently thinking about phenomena that occur over a region of a sphere with 30 micron diameter, taking place over a few nanoseconds. Part of what I'm interested in is how this flowing implosion works, how the flow sets up, what its directions are in this tiny volume, and what effect is has on a 200 picosecond flash, the time when the neutrons that I'm looking at are created and head off to be detected. There are many narratives we tell each other about what is going on, and they all compete in a very real way. Hypotheses are tested by more experiments, and experiments are a limited resource, not all of them could be done, so choices have to be made. While there are many good stories to tell to justify a request for these resources, those stories that are more convincing are the ones that get the awarded resources. By more convincing here I mean that the scientific justification woven into the narrative is a very important (but not all important) part of the story.
But they are the stories we tell.
The story of Emmy Noether creating what has been characterized as the most beautiful scientific idea is not that widely known. And beauty being in the eye of the beholder, requires the ability to "see" and to discern that beauty. But when I talk about it, I first talk in terms of the story, one that I narrate to make a convincing case for my contention.
What's for dinner?
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Dec 23, 2017 - 10:45am PT
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Dingus, rather than try and frame Mike in your own vantage (superficial meditation stupor), why not make an attempt to understand what he is actually saying. My sense is you are totally clueless at what he is driving at, based on your own experiences with introspection, which apparently have been both superficial and trance like. -- LarCo
Mu Yow, Mu yow ... Please, some food for thought? Keep your bung water.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 23, 2017 - 10:49am PT
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Emmy Noether
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether
That's quite a write-up.
A snip...
When Adolf Hitler became the German Reichskanzler in January 1933, Nazi activity around the country increased dramatically. At the University of Göttingen the German Student Association led the attack on the "un-German spirit" attributed to Jews and was aided by a privatdozent named Werner Weber, a former student of Noether. Antisemitic attitudes created a climate hostile to Jewish professors. One young protester reportedly demanded: "Aryan students want Aryan mathematics and not Jewish mathematics."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 23, 2017 - 12:28pm PT
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Fruity, your main beef is that I don't give absolute fealty to measuring as the gold standard per understanding both reality and our own lives. It takes little effort to understand - in a general way - most any vantage from a scientific perspective, so long as the posts are honest and measured and logical, as Ed's usually are. So you don't need me rooting for the home team, so to speak. What bothers you, I suspect, is that I accord credence to another perspective without "proof" drawn from the only perspective you value: measuring, and the work ups there of.
Not only have you been totally disrespectful to Mike, who has done some heavy lifting to try and make that perspective accessible, but what effort have you made to understand him. He's a "shitslinger" because you don't have the slightest idea about what he is saying, and you blame Mike for that because you expect something for nothing - that is, while he continuously says the truth is experiential in that regards, you believe you can noodle it and evaluate it with sage accuracy. It makes you sound like a yahoo and you're not, even though you have once more earned your time in the corner with the pointy hat.
I'll take a shot at trying to nutshell Mike's perspective. The depth of it you can't plumb without doing the work, but you can get some idea about what he means when he says, "we really don't know anything for sure." The science version of the same thing might be: "If you think you (know) understand it (reality), you don't."
What this means is not at all what you are thinking.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 23, 2017 - 12:32pm PT
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No, Largo, per usual, you (purposefully?) misunderstand nigh 100%.
No shuck and jive, no deflecting. MikeL is hardly the shitposters I had in mind. You'd have to be one dense rube to not know this already so I just do not count you as sincere here, sorry.
But regarding MikeL, since you brought him up: he's a postmodernist. Go ahead, ask him, he'll even admit it! I spent years in my 30s trying to get a handle on postmodernism. It's a ridiculous ideology, a magnitude worse than 18th century Kant philosophy.
A postmodernist will argue anything, throwing in obvious platitudes here and there, ultimately getting nowhere. In the end, it's all your shuck and jive. But to each their own.
totally disrespectful to Mike
You mean by simply ignoring him? lol - because that's all there's been.
I'll take a shot at trying to nutshell Mike's perspective...
It's a free world. Enjoy.
NOW BACK TO THE ISSUE, TRY TO FOCUS...
What YOU can do is lay off the flippancy and bullshit banter - the trash talk - when responding to the science types, pretty much all of them including me. BECAUSE this enables the nonsense sh#t-posters (they know who they are) TO PILE ON and to spoil a train a posts, otherwise enjoyable if not insightful dialogue.
Now if you truly don't get this, there's nothing much more I can say to you.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 23, 2017 - 12:40pm PT
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MikeL: Write all of it down here for me. EVERYTHING
Pork and beans sounded good.
Sorry, that's as deep as I can go.
;>(
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Dec 23, 2017 - 01:24pm PT
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Pork and beans? Oink! and beans ! a can with hotdogs and beans in bad sauce; Some like the sauce. Pulled pig and blacked eyed peas! Cute little pig mixed with legumes! Stinky Pig and lots of beans. Oink!!
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Dec 23, 2017 - 02:19pm PT
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Largo,
we really don't know anything for sure.
Largo, in all your self-proclaimed awareness and of having done the work, you are one big sucker, unknowingly, making grandeur statements in which you are caught in the self-reference mistake.
In case you do not understand, then if the statement, we really don't know anything for sure is true, then it cannot be true for sure either.
Get some awareness for your blunders!
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