Sunday, February 13, 2011

Why are (some) physicists so bad at philosophy?

In his book of reminiscences “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, Richard Feynman tells the story of a painter who assured him that he could make yellow paint by mixing together red paint and white paint.  Feynman was incredulous.  As an expert in the physics of light, he knew this should not be possible.  But the guy was an expert painter, with years of practical experience.  So, ready to learn something new, Feynman went and got some red paint and white paint.  He watched the painter mix them, but as Feynman expected, all that came out was pink.  Then the painter said that all he needed now was a little yellow paint to “sharpen it up a bit” and then it would be yellow.

I was reminded of this story when I read this foray into philosophy by physics professor Ethan Siegel, which a reader sent me, asking for my reaction.  Do give it a read, though I’ll summarize it for you:  

Arguments for God as cause of the universe rest on the assumption that something can’t come from nothing.  But given the laws of physics, it turns out that something can come from nothing. 

Here was my reaction:

Is this guy serious?  The laws of physics aren’t “nothing.”  Ergo, this isn’t even a prima facie counterexample to the principle that ex nihilo, nihil fit.  That’s just blindingly obvious.  Is this guy serious? 

(Actually, that was not my reaction.  My actual reaction cannot be printed on a family-friendly blog.  This is the cleaned up version.)

Feynman’s painter insisted that you can get yellow paint from red paint and white paint.  All you need to do is add some yellow paint.  Similarly, Siegel assures us that we can get something from nothing.  All we need to do is to add a little something, viz. the laws of physics.  I’ll bet Siegel has read Feynman’s book and had a chuckle at the painter’s expense.  Little does he realize that the joke’s on him.

Notice that the point has nothing to do with the further question “Where do the laws of physics come from?”  It has nothing to do with the debate between atheism and theism.  It has nothing to do with whether Siegel’s purely scientific claims are otherwise correct.  I’m not addressing any of that here.  Let the operation of the laws of physics be a brute fact if you like; let atheism be true, if you insist; let Siegel be a whiz-bang crackerjack physicist, if you must.  The point is that as a philosopher, he’s utterly incompetent, incapable of seeing the most blatant of fallacies staring him square in the face.

Siegel is in good company, if that’s the right way to put it.  As I showed in my review of their book The Grand Design for National Review, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow are no more philosophically competent than Siegel is.  Indeed, one of their errors is the same as Siegel’s: They tell us that “Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”  Ignore for the moment the incoherence of the notion of self-causation (which we explored recently here and here).  Put to one side the question of whether the physics of their account is correct.  Forget about where the laws of physics themselves are supposed to have come from.  Just savor the manifest contradiction: The universe comes from nothing, because a law like gravity is responsible for the universe.

For some reason this particular fallacy seems to be a favorite of physicists.  (And I mean physicists, specifically, not scientists in general – even Richard Dawkins isn’t this bad.)  Consider Oxford physicist Vlatko Vedral’s recent book Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information.  I hate to pick on Vedral.  He seems like a nice fellow, and there is in his book none of the obnoxious condescension toward philosophy and theology one finds in Hawking and Mlodinow.  Unfortunately, though, Vedral is only slightly better informed about these subjects than Hawking and Mlodinow are.  (He thinks, for example, that “What caused God?” is a serious objection to the First Cause argument.)  Worse, the argumentation is incredibly sloppy.  Epistemological and metaphysical issues are relentlessly conflated.  Murkiness abounds.  For example, Vedral suggests that information “comes from nowhere” and is “created from emptiness” but also that “there is no other information in the Universe than that generated by us as we create our own reality.”  So, is he contradicting himself – saying both that information comes from nowhere and that it comes from us?  Or is he saying instead that information causes us and we in turn cause it, but that there is nothing outside this loop – which would entail a vicious explanatory circle (for the reasons spelled out in the posts on self-causation linked to above)?  Or (seeing as either of these interpretations would sink his position) does he have some third alternative in mind?  He never tells us, and (like Hawking and Mlodinow, who say similar things) seems blithely unaware that there is even a problem here.

More to the present point, Vedral claims that “creation out of nothing” can occur even without a Creator, and offers as evidence von Neumann‘s proposal “that all numbers could be bootstrapped out of the empty set by the operations of the mind.”  We’re back to Feynman’s painter: Yellow can come from non-yellow as long as you add a little yellow to the non-yellow; and something can come from nothing as long as we add a little non-nothing – “the operations of the mind” – to the nothing.  How much cleverer these physicists are than us mere philosophers!

It is no good trying to defend Siegel, Hawking and Mlodinow, or Vedral by suggesting that perhaps they are not using “nothing” in a strict sense.  For each of them claims to be addressing the same issue that defenders of the First Cause argument for God’s existence are addressing, and the latter are using “nothing” in the strict sense.  So, these physicists can be acquitted of the charge of contradicting themselves only if they are guilty instead of sloppy thinking, and of loudly shooting off their mouths without doing their homework first.

And that is enough to merit them our scorn.  Philosophers and theologians are constantly told that they need to “learn the science” before commenting on quantum mechanics, relativity, or Darwinism.  And rightly so.  Yet too many scientists refuse to “learn the philosophy” before pontificating on the subject.  The results are predictably sophomoric.  What an arrogant and clueless amateur like Hawking or Dawkins needs to hear before putting on his philosopher’s toga is this.  And if he doesn’t get the message, this.  Instead, the reaction from equally clueless editors, journalists, and “educated” general readers is: “Gee, he’s a scientist!  He’s good at math and stuff.  He must know what he’s talking about!”  It really is no more intelligent than that. 

C. D. Broad took the view that “the nonsense written by philosophers on scientific matters is exceeded only by the nonsense written by scientists on philosophy.”  And that was in the days of scientists like Eddington, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, who actually knew something about philosophy.  (We’ve discussed a couple of these thinkers in earlier posts, here and here.)  Things had gotten worse by the time Paul Feyerabend wrote the following to Wallace Matson:

The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach, and so on.  But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth… (Quoted in Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, For and Against Method)

And things are even worse now.  Feynman was notoriously hostile to philosophy, but when his work on quantum mechanics brought him up against its inherent philosophical difficulties, he at least had the humility not to claim he knew how to resolve them.  Hawking and Vedral, by contrast, confidently peddle as “science” the kind of schlock you’d expect to find in the New Age section at Borders. 

What accounts for this decline?  Feyerabend blamed the “professionalization” of science, and there is much to be said for this.  We noted recently how John Heil and Stephen Mumford have decried the baneful effects “professionalization” has had on contemporary academic philosophy – hyper-specialization, smug insularity, careerist conformism, an emphasis on cleverness over depth.  Lee Smolin (who knew and respected Feyerabend) is one physicist who has argued that some of these same problems afflict contemporary physics.

One thing of which contemporary philosophers tend not to be guilty, however – scientism-whipped as they are – is ignorance of science, certainly not where science touches on their areas of philosophical specialization.  Hawking and Mlodinow assure us in The Grand Design that “philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.”  No one at all familiar with the explosion of serious work in philosophy of physics, philosophy of chemistry, and philosophy of biology over the last several decades – not to mention the work of writers like William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith in the philosophy of religion, or the Churchlands in philosophy of mind – could say such a thing.  (True, as philosophers the Churchlands are hopeless.  But one thing they do know – perhaps, one sometimes suspects, the only thing they know – is neuroscience.)

Hawking and Mlodinow are guilty of just the sort of ignorance of which they falsely accuse philosophers.  But they are unlikely ever to know it.  The Hawkings, Dawkinses, and Jerry Coynes of the world have been dancing the Myers Shuffle around their echo chamber for so long that they can only ever hear each other’s mutual congratulations shouted down the conga line.  Until this childishness is universally treated with the sort of contempt it deserves, we will not have a sane intellectual culture, one in which the deepest philosophical, theological – and, indeed, scientific – questions can be fruitfully debated. 

435 comments:

  1. Is anyone else amused by the fact that a confused physicist who can't even write 9th grade English is condescending to everyone about how he won't "teach" us anything because we couldn't "understand"? I think he is more protesting than he should be in his sentences that he is hastily writing in the language that is his native language very quickly.

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  2. @ BenYachov

    Before you would accuse me of not believing in god, you could ask me!!!

    Anyway, who is PZ Myers. It is Robert Myers from Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Last time I talked to him he was working on AdS/CFT.

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  3. 2:12,2:22pm Anon:

    I would be very interested to hear your "non-philosophical proof of God's existence." I never knew such a thing existed.

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  4. >Did I say I do not believe in god. In fact I do believe. And I have even a much more rigorous proof for god...

    Such as?

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  5. @ BenYachov

    It is fine. My English is very poor, or I am brain-dead.

    Why do you need to hear my proof of god?

    Yeah, it was a waist of time to come to this website, to be accused of so many things. While I better engage myself in my research which takes indeed lots of mental effort.

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  6. >Before you would accuse me of not believing in god, you could ask me!!!

    You believe in god yet you have been arguing for the idea that the universe is uncaused?

    Why?

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  7. >Why do you need to hear my proof of god?
    >Yeah, it was a waist of time to come to this website, to be accused of so many things.

    A Troll & a Drama Queen!

    Love it!:-)

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  8. Anonymous@TheOFloinn
    Multiverse is not a mathematical entity.

    It certainly is not a physical entity. So what's left, a metaphysical entity? Physicist Stephen Barr, who finds much merit in the idea, writes:

    "Right up front, it must be noted that this idea [the quantum creation of the universe] is extremely speculative, has not yet been formulated in a mathematically rigorous way, and is unable at this point to make any testable predictions. Indeed, it is very hard to imagine how it could ever be tested. It would be more accurate to call these 'scenarios' than theories."

    I am not Russian...

    You've been giving a very good pastiche of Russian syntax.

    Anyway, I am not an atheist. And I was not trying to disprove God.

    I don't think anyone has said that. Have they?

    I have some rigorous proof for them. ... it is very well supported by physics. In fact based on physics. I am not going to give you a hint. Though!!!

    Cumulatively, I have been noting that while you write often of being a professional physicist, you have at no point actually written anything that would demonstrate this. You wind up saying things like "I am not going to give you a hint." You write of the "multi"verse scenario in almost Wikipedian generality. (And you say it "explains" quantum theory. Yet, it is quantum theory that is cited to justify the "multi"verse. There may be a circularity lurking in there somewhere.)

    I was just trying to say your "nothing" issue is not good enough.

    But it was the physicists, Hawking and now Siegel, who were basing their arguments on what they naively thought was "nothing."

    The substance of Dr. Feser's essay was not that "nothing" somehow justified God. In fact, he allowed the multiverse, atheism, and everything else. He only said that at the basis of logical discourse, their arguments were messed up.

    Dr. Barr, a particle physicist at U.Delaware, said much the same thing. To say that the space-time continuum came into being by a quantum shift of the "multi"verse is not to say that it came from nothing: it came from a quantum state, k=0 manifolds + the entire structure of the quantum mechanics.

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  9. Anyway, I am not an atheist. And I was not trying to disprove God. I was just trying to say that if philosophers want to prove God, they can do better than this. I have some rigorous proof for them. But, it is not related to this discussion. But, it is very well supported by physics. In fact based on physics. I am not going to give you a hint. Though!!!

    So, I was just trying to say your "nothing" issue is not good enough.

    But, I am not against God.

    Why should we think that any time somebody stands against a bad argument supporting God that person should be atheist.

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  10. @ TheOFloinn:


    Physicists may have some disagreement with each other, too!!!

    I was referring to multiverse as an eternal entity.

    I still insist that many aspects of quantum theory can not be explained without an idea of multiverse.

    This include: quantum probability, entanglement, and post-selection.

    At each instant of Plankian time multiverse is affecting us. So, how is it then just a mathematical entity?

    Should I write math here to prove myself being a physicist?

    I wanted you to guess what is the way to a more rigorous proof to god. I really did not mean to annoy anybody by that. I thought it would be more fun, if anybody could guess it.

    What are Russian syntaxes?

    I do not deny that I am unable to follow proper punctuation. Because, I hate punctuation.

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  11. Dr. Barr, a particle physicist at U.Delaware, said much the same thing. To say that the space-time continuum came into being by a quantum shift of the "multi"verse is not to say that it came from nothing: it came from a quantum state, k=0 manifolds + the entire structure of the quantum mechanics.

    Is referring to the creation of our universe out of multiverse. Not the creation of eternal multiverse.

    It is indeed in analogy to foot and footprint.

    But, I guess we do not want to explain how footprint came out to be!!!! We want to explain how foot and footprint came out to be. If foot and footprint are both eternal it is meaningless to discuss their creation!!!!

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  12. @ Everybody.

    You guys just mis-understand Hawking.

    Or if he said anything like that, then I do not agree with him either.

    But, what was Hawking discussing was if the universe needs its initial condition adjusted by a god or not?

    He did not mean to discuss if universe has a creator.

    So, you first misunderstood what he means. Later, write article about his mistake.

    I hope it is clear for you that the two statement are different. With this point of view read again Hawking's comment and you realize all the discussion here is based on a misinterpretation of Hawking's words.

    And the question of initial condition is a physics question. Which is very essential for physics. It is not a philosophical question or religious one.

    I think whole the issue arise from misinterpretation given by journalists about Hawking's statement.

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  13. When modern physicists use the word "vacuum" they do not really mean an absence of matter. They mean more like a new kind of ether that differs from the ether the Michelson-Morley experiment led physicists to abandon. See this excellent article: "Aristotle's Aether and Contemporary Science" by Christopher A. Decaen of Thomas Aquinas College

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  14. I find the notion of nothingness more interesting. Obviously it is not a substance, nor can it be predicated of anything, so what is it?

    Jinzang, "nothing" is that than which nothing less can be said. :-)

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  15. >So, I was just trying to say your "nothing" issue is not good enough.

    I thought your original argument was that philosophy was bullshit & stupid and one can not learn anything from it? Which of course was the identical message of Human Ape the New Atheist.

    I don't believe a word you say.

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  16. If Edward Feser was serious about philosophy he might ask Ethan Siegel to define his terms. Does Siegel mean by "nothing" the same thing Feser does? I doubt that this is the case. Maybe Feser is creating a straw man from nothing.

    Feser further asserts that “What caused God?” is not a serious objection to the First Cause argument. For his next trick he'll pull a rabbit out of his hat. There will be no backstage passes for this show. That would spoil the magic.

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  17. djindra
    If Edward Feser was serious about philosophy he might ask Ethan Siegel to define his terms.

    Not when it is Siegel who has held up his "creation from nothing" as an answer to the the philosophers. If he is using "nothing" to mean "no matter" then he is the one equivocating.

    Feser further asserts that “What caused God?” is not a serious objection to the First Cause argument.

    Right. Because the arguments concludes to the necessary existence of an uncaused cause. It makes no sense to ask "what caused the uncaused cause?" Another argument concludes to a being whose essence is its existence. Can one ask "What gives existence to existence itself?" That these beings are equivalent to the Christian God is a later deduction.

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  18. In answer to a much earlier question, my "nothing" I mean the absence of beings. So the vacuum is "nothing" by definition because it is the space where you don't find anything.

    "Multiverse theory" is not serious science. It's not falsifiable, ergo it's philosophy not science. And frankly it's incredibly silly.

    I'm not familiar with either the transactional theory or Wolfgang Smith's theory; multiverse theory is stupid enough to dismiss offhand, Bohm's theory is incompatible with relativity and hidden variables theory is proven wrong by Bell's Theorem. So I stick with the current scientific consensus as the right thing to believe. Since I'm not a Thomist I highly doubt I would be satisfied with Wolfgang Smith (he seems to be only popular among traditionalist Catholics and perennialist Frithjof Schuon disciples anyway - not that I want to disparage either such group, but his ideas haven't taken in the scientific community).

    (String theory is not science yet either in the strictest sense - it's mathematical speculation which someday soon will be testable.)

    Jinzang, I'd like to thank you for the Conze article.

    Nick and BenYachov, my sympathies on your and your wife's and children's Aspergers Syndrome - I also have Aspergers (very high functioning, thanks to a lot of help I am eternally grateful to my parents for as a child).

    Pray for me a sinner.

    ~Seraphim

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  19. Multiverse is not just a mathematical entity. Anyway, you can take a look at this paper and the other papers written by this great physicist.
    This would be something you would enjoy!!!

    Even after all you accused me of!!!

    http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0246

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  20. When modern physicists use the word "vacuum" they do not really mean an absence of matter. They mean more like a new kind of ether that differs from the ether the Michelson-Morley experiment led physicists to abandon. See this excellent article: "Aristotle's Aether and Contemporary Science" by Christopher A. Decaen of Thomas Aquinas College

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  21. >In answer to a much earlier question, my "nothing" I mean the absence of beings. So the vacuum is "nothing" by definition because it is the space where you don't find anything.

    I reply: Three words....Zero Point Energy.

    Nuff said.

    Dude you are just confusing the classic definition of a Vacuum with the modern. Same error you just swapped out the term "nothing" with "vacuum".

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  22. >Nick and BenYachov, my sympathies on your and your wife's and children's Aspergers Syndrome - I also have Aspergers (very high functioning, thanks to a lot of help I am eternally grateful to my parents for as a child).

    Thanks guy.

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  23. TheOFloinn,

    You seem to think Siegel was trying to refute your favorite philosopher's dogma. I doubt he had that person in mind. They speak different languages and likely address different audiences.

    You say it makes no sense to ask "what caused the uncaused cause." Yet you merely conjure up your "uncaused cause" as if a definition settles the matter. We cannot define the truth.

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  24. >You seem to think Siegel was trying to refute your favorite philosopher's dogma.

    He commented on a philosophical matter(i.e. the existence of God and the classic arguments for said God). He's a physicist not a philosopher. Quentin Smith and JLL Smart are Atheist philosophers. They wouldn't be caught dead making this type of argument like Siegal. They have the competence to comment on these matters. Siegel does not or do you live in a fantasy land where every Atheist scientist is an automatic expert in every field?


    >I doubt he had that person in mind. They speak different languages and likely address different audiences.

    Rather he showed his profound ignorance on matters that pertain to philosophy. Typical New Atheist trait.

    >They speak different languages and likely address different audiences.

    In which case the wise move on his part would have been to say nothing. I don't see Dr. Feser pretending to be an authority on particle physics.

    >You say it makes no sense to ask "what caused the uncaused cause."

    Are you the sort of silly person who thinks it makes sense to have a conversation about married bachelors? I hope not. We might as well have a conversation with a flat-earther and be done with it.

    >Yet you merely conjure up your "uncaused cause" as if a definition settles the matter.

    Which is about as silly a statement on your part as when a Young Earther says "the shrinking sun" proves the universe is only a few thousand years old. The "uncaused cause" is the natural conclusion to the classical theistic arguments because the alternatives proved illogical(unless you want to explain to me how a caboose can be pulled by an infinite number of un-powered boxcars).

    >We cannot define the truth.

    Then logically how can you know the above statement is true?

    There are philosophically literate Atheists who don't make these mistakes. Unfortunately I fear they are the minority.

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  25. >They speak different languages and likely address different audiences.

    I'm Catholic. I define the doctrine of Justification differently from how the Lutheran defines.

    If the Lutheran wants to try to convince me to accept his definition and dogma I have no problem with that. However I have no patience or mercy for a hypothetical Lutheran Jerk who reads Catholic statements about Justification and Reads into them the Lutheran definition instead of the Catholic one.

    I would have even less tolerance for a Catholic Jerk who insisted on reading the Council of Trent's definition of Justification into the Augsburg's Confession. I don't believe in the Augsburg's Confession teachings are true for one second but I'll be damned before I misrepresent their authentic view.

    Too bad Siegel is too much of a New Atheist Fundie to realize "Nothing" as defined by classic philosophy is not the same as "nothing" defined by physicists today.

    I know the difference & if I became an Atheist tomorrow my opinion on the stupidity of Siegel's argument would not change.

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  26. Well said Ben, and I say this as a Baptist as well so I know I'm in a minority. (I tend to focus my apologetics however on what Lewis called Mere Christianity.)

    Bad representation is bad representation. If you want to disagree with an argument, at least get the argument right. I don't have any desire even for Christians who misrepresent atheistic ideals I disagree with. If we believe Christianity is true, then we should see that any argument cannot stand against it, as Aquinas himself said. There's no need to straw man and Christ is not glorified by a bad argument.

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  27. @Nick

    Side note & true story. I actually became convicted/convinced of the Catholic Church's condemnation of artificial birth control from reading a tract written by a Baptist.
    I was doing Navy Admin training in the South. It was funny after making the case against Artificial birth control & for NFP it refereed interested individuals to a local Catholic hospital.

    I rag on Protestant doctrine in my weaker moments but I can help but admirer believing Protestants themselves.

    God save our Baptist Brothers in Christ!

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  28. djindra:
    You seem to think Siegel was trying to refute your favorite philosopher's dogma.

    TOF
    I simply took Siegel at his word. He began his column by citing Parmenides' dictum, and even associated it (via cartoon) with the Cosmological argument. He clearly intended his dogma to be somehow an "answer" to these philosophical and theological issues. Dr. Feser merely pointed out that you cannot answer X by changing the definition of X to your own "personal" definition.

    djindra:
    You say it makes no sense to ask "what caused the uncaused cause." Yet you merely conjure up your "uncaused cause" as if a definition settles the matter.

    TOF
    But the necessary existence of an uncaused cause is not a definition. It is a conclusion of a train of reasoning starting from the ordering of efficient causes in the world. That is, it is a deduction, not an assumption.

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  29. Seraphim: "So I stick with the current scientific consensus as the right thing to believe."

    Sorry but, (and I'm sure you know this) scientific knowledge is the most tenuous type of knowledge there is. The current scientific consensus is in a constant state of flux and is in constant danger of being overturned as new evidence comes in. I certainly would not base my beliefs on anything so unstable!!!

    Sound philosophical knowledge, on the other hand, stands the test of time. Aristotle has a slew of devotees today. (Of how many scientists of his era can this be said?) This is because philosophical truths are always true.

    If you want something solid to base your beliefs on, well, Science ain't it. Maybe you should reconsider philosophy.

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  30. Anonymous physicist quotes Richard Feynman (or he thinks so):

    "Anyone who says that they understand Quantum Mechanics does not understand Quantum Mechanics"

    Even if R. Feynman had composed such absurdity how would it support your own?

    BTW. What R. Feynman actually said is: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." Which, regardless whether right or not, is perfectly coherent.

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  31. TheOFloinn,

    You said, But the necessary existence of an uncaused cause is not a definition. It is a conclusion of a train of reasoning starting from the ordering of efficient causes in the world.

    There is one rational thing about that statement. You keep the "train of reasoning" secret. So I guess your fallacies will stay private.

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  32. You keep the "train of reasoning" secret. So I guess your fallacies will stay private.

    Passive-aggressive much? If you want to know the details of the argument, man up and ask him directly instead of being such a wimp.

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  33. >There is one rational thing about that statement. You keep the "train of reasoning" secret. So I guess your fallacies will stay private.

    So the "train of reasoning" is secret yet somehow you know it contains fallacies?

    Right! Sure pal!

    This just shows us that you are not at all familiar with any real philosophical arguments for the existence of God (outside of perhaps the straw-man "Everything has a cause" fallacy of New Atheist Fundies).

    Not convincing.

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  34. You know, I'm going to make a really bizarre suggestion here and I hope all will forgive me for such a weird idea, but maybe if you want to know the arguments, you ought to read the books?

    Books were these items that were once popular that contained pages of information together. They had various types such as fiction and non-fiction broken down into groups like mystery, horror, and comedy in the former and philosophy, theology, and politics in the latter. (Wait. Maybe politics belongs in the former)

    They were really popular before the internet came along and people decided that a group of people consisting of collective ignorance called Wikipedia was more authoritative than work done by credentialed scholars and the idea that all it takes to be an authority in an area is to have Google and an opinion.

    Just a suggestion.

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  35. @ Alan Aversa,

    Fascinating read! Thanks for that.

    1) Vacuums as nothing, meaning it has no being?
    2) Vacuums as having real being aka prime matter?
    3) Vacuums as having logical being as opposed to real being?
    4) Vacuums as having real being aka substance analogous to Aristotle's aether?

    I think I am going for four now :).

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  36. I'm actually friends with a "New Atheist" type who declared all ontological philosophy to be trash. Why? Because there is no effective rebuttal that he could find that denies the non-physical mind, and there is no effective reply to the First Cause argument. So there was just a sort of intellectual paralysis that he suffered until he turned away from it. Atheism is more important to many than the pursuit of truth. And by the way, it was sites like this one that turned me away from atheism due to the quality of the arguments presented. While I am more inclined to the philosophy works of Brendan Myers at present, and I will probably never be a Christian, I just want to say thank you to Edward Feser and his intelligent commenters for providing some light.

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  37. Richard. If I may ask, why do you think you will never be a Christian?

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  38. >and I will probably never be a Christian,

    Never say never. But no pressure we will keep you in our prayers.

    Cheers man.

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  39. I'm a bit too pagan, I think. But thank you for the concern.

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  40. A bit too pagan?

    That's excellent! Then you're in a prime position to become a Christian!

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  41. You know, I'm going to make a really bizarre suggestion here and I hope all will forgive me for such a weird idea, but maybe if you want to know the arguments, you ought to read the books?

    Oh, no! Pleeeeez! Reading books? That takes too much effort and is boring. I prefer to skim over Wiki and post my "enlightened" opinions in comboxes. That's how intellectual discourse is done in the 21st century. Better get used to shallowness and philistinism, my friend!

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  42. Over at PZ Myers' blog he has been complaining about physicists believing they are experts in other scientific fields.

    It's a funny old world.

    Dear Physicists,

    Shut it.

    Sincerely,
    Everybody Else

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  43. Over at PZ Myers' blog he has been complaining about physicists believing they are experts in other scientific fields.

    Dawkins once debated a physicist believer, name forgotten, who cracked, "Your problem, Richard, is that you're not a scientist. You're a biologist."

    And I did read one time in a history of science the comment that the scientific method was developed in the physics of motion and works excellently well in the rest of physics and in chemistry, but less well in biology (cf. biophysics, biochemistry, genetics), and not at all in "social sciences." The more the objects of study have a mind of their own, the less well the methodology explains matters.

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  44. TheOFlinn,

    Pretty sure that was John D. Barrow.

    And while I'm no fan of Kaku (he's a pleasant-talking fellow, though), I have to give this round to him. Myers' response is basically one of sputtering and name-calling. He even gets Kaku wrong - he treats Kaku as saying that evolution as a whole has stopped, when the man specifically denies this.

    I rarely even glance at Pharyngula, and that entry reminds me of why. Even when the ball is in Myers' court, he flubs things badly and mostly gets by on hysterics. See this for a beautiful illustration of that.

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  45. TheOFloinn,

    You said, I simply took Siegel at his word. He began his column by citing Parmenides' dictum, and even associated it (via cartoon) with the Cosmological argument. He clearly intended his dogma to be somehow an "answer" to these philosophical and theological issues.

    The fact that Siegel introduced his article by using two cartoons should have been a dead give-away: Don't take this too seriously, folks. Then he made it perfectly clear he had no intention of making a philosophic case: "Well, let's take this question as seriously as our knowledge allows us to. (And by that, I mean physically, rather than philosophically or theologically.)

    So neither you nor Feser took Siegel at his word. Feser goes out of his way to ignore this caveat. He pretends Siegel was doing something he clearly said he was not.

    I find this amusing: Dr. Feser merely pointed out that you cannot answer X by changing the definition of X to your own "personal" definition.

    Actually, the reverse is the case. Theists have been playing this game for centuries. Sure, the laws of physics aren’t “nothing.” Feser is correct on that minor point. But God isn't "nothing" either. That’s "blindingly obvious." Feser merely restates what atheists have been saying about theist arguments -- theists expect to play by different rules and get away with it. Theists can't imaging an absolute "nothing" any more than a physicist can. It's humanly impossible to imagine that absolute, philosophical "nothing." So when Feser derides Siegel, he could as easily deride himself.

    But Feser is right to deflect attention away from his theology. He has pinned his hopes on philosophic playthings. He tells us, simplicity is "absolutely central." Essence must be existence. It seems Pure Act has a mystical significance.

    Yet if physicists like Siegel are correct, gravity is this "divine" simplicity. Gravity is where essence is existence. Gravity is that Pure Act some have been searching for. So open your hearts to materialism. Gravity is as close to a Subsistent Being as we can find. It's purely actual, pure potency, and probably non-contigent.

    It's ironic. Siegel was right to see the humor. After all these years, and after many philosophers have tried and failed, God is slowly being squeezed to death by physics.

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  46. Anonymous,

    You said. If you want to know the details of the argument, man up and ask him directly instead of being such a wimp.

    That's rich coming from you.

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  47. So, Siegel wasn't trying to make a philosophical case or argue against the cosmological argument. Except for the fact that he was. We weren't meant to take him seriously at all - it was all just a big joke, a riff! - except we were supposed to take him seriously because he's actually mounting the horrible argument everyone thought he was. And theists can't imagine "nothing", but somehow they can, and nothing happens to be something.

    Thanks for clearing that up, djindra!

    But I love that last bit about the law of gravity pre-existing the universe itself and creating something from nothing is "materialism". In fact, affirming the reality of Pure Act is materialism. Materialism has finally gone full-circle and become platonism or Aristotileanism according to djindra.

    To use an apt quote: It would be funny, if it weren't so pathetic. Oh what the heck, I'll laugh anyway. ;)

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  48. Oh, also, gravity is both pure act and pure potency. It's not that djindra is trying to discuss these things based on a few minutes of frantically googling "aquinas act potency" or anything. ;)

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  49. The fact that Siegel introduced his article by using two cartoons should have been a dead give-away: Don't take this too seriously, folks.

    Don't take Heisenberg and the vacuum energy seriously?

    C'mon, the cartoon was to show he didn't take the cosmological argument seriously. It was not a sign that he was not serious in proposing that the fluctuations in the false vacuum consequent to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle somehow conjured particles from nothing.

    Then he made it perfectly clear he had no intention of making a philosophic case: "Well, let's take this question as seriously as our knowledge allows us to. (And by that, I mean physically, rather than philosophically or theologically.)

    IOW, he was not going to address the issue, but a strawman. It is not unusual to find folks re-interpreting things in terms of their own field of training. And notice what he means by "seriously." Heisenberg would spit on him.

    Sure, the laws of physics aren’t “nothing.” Feser is correct on that minor point. But God isn't "nothing" either.

    I suppose not; but how is that a contradiction? Aristotelians and Thomists do not claim that something can come from nothing. It was Siegel claiming (incorrectly) that he was getting something from nothing. It is precisely because of the principle ex nihilo nihil fit that Aristotle and Aquinas concluded there must be an unmoved mover, an uncaused cause. Of course, God is not nothing.

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  50. Frankie Cowboy BootsFebruary 18, 2011 at 5:42 AM

    I'm going to be honest:
    I'm only coming here to watch Human Ape embarrass himself. If he's not posting then I might just quit lurking.

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  51. TheOFloinn,

    Aristotelians and Thomists do not claim that something can come from nothing. It was Siegel claiming (incorrectly) that he was getting something from nothing.

    I doubt there is a physicist on earth who claims the universe came from absolutely nothing. That accusation comes from your side. It's a disingenuous accusation. Siegel obviously knows he does not mean by "nothing" your philosopher's absolute nothingness. He states as much. He's merely showing your god, as creator, can be replaced by the simplicity of nature's laws. God = the most simple of nature's laws. He's given you what you asked for.

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  52. I not Russian too! Nyet. Why you think such a things?

    What is exactly wrong with my use of the the world random. Mathematicians can keep their statistics.

    I'll tell you what, pilgrim. You physicists can use all the random you want. But keep your damn hands off the math that we mathematicians developed. So, you explain your physics without any formulas or any relationships expressed as equations. Try that for a while. If you decide you want to come back and use our math, then you durn well better make sure that you are using our terms with the meanings that rigorously maintain the proper sense for our formulas that you are trying to make use of. Without that meaning you can't use the formulas without falling into mistakes.

    Unfortunately, random is one of the least successfully developed terms in math. So not even mathematicians are sure that it is rigorous when used "correctly". Much less whether it can be used so in physics. And I guarantee you that if the mathematicians cannot use the term rigorously yet, then the physicists are in a hopeless condition, because they are not even equipped to investigate the rigorous requirements.

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  53. djindra, I was just wondering...if the universe did not come from "nothing", but rather something, then was gravity the only something, or was there anything else involved?

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  54. Gravity is caused by Mass it is mere word games from an obvious philosophical illiterate to equate Gravity with something that is "Pure Actuality".

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  55. It's a disingenuous accusation. Siegel obviously knows he does not mean by "nothing" your philosopher's absolute nothingness. He states as much.

    No, he really doesn't. All indications are he's very confused on what he considers to be 'nothing' and 'something', and confused about the argument he's supposed to be answering. When you have to excuse him by saying "clearly he was kidding!", you're not doing him any favors.

    He made a mistake. It happens. It's just that sometimes the mistake is noticed by many people.

    He's merely showing your god, as creator, can be replaced by the simplicity of nature's laws. God = the most simple of nature's laws. He's given you what you asked for.

    No, he's not showing this. At best he's asserting it - but assertions are nothing new, and they're not particularly hard. We didn't need Siegel, or modern physics, to get someone saying 'The universe came into existence from absolutely nothing uncaused!' or 'The universe is self-caused!' or the like.

    What would be new is an argument that existence terminates in the (platonic?) law of gravity. Siegel didn't offer it. He really doesn't seem to realize that's what he needs to offer either.

    And making laws prescriptive rather than merely descriptive would not only be abandoning physics for philosophy. Trying to talk about the "law of gravity" as the most simple law from which all else springs forth, pure actuality, starts to sound a lot more like Neo-Platonism than materialism or atheism.

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  56. >I doubt there is a physicist on earth who claims the universe came from absolutely nothing.

    Yet Hawkings, Victor Stenger, Siegel & others seem to say otherwise??? Clearly it's the Fundamentalist New Atheists who are playing games here. Not the Classic Theists.

    >That accusation comes from your side. It's a disingenuous accusation.

    Rather it is mindless tribalism on your part. An Atheist said "A" a bunch of theists (& one Atheist if you look earlier in the tread) pointed out why "A" was 100% wrong.
    Instead of agreeing with the frikin obvious you defend the irrational arguments of Siegel to the N'th degree.

    Would it kill ya to admit Dr. Feser is right here? You don't have to admit the existence of God to do so. But if you are insecure in you beliefs I can understand your kneejerk reaction.

    >Siegel obviously knows he does not mean by "nothing" your philosopher's absolute nothingness.

    How is that obvious since he is taking on Arguments for the Existence of God that presuppose the concept of absolute nothingness?

    This is as bad as Siegel saying "I doubt the Andromeda Galaxy exists because I can't find it under my microscope".

    Category mistake much?

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  57. >He states as much. He's merely showing your god, as creator, can be replaced by the simplicity of nature's laws. God = the most simple of nature's laws. He's given you what you asked for.

    By "Laws Of Nature" do you mean non-material Platonic entities that guide the universe because for the life of me I can't see how a Classical Theistic God is overthrown by such? Or do you mean by LON observed regularities in nature processes?

    Do you know what you are talking about or is this the Tribal Atheist thingy?

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  58. djindra

    You are the Atheist version of the Young Earth Creationist who thinks the "Shrinking Sun" proves the Universe isn't billions of years old.

    Siegel is wrong get over it.


    >Theists can't imaging an absolute "nothing" any more than a physicist can.

    Why? When there is in this case nothing to imagine?

    I can have an intellectual concept of a Hectogon(100 sided object) even if I can't picture it in my imagination. Does that mean no Hectogon can exist?

    You are making the same philosophical error as David Hume did. Conflating intellect with imagination.

    Silly really & illogical.

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  59. "Siegel is wrong get over it."

    "Silly really & illogical."


    BY, has anyone ever told you that you're an exemplary example of an internet bully? I don't think Christ would be too happy at your blatantly belligerent behavior.

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  60. I suggest our poster read Stenger's "God: The Failed Hypothesis" and see Stenger's account of how the universe came to be.

    Meanwhile, for gravity, I'd say gravity is a term that is used that describes a relationship between two things. I'm not convinced something outside of us like gravity really exists as much as there is just a relationship between two things based on what those things are.

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  61. >BY, has anyone ever told you that you're an exemplary example of an internet bully? I don't think Christ would be too happy at your blatantly belligerent behavior.

    My child move out of you parent's basement.

    Seriously!

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  62. >BY, has anyone ever told you that you're an exemplary example of an internet bully?

    Yeh & that is kind of disappointing. I was hoping to be an Internet Lord of the Sith or at least an Internet Super-Villain.

    Boy do I have a lot of work to do.

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  63. What a great post and wonderfully intelligent conversation!

    One thing: "schlock you’d expect to find in the New Age section at Borders." needs to be changed to Barnes and Noble.

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  64. At last we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi! At last we will have revenge!

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  65. BenYachov,

    What you imagine me to be is irrelevant. You're confusing imagination with a serious rebuttal.

    I'm sure Siegel is wrong. But he's more right about creation than the theists I've run across.

    You say you can have an intellectual concept of a hectogon even if you can't picture it in your imagination. But we can draw one. I say that's not anything like imagining absolutely nothing. We have no experience of it. No human can imagine it in its full nothingness. How would we picture it? It's a mental absurdity. We seem to need some hook to make it conceptually valid for us, be it God or gravity.

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  66. Yet somehow, almost everyone here has been able to describe the sort of nothingness they mean - and also to know that the 'nothingness' claimed by others, ain't.

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  67. BenYachov,

    "Pure Actuality" is philosophic nonsense. Philosophers have been playing word games like this for a long time. Sometimes the word games are fun, which is one reason why I play. But there is a serious reason too. Some players think the game has, or should have, consequences. The game becomes political and authoritarian, like in Rollerball. When players develop that bad attitude, it's too risky to sit on the sidelines.

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  68. Crude,

    What would be new is an argument that existence terminates in the (platonic?) law of gravity.

    Yes, that would be theistic nonsense. Maybe Siegel could follow Plato and "prove" the indestructibility of the soul and how, through reincarnation, the soul wears out bodies like men wear out coats. Maybe Siegel could show how there is no learning, just uncovering of what we already know. That's the nonsense only the greatest philosophers can sell. I'm sure theists would welcome Siegel's defection. Maybe he'll do it in another life.


    Trying to talk about the "law of gravity" as the most simple law from which all else springs forth, pure actuality, starts to sound a lot more like Neo-Platonism than materialism or atheism.

    The analogy is for your benefit.

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  69. BenYachov,

    Yet Hawkings, Victor Stenger, Siegel & others seem to say otherwise???

    Even Feser sets you straight here. Siegel does not say otherwise because gravity is, in fact, something. As for the other two, do you have a reference?

    How is that obvious since he is taking on Arguments for the Existence of God that presuppose the concept of absolute nothingness?

    Which arguments are you talking about? The arguments I know of all presuppose an eternal God. Is God absolute nothingness? Well, I say so but what theist agrees with me?

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  70. djindra,

    Yes, that would be theistic nonsense.

    No, it would be the sort of argument Siegel needs. Believe it or not, there are more philosophers around than theistic, or non-materialist. Siegel was engaging in a bit of amateur (probably, he thought) materialist philosophy. He blew it, badly.

    I'm all in favor of guys like Siegel sticking to the science and leaving the philosophy to others. The problem is, that's going to leave some substantial questions outside the purview of science - and pretending that isn't the case is part of the point of these screw-ups for them.

    The analogy is for your benefit.

    Oh, I'm benefiting from it. Sadly, you don't seem to understand what the benefit of it really was.

    Even Feser sets you straight here. Siegel does not say otherwise because gravity is, in fact, something.

    No, Siegel says explicitly you *can* get something from nothing. That his 'nothing' is actually 'something' is a point he doesn't really seem to get, or he at least thinks his 'something' counts as 'nothing'.

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  71. @BenYachov re fredphelps wannabe post

    thanks for your comments lol

    excellent

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  72. Crude,

    No, Siegel says explicitly you *can* get something from nothing. That his 'nothing' is actually 'something' is a point he doesn't really seem to get, or he at least thinks his 'something' counts as 'nothing'.

    His caveat made his meaning clear. It explicitly denied what you say. "Nothing" was accurate in the context. How else could it have it been stated? Where did this new stuff come from? It was created from ... what?

    I suppose he could have said, I can get water from nothing. And then he burns this invisible substance called hydrogen, and guess what? -- but physics has gone way past that stage. Now "nothing" has no frame of reference. It's not simply an invisible gas. It's as close to "nothing" as we can get. How do we characterize that? What should it be called if not nothing?

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  73. Crude,

    I'm all in favor of guys like Siegel sticking to the science and leaving the philosophy to others.

    Science is philosophy. Anybody with the least bit of exposure to philosophy knows this. But they became two schools and parted ways. Science won. It proved to be a far superior basis of knowledge. And it may be the only (mostly) true philosophy.

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  74. His caveat made his meaning clear. It explicitly denied what you say. "Nothing" was accurate in the context. How else could it have it been stated? Where did this new stuff come from? It was created from ... what?

    There was no "caveat". What you're saying here adds up to, "Look, there's no way Siegel was saying what he clearly was saying, because THAT would have been moronic. So when he says you can get something from nothing, when he suggests that this disproves the philosophical argument he's targeting, we have to interpret him this other way."

    But no, we don't. We can just take him to say what he clearly was. He was wrong - he went off the rails, and he did so in such a way that made his entire article off-target. It really is possible for people, even scientists, to make such mistakes. He's been corrected, and he needed the correction. Hopefully he'll learn from it.

    Now "nothing" has no frame of reference. It's not simply an invisible gas. It's as close to "nothing" as we can get. How do we characterize that? What should it be called if not nothing?

    "As close to nothing as you can get", when there's something left over, is not "nothing". It is what it is - (platonic?) laws, (vacuum) energy, etc. Congratulations - you've reached a limit of science and empiricism. But you don't magically get beyond that limit by complaining "But this is as far as science goes, and it's not far enough!"

    It's a shame, but that's life.

    Science is philosophy. Anybody with the least bit of exposure to philosophy knows this. But they became two schools and parted ways. Science won. It proved to be a far superior basis of knowledge. And it may be the only (mostly) true philosophy.

    No, science is a subset of philosophy - it has a far narrower range, more rigid limits. It's been incredibly useful, but that use has been precisely because of its limits. What's being discovered is that, as useful as science is, it's next to useless when it comes to many big, important questions. And some people just can't stand that, so they want to pass off some philosophy as science. Or hope that, if a scientist makes a philosophical claim, everyone will pretend it's now a scientific claim.

    Again - sadly, it doesn't work that way. What's happening is more a victory of philosophy than science, since it turns out that some of the questions people really seek an answer to, science is almost entirely useless on. Scientists snort about philosophy, regard it as useless.. then dive into it with gusto. Hawking did it, Vedral did it (but seems to be very aware he did it, to his credit), and Siegel sloppily stumbled into it.

    Philosophy's burying its undertakers, as usual.

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  75. I doubt there is a physicist on earth who claims the universe came from absolutely nothing.

    Then they should not claim to have "answered" the question.

    He's merely showing your god, as creator, can be replaced by the simplicity of nature's laws.

    He hasn't shown that, either.

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  76. And making laws prescriptive rather than merely descriptive...

    A commenter on another site likened it to iambic pentameters causing the plays of Shakespeare.

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  77. I'm sure Siegel is wrong. But he's more right about creation than the theists I've run across.

    How could he be when he has said nothing whatever about it?

    I say that's not anything like imagining absolutely nothing. We have no experience of it. No human can imagine it in its full nothingness. How would we picture it?

    a) Use your intellect instead of your imagination.
    b) You could "picture" it the same way you would "picture" a function space topology.
    c) Notice how the post-modern age is discarding words and logic for pictures and imagery.

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  78. The arguments I know of all presuppose an eternal God.

    That's odd. The ones I know make no such presupposition at all, but reach it as a conclusion. The presuppositions are that there is motion in the world, there is an ordering of efficient causes, there are laws of nature, etc.

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  79. Where did this new stuff come from? It was created from ... what?

    From the vacuum energy. But it was not "created," only transformed.

    It's as close to "nothing" as we can get. How do we characterize that? What should it be called if not nothing?

    The Aristotelian aether, which was characterized as being as close as possible to nothing.

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  80. djindra: "How would we picture it [absolutely nothing]? It's a mental absurdity."

    djindra: "Is God absolute nothingness? Well, I say so but what theist agrees with me?"

    I guess he can picture it after all!

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  81. Daniel Smith,

    Cute, but no cigar. I picture a great big universe. I picture a universe where no gods hang out. I can't picture nothing at all.

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  82. Others have answered djindra's bizarre contradictions so I might as well add my 2 cents worth.

    >You say you can have an intellectual concept of a hectogon even if you can't picture it in your imagination. But we can draw one.

    Thus proving my point that our intellects can apprehend real truths even when our limited imagination fails us.


    >I say that's not anything like imagining absolutely nothing. We have no experience of it. No human can imagine it in its full nothingness. How would we picture it? It's a mental absurdity. We seem to need some hook to make it conceptually valid for us, be it God or gravity.

    By your own non-logical private philosophical standards a Hartle/Hawking State is also a mental absurdity (even thought it's not nothing but some of your kind seems to think it is), so is a collapsing Wave Fuction since we can't imagine these & we have no experience of them.

    But we can append them via our intellects.

    Heck I'll make it simple enough for even you to understand. If what you say is true then would it not be impossible to conceive of an ontological Zero? If I say there are no cars in the parking lot is that hard to imagine? Indeed to you literally have to imagine an empty parking lot to intellectually grasp the concept there are no cars there?

    The classic view of Nothing is just Being minus Being. It's not hard and you don't have to believe in any gods to grasp the obvious.

    >"Pure Actuality" is philosophic nonsense.

    Only too an uneducated Philistine who has never studied philosophy and prefers mockery to education.

    >Philosophers have been playing word games like this for a long time.

    I thought it was Theists who have been playing word games? One of the marks of the New Atheism and it's fundamentalist nature is the blind tendency to conflate philosophy & religion. The old guard Atheists respected philosophy and would never do this. They where intellectual giants. The New Atheist is a dwarf.

    >The game becomes political and authoritarian, like in Rollerball.

    Yes, New Atheist fundies do see religion and philosophy as politics by another means which is one of the many reasons why they are both boring and rationally vacuous.

    >Which arguments are you talking about? The arguments I know of all presuppose an eternal God. Is God absolute nothingness? Well, I say so but what theist agrees with me?

    Siegel plainly says "Arguments for God as cause of the universe rest on the assumption that something can’t come from nothing. But given the laws of physics, it turns out that something can come from nothing."END QUOTE

    Thus he is logically (as far as a philosophical illiterate can be logical) talking about cosmological arguments specifically as they refer to God & creatio ex nihilo.

    Do keep up my friend.

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  83. >I picture a great big universe. I picture a universe where no gods hang out. I can't picture nothing at all.

    So you can picture one type of non-being (no gods) but not another type "nothing at all"?

    Contradict yourself much?

    Why is the simple intellectual concept of Non-Being beyond your grasp?

    I can with great ease intellectually append no gods and nothing at all?

    It's not hard.

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  84. Scientists snort about philosophy, regard it as useless.. then dive into it with gusto. Hawking did it, Vedral did it (but seems to be very aware he did it, to his credit), and Siegel sloppily stumbled into it.

    Philosophy's burying its undertakers, as usual.


    Even Atheist Objectivist Philosophers agree with us.

    http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Rowlands/Philosophy_vs_Science.shtml

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  85. BenYachov,

    You say you can imagine nothing at all but those are mere words. I guarantee you can't imagine nothing at all. It's impossible. And I'm not the first to notice this limitation of the human mind.

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  86. BenYachov,

    Only too an uneducated Philistine who has never studied philosophy and prefers mockery to education.

    Are you describing yourself or your ignorance?

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  87. @Djindra

    Are you describing yourself or your ignorance?

    Reply: You know, if you want to use insults, which is just fine with me, could you at least make something half-way funny and/or shameful instead of this kind of "I'm rubber, you're glue" stuff?

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  88. BenYachov,

    Me: "You say you can have an intellectual concept of a hectogon even if you can't picture it in your imagination. But we can draw one."

    You: "Thus proving my point that our intellects can apprehend real truths even when our limited imagination fails us."

    Are you claiming "absolute nothing" is/was a real truth? I doubt you are, so what exactly do you think this proves?

    Our intellects can discuss all sorts of things, both true and untrue. We can talk about a square circle. That does not imply it's real and it does not imply we are capable of imagining it. You used the hectogon as an example of being beyond your imagination, yet it's nevertheless true. But I didn't claim certain real things are beyond our imagination. I claimed that trying to imagine an actual reality of there being absolutely nothing in existence is beyond our imagination. Sure, we can talk about it intellectually. But nobody can imagine it. The imagining of it is full of mental contradictions. You think a hectogon proves your point. But it doesn't. It is evidence for my point. The only way we can discuss this intellectually is by bringing in other concepts like hectogons -- concepts that may or may not be real but have some basis in reality somewhere, even if indirectly. We cannot discuss absolute nothingness except by referring to something. If anyone truly imagined a state of absolute nothingness his brain would have to be drained of all thought. He would have to stop thinking. He could make no connections to any other thought. He would not be able to remember the unthought. He would never know he never thought it.

    If I say there are no cars in the parking lot is that hard to imagine? Indeed do you literally have to imagine an empty parking lot to intellectually grasp the concept there are no cars there?

    Exactly. You have to imagine an empty parking lot. An empty parking lot is something. For you to count zero cars you have to be looking for cars, not uncars. You clearly do not understand the issue.

    One of the marks of the New Atheism and it's fundamentalist nature is the blind tendency to conflate philosophy & religion.

    This appears to be totally ignorant of the history of philosophy (including Aquinas, of all people). I don't want to jump to conclusions. So please explain what you mean.

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  89. Nick,

    Another party throws a silly, ineffectual ad hominem yet you blame me and remain silent about the perpetrator. Your filtering system appears to be clogged.

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  90. @djindra
    Can you picture a function space with a conjoining topology?

    Or have you discovered the limitations of a picture-oriented TV/video approach to knowledge?

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  91. You say you can imagine nothing at all but those are mere words. I guarantee you can't imagine nothing at all. It's impossible. And I'm not the first to notice this limitation of the human mind.

    Sure and 'tis only a limitation on the imagination, not on the mind.

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  92. >You say you can imagine nothing at all but those are mere words. I guarantee you can't imagine nothing at all. It's impossible. And I'm not the first to notice this limitation of the human mind.

    I reply: I said "I can with great ease intellectually append no gods and nothing at all.....".

    I also at one point said it was a mistake to conflate imagination with the intellect.

    Can you even read English?

    >Are you describing yourself or your ignorance?

    Says the person who can't read plain English.

    >Our intellects can discuss all sorts of things, both true and untrue. We can talk about a square circle.

    You can't intellectually append a "square circle" since our intellect tell us it is a contradiction(like 1+1=5). Like the typical Fundamentalist Humean you are dogmatically conflating imagination with intellect. They are not the same and the lack of ability to imagine something does not equate the inability to conceive of it intellectually.

    I can't intellectually append a square circle(or imagine it). Anymore than I can intellectually append 2+2=5.

    >But I didn't claim certain real things are beyond our imagination.

    Then why make a big deal about your supposed inability to imagine nothing & why do you still conflate imagination with the intellect? It doesn't matter if you can't imagine something. What is relevant is wither or not you can grasp it intellectually.

    >The only way we can discuss this intellectually is by bringing in other concepts like hectogons -- concepts that may or may not be real but have some basis in reality somewhere, even if indirectly.

    I don't disagree but that is not what you have been doing. You have been conflating imagination with the intellect.

    That is not something you do on a blog full of anti-Humean Thomists and their fellow travelers. Unless know and are prepared to defend Hume. But for that you would have to know some philosophy.

    >We cannot discuss absolute nothingness except by referring to something.

    No we just have to intellectually understand the concept of Zero and apply it across the board. Of course this is off topic from creatio ex nihilo and Seigel's philosophical incompetence and your tribal kneejerk defense of him.

    >If anyone truly imagined a state of absolute nothingness his brain would have to be drained of all thought.

    Imagination is still not the same as intellect. My intellect tells me there is such a thing as ontological zero.

    >You have to imagine an empty parking lot.

    No you don't. You just have to know in your intellect the number of cars is zero. You have to comprehend the concept of Zero.

    >You clearly do not understand the issue.

    Says the guy who originally claimed Siegel wasn't claiming the Universe was created out of a real nothing.

    >Are you claiming "absolute nothing" is/was a real truth? I doubt you are, so what exactly do you think this proves?

    I'm claiming the concept of nothing is with great ease defined as a complete and total absence of being. Of anything! Your boy Siegel seems to think nothing is another something (Quantum Vacuum, Hartle/Hawking State, Naked Singularity etc).
    That is why he is an idiot. Defending him is about as smart as me defending Ray Commfort and his dumb arse banana argument for the existence of God.

    You have been all over the map. At first you seemed to claim the definition of nothing was meaningless because you could not imagine it. No you seem to be backing off that.

    You are all over the map and it is clearly you who doesn't understand the issues here.

    Simply admit it.

    ReplyDelete
  93. @BenYachov
    djindra wrote: "If anyone truly imagined a state of absolute nothingness his brain would have to be drained of all thought."

    To which one might reply: "If anyone truly imagined a tree, his brain would have turned to wood."

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  94. BY:One of the marks of the New Atheism and it's fundamentalist nature is the blind tendency to conflate philosophy & religion.

    djindra: This appears to be totally ignorant of the history of philosophy (including Aquinas, of all people).

    Your the one who said "'Pure Actuality' is philosophic nonsense." & "Philosophers play word games...".

    Later you said "Science is philosophy".

    Incoherent much?

    >I don't want to jump to conclusions. So please explain what you mean.

    Modern New Atheists reject philosophy(Dawkins, Hawking, Siegel, Harris) and believe empirical science alone is the only worth while standard to append truth. Not all Atheists agree (like Ayn Rand) with this limited intellectually vacuous view.

    But it's negative effects on learning can be felt and seen (especially with your posts which have been terrible).

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  95. >Are you claiming "absolute nothing" is/was a real truth?

    Yes I am pretty sure as I am typing this the amount of large elephants in my house is zero. This would be true even if I forgot what the inside of my elephent-less house looked like.

    BTW I wonder if you are confused about creatio ex nihilo? Do you believe(& I would bet the farm you do) creatio ex nihilo means God created the universe out of some invisible substance called "Nothing"?

    Are you aware Parmenides formula ex nihilo nihil fit(i.e. from nothing nothing comes) was at first disliked by many Christians since it implied creatio ex nihilo was impossible?

    Maybe this will help you get on teh same page as the rest of us.

    http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2008/0811fea4.asp

    ReplyDelete
  96. @Djindra

    Another party throws a silly, ineffectual ad hominem yet you blame me and remain silent about the perpetrator. Your filtering system appears to be clogged.

    Reply: I have no problem with the insults. I guess you didn't read that part. Ben actually has substance to what he says. Anyone who disregards "Pure actuality" as nonsense has no substance.

    ReplyDelete
  97. @TheOFloinn:

    To which one might reply: "If anyone truly imagined a tree, his brain would have turned to wood."

    Reply: That could explain a lot if true. Reading the new atheists can cause one's brain to turn to nonsense.

    ReplyDelete
  98. Not about to read through a 300 comment thread, this has likely been brought up already if not then it should have....

    The physicist meant energy, obviously. A tiny bit of the principle of charity would have obviated this post. From Newton through Kant to Eddington, conservation of mass/energy was thought to be an exceptionless law. Turns out they were wrong. That's all he meant.

    Philosophers like to stick it to scientists, and vice versa. A little bit of charity goes a long way. I have seen Feser overreact like this before at his blog, which might be good for people looking to have their confirmation bias stoked, but not very good for the dispassionate looking for objectivity.

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  99. If thats' all he meant then why this sentence in the original post?

    "And, most often when people bring this up to me, it's in an attempt to prove the existence of God -- and the insufficiency of the Big Bang -- by pointing to the Universe."

    It seems that he is, in fact, claiming that physics has shown a particular metaphysical position to be invalid.

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  100. TheOFloinn,

    Can you picture a function space with a conjoining topology? Or have you discovered the limitations of a picture-oriented TV/video approach to knowledge?

    I suppose I could claim discovery of a limitation of knowledge based on nothingness -- but I doubt I'm the first.

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  101. Can you picture a function space with a conjoining topology? Or have you discovered the limitations of a picture-oriented TV/video approach to knowledge?

    djindra
    I suppose I could claim discovery of a limitation of knowledge based on nothingness -- but I doubt I'm the first.


    Non-responsive. You made a claim based on your inability to imagine X. I asked if you could imagine a function space with a conjoining topology. If not, does that tell us about function space topologies or about your imagination?

    ReplyDelete
  102. @BDK

    Good to have you here.

    >I have seen Feser overreact like this before at his blog, which might be good for people looking to have their confirmation bias stoked, but not very good for the dispassionate looking for objectivity.

    I strongly but respectfully disagree with you that it is an overreaction or a lack of charity on Feser's part.

    I do think it is an example of polemics.

    http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/06/can-philosophy-be-polemical.html

    ReplyDelete
  103. The problem is summed up rather nicely in this quote I ripped off from TheOFloinn Blog.

    "The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach, and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth…"
    -- Paul Feyerabend to Wallace Matson
    (Quoted in For and Against Method, by Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend)

    ReplyDelete
  104. BenYachov,

    Then why make a big deal about your supposed inability to imagine nothing & why do you still conflate imagination with the intellect? It doesn't matter if you can't imagine something. What is relevant is wither or not you can grasp it intellectually.

    I think you're the one making a big deal of it. I do wonder why you are so confused about my meaning. I'm not conflating imagination with the intellect. If anyone is doing that, it is you. And you certainly cannot "grasp" the concept of absolute nothingness intellectually. You can talk about the concept in superficial terms, like 2+2=5, but you cannot "grasp" either concept. Absolute nothingness, as a state of being, is just as contradictory as a square circle.

    My intellect tells me there is such a thing as ontological zero.

    Your dogma tells you there is an ontological zero. Zero isn't. But that's a different issue. My only interest in absolute nothingness is in noting the fact that nobody seriously defends the state of absolutely nothingness as a beginning.

    That is not something you do on a blog full of anti-Humean Thomists...

    I don't see why not. Convince me you know something.

    Says the guy who originally claimed Siegel wasn't claiming the Universe was created out of a real nothing.

    Says the guy who edits Siegel's words until they fit his position but ignore the context.

    I'm claiming the concept of nothing is with great ease defined as a complete and total absence of being. Of anything! Your boy Siegel seems to think nothing is another something (Quantum Vacuum, Hartle/Hawking State, Naked Singularity etc).

    It doesn't really matter what you think of his definitions. The only thing that matters is the science, and whether or not it offers a naturalistic alternative to divine creation stories. Aquinas doesn't have anything to do with that.

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  105. The only thing that matters is the science, and whether or not it offers a naturalistic alternative to divine creation stories.

    [Natural] science is not the only thing that matters when one is talking about creation stories. One must talk about actual creation, not the transformation of the vacuum energy [aether] into virtual particles.

    ReplyDelete
  106. BenYachov,

    Modern New Atheists reject philosophy(Dawkins, Hawking, Siegel, Harris) and believe empirical science alone is the only worth while standard to append truth.

    Since I've not read any of their books I can't really argue the point. But why would empirical science bother you if you had a better way towards truth? I'm guessing you think some other epistemology does better. How would we test it against science, the world, our experience, or whatever else you think is important?

    ReplyDelete
  107. BenYachov,

    I am pretty sure as I am typing this the amount of large elephants in my house is zero. This would be true even if I forgot what the inside of my elephent-less house looked like.

    See, you really do not understand the issue. You keep making my case. The only way you can think about nothing is by referencing things. And you haven't even come close to the ultimate nothing -- no house, no elephants, no space, no time, no gods -- not anything.

    ReplyDelete
  108. But why would empirical science bother you if you had a better way towards truth? I'm guessing you think some other epistemology does better.

    It doesn't bother me. It's perfectly adequate within its proper domain; viz., the metrical properties of physical bodies. However, modern science has made a career of abandoning the empirical, and shoving the seen, heard, smelt, sniffed dimensions of reality - that is, the empirical, into the closet labeled "subjective."

    But mathematics does "better" in another domain. No amount of empirical science will ever discover that pi is irrational, let alone that a conjoining and splitting topology is always minimal conjoining and maximal splitting.

    Humanism does better in another domain; art in still another; and so on. Consider a grape. It is known to a vintner, a chemist, a farmer, a merchant, a poet, an artist... Each knows the grape in some way. It would be silly to suppose that the chemist's knowledge is the only sort of knowledge you could have.

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  109. BenYachov,

    You're the one who said "'Pure Actuality' is philosophic nonsense." & "Philosophers play word games...". Later you said "Science is philosophy". Incoherent much?

    No, a difference in context. Few scientist think of themselves as philosophers today, but I submit it's looking more and more like they are becoming the only true lovers of wisdom. Besides, scientists do sometimes produce nonsense. Science is full of errors. Why should it surprise anyone that philosophy is also? It has to be. Philosophers disagree.

    ReplyDelete
  110. >I'm not conflating imagination with the intellect.

    "Philosophers play word games" vs "science is philosophy."

    So you changing your story again eh?

    >Absolute nothingness, as a state of being, is just as contradictory as a square circle.

    Naturally, which is why I would never said that, not even once. A state of being is something. A lack of being is nothing. Why is this so hard for you to understand?
    A simple concept to comprehend intellectually which you dismiss because you can't imagine it.

    Yet you seemed to have figured out that nothingness as a state of being is a contradiction. Now did your imagination tell you that or your intellect.

    Checkmate.

    >Your dogma tells you there is an ontological zero.

    So the intellectual concept of "no cars" in a parking lot is a dogma?.....right sure pal.

    Do you even know what an ontological zero is? Do you think because the word "ontological" is in it that it has something to do with St Anslem's argument for the existence of God (which thomists reject)? No, try it this way. There can't really be negative three number of cars in a parking lot now can there? There can only be zero to potential infinity.

    Got it now?

    >My only interest in absolute nothingness is in noting the fact that nobody seriously defends the state of absolutely nothingness as a beginning.

    Thomas Aquinas didn't believe you could prove philosophically the universe had a beginning. Thomistic Cosmological arguments don't presuppose a beginning. Also no cosmological argument presupposes that absolute nothing existed at the Beginning.

    Boy are you off track.

    >I don't see why not. Convince me you know something.

    You first.

    >Says the guy who edits Siegel's words until they fit his position but ignore the context.

    You have not shown any alternate meaning via the "context". Cite a passage from Siegel indicating he had another meaning other than what he said.

    >It doesn't really matter what you think of his definitions.

    Yes it does since I have zero tolerance for bad arguments. These are bad arguments.

    >The only thing that matters is the science, and whether or not it offers a naturalistic alternative to divine creation stories.

    The above is simply not a scientific question. It's a philosophical question. Now maybe Atheist Philosophy can provide an alternative to theistic creation but science never can.

    Except it.

    >Aquinas doesn't have anything to do with that.

    This is a blog about Aquinas philosophy so it has everything to do with it.

    ReplyDelete
  111. BenYachov,

    But it's negative effects on learning can be felt and seen (especially with your posts which have been terrible

    First, I'm the one making sense here, not you. Second, you demonstrate the weakness of your background. Evidently it has not taught you to avoid jumping to conclusions. You know nothing about my background. Yet you assume you know the source of my alleged "terrible" posts. I do admit I don't know the source of your confused posts.

    ReplyDelete
  112. BenYachov,

    Do you believe(& I would bet the farm you do) creatio ex nihilo means God created the universe out of some invisible substance called "Nothing"?

    I don't control what theists believe. You have noticed they don't all agree, have you not? I've argued with theist online for 20 years. And no two seem to think exactly alike.

    ReplyDelete
  113. Nick,

    Anyone who disregards "Pure actuality" as nonsense has no substance.

    I'd say the opposite. Anyone who believes in "Pure actuality" is a superficial thinker.

    ReplyDelete
  114. TheOFloinn & Nick,

    To which one might reply: "If anyone truly imagined a tree, his brain would have turned to wood."

    Let's look at one theist's position on this issue:

    Jonathan Edwards, Of Being: "That there should absolutely be nothing at all is utterly impossible. The mind can never, let it stretch its conceptions never so much, bring itself to conceive of a state of perfect nothing. It puts the mind into mere convulsion and confusion to endeavor to think of such a state. And it contradicts the very nature of the soul to think that it should be. And it is the greatest contradiction and the aggregate of all contradictions to say that there should not be. ’Tis true we can’t so distinctly show the contradiction by words, because we cannot talk about it without speaking horrid nonsense and contradicting ourselves at every word, and because ‘nothing’ is that whereby we distinctly show other particular contradictions."

    ReplyDelete
  115. >But why would empirical science bother you if you had a better way towards truth? I'm guessing you think some other epistemology does better.

    What TheOFlinn said.

    >No, a difference in context. Few scientist think of themselves as philosophers today, but I submit it's looking more and more like they are becoming the only true lovers of wisdom.

    No they are merely lovers of science. That is not the same as being philosophically knowledgeable or competent which they clearly are not. Or at least some of them like Siegel.

    >Besides, scientists do sometimes produce nonsense. Science is full of errors. Why should it surprise anyone that philosophy is also? It has to be. Philosophers disagree.

    I don't disagree here.

    >See, you really do not understand the issue. You keep making my case. The only way you can think about nothing is by referencing things.

    I think that I do.

    Yes when one is a young child and cannot think in the abstract they rely heavily on the imagination. But as you grow older you rely more on the intellect and less on the mere imagination.

    >And you haven't even come close to the ultimate nothing -- no house, no elephants, no space, no time, no gods -- not anything.

    I was originally discussing the concept of nothing. The phrase "Absolute nothing" is your tangent. I have merely been indulging you. There really is no such thing as a concept of ultimate nothing. You can't have a ranking system for nothing since there is nothing to rank.

    You have either something or nothing. Being or non-being and Quantum Vacuums still are not nothing.

    ReplyDelete
  116. >First, I'm the one making sense here, not you.

    Only to yourself.

    >Evidently it has not taught you to avoid jumping to conclusions.

    Of course you are not guilty of that here. (cancel sarcasm mode)

    >I don't control what theists believe. You have noticed they don't all agree, have you not?

    Much like Atheists.

    >I've argued with theist online for 20 years. And no two seem to think exactly alike.

    Which is why your New Atheist one size fits all polemics are such a terrible bore. You know nothing about Thomism or Catholicism or Classic Philosophy. Stop pretending you do.

    >Let's look at one theist's position on this issue:

    >Jonathan Edwards, Of Being:

    You are citing a Protestant Calvinist who holds a Post Englightment philosophical outlook to a bunch of mostly Catholic, Thomistic advocates of Classical Philosophy who reject Post Englightment philosophy?

    You might as well complete the farce and cite Jacob Arminius to a blog full of Reformed types. Or go to an Ayn Rand atheist website and try to sell your theory philosophy isn't important.

    The laughter will be deafening.

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  117. "That there should absolutely be nothing at all is utterly impossible."


    Of course as TheOFloenn already noted.

    Aristotelians and Thomists do not claim that something can come from nothing. It was Siegel claiming (incorrectly) that he was getting something from nothing. It is precisely because of the principle ex nihilo nihil fit that Aristotle and Aquinas concluded there must be an unmoved mover, an uncaused cause. Of course, God is not nothing.

    >Anyone who believes in "Pure actuality" is a superficial thinker.

    Why don't you just fess up? You don't understand the concepts of Form, Matter, Potency, Actuality, Prime Matter, Essence etc from a hole in the head.

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  118. TheOFloinn,

    At least this is more interesting.

    Science is perfectly adequate within its proper domain; viz., the metrical properties of physical bodies.

    What if "the metrical properties of physical bodies" is all there is? Then theoretically nothing would be beyond its domain. It would be only a matter of time until some, if not all, of those mysterious subjectivities also fall within the domain.

    However, modern science has made a career of abandoning the empirical, and shoving the seen, heard, smelt, sniffed dimensions of reality - that is, the empirical, into the closet labeled "subjective."

    I think most scientists are aware of this pitfall. Forgetting science for a moment, I hope you're not suggesting the subjective is a basis for knowledge.

    It would be silly to suppose that the chemist's knowledge is the only sort of knowledge you could have.

    Yes it would. There are other fields of science. And even other disciplines -- like linguistics -- are slowly coming under the umbrella. Even those subjective feelings about grapes are doomed to scientific study.

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  119. >What if "the metrical properties of physical bodies" is all there is?

    How would or could you prove that scientifically?

    The above is clearly a philosophical question not a scientific one.

    I will leave the rest to TheOFloinn who has been doing a great job in his responses.

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  120. Djindra:


    I'd say the opposite. Anyone who believes in "Pure actuality" is a superficial thinker.


    Reply: And you reached this conclusion how? Do you realize this makes Aristotle also a superficial thinker?

    ReplyDelete
  121. TheOFloinn
    Science is perfectly adequate within its proper domain; viz., the metrical properties of physical bodies.

    djindra:
    What if "the metrical properties of physical bodies" is all there is?

    TOF
    It is a common trap for anyone enthused about a particular methodology to suppose that only those things amenable to the methodology are worth study. Hence, those who study the metrical properties of physical bodies tend to think that only such properties are real.

    Yet, we have the whole field of mathematics, which deals with the properties of ideal bodies and without which natural science sits dumb, as a refutation.
    + + +
    djindra
    I think most scientists are aware of this pitfall. Forgetting science for a moment, I hope you're not suggesting the subjective is a basis for knowledge.

    TOF
    Of course it is. Unless you can prove through natural science that your mother loved you.

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  122. I think most scientists are aware of this pitfall. Forgetting science for a moment, I hope you're not suggesting the subjective is a basis for knowledge.

    How do you know that your knowledge is "objective"? Just because the reviewers of a peer-reviewed journal agreed to publish that result?

    That's not objective. That's intersubjective.

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  123. BenYachov,

    Do you even know what an ontological zero is? Do you think because the word "ontological" is in it that it has something to do with St Anslem's argument for the existence of God (which thomists reject)? No, try it this way. There can't really be negative three number of cars in a parking lot now can there? There can only be zero to potential infinity.

    Yeah, I got it. First you imply zero is. Then you claim it isn't. If you stick by that second claim, we agree.

    ReplyDelete
  124. First you imply zero is. Then you claim it isn't. If you stick by that second claim, we agree.

    You must be hell on wheels in mathematics.

    ReplyDelete
  125. TheOFloinn,


    The issue is ontology, not math. One doesn't exist either. One apple in the refrigerator exists, one does not.

    ReplyDelete
  126. One apple in the refrigerator exists, one does not.

    If does not exist, how can there be "one" apple?

    First you diss metaphysics and logic; then you diss mathematics. What next?

    Are you a strict nominalist?

    ReplyDelete
  127. BenYachov,

    Me: My only interest in absolute nothingness is in noting the fact that nobody seriously defends the state of absolutely nothingness as a beginning.

    You: Thomas Aquinas didn't believe you could prove philosophically the universe had a beginning. Thomistic Cosmological arguments don't presuppose a beginning. Also no cosmological argument presupposes that absolute nothing existed at the Beginning. Boy are you off track.

    It's one thing to complain about differences in opinion we may have between us. It's another to complain about my opinions when they do not substantially differ from yours. If you read carefully, I did not say, nor did I mean to imply, that Thomistic Cosmological arguments necessarily presuppose a beginning. And I've stated repeatedly that nobody -- and this especially includes a theist -- argues that absolutely nothing existed at the beginning. And if a person believes there was no beginning (a person such as me and maybe you) that person certainly does not presuppose a state of absolutely nothing at a beginning that never happened.

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  128. BenYachov,



    First I'm told to go read and try to understand Aquinas. Now I'm told that it's okay to dismiss a person's views simply because he holds an "Enlightenment philosophical outlook" or is a Calvinist. So I guess that means it's okay for me to dismiss a Medieval Catholic like Aquinas simply because he is a Medieval Catholic.

    I cited Edwards not to convince anyone. I cited him because I happened to stumble across the quote. It was a freak coincidence. It shows that what I was saying was by no means original with me. And the view was held by a man who has much more in common philosophically with those here than with me.

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  129. BenYachov,

    Me: What if "the metrical properties of physical bodies" is all there is?

    You: How would or could you prove that scientifically?

    There's no need to prove it. But why not use that as a working assumption? If we bump into something that defies scientific understanding, what harm is there in making the attempt?

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  130. djindra: What if "the metrical properties of physical bodies" is all there is? There's no need to prove it. But why not use that as a working assumption? If we bump into something that defies scientific understanding, what harm is there in making the attempt?

    Because we can easily identify things that are not metrical properties of physical bodies. Truth, beauty, justice, conjoining topologies, three, Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A, taste, color, feelings, understanding, political opinion, u.s.w.

    The only way some of these can be shoehorned in is by re-imagining them as particles in motion according to the accepted paradigm. Thus, music becomes air-atoms in motion, color becomes photons of various wavelengths bouncing around, heat becomes molecules bouncing around, a lot.

    But imagine someone raised in a gray room: everything is black and white and shades of gray. But this person has access to all knowledge about bouncing photons - and for that matter, bouncing neurons in the brain, so that every metrical property of "red" is known.

    Now, that person leaves the Gray Room and sees a bright red luscious apple for the first time. Has he experienced something new? Of course. So not all knowledge about even the physical world is reducible to the metrical properties of physical bodies. Physical bodies have qualities, not just quantities.

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  131. Nick,

    Do you realize this makes Aristotle also a superficial thinker?

    Not so fast. There are 2300 years separating us from Aristotle. He has some lame ideas. But he was a giant. In 2000 years they'll look back at some of our best and marvel at how wrong we were. My issue is not with Aristotle, or even Aquinas. My issue is with those today who should know better. A lot has happened in science and philosophy and history since Ancient Greece. I don't see how any serious person today can ignore that and focus on one ancient school. No philosopher had all the answers. Some had a few tempting answers. Most had none. But many were inspired. Some were terrifically creative. Thrasymachus' and Glaucon's challenge to Socrates, in praise of injustice, is riveting, though wrong-headed. Who can't be knocked over by Descartes flawed but beautiful proof of his own existence? or "Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains?" or 'The world is my idea'? or even Locke's surprisingly amusing Two Treatises. We should be inspired by the best in philosophy to question and seek answers knowing every philosopher has barely scratched the surface. My complaint is with those who stop short and bow down to dead ideas, as if they're too tired to make the journey themselves.

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  132. TheOFloinn,

    How do you know, before even making the attempt, that a certain thing is beyond scientific understanding? Above you suggested that proving my mother's love for me was beyond the capabilities of natural science. I don't think that's true. It's a difficult problem. That's true. And science is nowhere close to understanding love today. But love is a biological reaction. It's brain activity. We are learning more and more about the brain. One day -- and probably soon -- we will be able to measure love and distinguish among its flavors. It does not seem to me that scientifically measuring such things is off limits, or impossible. Some things seem more difficult than others. For example, should my mother love me? That's probably a lot more difficult. But we will never know what we can answer scientifically if the attempt is never made. Why should we believe philosophy, theology or art will reach better answers?

    ReplyDelete
  133. @Djindra:

    Not so fast. There are 2300 years separating us from Aristotle.

    Reply: I was not aware that a calendar determined truth.

    Djindra: He has some lame ideas. But he was a giant. In 2000 years they'll look back at some of our best and marvel at how wrong we were.

    Reply: Wow. I prefer to look back at Aristotle and marvel at how right he was. Now tell me, when Aristotle used the term "pure actuality" what did he mean?

    Djindra: My issue is not with Aristotle, or even Aquinas.

    Actually, it is.

    Djindra: My issue is with those today who should know better.

    Well learning to argue with yourself is a good beginning.

    Djindra: A lot has happened in science and philosophy and history since Ancient Greece. I don't see how any serious person today can ignore that and focus on one ancient school.

    We all do. You either think like an Aristotlean or a Platonist. It is not the existence of new schools. It is simply building on the old schools.

    Djindra: No philosopher had all the answers.

    No one claims that.

    Djindra: Some had a few tempting answers. Most had none.

    Reply: Notice the concept of correct answers was left out.

    Djindra: But many were inspired.

    Reply: No idea what you mean by this.

    Djindra: Some were terrifically creative. Thrasymachus' and Glaucon's challenge to Socrates, in praise of injustice, is riveting, though wrong-headed.

    It was mainly Thrasymachus.

    Djindra: Who can't be knocked over by Descartes flawed but beautiful proof of his own existence?

    Reply: I can.

    Djindra: or "Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains?" or 'The world is my idea'? or even Locke's surprisingly amusing Two Treatises. We should be inspired by the best in philosophy to question and seek answers knowing every philosopher has barely scratched the surface. My complaint is with those who stop short and bow down to dead ideas, as if they're too tired to make the journey themselves.

    Reply: No. We just don't re-invent the wheel.

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  134. TheOFloinn wrote: “Data, including the data of the Bell experiment underdetermine reality.

    Exactly right. Physical data underdetermine reality for the simple reason that it is always possible to conceptualize different realities producing exactly the same physical data. That’s why one can use physical data only to falsify ontological hypotheses, but not to affirm one. And, as far as I am concerned, the debacle of how to interpret quantum phenomena comes very close to falsifying scientific realism.

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  135. Being 339th down the list of comments, I doubt that anyone will ever read this...but the big mistake of these scientists was in believing that there is such a state as "nothingness." There isn't. And it would also be a logical impossibility. What we call "nothingness" ie the quantum void or quantum vacuum is not nohingness at all. It is pure energy at the level of "strings." Energy can neither be created nor distroyed. The entire Universe including all matter is made of energy. That's why E=MC2 works. Even space time is an energy field upon which matter can exist. No spacetime...no matter. Energy can change forms. It can become different forms of energy, and it can become matter. Matter can be converted back to energy. The Universe is simply a different form of energy and energy patterns. What makes up our Universe is "particulate" energy and "particulate" matter. The energy of the quantum vacuum is not particulate but can convert briefly to "virtual particles" and then return once again to their origina; form. A creation of a Universe occurs when there is a fluctuation in the quantum void. It creates a quantum universe which undergoes rapid "inflation." In essence, it creates the spacetime field. With expansion the increasing volume causes the concentration of energy to decline and this in turn causes tempatures to drop. As the temperatures drop, energy goes through "phase changes" just as water vapor, water, ice. With each phase change the properties change. "matter" condences out of energy. The properties of these new forms of energy relate in specific ways, and eventually when the temperature drops enough, these separate particles can combine to form quarks, proton, neutrons, electrons, etc. which then can form atoms - which, in molecular form, we call "matter." Atoms are nothing but energy fields relating to each other in specific ways. So, in a sense, the Universe can come from what we "call" nothingness, but is actually pure energy at the bottom of the quantum level. It is reasonable to assume that this process continuously happens forming new Universes all the time. Most Universes would be "still born" and recollapse in on themselves. Of those that escape that fate, some have the right properties to become just like our Universe, while others will expand to fast to form matter or any kind of structure at all. Those are called "empty universes." Not all existing Universes have the same properties we do, so they can be very different. Scientists confuse people when they use the world "nothing" or "nothingness." They should drop the use of those words. - Rex Bennett

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  136. And here is a man not really getting (again) what the argument againt any form of higher power or creator is about. There is no point in scientists trying to deny that in theory (a hypothesis proposed as an explaination, speculation, an idea or set of ideas about something) there could be a higher power or creator, just as it could be said that in theory, there is a teapot that we cannot perceive with any instrument we currently possess is in geostationary orbit around the Earth.

    The point that people who think scientifically try to make is that the difference between a theory as defined above, and a scientific theory (a theory or hypothesis held as an explaination or account of a group of facts or phenomena, an idea that has been confirmed by experiment that can be replicated) is a very large one.

    All scientific theory,for example the theory of evolution, or the theory of plate tectonics, or big bang theory, is based around observable, replicable, explicit fact. These theories are changed to match the facts, just as if you were imagining the entireity of a puzzle picture of a landscape with just a few pictures, and then a few more pieces were added that didn't quite fit with where you had placed certain details. Perhaps some trees were too far to the left, or perhaps some people were by a river that you hadn't thought were there.

    There is no need for a scientist to learn philosphy, so long as they understand the interpretation of physical phenomena. All science does is slowly add pieces to the puzzle. Scientists do try to perceive the whole picture so that they know where to logically look for, and then place, the next piece, but they expecty their guesses to be wrong, or at least approximately wrong, because it's a guess. Whether the guesses or even the pieces are logically sound or not is no matter, the guesses are there to find the pieces of the puzzle, and the pieces are fact and whether fact is logical or philosophically sound is irrelevant.

    As an atheist, I believe that the picture is only very, very partially understood. Theists tend to have a picture that is already painted with 12 coats and varnished, and if a scientist finds a piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit anywhere on their painting, they ignore it, or say that it can't belong in the box. Perhaps theists just need to realise that their picture may actually be wrong.

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  137. The comments/rants by "Seraphim" are too ironic to go by any sophisticated reader without a good chuckle.

    It seems that to this physicist, all it takes is some foot-stomping and repetition to shift the topic of conversation by shifting the the meaning of "thing" to merely (actual) "particles."

    He has gone from making patently fallacious equivocations and begging the question types of errors in reasoning to making outright false statements (that philosophers haven't contributed "one iota" of knowledge to mankind) then back to using murky language to try and cover up the damning evidence of his confusions. All this is completely predicted by the post he was responding.

    The yellow paint on his hands are all too obvious but who can blame him? He probably has had little by way of philosophical training to recognize the errors.

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  138. What a great article. I, being a physicist, have noticed the exact same problem. Laws may explain the universe but what explains the laws?

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  139. Anonymous,

    Your "sophisticated reader" comment gave me a good chuckle. It makes me think of how easily "sophisticated" Trotskyites used to solve the worlds problems over lunch. Perhaps you solved some of those same problems.

    You say it's an outright falsehood to claim philosophers haven't contributed one iota of knowledge to mankind. So maybe you could tell us what knowledge you had in mind.

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  140. Nick,

    You either think like an Aristotlean or a Platonist. It is not the existence of new schools. It is simply building on the old schools.

    Very amusing. I'd say very few think like either. I certainly think like neither.

    Notice the concept of correct answers was left out.

    You should have noticed since it was my intent.

    It was mainly Thrasymachus.

    Read it again. We could count words if you like.

    Now tell me, when Aristotle used the term "pure actuality" what did he mean?

    In a nutshell, he meant to slip in a bogus metaphysical basis of matter.

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  141. djindra said:

    >Your "sophisticated reader" comment gave me a good chuckle. It makes me think of how easily "sophisticated" Trotskyites used to solve the worlds problems over lunch. Perhaps you solved some of those same problems.<

    This is the kind of fascist personality type that can't handle an argument but always resort to the empty rhetoric of calling or suggesting anyone who doesn't agree with him or her is a "Trotskyite".

    >You say it's an outright falsehood to claim philosophers haven't contributed one iota of knowledge to mankind. So maybe you could tell us what knowledge you had in mind<

    Perhaps if you knew one iota about the history of philosophy you'd realize how patently absurd his claim really is.

    Consider the scientific method itself. It history is replete with famous philosophers who have contributed to its development.

    Analytical geometry was created by a philosopher (Descartes, which is why it's called "Cartesian geometry").

    Calculus was first published by a philosopher (Leibniz. Newton only published his work several years after Leibniz)

    Many of the sciences themselves spring from philosophers' work.

    Modern economics was first developed by the moral philosopher Adam Smith. Psychology, sociology political science all originated from the minds of philosophers.

    Modern work in logic was heavily influenced by philosophers. The truth table in logic was first seen in the work of a philosopher (1919 by Wittgenstein) which eventually lead to the electronic revolution of the 60s.

    The earliest development of modal logic is by Aristotle, C.I. Lewis, Ruth Marcus and Saul Kripke, all philosophers.

    Cybernetics, the science of regulatory systems was started by someone with a philosophy PhD (Norbert Weiner).

    Modern linguistics bases much of its work on formal semantics almost exclusively on the works of philosophers of language such as Frege, Russell, Kaplan, Montage, David Lewis and many others.

    The 2005 Nobel Prize for economics went to mathematician Robert Aumann who based his work on economic conventions on the work of David Lewis's notion of "common knowledge".

    This is just off the top of my head and not even including all the work that philosophy has contributed to our knowledge of ethics and metaphysics for example.

    Enough with the hubris and condescending attitude. Maybe you should learn something about philosophy before spewing this nonsense.

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  142. Besides all those examples, you may also want to add credit to the development of modern cognitive science, both its inception and developments within to this day to philosophers.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_scientists

    And much of decision theory have been developed by philosophers as well.

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  143. Anonymous,

    Such a poor sport! Really, now. You shouldn't accuse me of empty rhetoric when you smugly accuse others of unsophistication.

    Now to the issue. I asked you what philosophic knowledge you had in mind. You mention the scientific method. I mentioned above that scientists may be the only true philosophers left. And now you seem to agree there may be a kernel of truth to that. Personally, I would classify the scientific method, math and logic as tools to acquiring knowledge. But broadly speaking let's call the tools knowledge of a sort. Still, nothing you mention really falls under the category of philosophy. Unless things have changed since I was in college, they don't teach economics or math in philosophy class. I assume they still teach logic. Nevertheless, the so-called very important philosophic questions of politics, morality, and the best life are noticeably absent from your list. So your answer as it now stands actually supports the rants made by "Seraphim" which gave you a chuckle.

    And no, I won't credit modern cognitive science to philosophers or anyone else, under the title of knowledge, until we understand what cognition is, which we do not.

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  144. Djindra: Very amusing. I'd say very few think like either. I certainly think like neither.

    Reply: Then I'd say you understand neither.

    Djindra: You should have noticed since it was my intent.

    Reply: Oh yes. I notice dodges.

    Djindra: Read it again. We could count words if you like.

    Reply: Feel free. Thrasy was the one Socrates was mainly having that dialogue with.



    Djindra: In a nutshell, he meant to slip in a bogus metaphysical basis of matter.

    Reply: Um. No. This is just a reply of someone ignorant of metaphysics. Wanna try again?

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  145. djindra said:"Personally, I would classify the scientific method, math and logic as tools to acquiring knowledge."

    It takes a very specious reasoner to reason as you did. "ok ok, I don't mean 'knowledge' per se, I mean something like 'direct knowledge' of the world and not 'methodological' knowledge". That is what you have now resorted to. It's clearly specious and ad hoc. And besides that, mathematical and logical knowledge cannot be all classified as "methodological." Anyone who knows math and logic knows that.

    "Still, nothing you mention really falls under the category of philosophy."

    Again, totally fallacious shifting of the contexts of discussion. The original claim is that philosophers or philosophy have not provided "one iota" of knowledge to mankind. So now you have danced and back-peddled into "ok ok, what I really meant is, no methodological knowledge that is also not philosophical."

    First of all, the speciousness of that reasoning aside, it is wrong on many other accounts. Much of those disciplines are sub-disciplines of philosophy. You can't redraw the lines wherever you like the English language be damned. Logic is a traditional subdiscipline of philosophy. Cognitive science is by its nature an interdisciplinary subject with philosophy as one principle factor. that's also a fact. Your ignorance of this will not make it not so. You attempt to arbitrarily redraw these disciplinary boundaries ad hoc to avoid your patently false claims are clearly ineffective.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_science

    Look it up.

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  146. djindra said:
    "Unless things have changed since I was in college, they don't teach economics or math in philosophy class."

    Again, that's just your ignorance about philosophy. Philosophy taught at the graduate level is multi disciplinary and overlaps with many subjects. Many philosophers learn all sorts of logic (which overlaps with math, see link), decision theory (math and economics), and game theory and probability. Many philosophers work in these areas and it's related to other fields of philosophy. Many philosophers have published in journals for these disciplines.

    Again, the topics I mentioned are only a very small fraction of all philosophers have contributed. Most of their contributions are in the more traditional areas of philosophy like metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, etc. Of course, seeing the fallacious nature of your double talk, you would probably not classify the insights from these areas as "knowledge" for one arbitrary and misinformed reason or another.

    "I assume they still teach logic. Nevertheless, the so-called very important philosophic questions of politics, morality, and the best life are noticeably absent from your list."

    Wrong, I mentioned "ethics and metaphysics, for example" Just because you ignored what I said didn't mean they were absent.

    "And no, I won't credit modern cognitive science to philosophers or anyone else, under the title of knowledge, until we understand what cognition is, which we do not."

    It doesn't matter what you "credit". Just because you don't credit it doesn't mean it ain't so. Just because you don't understand anything about cognition doesn't mean others are as equally ignorant. Read up on cognitive science and all the contributions it has made and philosophers have made to it. Putting blinders on to the world will not make it disappear. Fact: we now know far more about the mind than we previously before cognitive sciences' inception and much of that is due to contributions of philosophers.

    In the end, I gave more than "one iota" of example completing obliterating the ignorant and easily disprovable claim that philosophers have not contributed to knowledge. It's more than amusing watching all the patently fallacious back-peddling you have done to cover that up. I don't blame you, you probably can't even help it as you probably have had little philosophical training to notice all the critical thinking errors you have made.

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  147. >Djindra: In a nutshell, he meant to slip in a bogus metaphysical basis of matter.

    Something that is purely actual could not in principle contain matter. Matter in the thought of Aristotle corresponded with potency and something purely actual could not contain any potency otherwise it would not be purely actual but rather an irreducible composite of Form and matter or actuality in potency.

    This is lame. Like I said earlier why don't you just fess up? You don't understand the concepts of Form, Matter, Potency, Actuality, Prime Matter, Essence etc from a hole in the head...do you?

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  148. Let's survey all the fallacious and false claims djindra has so far made to avoid the damning facts of my counter examples to the claim that philosophers have not contributed anything knowledge.

    I gave the example of cognitive science. djindra's response is that cognitive science has not provided any knowledge because it has not explain cognitions (to his liking). This is false. Cognition is far better understood now due to the work of cognitive scientists (philosophers included) than before. That is a fact that all the ignorance in the world will not cover.

    I gave the example of logic, the scientific method and decision theory. djindra claims that knowledge of these truths are not really knowledge because they are "methodological." This is both false and a non sequitur. Even if they were all methodological (which they most certainly all are not) it still doesn't mean they are not knowledge.

    Of course, this is not even the tip of the iceberg with all the knowledge philosophers have provided within other disciplines of philosophy such as metaphysics and ethics and political philosophy.

    How many times can one person be proven wrong in such short space and in such devastating ways?

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  149. Anonymous,

    Decision theory, game theory, probability? Multi-disciplinary? You keep hanging yourself. You got a "chuckle" from "philosophy has yet to contribute one iota to our knowledge of the world," yet you keep showing the only "philosophy" that contributes to knowledge of the world occurs when, in the best case, philosophy throws up a white flag and surrenders to the enemy. Or you assert knowledge -- like decision theory or cognition (or ethics!) -- when philosophy has merely done what it's always done -- asked questions and maybe even proposed places to look. Questions are not knowledge. Speculating on the existence of treasure or pointing out places to look for treasure is not the same as digging up treasure. I think it was clear that "Seraphim" was not including things like economics or calculus into a concept of philosophy. The only way you can argue against him is to sidestep the issue and include those disciplines he probably wouldn't.

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  150. Anonymous,

    The original claim is that philosophers or philosophy have not provided "one iota" of knowledge to mankind. So now you have danced and back-peddled into "ok ok, what I really meant is, no methodological knowledge that is also not philosophical."

    No, I'm trying to understand the context of the original claim. Of course I understand it's not in your interest to try to do so. It's you who is back-peddling.

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  151. Nick,

    Thrasy was the one Socrates was mainly having that dialogue with.

    It's about 1/3 into book 1 when Thrasymachus barges in. Socrates polishes him off in the remainder of that first book. Thrasymachus blushes and essentially agrees to disagree since neither side can prove his case. In total, Thrasymachus speaks about 2250 words.

    "With these words I was thinking that I had made an end of the discussion," writes Socrates, "but the end, in truth, proved to be only a beginning." Glaucon and Adeimantus want more, much more. They want to know why shouldn't Thrasymachus be right? Why worry that justice is the advantage of the strong if justice itself is suspect. If it isn't a good in itself, there is no reason to prefer it, no matter who defines it or enforces it. Nobody, if granted their every wish, would conform to any standard of justice except their own. Glaucon makes his case in about 2180 words. His brother elaborates in about 2250 words. Theirs is a much more powerful challenge. So Plato devotes the remaining eight and a half books to answering Glaucon and Adeimantus, not Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus is virtually ignored from that point on.

    IMO, Socrates sees the perfect city as a kind of well-oiled machine where everyone has his part and his own narrow area of competency. The philosopher is the only one capable of seeing all those parts as a whole. So it falls on his shoulders to keep the machine running smoothly, perpetually, and safely.

    So Socrates argues the philosopher is, in fact, the strongest, and in this sense the stronger does define justice. But it is not a program of self-interest. It's a program for the interest of the whole even though all are not capable of seeing it. Only the "strong" philosopher can successfully implement it -- through the creation of myths. He does not require the strong-arm tactics of a Nietzschean bully.

    Without the clarification made by Glaucon and his brother, The Republic would have ended with book 1

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  152. Anonymous,

    Cognitive science is by its nature an interdisciplinary subject with philosophy as one principle factor. that's also a fact.

    Okay, let's say someone does create a machine that passes the Touring test. For all practical purposes, we demonstrate we understand cognition because we build it from scratch. Who gets the credit? Those philosophers who have been debating the issue for 2000 years, or those computer scientists who forged their own way and solved it? I say philosophers will not solve the problem. If computer science or neuroscience solves it, they deserve the credit.

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  153. BenYachov,.

    Something that is purely actual could not in principle contain matter.

    As clever as Aristotle was, the universe cares nothing for his principles. He can define them but that is not the same as finding them. If you like, I could rephrase. Aristotle meant to slip in a metaphysical basis of matter through use of a bogus principle.

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  154. djindra, your sad attempts at trying to argue that the scientific method (which was historically credited to philosophical insights) did not contribute to knowledge only proves how insufficiently deficient at reasoning you are.

    The original claim was that philosophers or philosophy has not "contributed one iota" to knowledge. I more than demolished that claim by all the examples I gave and any deficient attempts by you to show otherwise is only exposes your deficient reasoning capabilities.

    The scientific method perhaps contributed more to human knowledge than any single development in human history and thus totally demolishing the claim and your ridiculous attempt at defending it. My other examples also demolish the claim. These facts (both of the demolition of the claim and your incompetent reasoning capabilities) cannot be ignored by those with one iota of sense.

    Again, the claim is that philosophy has not contributed one iota to knowledge. The scientific method was developed by philosophers. It is itself knowledge of how to obtain more knowledge and it has contributed tremendously to knowledge. How wrong can you get?

    Demolished.

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  155. >No, I'm trying to understand the context of the original claim. Of course I understand it's not in your interest to try to do so. It's you who is back-peddling<

    Your constant shifting of the goal post from denying that all the examples I gave constitute any knowledge is seriously fallacious. It is back peddling par excellence as anyone with one iota of critical thinking ability will see. Th "original context" is a comparison of the epistemic value of physics vs philosophy. The physicists made the obviously false claim that philosophy has not contributed one iota to knowledge 9unlike presumably physics) which was ably and conclusively show false my myself and others. All you can do is play these silly word games (methodological knowledge is not knowledge! Cognitive science does not contribute to our knowledge because cognition is unknown!) is sad and pathetic. You only demonstrate the desperate need for philosophy in education with these patently fallacious arguments.

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  156. Anonymous,

    Of course, this is not even the tip of the iceberg with all the knowledge philosophers have provided within other disciplines of philosophy such as metaphysics and ethics and political philosophy.

    Let's say we single out political philosophy. Who exactly contributed "one iota" to knowledge of the world? Locke? Hobbs? Rousseau? Carl Schmitt? Nietzsche? Plato? Machiavelli? Strauss? JS Mill? Marx? Issues of political philosophy are far from settled. Sure, the Iron Curtain has fallen. But we have not reached the "end of ideology" or the "end of history." In some ways there's more polarization today than ever. Some seem to want to forget Locke ever existed and latch their hopes on Aristotle.

    At the risk of being accused of back-peddling, I do not believe every solution is of equal value. I do believe some solutions are far superior to others. But there is no way to prove this through philosophy. Experience is surely the best test of those truths and probably the only test.

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  157. >Who gets the credit? Those philosophers who have been debating the issue for 2000 years, or those computer scientists who forged their own way and solved it? I say philosophers will not solve the problem. If computer science or neuroscience solves it, they deserve the credit.<

    Wrong and wrong again. Philosophers continue, to this day, contribute to solving many problems in cognitive science. Now I am not an expert on cognitive science but I do know that philosophers have contributed immensely to modern cognitive science and its current understanding of many of the cognitive processes and even setting the stage for many of the debates.

    Some of the most influential theories in modern cognitive science originated within debates among cognitive science philosophers first such as the modular theory of mind, the theory theory of mind, the simulation theory of mind, the concept of a "mental language" and probably dozens of other contemporary theories of mind and how it works in various domains.

    As Simon Baron-Cohen has noted in his Mindblindness of the philosopher, Jerry Fodor

    "Fodor (1983)was perhaps the person who gave the most impetus and the most serious consideration in modern psychology to the notion that the mind and the brain have modular organization, and it was he that made this notion acceptable..."

    Alvin Goldman and John Searle, other philosophers are often credited as two of the founders of modern cognitive science.

    Please educate yourself before risking further embarrassing yourself.

    http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/goldman/Research.htm

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  158. @Djindra

    Thanks for demonstrating your ineptitude again. Of course the conversation was kept going. It was kept going to find out why Thrasy was wrong. It was not kept going because others were arguing his position.

    You see, unlike you, I've actually read the Republic.

    Maybe you should try reading sometime. It might help.

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  159. Would it be fair to say that philosophy has been the source of many fruitful ideas and concepts, but that the truth of those ideas and concepts required scientific verification to demonstrate that the world actually operates according to them?

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  160. @dguller:

    Would it be fair to say that philosophy has been the source of many fruitful ideas and concepts, but that the truth of those ideas and concepts required scientific verification to demonstrate that the world actually operates according to them?

    Reply: No.

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  161. dguller said:

    >Would it be fair to say that philosophy has been the source of many fruitful ideas and concepts, but that the truth of those ideas and concepts required scientific verification to demonstrate that the world actually operates according to them?<

    Some claims in philosophy may depend on empirical observation to verify and some disputes in the history of philosophy have been settled just this way. But other claims are like mathematical claims; they are determined by reason alone and sometimes perhaps some personal introspection and experience/observation from personal, everyday contexts (not experimental settings).

    djindra, I hope that you will be able to battle through the smugness and fuzzy thoughts to arrive at a moment of honest clarity to look at these questions objectively.

    1. Has the scientific method (a child of philosophy) contributed one or more iota of knowledge to mankind?

    2. Is methodological knowledge knowledge?

    3. Is knowing logical and other mathematical theorems knowledge?

    4. Has cognitive science contributed one or more iota to our knowledge?

    When you can do that, I think you will have greatly improved your abilities as a rational thinker. Good luck!

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  162. >Would it be fair to say that philosophy has been the source of many fruitful ideas and concepts, but that the truth of those ideas and concepts required scientific verification to demonstrate that the world actually operates according to them?

    Well.....no.

    That's like me pre-agreeing with a Protestant evangelical to treat the Bible as the sole rule of faith. It begs the question.

    Empiricism alone is a philosophy not something you can know or verify empirically. Philosophy always holds the primacy. Of course philosophy alone sans science is equally lame and should be rejected.

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  163. >As clever as Aristotle was, the universe cares nothing for his principles.

    So that's a yes then? You really don't understand the concepts of Form, Matter, Potency, Actuality, Prime Matter, Essence etc from a hole in the head!

    I bet you think the concept of "motion" in Aristotle really deals with physical movement?

    Fess up.

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  164. Anonymous:

    >> Some claims in philosophy may depend on empirical observation to verify and some disputes in the history of philosophy have been settled just this way.

    Exactly right.

    >> But other claims are like mathematical claims; they are determined by reason alone and sometimes perhaps some personal introspection and experience/observation from personal, everyday contexts (not experimental settings).

    First, how many different philosophies are there that claim to be by “reason alone”? How does one differentiate between them and determine which are actually true? What is the agreed-upon method that I can use to test the different philosophical systems for truth?

    Second, in order to know if mathematical claims apply to the world, they must be tested in the world. To determine whether Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry represented the world, measurements in the world were taken, and it was found that the latter was more applicable.

    Third, I would be careful about elevating personal introspection and anecdotes. There is certainly a role for them, but you must be aware of the fact that they are prone to being affected by multiple factors that are almost impossible to detect, such as the influence of chance, cognitive biases and distortions, and other confounding factors. Again, I would advise caution about building a foundation upon such types of information, because it runs the risk of being quite fragile.

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  165. Ben:

    >> Empiricism alone is a philosophy not something you can know or verify empirically. Philosophy always holds the primacy. Of course philosophy alone sans science is equally lame and should be rejected.

    I think people forget that before we have a philosophy, we live in the world in a state of philosophical naïveté. In that original and primate state, we experience the world through our senses, and our senses are, for the most part, veridical. You can call this a philosophy, but it is actually the baseline and default cognitive state of the vast majority of human beings. Now, once you begin to reflect upon this state of affairs, then philosophy begins, but philosophy is definitely not primary.

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  166. "dguller said:

    "First, how many different philosophies are there that claim to be by “reason alone”?"

    Logic probably is the most commonly cited example but metaphysics, philosophy of language all depend on large part on how to analyse concepts and offer appeals to intuition. It's very difficult to settle things this way but work gets done and often arguments get refuted, etc.

    "How does one differentiate between them and determine which are actually true?"

    They offer arguments in favor of something. Take for example a claim that sets out to explain some what knowledge is. Many philosophers once thought knowledge simply is justified true belief but since the 60s, very convincing counter examples that something can be justified true belief and still not be knowledge.


    In ethics, we often wish to have a principle and if that principle is shown that it implies an action in some situation that is clearly immoral, we would have good reason to reject that ethical principle.


    "What is the agreed-upon method that I can use to test the different philosophical systems for truth?"

    Common observations of things and events, coherence and internal consistency, likelihood of compatibility with other accepted theories, philosophical or scientific or common sense etc.

    "Second, in order to know if mathematical claims apply to the world, they must be tested in the world."

    No, not really. There are many mathematically true things that have never been "tested empirically." They are true because they are proven true within some axiomatic system. Some metamathematical truths are proven with additional philosophical "axioms" added such as Godel's first incompleteness proof which adds a "consistency" assumption/axiom.

    "To determine whether Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry represented the world, measurements in the world were taken, and it was found that the latter was more applicable."

    No, both euclidean and non euclidean geometries have their applications. Their truth is altogether is a different matter. Their truth depends on whether certain axioms entail their truth hood. Whether or not they have applications is a different matter all together.

    There are many truths (probably most) in mathematics that have no applications in reality and yet are proven and accepted by mathematicians. Consider Fermat's last theorem and many proofs in number theory have no applications and it doesn't even make sense to "test them empirically."

    "Third, I would be careful about elevating personal introspection and anecdotes."

    I would be too. But sometimes that's the best we have so here we agree.

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  167. >I think people forget that before we have a philosophy, we live in the world in a state of philosophical naïveté.

    So what? Before I can do science and math I must learn how to count. We live in the world in a state of scientific naïveté.

    So what?

    >In that original and primate state, we experience the world through our senses, and our senses are, for the most part, veridical.

    But we need to use our intellects to reason and interpret the meaning of our senses, thus philosophy is still primary to know.

    >You can call this a philosophy, but it is actually the baseline and default cognitive state of the vast majority of human beings.

    Animals have senses without intellect. They do not do philosophy. That gift is unique to mankind. True philosophy begins with the intellect. Not the senses.

    >Now, once you begin to reflect upon this state of affairs, then philosophy begins, but philosophy is definitely not primary.

    Your analysis is backwards. Until we use our intellects and reason we cannot know. Beasts are creatures of mere sensation and they by definition cannot know any truth since the power to know resides in the intellect. Thus philosophy is primary if it is not good luck trying to get a bunch of mindless beasts to do mere empirical science much less metaphysics and advanced philosophy.

    Senses are not primary the intellect is primary otherwise we could not have this discussion and you would have no ability to think up any responses to me.

    Philosophy is the primary natural knowledge.

    Sensation without intellect has no meaning and can disclose no truth.

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  168. Anonymous:

    >> Logic probably is the most commonly cited example but metaphysics, philosophy of language all depend on large part on how to analyse concepts and offer appeals to intuition. It's very difficult to settle things this way but work gets done and often arguments get refuted, etc.

    So, what is the consensus of centuries of discussion by those who use reason alone regarding metaphysical truths?

    >> No, not really. There are many mathematically true things that have never been "tested empirically." They are true because they are proven true within some axiomatic system. Some metamathematical truths are proven with additional philosophical "axioms" added such as Godel's first incompleteness proof which adds a "consistency" assumption/axiom.

    There are mathematical truths, but they pertain to mathematics. If you want to know if a mathematical truth is also an empirical one that describes how the world works, then you have to test it in the world empirically. That’s all I meant, and I don’t think this is particularly controversial.

    >> No, both euclidean and non euclidean geometries have their applications. Their truth is altogether is a different matter. Their truth depends on whether certain axioms entail their truth hood. Whether or not they have applications is a different matter all together.

    Right, but how did you know when Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry was applicable, except by testing to see which works for what situation? You did not know this a priori. I am not talking about which is true in a mathematical sense, but in an empirical sense.

    >> There are many truths (probably most) in mathematics that have no applications in reality and yet are proven and accepted by mathematicians. Consider Fermat's last theorem and many proofs in number theory have no applications and it doesn't even make sense to "test them empirically."

    Agreed. All I am trying to say is that just because something is proven in mathematics as a mathematical truth does not imply that it is also operative in the world as an empirical truth about how the world works.

    >> I would be too. But sometimes that's the best we have so here we agree.

    Agreed.

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  169. Ben:

    >> So what? Before I can do science and math I must learn how to count. We live in the world in a state of scientific naïveté.

So what?

    Because THAT is what we take for granted as the world that we experience, and that is the default state from which we all begin. If the default state is totally wrong – not partially wrong, which is actually true – then anything derived from it is equally wrong. It is a reductio ad absurdum proof against skepticism. You cannot cut the branch that you are sitting on while expecting to stay at the same level. No, you will fall, and it will hurt.

    >> But we need to use our intellects to reason and interpret the meaning of our senses, thus philosophy is still primary to know.

    Take the following example. I hear raindrops in the other room hitting a window. I wonder whether it is, in fact, raining. I reason that I should get up to look just to make sure, because I need to know in order to plan my day. So, I get up and look, and see that it is not raining. Instead, the sprinkler is accidentally washing the window with water.

    Was that philosophy? Or was it an everyday use of reason and experience to solve a problem. And when does this become philosophy? I think that the everyday use of reason and experience is primary, and philosophy is an extension of this everyday activity, perhaps in a similar way that science is an extension of a similar activity. After all, science and philosophy were, at some time, identical. However, with a shift in emphasis and technique, they diverged. None of this changes the fact that they are rooted in an everyday process of engaging in inquiry.

    >> Animals have senses without intellect. They do not do philosophy. That gift is unique to mankind. True philosophy begins with the intellect. Not the senses.

    “True philosophy begins with the intellect”. And the intellect is something we use PRIOR to engaging in philosophy. I disagree that any time we use our intellect or reason, we are engaging in philosophy. Philosophy is a specific type of use of our intellect, as is science.

    >> Your analysis is backwards. Until we use our intellects and reason we cannot know. Beasts are creatures of mere sensation and they by definition cannot know any truth since the power to know resides in the intellect. Thus philosophy is primary if it is not good luck trying to get a bunch of mindless beasts to do mere empirical science much less metaphysics and advanced philosophy.

    Again, you are assuming that whenever we use our intellect and reason, we are automatically philosophizing. I think that in our everyday life we are not. That is how we can continue to live in the world despite being puzzled by philosophical paradoxes about whether it exists or not. The default state returns as soon as the exposure to philosophy has passed.

    I think that the big difference between us is that I think we have reason and intellect, and you think we have Reason and Intellect. The latter, whatever they are, are parasitic upon the former, I think.

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  170. Nick,

    I know The Republic very well. I've read it three times in the last year. Your inept reply to me demonstrates you have no idea what is in the work. Typically of the ignorant, you merely assert my unfamiliarity and then make no attempt to provide evidence of your own.

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  171. Anonymous,

    Philosophers continue, to this day, contribute to solving many problems in cognitive science.

    What problems have been solved? Did you bother to follow your own links? In order to make your case, you have to first demonstrate any problem has been "solved" by anyone. Then you have to demonstrate philosophy has contributed to solving that problem. Your links do neither. They do show speculation.

    Btw, I'm approaching this issue raised by "Seraphim" as a kind of devil's advocate. I'm not as dismissive of philosophy as he is. But I'm not very far from his position either.

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  172. Further to what djindra said, the origin of an idea is irrelevant to its truth, otherwise one commits the genetic fallacy. So, just because an idea that ended up being true was initially conceived by philosophers does not mean that they have a special insight or skill into uncovering the truth. How did we find out whether that philosopher’s idea was true? By testing it scientifically in the world. The true solution to the problem occurred after it was confirmed in the world by empirical observation. Before that, it was a hypothesis in need of verification, irrespective of the elaborate rational arguments that buttressed it.

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  173. @dguller

    At this point my friend I think we are talking past each other because I don't understand anymore what you are really saying?

    Are you an empiricist or aren't you? Do you accept Hume or do you reject him? Because it was my understanding Empiricists like hume reject rationalism.

    OTOH I do remember you saying somewhere you are not a classic empiricist?

    >Again, you are assuming that whenever we use our intellect and reason, we are automatically philosophizing.

    Pretty much yeh that is my understanding of what Philosophy is in the default mode.

    We are talking past each other.

    Thus my advice is you read Feser's books come back and then we will have some common ground for discussion.

    Cheer man.

    I enjoyed reading your responses. Didn't agree with them but I admire you taking the time to learn(unlike some people who shall remain nameless).

    Cheers man!

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  174. Djindra.

    What needs to be said? That the question continued to be asked is not debated. What is debated is who was putting forth and supporting the original proposition that injustice is better than justice. That was Thrasymachus.

    Counting words does not establish that.

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  175. >So, what is the consensus of centuries of discussion by those who use reason alone regarding metaphysical truths?<

    There are too many to name. But here is one very famous example.

    Some philosophers have proposed that all truth is relative to persons who hold beliefs. Plato's version of Protageras is one such example. But notice that the view is self-refuting. Such a view must also be relative to Protageras or whoever makes it and it would have no import for actual philosophical views of others which it purports to say something about.


    Pascal's wager has also been refuted because it does not square well with our present day notions of infinity (of which is a mathematical truth which is obtained by reason and not by empirical observation).

    The negation of these views are thus true and accepted and they have been refuted through the use of reason by showing things like internal inconsistencies or inconsistencies with logic or mathematics (not with empirical findings etc).

    assumption/axiom.

    >There are mathematical truths, but they pertain to mathematics. If you want to know if a mathematical truth is also an empirical one that describes how the world works, then you have to test it in the world empirically. That’s all I meant, and I don’t think this is particularly controversial.<

    Mathematical truths are mathematical, not of the physical world and capable of observation so we will not be able to "test" them empirically by conducting experiments, etc. We prove them using logical inference. Something can be true in mathematics and yet have no relation to anything in the world and yet it is as true as anything else.


    >Right, but how did you know when Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry was applicable, except by testing to see which works for what situation?<

    Like I said, you are confusing application with truth. Something can be true in mathematics and yet have no application to anything in physical science or mathematics. Something can also be applicable and yet not true. For example, we now know that Newton and Leibniz's early interpretation of the infinitesimal calculus was seriously flawed (false) but it was still a very useful and applicable approach to modeling physical phenomenon. These flaws associated with the foundations of calculus were later fixed (by Karl Weirstrass and others) but it did not affect their use in modeling the physical phenomenon they were designed to model in Newtons time because the relevant parts that were modified were irrelevant to its accuracy in describing the world. Calculus was equally useful in describing reality when it was false as when it was true. Applicability to be used in physical theories and truth are two very different things.

    >You did not know this a priori. I am not talking about which is true in a mathematical sense, but in an empirical sense.<

    Mathematics is not true or false in an "empirical sense." It makes NO SENSE to say whether a mathematical truth is true in an empirical sense. .


    >Agreed. All I am trying to say is that just because something is proven in mathematics as a mathematical truth does not imply that it is also operative in the world as an empirical truth about how the world works.<

    Again, you are confusing now "truth" with "operative in the world." Remember, this argument was originally about truth of logical, mathematical and metaphysical claims, not whether they can be made to be "operative" "in the world" whatever that means. Whether or not they are operative or "applicable" to some physical science theory is about their *use* and appropriateness, not their truth. Usefulness and truth are two very different animals.

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  176. djindra said...

    "What problems have been solved?"


    Like I said, I am not an expert on cog science but I already gave examples. OTOH, you seem unable to answer any of the questions I raised showing that what seraphim said and what you tried to defend is 100% false.




    Did you bother to follow your own links? In order to make your case, you have to first demonstrate any problem has been "solved" by anyone. Then you have to demonstrate philosophy has contributed to solving that problem. Your links do neither. They do show speculation.

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  177. Ben:

    >> OTOH I do remember you saying somewhere you are not a classic empiricist?

    Nope, I’m not. There are more empiricisms than are dreamt of in your philosophies.

    >> Pretty much yeh that is my understanding of what Philosophy is in the default mode.

    Well, then I disagree. When I reason that my brother has arrived home, because I hear his voice down the hall, then I am not engaging in philosophy. If I further reflect on why hearing his voice is a justification of the belief that he is home, then that is philosophy. It is a higher-order form of reasoning and reflection, but the first-order is just garden variety figuring something out. But anyway, maybe we are just arguing semantics.

    >> I enjoyed reading your responses. Didn't agree with them but I admire you taking the time to learn(unlike some people who shall remain nameless).

    Ditto. Take care.

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  178. Anonymous:

    >> Some philosophers have proposed that all truth is relative to persons who hold beliefs. Plato's version of Protageras is one such example. But notice that the view is self-refuting. Such a view must also be relative to Protageras or whoever makes it and it would have no import for actual philosophical views of others which it purports to say something about.

    So, there are no relativists in philosophy? They are automatically excluded from philosophical journals and conferences, because their views have been rejected by the consensus of philosophers?

    >> Pascal's wager has also been refuted because it does not square well with our present day notions of infinity (of which is a mathematical truth which is obtained by reason and not by empirical observation).

    So, I will not find any philosopher publishing a defense of Pascal’s wager in a journal or published by a reputable scholarly publisher?

    >> Mathematical truths are mathematical, not of the physical world and capable of observation so we will not be able to "test" them empirically by conducting experiments, etc. We prove them using logical inference. Something can be true in mathematics and yet have no relation to anything in the world and yet it is as true as anything else.

    I agree. Of course, the next question is if there are mathematical truths that do not relate in any way to the world, then who cares about them, and what positive impact could they have?

    >> Like I said, you are confusing application with truth.

    No, I am not. I agree with you that mathematical truth and mathematical application are distinct. The dilemma that I have is regarding a truth that does not describe how the universe works at all. I have no problem with mathematical truths that actually help us understand ourselves and the world, but the other class of mathematical truths are another thing altogether. I especially have a problem with the idea that these mathematical truths are somehow about immaterial ontological entities that transcend the universe.

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  179. Anonymous:

    >> Mathematics is not true or false in an "empirical sense." It makes NO SENSE to say whether a mathematical truth is true in an empirical sense. .

    Sure it does. All it means is that a mathematical truth is applicable to the empirical world. We know, for a fact, that it is not just speculation or manipulation of symbols, but rather is grounded in the universe, and thus real.

    Imagine that I have a hypothesis about some empirical phenomena. The hypothesis is internally consistent, and logically consistent with known facts about the world. However, until I test it in the world, I do not know if it is true. I do not see the problem in treating mathematical truths in the same way. I do not consider them true, in the sense of accurately representing the way the world is, until they can be tested in the world. Until then, they are logically and mathematically consistent and coherent, but not true in my sense.

    Another way to look at it is to imagine the Harry Potter books. They are internally consistent, and logically flow from the premises within that fictional universe. However, are they true in the sense of accurately representing our world? No. I would say the same is the case for mathematical truths.

    Any thoughts?

    >> Again, you are confusing now "truth" with "operative in the world."

    Wow. How can I be confused about a distinction that I explicitly mentioned?

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  180. BenYachov,

    I bet you think the concept of "motion" in Aristotle really deals with physical movement?

    We cannot look at the same rock twice... Change can be a painfully slow journey, but it is happening nonetheless..., etc. Do you consider stuff like this to be profound? How are you going to get from this mundane trivia about "actuality" and "potentiality" to anything of relevance?

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  181. Anonymous.

    Has the scientific method (a child of philosophy) contributed one or more iota of knowledge to mankind?

    This is an odd question. Of course the scientific method has contributed to our knowledge. That's the issue. Science, by using its method has advanced knowledge. Philosophy (that's not science), by using remaining methods, has a poor record -- possibly no record. I'm aware that science is the abandoned child of philosophy. I've mentioned twice that science may be the only philosophy remaining.

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  182. Nick,

    I'll be generous and assume you've read The Republic recently and carefully. So I have to assume we read the text differently. I don't see how you could read it differently. I think it's quite obvious that Socrates spends his time tackling the issues raised by the brothers, and that my position is uncontroversial. Nevertheless, honest differences of opinion happen.

    This goes back to what I wrote above somewhere. I know The Republic fairly well. I don't know Aquinas all that well. He simply does not interest me much. So I tend to read those writers who do interest me. But simply telling me I do not understand him is not enough. The implication is that if I read him I would understand him as you do. That does not happen very often. I could read Aquinas as much as anyone here and still think he has been badly misinterpreted or misused. That's why I prefer to know what a person's own opinion is rather than their interpretation of another's opinion.

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  183. dguller,

    When I reason that my brother has arrived home, because I hear his voice down the hall, then I am not engaging in philosophy.

    Exactly. A philosopher might be inclined to prove you could be wrong, and that therefore you have no basis to believe your brother is home.

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  184. @djindra

    >We cannot look at the same rock twice...

    That Heraclitus loser not Aristole. You really don't know anything of classic philosophy from a hole in the head do ya?

    >Do you consider stuff like this to be profound?

    That is a pretty bold claim coming from someone who admits in the next post "I don't know Aquinas all that well.".

    Thus you can't comment with any authority and your opinion is meaningless to those of us who have done at least some study of the matter. Your pretending otherwise is not only tedious but it's insulting.

    >How are you going to get from this mundane trivia about "actuality" and "potentiality" to anything of relevance?

    You could think for youself for once. Read Dr. Feser's book and learn for yourself. Or you can just believe uncritically everything Steve Harris tells you for the rest of your life.

    It's up to you.

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  185. dguller said:

    >So, there are no relativists in philosophy?<

    Of course their are. But that is not the consensus view in the philosophy of science.

    http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/consensus



    >They are automatically excluded from philosophical journals and conferences, because their views have been rejected by the consensus of philosophers?<

    No. Read above.



    >So, I will not find any philosopher publishing a defense of Pascal’s wager in a journal or published by a reputable scholarly publisher?<

    No one defends Pascal's wager as sound as far as I am aware. There is some disagreement whether or not it is even valid (see the wiki on the difference between soundness and validity). Now even if there were a few that thought Pascal is right that still doesn't show that it is the consensus view. Just as there are scientists who hold unconventional views today on just about everything, that still doesn't show that there is no consensus.


    >I agree. Of course, the next question is if there are mathematical truths that do not relate in any way to the world, then who cares about them, and what positive impact could they have?<

    They tell us about truth and reality of the *mathematical world* and that furthers knowledges which is a good in itself. You might disagree but mathematicians and philosophers don't really care about your views.



    >No, I am not. I agree with you that mathematical truth and mathematical application are distinct.<

    Umm... no you keep doing so and continue to do so. Just by denying it don't make it magically disappear.

    >The dilemma that I have is regarding a truth that does not describe how the universe works at all.<

    What is so special about describing the "universe" as opposed to describing the mathematical universe? Both are good for their own sake. Now if you say that describing the concrete universe helps with technology then the reply is that there are some physical theories taht will likely never have applications to technology. It will never help us build better toasters, ipods etc. But know them is its own reward. Many math truths will likely never find applications. That doesn't mean they are not worth knowing for their own good.

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  186. djindra said:

    This is an odd question. Of course the scientific method has contributed to our knowledge. That's the issue. Science, by using its method has advanced knowledge. Philosophy (that's not science), by using remaining methods, has a poor record -- possibly no record. <

    The original issue is whether or not philosophy has contributed to knowledge. I gave a bunch of examples that destroyed seraphim's claim that it has not and your defense of it.

    The scientific method has contributed to knowledge. Logic and math developed by philosophers have contributed to knowledge. All the sciences that were originally philosophical disciplines have. Cog science have. There is no more need to beat a dead horse that been pulverized.

    What is more interesting is your subsequent attempt at trying to fallaciously cover up the evidence of that wholly thorough refutation by red herrings and word games. That was quite entertaining. Your ultimate back peddle in a last ditch attempt by saying that you don't agree actually with that claim but was simply playing "devil's advocate" (good one!) after realizing the hopelessness of defending it is the icing on the cake.

    Thanks for the laughs.

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  187. Anonmyous:

    >> Of course their are. But that is not the consensus view in the philosophy of science.

    Oh, I was asking about philosophy, period. And how do you know what the consensus view is in the philosophy of science? Is there a top philosophy of science journal or publishing house that refuses to publish relativist positions?

    >> They tell us about truth and reality of the *mathematical world* and that furthers knowledges which is a good in itself. You might disagree but mathematicians and philosophers don't really care about your views.

    First, how do you know that such a mathematical world exists?

    Second, if there can be such a world, then is there also a Harry Potter world?

    >> Umm... no you keep doing so and continue to do so. Just by denying it don't make it magically disappear.

    No, I don’t. There are clearly mathematical truths that are perfectly valid within the purview of mathematics. However, there is a subset of mathematical truths that are also applicable and descriptive of the empirical world. What I deny is that mathematical truths are necessarily about an external mathematical reality that exists independently of ourselves. I can affirm that the mathematics that describes the universe can exist independently in some sense, because the universe appears to operate according to those principles, but the rest of it is as real to me as Harry Potter. Oh, and there are truths about Harry Potter, relative to his fictional universe.

    >> What is so special about describing the "universe" as opposed to describing the mathematical universe? Both are good for their own sake. Now if you say that describing the concrete universe helps with technology then the reply is that there are some physical theories taht will likely never have applications to technology. It will never help us build better toasters, ipods etc. But know them is its own reward. Many math truths will likely never find applications. That doesn't mean they are not worth knowing for their own good.

    I never said that they weren’t worth knowing. I mean, if there were no pure mathematicians pursuing their interests, then many mathematical theorems and applications to the world would never have occurred. My point is that unless a mathematical truth can be shown to be demonstrative of something in the universe, then it is only true in the sense that “Harry Potter is a wizard” is true within the fictional universe of those books. In other words, within the idealized assumptions that make up mathematics, the theorems are true, but it does not refer to an independently existing mathematical reality, no more than Harry Potter refers to an independently existing fictional reality.

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  188. Anonymous,

    You have "destroyed" Seraphim's position by essentially agreeing with it. The only cases you have presented where philosophers might have added anything at all to knowledge about the world is when those philosophers put on the scientist's or mathematician's hat. Otherwise you have made unsupported assertions of knowledge which simply isn't there -- like ethics.

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  189. BenYachov,

    That Heraclitus loser not Aristotle. You really don't know anything of classic philosophy from a hole in the head do ya?

    Well, duh! You really don't understand historical influences, do you?

    That is a pretty bold claim coming from someone who admits in the next post "I don't know Aquinas all that well.".

    That assumes there's anything to understand. Based on the side-stepping around here, I've got to assume there is nothing to understand. Everyone seems afraid to make the case for Aquinas. They will generously make the case for anything else, but on Aquinas they are suspiciously silent. Evidently it's a "secret wisdom," which is to say, a mystical dogma.

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  190. @djindra

    >Well, duh! You really don't understand historical influences, do you?

    So you are admitting here you don't understand Aristotle in your confusing him with the ideas of Heraclitus?

    Well that is some progress.

    >That assumes there's anything to understand.

    Which is the same reply as a Young Earth Creationist who says "There isn't anything to understand in evolution".

    >Based on the side-stepping around here, I've got to assume there is nothing to understand.

    Project much? dguller an Atheist who is the bipolar opposite to you has been asking questions. Interacting & learning something about what we believe and the reasons behind it.

    He doesn't agree with us & he might never agree for all we know. But at least his disbelief in our views will come from a position of knowledge.

    His success is rooted in that he up front admits "I don't understand Thomistic or Aristotelian and how it shows there is a God. Why do you believe any of this?"

    Your faking it & pretending you know it all or that it's too beneath you to learn about it is tedious at this point.

    >Everyone seems afraid to make the case for Aquinas.

    Since when did you ask anyone here too? There doing alright by dguller.

    Later wannabe.

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  191. >First, how do you know that such a mathematical world exists?<

    This is a controversial area (unlike some of my other examples). We don't know but read here.

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/

    >Second, if there can be such a world, then is there also a Harry Potter world? <

    The Potter worlds is a possible world. SOme philosophers have defended the reality of possible worlds. See David Lewis's work.


    >> Umm... no you keep doing so and continue to do so. Just by denying it don't make it magically disappear.

    >No, I don’t. There are clearly mathematical truths that are perfectly valid within the purview of mathematics.<

    Then I am afraid that you are deeply confused. I was talking about truth of mathematics and you responded to my post saying that mathematical claims must be tested against the world for truth much as physical theories. Now you are saying that you didn't really mean that but simply meant that mathematical claims don't need to be tested for truth in the concrete world but whether or not they are applicable to use in physical theories, etc. That's a different issue as I have shown. So right off the bat, it seems that you have equivocated and misunderstood what I said.


    >What I deny is that mathematical truths are necessarily about an external mathematical reality that exists independently of ourselves.<

    First of all, that another issue again. You keep conflating different issues. Denying the existence of a real mathematical world is called anti realism about mathematics or anti platonism. So first you conflate truth with use or application and now you conflate all of the above with the harry issues with platonism. Now I actually agree with you that strictly speaking, mathematical objects don't exists "for real" independently of minds. Consider chess. It has rules. One either follows them or violates them when playing the game. It makes no sense to ask if we can "test" the rules to see if it "fits" the "real world". The rules are either correct in its own fictional world or not. They are correct when they are allowed by the internal rules of the game, not whether or not they correspond to some part of physical reality. To ask whether these rules are "real" or mind independent is another question. I don't think they are but that is an irrelevant issue.


    I can affirm that the mathematics



    >I never said that they weren’t worth knowing.<

    Again, you seem to be confused again. You said:

    "Of course, the next question is if there are mathematical truths that do not relate in any way to the world, then who cares about them, and what positive impact could they have?"

    I simply answered that question (your question) with that they are worth knowing in themselves much as some physical theories are worth knowing for knowledge's sake even if they will never have applications to technology etc.

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  192. The logic of djindra:

    By denying the claim that philosophy has not "contributed one iota of knowledge" through providng damning counter examples (which djindra could not respond to) I have "agreed" with him.

    The bottom line: The scientific method has contributed more than one iota to knowledge and since the method is a product of philosophical investigation, philosophy has contributed. Methodological knowledge is knowledge. The sciences spawned by philosophy has contributed more than one iota to knowledge. Logic has contributed one or more iota to knowledge and logic is also a branch of philosophy.

    You have miserably failed at any attempt to defend seraphims ridiculous claim against these counter examples.

    What more could be obvious?

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  193. Anonymous:

    >> The Potter worlds is a possible world. SOme philosophers have defended the reality of possible worlds. See David Lewis's work.

    How is Harry Potter a possible world, except in the sense that we can imagine it? Is that all it takes? If X is imaginable, then X is possible? If you want to go that route, then you might as well jettison Aristotle and Aquinas, because I doubt that they would say that an acorn could possibly become a human being. I mean, I can imagine it, especially if Harry Potter did it, but that does not make it a real possibility. It is just fantasy.

    >> Then I am afraid that you are deeply confused.

    It wouldn’t be the first time.

    >> I was talking about truth of mathematics and you responded to my post saying that mathematical claims must be tested against the world for truth much as physical theories. Now you are saying that you didn't really mean that but simply meant that mathematical claims don't need to be tested for truth in the concrete world but whether or not they are applicable to use in physical theories, etc. That's a different issue as I have shown. So right off the bat, it seems that you have equivocated and misunderstood what I said.

    I think that I have made myself clear. Mathematical theorems can be considered true within the assumptions and rules of mathematics. Similarly, Harry Potter can be considered true within the assumptions and rules of his fictional universe. My question is whether this sense of “true” is what is important to you. Does the fact that it is true that Harry Potter wears glasses make you feel like you have touched a deeper reality? Probably not, because you clearly recognize him as a fictional character. And why is that? Because there is no evidence that he really exists in the world.

    I would make the same point about mathematical theorems. Yes, they are true relative to mathematics, but that does not make them TRUE. What would make them true is whether they accurately represent how the world works, which many theorems actually do, and I would happily call them true. The rest are hypotheses that may be true relative to mathematical assumptions and rules, but that is not what I mean by “true” at all.

    I mean, any hypothesis is true relative to the assumptions that led up to it. The hypothesis that vaccines cause autism is true relative to the observation that the symptoms of autism begin to appear after some vaccines, that autism rates have gone up since vaccines have increased, and so on. But that does not matter. What matters is that when this hypothesis is tested in the world, it is false, no matter what assumptions and observations justified its postulation.

    So yes, I suppose you could say that I am equivocating, but that is because I want to bring out different senses of “true”. If you are happy to accept something as true if and only if it fits within a set of assumptions, then that is your business, but you will be stuck with relativism of a nasty sort. What breaks this process is determining whether something is true in the world. That is the only truth that really matters, at least to me.

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  194. >> Now I actually agree with you that strictly speaking, mathematical objects don't exists "for real" independently of minds. Consider chess. It has rules. One either follows them or violates them when playing the game. It makes no sense to ask if we can "test" the rules to see if it "fits" the "real world". The rules are either correct in its own fictional world or not. They are correct when they are allowed by the internal rules of the game, not whether or not they correspond to some part of physical reality. To ask whether these rules are "real" or mind independent is another question. I don't think they are but that is an irrelevant issue.

    Good, then we agree. The only thing I would add is that the difference between chess and mathematics is that mathematics has been enormously useful to actually understand how the world works. That makes it is easy for some to take this fact as justification that mathematics inherently probes the underlying necessity of the universe, or something as grandiose. Perhaps you do not share this perspective, and I’m glad that you don’t, but I was speaking of others here who do. I apologize if I was arguing through you to someone else. My only point, which now we agree upon, is that mathematical truths do not describe an independent and transcendent reality, and that their truth is relative to mathematical assumptions and rules. The only important kind of mathematical truth is one that is applicable to assist in understanding the world.

    >> I simply answered that question (your question) with that they are worth knowing in themselves much as some physical theories are worth knowing for knowledge's sake even if they will never have applications to technology etc.

    You are right. I was wrong and misspoke.

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  195. BenYachov,

    So you are admitting here you don't understand Aristotle in your confusing him with the ideas of Heraclitus?

    Lighten up. You bet me that I think the concept of "motion" in Aristotle really deals with physical movement. I called that bet with a bit of humor. Sitting rock... Aristotle's "motion"... get it?

    Maybe not. I thought your wit was sharper. But I guess I need to spell it out.

    No, I don't believe Aristotle's concept of motion is strictly about physical movement. The fact that change is also "motion" is not exactly Aristotle's most creative moment. There's no need to read Aristotle to grasp this concept. The idea had well-known roots.

    Your faking it & pretending you know it all or that it's too beneath you to learn about it is tedious at this point.

    That characterization of me is your invention. I never claimed to know it all. I never suggested I'm unwilling to learn. I'm suggesting nobody here knows it all and most here are unwilling to learn. I suggest you accept dogma as truth and blame me for doubting its holy origin.

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  196. Anonymous,

    The scientific method has contributed more than one iota to knowledge and since the method is a product of philosophical investigation, philosophy has contributed.

    That's what I mean. You agree with Seraphim. Philosophy contributes only when it does so through science. That was his position. Do you denying it was his position? There's no point in me responding to your examples which contribute to Seraphim's position. But I have responded to your lame claims that philosophy has contributed to "knowledge" in cognitive science. It hasn't. It's speculated. You seem to grasp onto the hope that speculation will pass for knowledge. It won't.

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  197. dguller said:

    >How is Harry Potter a possible world, except in the sense that we can imagine it? Is that all it takes? If X is imaginable, then X is possible? If you want to go that route, then you might as well jettison Aristotle and Aquinas, because I doubt that they would say that an acorn could possibly become a human being. I mean, I can imagine it, especially if Harry Potter did it, but that does not make it a real possibility. It is just fantasy. <

    That's all that is generally meant by "possible." Many philosophers use that term loosely and I meant nothing serious and relevant by using it that way.

    >My question is whether this sense of “true” is what is important to you. <

    Both are "important" in their own ways. Mathematics, though true in a quasi sense in my opinion (though others have good reasons to disagree) is still more important than trivial and arbitrary institutions of formal rules like chess because math is so general that it makes sense to learn its "truths" because it says something about the nature of what it means to be rational in general.

    >What would make them true is whether they accurately represent how the world works, which many theorems actually do, and I would happily call them true. The rest are hypotheses that may be true relative to mathematical assumptions and rules, but that is not what I mean by “true” at all.<

    I disagree. It would make the physical theories true in that case, not the math. That parts is proven within the mathematical system. Einstein's theory of relativity is independent of the math used to model it. In fact, there is a way to use a formal system of rules which make no mention of numbers which is equally adept at modeling relativity. Proving the physical theory (depends on empirical observation) and the math used in it (depends on non empirical considerations) are two different things.

    >What breaks this process is determining whether something is true in the world. That is the only truth that really matters, at least to me.>

    I don't think it will lead to relativism much as the truths of biology being different from the truths of physics does not lead to it. They just relate to different domains of investigation.
    >The only thing I would add is that the difference between chess and mathematics is that mathematics has been enormously useful to actually understand how the world works. <

    That's exactly why some philosophers think that there is good reason to believe that there is a mind independent math world filled with abstracta such as sets and whatnot. I think that this is false because mathematics usefulness us is due to its general nature and that there is bound to find some use of it. Now most of it probably is not useful for physical theories and are like chess in that regard.

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  198. >No, I don't believe Aristotle's concept of motion is strictly about physical movement.

    Well why didn't you just plainly say so?

    >The fact that change is also "motion" is not exactly Aristotle's most creative moment.

    Rather it was part of a brilliant response to the views of Parmedies and Heraclitus. Your sneering at it is not an intellectual response and is not justified.

    >There's no need to read Aristotle to grasp this concept. The idea had well-known roots.

    The concept of change is not relevant. It is the meaning of change. Both Parmedies and Heraclitus taught change was unreal. Aristotle made change safe for Realism.

    You didn't know that?

    >That characterization of me is your invention.

    You can't even answer a straight question can you?

    > I never claimed to know it all. I never suggested I'm unwilling to learn.

    You have only spend this whole thread poo pooing philosophy and refusing to own up to the fact you don't understand Aristotle yet you feel that gives you license to dismiss him?

    You don't have to believe in God to recognize Aristotle was a Genius. Ayn Rand called him the most brilliant philosopher of all time.

    >I'm suggesting nobody here knows it all and most here are unwilling to learn.

    You projecting your own faults here on others. It's not convincing.

    >I suggest you accept dogma as truth and blame me for doubting its holy origin.

    The fact you conflate Aristole's metaphysics with religious dogma is even further proof you don't know what you are talking.

    You characterization of me is your invention.

    Typical Gnu Atheist hypocrite.

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