am feeling puzzled by things tonight. the world hangs together, and obviously sight gives us real information, and the world of the senses is not a lie, but what makes it all hang together?
I am convinced, but cannot prove, that time does not exist. I mean that I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about nature, that makes no use of the notions of space and time at the fundamental level. And that this way of thinking will turn out to be the useful and convincing one.
I think that the notions of space and time will turn out to be useful only within some approximation. They are similar to a notion like "the surface of the water" which looses meaning when we describe the dynamics of the individual atoms forming water and air: if we look at very small scale, there isn't really any actual surface down there. I am convinced space and time are like the surface of the water: convenient macroscopic approximations, flimsy but illusory and insufficient screens that our mind uses to organize reality....
you can twist yourself into as many intellectual contortions as you want but you cannot ever REALLY trump Common Sense. Now common sense tells us that time DOES exist. Carlo Rovelli just has a too high IQ...
I dont think that you can say that Common sense tells us that ime exists - habit and experience might, but they in themselves are subjective anyway.
Me, I believe that the universe is continually regenerated, rebooted every millisecond. Have you ever had the experiece late at night when you are lying in bed, and at the same time you hear the timber-framing contract and crack, your body produces an involuntary movement? This is the energy being redistibuted...
I can't speak for the author but it seems to me that your common sense is different than my own and any 'agreed upon' system is just an arrangement of knowledge...be it formal or informal. Menken tends to speak in generalizations so i would assume (bad word, i know, especially in the terms of this thread) he is being rather bleak, that is...time being a construct of the human brain as is place...hence the 'we'...but as you and others have stated here, John...even that 'construct' may be penetrable theory.
i would think, cyn, that if sight is phenomenological reciprocity then you would then, in fact, have to believe what you 'see'...and with that we're back to Rovelli's quote regarding the layers of understanding...the water's surface 'isn't'.
I think tomorrow morning I'll go for a walk for an hour or so and pick up garbage. I respect you, cyn & instrumentOFaction, for your questing. the path to the truth is dialogue...
well, you can't have sight without the thing seen. does that mean that you have to belief what you see? maybe you could interpret it differently. always against background and context.
can i ask another naive question? what do newborns see? they are clearly born with sight right? but their experience or lack thereof makes comprehension through sight not possible. perhaps corrupted by experience, parents, society, etc...informs our sight, so sight is a construct, a fabrication of biased experiences?
OK, that notion of "the surface of the water", which isn't really a surface, infected my dreams lat night. Reminds me of the fact - the physical fact - that glass is not a solid at all, it is a liquid that just moves very, very slowly.
Everything actually moves - one of our seminars at Cranbrook was about the difficulty we face as architects trying to pin everything down in space - which of course is constantly moving. Surveying equipment that places the corners of our buildings doesn't really account for the curvature of the earth. The apparent stability and fixity of a column doesn't really account for two facts: that the planet is hurtling through space at 15 miles per second, and that the column is made up of material in motion - most basically either living wood, or stone, in a constant state of decay, or any other material that on a molecular level is composed of atomic particles that we can't locate because they always move.
So given this living, writhing, flexing material mass within which we live as a starting point, it is easy for me to make the leap that our notions of a fixed, stable, and linear world are based on habit and a need to simplify our understanding of things so we can just get on with living in it.
So the leap that time is NOT just a simple linear trajectory is also easy for me. This notion of the world continually rebooting, millisecond by millisecond, and we only percieve at any one time the one momentary situation in which our conciousness resides, seems pretty possible. That's also why we get deja-vu, despite what the Matrix posits on that topic.
As if this post wasn't long (and nonsensical) enough already, let me bring the notion of sight, esepecially of a newborn as iOf brought up, into this worldview. The moment my newborn son, fresh and bloody into the world, laid eyes on me, and I said "Hello" - the look in his eyes was recognition. Dismiss this as a mother's projections if you like. But I know that he looked at me as if to say, "ah ha, there she is". Certainly my voice, which he had heard in utero for months, played a part in his recognition, but combined with his ability to see my eyes, in that instant he learned that his haptic senses could bring him knowledge and help him "fix" his place in this world.
As we get older, we learn that haptic senses aren't the only things on which we can rely for knowledge, and that often those haptic senses are actively unreliable.
There is a surface to water. The cohesive forces between liquid molecules are responsible for the phenomenon known as surface tension. The molecules at the surface do not have other like molecules on all sides of them and consequently they cohere more strongly to those directly associated with them on the surface. This forms a surface "film" which makes it more difficult to move an object through the surface than to move it when it is completely submersed.
Glass can not be accurately described as a liquid. In terms of molecular dynamics and thermodynamics it is possible to justify various different views that glass is a highly viscous liquid, an amorphous solid, or simply that glass is another state of matter which is neither liquid nor solid. The difference is semantic. In terms of its material properties we can do little better. There is no clear definition of the distinction between solids and highly viscous liquids. All such phases or states of matter are idealisations of real material properties. Nevertheless, from a more common sense point of view, glass should be considered a solid since it is rigid according to every day experience. The use of the term "supercooled liquid" to describe glass still persists, but is considered by many to be an unfortunate misnomer that should be avoided. In any case, claims that glass panes in old windows have deformed due to glass flow have never been substantiated. Examples of Roman glassware and calculations based on measurements of glass visco-properties indicate that these claims cannot be true. The observed features are more easily explained as a result of the imperfect methods used to make glass window panes before the float glass process was invented.
an excerpt:
"4 months; Your baby's beginning to develop depth perception. Until now, it was tough for him to locate an object's position, size, and shape, then get a message from his brain to his hand to reach out and grasp it. At 4 months, he has both the motor development to handle the task and the maturity in his brain circuitry to coordinate all the moves needed to accomplish it.
5 months; Your baby is getting better at spotting very small items and tracking moving objects. He may even be able to recognize something after seeing only part of it. This is evidence of his budding understanding of object permanence (knowing that things exist even when he can't see them at the moment), which is why he loves to play peek-a-boo."
object permanence....hmmm...while the basic sense of sight is prepared at birth, the knowledge that things exist is not readily apparent, although this is a chemical brain development and not so much an ocular one...nor is it situational.
although proper attentive parenting would certainly help, it isn't scientifically necessary for a baby to be visually stimulated in order to grasp this knowledge...it only speeds development and understanding. So, it seems to me (not a parent, btw but i did stay in a holiday inn express last night;-) that you are correct beta...the development of sight itself isn't based on comprehension but the use of sight as a tool is.
...if tools are indicative of a culture's understanding of their surroundings (archeologically speaking) then sight is just another tool used to grasp, understand and complicate the surroundings of modern man. it was not until man was able to overcome and master the basic necessities of daily life to stay alive that he began to attempt to understand or place meaning on his world.
What I find interesting and pertinent to this discussion is how the evolution of man's brain developed parallel to their understanding of the world. Did the evolution of their problems open the next door to understanding or was it exposure to the unknown that spawned great development in the realms of faith, religion, poetry, art, science and philosophy? It could be argued that this is constantly occurring and we never outgrow our problems...always creating new ones to conquer...hence this thread...never completing a journey we don't want to end.
instrumentOFaction - sorry, I misread, it was actually betadine that posted about newborns, as you address.
Your sentence "It could be argued that this is constantly occurring and we never outgrow our problems...always creating new ones to conquer...hence this thread" reminds me of a story that has always stuck with me. A Stephen King short story, actually - I think he rocks at this sort of story, whatever anyone's opinion of him as a writer might be.
In this story man had invented a way to teletransport, and used it to get to the moon. But to transport humans, they had to be unconcious - the few humans who had teletransported while awake had exited the "portal" babbling insane and dead immediately thereafter, as had any animals tested in the transporter. The reason for this seemed to be, although it was unproven, that while your body would transport from one location to another instantaneously, it took your mind a long, long time to get through...and in that eternity of aloneness and not having any input to remain stimulated, the brain turned on itself. Always a creepy notion to me - running out of things to think about.
anatomical gift, I don't dispute your science, and it does all come down to semantics, and where you choose to place yourself in the possibilities of perception. When I look at glass, I perceive it as a very slowly moving liquid, and when I see a granite countertop I perceive a chunk of "living" stone, wrenched from the earth and redistributed to a kitchen.
I know I'm talking a lot of nonsense here, but frankly: I just got back from a site visit where the garage is going to have to be torn completely away instead of reused and we can't get enough drop for the sewer unless we add an ejector pump and the client wants the pricing, which is going to double now, by the end of the week and so I'd rprefer to type/discuss notions of being and perception rather than deal with what being an architect actually entails.
Liberty, was that "The Jaunt"? i may have to check that out. it is an intriguing topic. Leave it to stephen king to allow for the mental breakdown aspect of anything, including teleportation. i suppose it makes sense that a writer would interpret the brain/thought/happiness/life as on a tier above normal physical limitations like the body, hence its 'greater mass'/slower uptake time during teleportation. Although i haven't read the story it would seem to me that King also chooses not to put a value on a 'soul' within man. This would probably be an omission most people would scoff at and i find that very interesting. what value do philosophers, spiritualists, etc rank this unproven construct?
I think you've definately said something important about the tendency to require stimulation in order to function properly. Remember that as you deal with penny pinching clients worried about sewer grades. while not all mentally enjoyable, its all stimulation, Liberty;-)
I'm barely a dime-store physicist but i found this text and though it appropriate to post in relation to our discussions: "Heisenberg realized that the uncertainty relations had profound implications. First, if we accept Heisenberg's argument that every concept has a meaning only in terms of the experiments used to measure it, we must agree that things that cannot be measured really have no meaning in physics. Thus, for instance, the path of a particle has no meaning beyond the precision with which it is observed. But a basic assumption of physics since Newton has been that a 'real world' exists independently of us, regardless of whether or not we observe it. (This assumption did not go unchallenged, however, by some philsophers.) Heisenberg now argued that such concepts as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we observe them."
Essentially, Heisenberg's challenge was taken quite broadly but the fact remains that physicists who study energy, and thus matter, can only determine one of three aspects of a certain bit of matter; its specific location, its specific momentum and its future. The future itself is not even specifically determinable but can only be hypothesized using prior data on similar bits of matter.
So, if what we see has no velocity or does but this must be negated in order to put a 'location' on it, and its future is only determined by prior knowledge (as the newborn learns 'object permanence' and what we take for granted as 'reality'), what do we really know?
if what Rovelli sees, or rather can't see, in the surface of water are individual atoms and if heisenberg tells us we aren't really seeing their exact location since we can't pinpoint them along their path of momentum then we aren't really seeing anything, are we?...at least in a strict, controlled scientific framework of observation.
So, i find myself back here:
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine. --H. L. Mencken
I think it is "The Jaunt" - been years since I read it.
Now to bring a cheesy 80s music vibe to the discussion, how about that Stevie Nicks lyric "...changes color, but the sea does not change..." Deep, huh? =-)
The surface of the water is a physical phenomenon, but it's not an object. It can't be pinpointed in location, velocity, or future, I believe. Nonetheless, it is a phenomenon that scooterbugs can stand on. That's wacky.
I remember asking my dad as a child what makes the sky so pretty blue. Dad's an engineer, so his extensive answer was all about light refraction and the wavelengths of various color entering our eyeballs...I listened patiently, then asked "But Daddy what REALLY makes the sky so pretty blue?"
So, time isn't linear but happens all at once and constantly, and the ocean that I think I see at this instant isn't actually there in any measurable way, and the Calcutta Gold slab I selected for a countertop yesterday was both created a few million years ago and right at the instant I selected it, while the beauty of the ochre vein in that stone might be purple if your eyes aren't calibrated the same as mine...yes, everything is moonshine, including the here and now.
Despite which, I still have to bolt so I can pick up my kid from daycare. Hurray for common sense!
tie shi master- land chinese- change mass- hand easy, easy to glass through, really water, pull hand, easy, easy-glass break no, skin smooth. masss no thing. phantique. there, see, hoooo, moonshine, ya! from.
The surface of the water idea is an intriguing one. There are many examples of this kind of problem where an entity exists, but counters any attempt to quantify it, such as grains of sand on a beach, or the air.
I think the one of the key features of these entities is the interchangability of the particles making up the entity. One h2O molecule can just as easily be another located 5 miles away. I dont mean necessarily that particles actually swap with each other, but that the lowest common denominator is unbelieveably large field of equal objects, making up an indistinguishable entity.
I think what Rovelli is pointing to is that there exist countless examples of systems and objects that fail to make sense when we delve beneath the surface.
In regards to time, there are some interesting theories out there, but I am intrigued by the ideas of Peter Lynds. There is an article in last months Wired magazine briefly describing his ideas, of which here is an excerpt:
"Enter Lynds. In his theory, reality is merely sequences of events that happen relative to one another; time is an illusion. There's no chronon, no direction for time's arrow to fly, no "imaginary time" flowing 90 degrees off the axis of normal time. "I got to a point in my life where I was asking deeper and deeper questions," Lynds says. "If you want to understand reality, you have to get into physics. And if you're really interested in physics, you have to ask really big questions."
His answers make the mathematics of space and time look strange. If instants don't exist, then calculus - in which equations depend on fixed before-and-after positions in space - doesn't accurately describe reality. And that means a fundamental indeterminacy connects the blurry probabilities of the quantum universe with the seemingly stable macroverse where you and I live. Uniting those two seemingly incompatible worldviews dogged Einstein until his death; Lynds is happy to help the great man out. A further realization: The human perception of time as a sequence of moments is just a neurological artifact, an outgrowth of the chunk-by-chunk way our brains perceive reality. As the famous geneticist J. B. S. Haldane said: The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine."
i was trying to find a reference to this thread and started with bertrand russell. then i ran into 'logical atomism' in language and his work in 'analytic philosophy'. here is alink that might be an 'in' to johndevlin's question;
'if sight is a concept, what is the thing seen?'
Sight could be deceiving...Then the hand becomes an accesory of the eyes. The thing seen? Just your interpretation of reality based on your pre-acquired knowledge.
About the topic.
John Dewey
Juhani palaasmaa (the eyes of the skin)
[sight]http://www.image.com/sight.jpg[c:/pictures/sigth]
i'd like to quote this from above link. boldly put.. thanks for the link.
'Although indefinable, the concept of good is not meaningless, since we use it to distinguish good from bad every day. Hence, Moore concluded that "good" must be a simple, non-natural, indefinable quality that good things have. We recognize it in our experience, even though there is no explaining it; this is a version of ethical intuitionism.'
also see Moore on personal love and his influence on the Bloomsbury Group and such influential gays in it such as Keynes and Lytton Strachey who interpreted his philosophy of love as "Higher Sodomy": http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore-moral/#5
Jul 1, 05 5:53 am ·
·
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.
a phony conundrum?
if sight is a concept, what is the thing seen?
things.
the inspiration?
or part of the mind that thinks of the concept?
am feeling puzzled by things tonight. the world hangs together, and obviously sight gives us real information, and the world of the senses is not a lie, but what makes it all hang together?
Sight is a tool for capturing information at a distance. The concept is apprehension, the thing seen is an apparition.
yes, I think we are all ghosts inhabiting a ghostly world...
Having said that, distance is an illusion...
I often read the answers at the World Question Centre at edge.org, and I am captured by the following answer given by Carlo Rovelli to the question WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?:
I am convinced, but cannot prove, that time does not exist. I mean that I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about nature, that makes no use of the notions of space and time at the fundamental level. And that this way of thinking will turn out to be the useful and convincing one.
I think that the notions of space and time will turn out to be useful only within some approximation. They are similar to a notion like "the surface of the water" which looses meaning when we describe the dynamics of the individual atoms forming water and air: if we look at very small scale, there isn't really any actual surface down there. I am convinced space and time are like the surface of the water: convenient macroscopic approximations, flimsy but illusory and insufficient screens that our mind uses to organize reality....
Now that is puzzling.
you can twist yourself into as many intellectual contortions as you want but you cannot ever REALLY trump Common Sense. Now common sense tells us that time DOES exist. Carlo Rovelli just has a too high IQ...
I dont think that you can say that Common sense tells us that ime exists - habit and experience might, but they in themselves are subjective anyway.
Me, I believe that the universe is continually regenerated, rebooted every millisecond. Have you ever had the experiece late at night when you are lying in bed, and at the same time you hear the timber-framing contract and crack, your body produces an involuntary movement? This is the energy being redistibuted...
ps: I'm not, to my knowledge, insane.
that's OK: it made me laugh...
where do you even begin to break that down
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine. --H. L. Mencken
is he implying that Common Sense is moonshine, I wonder? Common Sense being those maxims that help us get through daily life: rules of thumb etc.
what if sight is not a concept, but a phenomenon? then what is the thing seen? it is a phenomenological reciprocity.
I can't speak for the author but it seems to me that your common sense is different than my own and any 'agreed upon' system is just an arrangement of knowledge...be it formal or informal. Menken tends to speak in generalizations so i would assume (bad word, i know, especially in the terms of this thread) he is being rather bleak, that is...time being a construct of the human brain as is place...hence the 'we'...but as you and others have stated here, John...even that 'construct' may be penetrable theory.
i would think, cyn, that if sight is phenomenological reciprocity then you would then, in fact, have to believe what you 'see'...and with that we're back to Rovelli's quote regarding the layers of understanding...the water's surface 'isn't'.
I think tomorrow morning I'll go for a walk for an hour or so and pick up garbage. I respect you, cyn & instrumentOFaction, for your questing. the path to the truth is dialogue...
well, you can't have sight without the thing seen. does that mean that you have to belief what you see? maybe you could interpret it differently. always against background and context.
can i ask another naive question? what do newborns see? they are clearly born with sight right? but their experience or lack thereof makes comprehension through sight not possible. perhaps corrupted by experience, parents, society, etc...informs our sight, so sight is a construct, a fabrication of biased experiences?
diabase, awesome contributions to this thread but am too wiped out to respond to them in any meaninful way tonight.
But I will add that the thing I absolutely believe but cannot prove is love.
Liberty Bell, come back tomorrow and we can get metaphysical...
OK, that notion of "the surface of the water", which isn't really a surface, infected my dreams lat night. Reminds me of the fact - the physical fact - that glass is not a solid at all, it is a liquid that just moves very, very slowly.
Everything actually moves - one of our seminars at Cranbrook was about the difficulty we face as architects trying to pin everything down in space - which of course is constantly moving. Surveying equipment that places the corners of our buildings doesn't really account for the curvature of the earth. The apparent stability and fixity of a column doesn't really account for two facts: that the planet is hurtling through space at 15 miles per second, and that the column is made up of material in motion - most basically either living wood, or stone, in a constant state of decay, or any other material that on a molecular level is composed of atomic particles that we can't locate because they always move.
So given this living, writhing, flexing material mass within which we live as a starting point, it is easy for me to make the leap that our notions of a fixed, stable, and linear world are based on habit and a need to simplify our understanding of things so we can just get on with living in it.
So the leap that time is NOT just a simple linear trajectory is also easy for me. This notion of the world continually rebooting, millisecond by millisecond, and we only percieve at any one time the one momentary situation in which our conciousness resides, seems pretty possible. That's also why we get deja-vu, despite what the Matrix posits on that topic.
As if this post wasn't long (and nonsensical) enough already, let me bring the notion of sight, esepecially of a newborn as iOf brought up, into this worldview. The moment my newborn son, fresh and bloody into the world, laid eyes on me, and I said "Hello" - the look in his eyes was recognition. Dismiss this as a mother's projections if you like. But I know that he looked at me as if to say, "ah ha, there she is". Certainly my voice, which he had heard in utero for months, played a part in his recognition, but combined with his ability to see my eyes, in that instant he learned that his haptic senses could bring him knowledge and help him "fix" his place in this world.
As we get older, we learn that haptic senses aren't the only things on which we can rely for knowledge, and that often those haptic senses are actively unreliable.
There is a surface to water. The cohesive forces between liquid molecules are responsible for the phenomenon known as surface tension. The molecules at the surface do not have other like molecules on all sides of them and consequently they cohere more strongly to those directly associated with them on the surface. This forms a surface "film" which makes it more difficult to move an object through the surface than to move it when it is completely submersed.
Glass can not be accurately described as a liquid. In terms of molecular dynamics and thermodynamics it is possible to justify various different views that glass is a highly viscous liquid, an amorphous solid, or simply that glass is another state of matter which is neither liquid nor solid. The difference is semantic. In terms of its material properties we can do little better. There is no clear definition of the distinction between solids and highly viscous liquids. All such phases or states of matter are idealisations of real material properties. Nevertheless, from a more common sense point of view, glass should be considered a solid since it is rigid according to every day experience. The use of the term "supercooled liquid" to describe glass still persists, but is considered by many to be an unfortunate misnomer that should be avoided. In any case, claims that glass panes in old windows have deformed due to glass flow have never been substantiated. Examples of Roman glassware and calculations based on measurements of glass visco-properties indicate that these claims cannot be true. The observed features are more easily explained as a result of the imperfect methods used to make glass window panes before the float glass process was invented.
beta...interesting site i found about newborns and their sensory development, specifically sight: http://www.babycenter.com/refcap/baby/babydevelopment/6508.html
an excerpt:
"4 months; Your baby's beginning to develop depth perception. Until now, it was tough for him to locate an object's position, size, and shape, then get a message from his brain to his hand to reach out and grasp it. At 4 months, he has both the motor development to handle the task and the maturity in his brain circuitry to coordinate all the moves needed to accomplish it.
5 months; Your baby is getting better at spotting very small items and tracking moving objects. He may even be able to recognize something after seeing only part of it. This is evidence of his budding understanding of object permanence (knowing that things exist even when he can't see them at the moment), which is why he loves to play peek-a-boo."
object permanence....hmmm...while the basic sense of sight is prepared at birth, the knowledge that things exist is not readily apparent, although this is a chemical brain development and not so much an ocular one...nor is it situational.
although proper attentive parenting would certainly help, it isn't scientifically necessary for a baby to be visually stimulated in order to grasp this knowledge...it only speeds development and understanding. So, it seems to me (not a parent, btw but i did stay in a holiday inn express last night;-) that you are correct beta...the development of sight itself isn't based on comprehension but the use of sight as a tool is.
...if tools are indicative of a culture's understanding of their surroundings (archeologically speaking) then sight is just another tool used to grasp, understand and complicate the surroundings of modern man. it was not until man was able to overcome and master the basic necessities of daily life to stay alive that he began to attempt to understand or place meaning on his world.
What I find interesting and pertinent to this discussion is how the evolution of man's brain developed parallel to their understanding of the world. Did the evolution of their problems open the next door to understanding or was it exposure to the unknown that spawned great development in the realms of faith, religion, poetry, art, science and philosophy? It could be argued that this is constantly occurring and we never outgrow our problems...always creating new ones to conquer...hence this thread...never completing a journey we don't want to end.
instrumentOFaction - sorry, I misread, it was actually betadine that posted about newborns, as you address.
Your sentence "It could be argued that this is constantly occurring and we never outgrow our problems...always creating new ones to conquer...hence this thread" reminds me of a story that has always stuck with me. A Stephen King short story, actually - I think he rocks at this sort of story, whatever anyone's opinion of him as a writer might be.
In this story man had invented a way to teletransport, and used it to get to the moon. But to transport humans, they had to be unconcious - the few humans who had teletransported while awake had exited the "portal" babbling insane and dead immediately thereafter, as had any animals tested in the transporter. The reason for this seemed to be, although it was unproven, that while your body would transport from one location to another instantaneously, it took your mind a long, long time to get through...and in that eternity of aloneness and not having any input to remain stimulated, the brain turned on itself. Always a creepy notion to me - running out of things to think about.
anatomical gift, I don't dispute your science, and it does all come down to semantics, and where you choose to place yourself in the possibilities of perception. When I look at glass, I perceive it as a very slowly moving liquid, and when I see a granite countertop I perceive a chunk of "living" stone, wrenched from the earth and redistributed to a kitchen.
I know I'm talking a lot of nonsense here, but frankly: I just got back from a site visit where the garage is going to have to be torn completely away instead of reused and we can't get enough drop for the sewer unless we add an ejector pump and the client wants the pricing, which is going to double now, by the end of the week and so I'd rprefer to type/discuss notions of being and perception rather than deal with what being an architect actually entails.
Argh.
Liberty, was that "The Jaunt"? i may have to check that out. it is an intriguing topic. Leave it to stephen king to allow for the mental breakdown aspect of anything, including teleportation. i suppose it makes sense that a writer would interpret the brain/thought/happiness/life as on a tier above normal physical limitations like the body, hence its 'greater mass'/slower uptake time during teleportation. Although i haven't read the story it would seem to me that King also chooses not to put a value on a 'soul' within man. This would probably be an omission most people would scoff at and i find that very interesting. what value do philosophers, spiritualists, etc rank this unproven construct?
I think you've definately said something important about the tendency to require stimulation in order to function properly. Remember that as you deal with penny pinching clients worried about sewer grades. while not all mentally enjoyable, its all stimulation, Liberty;-)
I'm barely a dime-store physicist but i found this text and though it appropriate to post in relation to our discussions: "Heisenberg realized that the uncertainty relations had profound implications. First, if we accept Heisenberg's argument that every concept has a meaning only in terms of the experiments used to measure it, we must agree that things that cannot be measured really have no meaning in physics. Thus, for instance, the path of a particle has no meaning beyond the precision with which it is observed. But a basic assumption of physics since Newton has been that a 'real world' exists independently of us, regardless of whether or not we observe it. (This assumption did not go unchallenged, however, by some philsophers.) Heisenberg now argued that such concepts as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we observe them."
Essentially, Heisenberg's challenge was taken quite broadly but the fact remains that physicists who study energy, and thus matter, can only determine one of three aspects of a certain bit of matter; its specific location, its specific momentum and its future. The future itself is not even specifically determinable but can only be hypothesized using prior data on similar bits of matter.
So, if what we see has no velocity or does but this must be negated in order to put a 'location' on it, and its future is only determined by prior knowledge (as the newborn learns 'object permanence' and what we take for granted as 'reality'), what do we really know?
if what Rovelli sees, or rather can't see, in the surface of water are individual atoms and if heisenberg tells us we aren't really seeing their exact location since we can't pinpoint them along their path of momentum then we aren't really seeing anything, are we?...at least in a strict, controlled scientific framework of observation.
So, i find myself back here:
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine. --H. L. Mencken
argh, indeed. my brain hurts.
why need bottom foundation for to see. no need. float, float, float.
cf, your haiku's aren't.
please, why use box for word. holding breath as you, easy die. laugh now, please.
love
I think it is "The Jaunt" - been years since I read it.
Now to bring a cheesy 80s music vibe to the discussion, how about that Stevie Nicks lyric "...changes color, but the sea does not change..." Deep, huh? =-)
The surface of the water is a physical phenomenon, but it's not an object. It can't be pinpointed in location, velocity, or future, I believe. Nonetheless, it is a phenomenon that scooterbugs can stand on. That's wacky.
I remember asking my dad as a child what makes the sky so pretty blue. Dad's an engineer, so his extensive answer was all about light refraction and the wavelengths of various color entering our eyeballs...I listened patiently, then asked "But Daddy what REALLY makes the sky so pretty blue?"
So, time isn't linear but happens all at once and constantly, and the ocean that I think I see at this instant isn't actually there in any measurable way, and the Calcutta Gold slab I selected for a countertop yesterday was both created a few million years ago and right at the instant I selected it, while the beauty of the ochre vein in that stone might be purple if your eyes aren't calibrated the same as mine...yes, everything is moonshine, including the here and now.
Despite which, I still have to bolt so I can pick up my kid from daycare. Hurray for common sense!
tie shi master- land chinese- change mass- hand easy, easy to glass through, really water, pull hand, easy, easy-glass break no, skin smooth. masss no thing. phantique. there, see, hoooo, moonshine, ya! from.
The surface of the water idea is an intriguing one. There are many examples of this kind of problem where an entity exists, but counters any attempt to quantify it, such as grains of sand on a beach, or the air.
I think the one of the key features of these entities is the interchangability of the particles making up the entity. One h2O molecule can just as easily be another located 5 miles away. I dont mean necessarily that particles actually swap with each other, but that the lowest common denominator is unbelieveably large field of equal objects, making up an indistinguishable entity.
I think what Rovelli is pointing to is that there exist countless examples of systems and objects that fail to make sense when we delve beneath the surface.
In regards to time, there are some interesting theories out there, but I am intrigued by the ideas of Peter Lynds. There is an article in last months Wired magazine briefly describing his ideas, of which here is an excerpt:
"Enter Lynds. In his theory, reality is merely sequences of events that happen relative to one another; time is an illusion. There's no chronon, no direction for time's arrow to fly, no "imaginary time" flowing 90 degrees off the axis of normal time. "I got to a point in my life where I was asking deeper and deeper questions," Lynds says. "If you want to understand reality, you have to get into physics. And if you're really interested in physics, you have to ask really big questions."
His answers make the mathematics of space and time look strange. If instants don't exist, then calculus - in which equations depend on fixed before-and-after positions in space - doesn't accurately describe reality. And that means a fundamental indeterminacy connects the blurry probabilities of the quantum universe with the seemingly stable macroverse where you and I live. Uniting those two seemingly incompatible worldviews dogged Einstein until his death; Lynds is happy to help the great man out. A further realization: The human perception of time as a sequence of moments is just a neurological artifact, an outgrowth of the chunk-by-chunk way our brains perceive reality. As the famous geneticist J. B. S. Haldane said: The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine."
i was trying to find a reference to this thread and started with bertrand russell. then i ran into 'logical atomism' in language and his work in 'analytic philosophy'. here is alink that might be an 'in' to johndevlin's question;
'if sight is a concept, what is the thing seen?'
nice micro-essay, Mz gift.
johndevlin:
"the world of the senses is not a lie, but what makes it all hang together" the brain needs input?
now, can we move on to more urgent discussion, such as "what's for dinner?" or, "Just a minute. i need to shake a tiny pebble out of my shoe."
Sight could be deceiving...Then the hand becomes an accesory of the eyes. The thing seen? Just your interpretation of reality based on your pre-acquired knowledge.
About the topic.
John Dewey
Juhani palaasmaa (the eyes of the skin)
[sight]http://www.image.com/sight.jpg[c:/pictures/sigth]
How can I post an image?
For posting an image instructions, look below the "Post a response..." box.
abracadabra: try G.E. Moore
G.E. Moore on common sense:
http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/6k.htm#comm
i'd like to quote this from above link. boldly put.. thanks for the link.
'Although indefinable, the concept of good is not meaningless, since we use it to distinguish good from bad every day. Hence, Moore concluded that "good" must be a simple, non-natural, indefinable quality that good things have. We recognize it in our experience, even though there is no explaining it; this is a version of ethical intuitionism.'
do you think it will ALWAYS be indefinable? It was in 1925, but aren't we getting warmer??
i don't know, but perhaps since 1925's it became more elusive and bent. maybe it is getting tempered against natural forces. thus heat.
I love Moore on 'states of mind'... having sherry with your tutor in Trinity Great Court
You guys are stuck in the Matrix aren't you. Let me know if you need a phone call.
WonderK: it's all right... I'm out now (thanks for the offer of help, though...)
also see Moore on personal love and his influence on the Bloomsbury Group and such influential gays in it such as Keynes and Lytton Strachey who interpreted his philosophy of love as "Higher Sodomy":
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore-moral/#5
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.