Godel's theorem involves unphysical infinities; it just doesn't apply to any physical system.
His proof involves unphysical infinities. The unprovable statements that his theorem says exist do not necessarily involve unphysical infinities. Except in the sense that all arithmetic statements depend on unphysical infinities, since those are built into the axiomatic system.
Many arithmetic statements that are not currently proved have implications for physical applications, and Godel's result does not somehow exclude those. Its true that Godel's result has no immediate practical use in relation to a physical system, because you have know way of knowing which physically meaningful statements may be unprovable vs not proved yet. But the operational irrelevance of his theorem does not imply the irrelevance of those unprovable arithmetic statements.
Not knowing that Godel's theorem applies to a physical system is not the same as knowing that it does not.
How have you decided which infinities are unphysical? I'm aware that some people regard all infinities as unphysical. Is it because you can't count an infinite number of objects in a finite amount of time, countably infinite or not? I see this definition of what it means for something to be 'physical' to be unimaginative and somewhat arbitrary. Is color physical? Colors are somewhat arbitrarily assigned in the brain to different wavelengths of light. Colors are physical because the brain is physical? Infinities are in the brain also. Or at least they're in mine. How about atoms, are they physical? What a person thinks is of as an atom is also an idea, in the brain, which represents something external, and which has some actual though limited similarity to it. Are infinities unphysical because you can construct a completely equivalent physical theory without using infinities, implied or otherwise? Can you do that?
Theists assert that "God" exists and acts in the physical world: burning bushes, parting of the Red Sea, punishing the wicked, creation of Adam and Eve, writing scriptures, communicating through prayer, etc.
Yes, a great many theists make those kinds of claims, and I agree they're mostly bullshit. The 'word of God' was written by men, and not very honest ones for the most part. Personally, I tire of arguing with or about those kinds of people, going over the same ground endlessly. I want to find new answers, not just stroke myself by making winning arguments against fools who won't listen to reason anyway.
If you want to propose other ways in which God acts in the physical world, do so and we can test them.
I could do that. I don't have a lot of confidence that its worth the time to explain though, that you won't just keep going back to the God concepts of the most stupid of Christians and arguing against those. As I indicated in my first post, other ways God may act would be very, very difficult to test in a manner which you could publish and other people could do the same test and consistently enough get the same result. Scientists have found reliable answers only to the problems that are easy in that regard.
I presume you know that the model that physicists use to describe nature is severely under-determined. Anything that the model doesn't capture is called 'random' and left outside of it. But of course for something to appear to be randomly distributed, it doesn't have to be truely random, its non-random characteristics just have to be orthogonal to the kinds of questions you're capable of asking about it. There's really quite a lot left outside of the model, a lot that is generally yet to be discovered and understood.
A burning bush is a source of almost white noise. If a person's mind is relaxed, or of a creative, neurotic temperament, like a high-gain amplifier, it may draw its attention to some of the sounds and ignore others, so that it can sound like a voice is speaking. Suppose that God was real, and used this means to speak to Moses. How would you, as a third party, be able to tell? Since there is another plausible explanation, that Moses is crazy, that is the explanation you will always choose. And you will usually be right, because the word of other people is usually not to be trusted. But you will not discover anything else that may be there.
Personally, I don't have an opinion about whether 'God' spoke to Moses, because I have no way of knowing. As I said earlier, I also do not pray to, believe in, or otherwise worship a 'God'.
I do believe that things are possible that you would consider unreal. I would go so far as to say I know this for certain. But I don't see how I can convince you. If I relate my own evidence to you, you will believe I am lying. If I tell you how to do the experiment for yourself, so that you can know for sure, you will not have the patience, because it will take years, and you are sure you already know the answer.
Statements about an "unknowable God" are meaningless gibberish, created by theists whose actual claims about what can do (see above) have failed to hold up to scrutiny.
I'll grant that as a possibility. I'm really not that up on the history of the "unknowable God" thought, or how people use it. My claim is that some things are a lot easier to know than other things, and that most people are inclined to give up on the more difficult types of problems.
So, cut the crap and the excuses. If you want to claim "God exists", you have to clearly define what that means, and then we have to see whether your definition makes sense.
I won't make the "God exists" claim, because I don't know that its true, or what it would mean exactly. Other people's ideas of God don't make sense to me that way, and I don't have my own idea of "God".
The arithmetic construct which Godel's theorems apply to is a very good model for certain aspects of physical reality.
Any knowledge that we have of any physical agent involves some kind of mental model. All of our "observations" are built into and interpreted through such models. We have no rigorously proved theorems like Godel's, or contrary to them, for these other models. So when you make the claim anyway, as if you have a theorem like Godel's but contrary to it for ideas about God, you're just making that up. And I don't think the hypothesis that you're putting your faith in is very plausible, given that arithmetic is a relatively trivial system, and your assertion doesn't hold up even for it.
You also completely blew off my second argument. If you claim that God is unknowable in principle, you're making that up, because you do not know one way or the other. Or if you accept that you do not know, then your "unknowable in principle" argument doesn't support a claim that God doesn't exist. All you can honestly do is say that you know certain common ideas about God to be illogical, false, and even contemptible. And you can reasonably decline to care about things that you personally have no awareness of. But the "if something is unknowable in principle, it doesn't exist" thought fails to be applicable.
Things that "exist" are observable, and hence knowable, as part of the real world. If something is unknowable in principle, it doesn't exist, by definition.
Quoting from the Wikipedia entry on Godel's incompleteness theorems:
The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" (essentially, a computer program) is capable of proving all facts about the natural numbers. For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system.
It seems that by your definition, such statements are true but not real. I don't think that this the same definition of 'real' that people usually have in mind when they say that a god is not real however.
There are also a great many facts that are true and provable, but which are really, really hard to prove, because of difficulties of scale or other subtleties. These facts don't suddenly start existing when you finally prove them, they existed beforehand also. When someone says 'X can not be proved', they usually are not actually aware that X is unprovable in principle, but only that proving X has so far been prohibitively difficult. X may still matter, and it may be that we do know quite a bit about X, even though we can not prove it definitively.
I don't worship deities for three reasons: I have no evidence that what people claim about their gods is true, I have evidence that many of their claims are false, and I furthermore find some of their claimed attributes morally unacceptable: the gods described are not worthy of my worship even if real. But there is much that is currently unprovable that nevertheless matters.
Their error, as I understand it, is they imagine the universe entirely in terms of geometry, without trying to understand dynamics. How do they account for the path a satellite in a polar orbit takes over the earth?
I think we had a miscommunication here. I'm more in agreement than not with what you've been saying about conscience, and I never claimed that immorality was beautiful. I think immorality is wholly ugly. I did say that there's beauty in the lives of immoral people, and I'm categorizing most people as immoral, as it seems you were. But there's a lot to a person besides their moral or immoral motive, and people aren't that clear cut. I'll give an example. I worked with someone recently who was a weasel - almost everything that came out of his mouth was a shameless, self-serving lie. But he did also have other virtues, for example a kind of live-and-let live cheerfulness and non-confrontational gentleness. Did it make up for the lying? No. But there was still something of value in his character. It appears you and I are very strongly in agreement about what is important in life, yet we still can't exchange a couple of observations without it quickly coming to insults. I think this is largely my fault, but I don't think I'm the only one who could stand to learn from that other guy.
Some people are amoral. Other people who seem to be moral are so arrogantly vicious that it almost negates their ostensible morality. I would put myself somewhat in the latter bin, though I also make what I consider moral choices and I work on the aggression also. You I don't know, I was just responding to your words, and its easy to misunderstand. I assume that you really do value conscience, and have some real and valuable understanding of its role in life. You've also been coming across as prideful and contemptuous. If you do actually care about service to 'conscience', you might consider trying to value what other people are saying, rather than just casting yourself as a teacher and dismissing other people's observations as bullshit without understanding them. Otherwise, you're just talking loudly and publicly to yourself.
I don't think companies have moved manufacturing to China because of lawsuits. However, as American companies get big and soft, lawsuits have been a part of what has prevented younger, more productive companies from expanding and replacing them.
Also, in some industries labor costs have not been the primary thing driving manufacturing to China. In the semiconductor industry, labor costs are small compared to equipment costs. But asian countries have been willing to heavily subsidize fab construction, and it seems American's haven't cared much about keeping those kinds of jobs here.
those with a higher conscience in this world pay a heavy price, unfortunately, for the sake of the actions of all the assholes without a conscience
To the list of "assholes" I would also add those who praise conscience but choose moral grandstanding, even if its only in front of themselves, to actually seeing and doing the right thing. Sometimes the real choices that life offer can stand in contradiction with one's identity as a Jedi-like defender of civilization.
I agree that a relatively small number of people are responsible for a very large part of what we regard as civilized social order, and that it would fall apart without them. But I'm not sure it makes that much of a difference to everyone else in a way that really matters. Yes they would be poorer, and fewer, and more ignorant, and there would be more war and disease. But their basic loves and motivations would remain the same - in a way they would still live the same kinds of lives. Furthermore civilized moral arrogance can also lead to horrors like technological wars that we wouldn't have otherwise. And I don't think we've seen the full potential of that yet.
I also think that the state of the world, where a few people have a really big impact on societal development, is ultimately somewhat unnatural. Part of what will happen as the world improves, if it improves, is that kind of power will become more distributed. Fewer philosophical and political gurus and more people just thinking and making positive choices in their own lives. So although its a part of reality now, I reject moral elitism in the sense that its something I'd like to begin to move away from.
Maybe I also think that the lives of immoral people have more beauty and value than on the surface you seem to attribute to them. But I suppose everyone is entitled to whatever perceptions and values they want.
it is a simple inescapable fact of life that if you care and work for something that goes against vested interests, you will be nailed to a cross
Its inescapable because most people behave like unprincipled thugs. But the fact that people are inclined to behave that way is not justification for behaving that way. If he was trying to do what is right, that should be taken into account and weighed against his crime during his trial. There's legal precedent that says that soldiers have a higher responsibility than just following orders, and that circumstances and motives are relevant when considering sentencing. And it is perfectly reasonable for other people to advocate for him, and do anything they can to ensure that he gets fair treatment.
In other words, of course when we make moral choices we should be prepared to suffer for it. But that's a lame excuse to stand by why other people suffer for their moral choices without lifting a finger to help them. If we value 'higher' things, and most people do to at least some extent, we should stand up for them in relation to other people.
Yes. For brevity I didn't qualify my statement more carefully than saying it was 'my thought at that time'. I don't remember the details adequately now. There were no 'error bars' given on either of the two estimates, skewed or otherwise, to account for the disagreement though. And the disagreement between estimates was quite a bit more than a factor of 2, but I don't remember how much. My point was more that it was curious that the parent poster and I both thought of earth's core rotation in the same context, maybe having the same paper or similar.
Funny you should mention that. The first thing I thought of when I saw the headline was a Science paper from about 15 years ago about the rotation of the earth's core. The angular velocity they estimated differed from a previous estimate by more than a factor of 2, but they considered the two results to be in agreement because the spin was in the same direction. My thought at that time was that if results differ by that much, they're only a little better than noise, and rotation in the opposite direction would be within the same margin of error.
Well, according to some guys on here last month, pi is dependent on physics, because 2*pi*r is the circumference of an Euclidean circle. But I see that there's a 2 in that expression also, so why not?
it's so utterly simple that we constantly overlook it.
Yes, hard to articulate and be understood sometimes though.
I view real beauty as something that is discovered, not envisioned.
When I said 'vision of beauty', I was following your earlier language of 'imagine a world where virtue is the norm'. Also I meant to indicate that I've often been most aware of beauty in contexts that might be said to be abstract, potential, or internal. To say its discovered and then found everywhere is a nice thought though, and it makes some sense to me.
Everyone's experience of this seems to me to be somewhat unique. Personally I started off by being more aware of beauty's apparent absence. Certain apparently unavoidable facts of life, for instance that many animals must kill other animals to survive, seemed to me to be not as they should be, somehow not as I expected. Then by grace the place where "I" stand when I think about things shifted, turned upside down in a way, and the meaning and apparent causes of things the world changed. I also dug for the source of the perception that some things are "not beautiful", and found there is always an awareness of some flavor of indestructible beauty at the root of that.
I've been inspired by other people's best thoughts. Practically everybody has some unique trait or awareness that's beautiful, and when I am able to recognize that my own awareness expands to include what I recognized, and generally stays that way. This has been a primary value to me of honest conversations with people.
I'm aware that there is considerably more beauty in my surroundings than I am conscious of. Being more aware of it requires a kind of emotional openness that I haven't learned how to do while maintaining my own emotional integrity. Attempting to explain what I mean will sound like gibberish to most people, and I have no idea if it will make any sense to you. I feel something crudely analogous to an atmosphere, or spring of water in relation to the minds of other people. If I'm open to it, it flows into my mind, and aspects of my mind which are usually dried up or 'off' come to life, and I'm aware of more. But other people have different motives than I do, and different desires and psychological conditions, and these generally don't interact well with my mine. To push the water metaphor further, I'm a deep, clear, demon infested well with a broken bucket. So is everyone, but it seems that most people have more going on at the surface, and may be far less aware of what's underneath. Given our imperfections, I think there's a natural tradeoff which tends to prevent people from getting into deeper trouble than they would otherwise.
One thing that has been particularly valuable to me personally is learning not to make firmer judgments than currently available information warrants. Many if not all things are partially imprecise, or undefined. Trying to make them more concrete than they naturally are in the present moment is an act of mental intemperance which ties one's feeling and reason in a tiny knot. I feel my personality to be a mess of a huge number of such knots. I'm not saying that its useful to for one's thinking to be all vague: we also need to be precise or definite. I mean that often there's a tiny half-lie when we say what something definitely is, and the accumulation of those half-lies contorts our minds and blinds us to all sort of things. To the extent that we relax this, and control it better, in stages things which we were blind to become apparent. This is another way to say what I tried to say earlier. When a person perceives something beautiful, or gains an insight, or builds a virtue, there is a temptation, often inescapable, to emotionally over-react and create a particularly big knot. Then we tend to form knots about those knots, and so on, like the sorcerer's apprentice chopping up broomsticks. But we can only proceed from where we are presently, and from here its just a part of the process.
The juxtaposition of my own ugliness with my awareness of beauty causes a kind of destructive psychological stress, both internally and in relation to other people. It appears that most people try to deal with the stress by denying the possibility of virtue, and also by denying their own imperfection.
If that psychological stress is destructive, then to whom? To your thought-idea of who you are and what your goals in life are about? To the notion that you are happy if you get what you want and miserable if you don't?
Its destructive to the actualization of my vision of beauty.
I've known several people who care deeply about virtue, or who believe they do. Decades later, all of them in significant ways seem to be less virtuous than average people, and not as measured by the values of 'the world', but by their own ideals. How does this happen? They seem unable to consider the possibility that their troubles are clues to limitations of their vision. They interpret their troubles as things that matter only to 'the ego', or sometimes as symptoms of pre-existing shortcomings. But to their vision of progress they cling like drowning men clinging to a concrete block. They believe themselves wise, far beyond ordinary men, but can not learn except along limited and rapidly constricting paths.
I think that when a twisted mind is inspired by beauty, its response is unavoidably twisted, and it skewers itself with it. Its not just 'the ego' that gets skewered, with an angel of perfection revealing itself from beyond the ashes. Its all ego, and the angel is a monster, not just to the ego but in an absolute sense.
Too much medicine is poison. If you could somehow take a person and force them to see perfection before they are ready, and in contrast their own imperfection, you would destroy them. And its the same if you do it to yourself.
Many people see no virtue beyond expedience. Argue with them for a lifetime and they'll never understand your point.
Agreed, though I would add something: that is only true because such people are not capable of imagining a world where virtue is the norm. Otherwise they'd work towards it and advocate for it knowing that they could never change the world on their own or anything like that, but satisfied that they as an individual are at least not part of the problem and appreciative that others must make the same decision.
I've met some people that do seem to be able imagine a world where virtue is the norm, and yet they still don't choose it. Maybe its because they intellectually understand what virtuous behavior would be and what the implications would be, but they are in some motivational sense unable to feel it. When the opportunity comes to betray for advantage, they can not resist.
I can't say I totally understand this, but I do experience something like it. I'm certain that its possible for a world to be vastly better than ours, and I know something of what it feels like. But another more vicious part of my mind still desires things that I'm pretty sure are inconsistent with that vision. And no amount of arguing with it seems to change its nature. Seeing how limited I am in my ability to change myself, I really don't know what other people are capable of.
The juxtaposition of my own ugliness with my awareness of beauty causes a kind of destructive psychological stress, both internally and in relation to other people. It appears that most people try to deal with the stress by denying the possibility of virtue, and also by denying their own imperfection.
For you to be satisfied 'not being a part of the problem' seems to me to imply some sort of awareness of or faith in beauty as a transcendent reality, unaltered by our current condition. Otherwise, when you see that your efforts for improvement are thwarted at your expense by others' dishonesty, you'd stop being a chump.
It seems that many atheists, if they can't find a way to understand something in a simple and concrete manner, just declare that it doesn't exist and don't try to deal with it at all. Its as if they have difficulty dealing with ambiguity.
I guess I would say the same thing goes double for most religious people though. They can't deal with ambiguity in relation to 'God', so they make a whole bunch of fantastic shit up, write it down in fancy lettering, and call it The Truth. The simplification-by-negation that militant atheists prefer is cleaner at least.
When I have an empirical proof that god exists, I will believe. For the moment, I have empirical proof that gravity exists, and Hawking simply extrapolated the laws of physics to the extreme, then came up with the big bang theory, and the theory still holds today.
Some things, while real, are much more difficult to prove empirically than other things.
I have no problem at all with the idea that something like gravity is eternal and inevitable as a principle, even if its manifestation is always local or temporary. In fact I can't imagine how it could not be that way. I don't believe in a Creator, because I have no awareness, understanding, or evidence of the existence of such, and I would not kiss the creator's ass in any case. But there are other things that I do believe about life that would be very, very hard to demonstrate in a rigorous, universally repeatable manner.
By way of analogy....Electrical engineers, particularly in decades past, tend to model nearly everything as being linear. Sort of by definition, a linear model often captures important first-order effects, and linear equations are really easy to work with. Non-linear methods are a lot more difficult, but will capture a lot that linear equations won't. At some point beyond that you're pretty much fucked, as far as mathematical modeling. But it doesn't mean that only the things that are easy to model or work with are real and important to our lives. Gravity, to use another metaphor, is a very weak force compared to the other ones, but it has important effects because it cumulatively acts in the same direction. Other intangible influences may be not only too weak to detect easily, but unlike gravity may also have results that are inconsistent or orthogonal to the kinds of lab experiments we are currently capable of. It doesn't mean that those things are unreal though, or that nobody can have any awareness or understanding of them. It seems that many atheists, if they can't find a way to understand something in a simple and concrete manner, just declare that it doesn't exist and don't try to deal with it at all. Its as if they have difficulty dealing with ambiguity.
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Godel's theorem involves unphysical infinities; it just doesn't apply to any physical system.
His proof involves unphysical infinities. The unprovable statements that his theorem says exist do not necessarily involve unphysical infinities. Except in the sense that all arithmetic statements depend on unphysical infinities, since those are built into the axiomatic system.
Many arithmetic statements that are not currently proved have implications for physical applications, and Godel's result does not somehow exclude those. Its true that Godel's result has no immediate practical use in relation to a physical system, because you have know way of knowing which physically meaningful statements may be unprovable vs not proved yet. But the operational irrelevance of his theorem does not imply the irrelevance of those unprovable arithmetic statements.
Not knowing that Godel's theorem applies to a physical system is not the same as knowing that it does not.
How have you decided which infinities are unphysical? I'm aware that some people regard all infinities as unphysical. Is it because you can't count an infinite number of objects in a finite amount of time, countably infinite or not? I see this definition of what it means for something to be 'physical' to be unimaginative and somewhat arbitrary. Is color physical? Colors are somewhat arbitrarily assigned in the brain to different wavelengths of light. Colors are physical because the brain is physical? Infinities are in the brain also. Or at least they're in mine. How about atoms, are they physical? What a person thinks is of as an atom is also an idea, in the brain, which represents something external, and which has some actual though limited similarity to it. Are infinities unphysical because you can construct a completely equivalent physical theory without using infinities, implied or otherwise? Can you do that?
Theists assert that "God" exists and acts in the physical world: burning bushes, parting of the Red Sea, punishing the wicked, creation of Adam and Eve, writing scriptures, communicating through prayer, etc.
Yes, a great many theists make those kinds of claims, and I agree they're mostly bullshit. The 'word of God' was written by men, and not very honest ones for the most part. Personally, I tire of arguing with or about those kinds of people, going over the same ground endlessly. I want to find new answers, not just stroke myself by making winning arguments against fools who won't listen to reason anyway.
If you want to propose other ways in which God acts in the physical world, do so and we can test them.
I could do that. I don't have a lot of confidence that its worth the time to explain though, that you won't just keep going back to the God concepts of the most stupid of Christians and arguing against those. As I indicated in my first post, other ways God may act would be very, very difficult to test in a manner which you could publish and other people could do the same test and consistently enough get the same result. Scientists have found reliable answers only to the problems that are easy in that regard.
I presume you know that the model that physicists use to describe nature is severely under-determined. Anything that the model doesn't capture is called 'random' and left outside of it. But of course for something to appear to be randomly distributed, it doesn't have to be truely random, its non-random characteristics just have to be orthogonal to the kinds of questions you're capable of asking about it. There's really quite a lot left outside of the model, a lot that is generally yet to be discovered and understood.
A burning bush is a source of almost white noise. If a person's mind is relaxed, or of a creative, neurotic temperament, like a high-gain amplifier, it may draw its attention to some of the sounds and ignore others, so that it can sound like a voice is speaking. Suppose that God was real, and used this means to speak to Moses. How would you, as a third party, be able to tell? Since there is another plausible explanation, that Moses is crazy, that is the explanation you will always choose. And you will usually be right, because the word of other people is usually not to be trusted. But you will not discover anything else that may be there.
Personally, I don't have an opinion about whether 'God' spoke to Moses, because I have no way of knowing. As I said earlier, I also do not pray to, believe in, or otherwise worship a 'God'.
I do believe that things are possible that you would consider unreal. I would go so far as to say I know this for certain. But I don't see how I can convince you. If I relate my own evidence to you, you will believe I am lying. If I tell you how to do the experiment for yourself, so that you can know for sure, you will not have the patience, because it will take years, and you are sure you already know the answer.
Statements about an "unknowable God" are meaningless gibberish, created by theists whose actual claims about what can do (see above) have failed to hold up to scrutiny.
I'll grant that as a possibility. I'm really not that up on the history of the "unknowable God" thought, or how people use it. My claim is that some things are a lot easier to know than other things, and that most people are inclined to give up on the more difficult types of problems.
So, cut the crap and the excuses. If you want to claim "God exists", you have to clearly define what that means, and then we have to see whether your definition makes sense.
I won't make the "God exists" claim, because I don't know that its true, or what it would mean exactly. Other people's ideas of God don't make sense to me that way, and I don't have my own idea of "God".
I do understand how to reconcile the 'Adam
This should not have been modded flamebait.
The arithmetic construct which Godel's theorems apply to is a very good model for certain aspects of physical reality.
Any knowledge that we have of any physical agent involves some kind of mental model. All of our "observations" are built into and interpreted through such models. We have no rigorously proved theorems like Godel's, or contrary to them, for these other models. So when you make the claim anyway, as if you have a theorem like Godel's but contrary to it for ideas about God, you're just making that up. And I don't think the hypothesis that you're putting your faith in is very plausible, given that arithmetic is a relatively trivial system, and your assertion doesn't hold up even for it.
You also completely blew off my second argument. If you claim that God is unknowable in principle, you're making that up, because you do not know one way or the other. Or if you accept that you do not know, then your "unknowable in principle" argument doesn't support a claim that God doesn't exist. All you can honestly do is say that you know certain common ideas about God to be illogical, false, and even contemptible. And you can reasonably decline to care about things that you personally have no awareness of. But the "if something is unknowable in principle, it doesn't exist" thought fails to be applicable.
Things that "exist" are observable, and hence knowable, as part of the real world. If something is unknowable in principle, it doesn't exist, by definition.
Quoting from the Wikipedia entry on Godel's incompleteness theorems:
The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" (essentially, a computer program) is capable of proving all facts about the natural numbers. For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system.
It seems that by your definition, such statements are true but not real. I don't think that this the same definition of 'real' that people usually have in mind when they say that a god is not real however.
There are also a great many facts that are true and provable, but which are really, really hard to prove, because of difficulties of scale or other subtleties. These facts don't suddenly start existing when you finally prove them, they existed beforehand also. When someone says 'X can not be proved', they usually are not actually aware that X is unprovable in principle, but only that proving X has so far been prohibitively difficult. X may still matter, and it may be that we do know quite a bit about X, even though we can not prove it definitively.
I don't worship deities for three reasons: I have no evidence that what people claim about their gods is true, I have evidence that many of their claims are false, and I furthermore find some of their claimed attributes morally unacceptable: the gods described are not worthy of my worship even if real. But there is much that is currently unprovable that nevertheless matters.
I wasn't trying to characterize Catholics as geocentrists. I was simply stating, from past experience online, that some geocentrists are Catholic.
My post was stupid anyway, and I regretted it as soon as I put it up. I was just killing time on my phone, waiting for something.
Their error, as I understand it, is they imagine the universe entirely in terms of geometry, without trying to understand dynamics. How do they account for the path a satellite in a polar orbit takes over the earth?
I think we had a miscommunication here. I'm more in agreement than not with what you've been saying about conscience, and I never claimed that immorality was beautiful. I think immorality is wholly ugly. I did say that there's beauty in the lives of immoral people, and I'm categorizing most people as immoral, as it seems you were. But there's a lot to a person besides their moral or immoral motive, and people aren't that clear cut. I'll give an example. I worked with someone recently who was a weasel - almost everything that came out of his mouth was a shameless, self-serving lie. But he did also have other virtues, for example a kind of live-and-let live cheerfulness and non-confrontational gentleness. Did it make up for the lying? No. But there was still something of value in his character. It appears you and I are very strongly in agreement about what is important in life, yet we still can't exchange a couple of observations without it quickly coming to insults. I think this is largely my fault, but I don't think I'm the only one who could stand to learn from that other guy.
Some people are amoral. Other people who seem to be moral are so arrogantly vicious that it almost negates their ostensible morality. I would put myself somewhat in the latter bin, though I also make what I consider moral choices and I work on the aggression also. You I don't know, I was just responding to your words, and its easy to misunderstand. I assume that you really do value conscience, and have some real and valuable understanding of its role in life. You've also been coming across as prideful and contemptuous. If you do actually care about service to 'conscience', you might consider trying to value what other people are saying, rather than just casting yourself as a teacher and dismissing other people's observations as bullshit without understanding them. Otherwise, you're just talking loudly and publicly to yourself.
your invisible hand is off giving a billionaire a whack job
I don't think companies have moved manufacturing to China because of lawsuits. However, as American companies get big and soft, lawsuits have been a part of what has prevented younger, more productive companies from expanding and replacing them.
Also, in some industries labor costs have not been the primary thing driving manufacturing to China. In the semiconductor industry, labor costs are small compared to equipment costs. But asian countries have been willing to heavily subsidize fab construction, and it seems American's haven't cared much about keeping those kinds of jobs here.
those with a higher conscience in this world pay a heavy price, unfortunately, for the sake of the actions of all the assholes without a conscience
To the list of "assholes" I would also add those who praise conscience but choose moral grandstanding, even if its only in front of themselves, to actually seeing and doing the right thing. Sometimes the real choices that life offer can stand in contradiction with one's identity as a Jedi-like defender of civilization.
I agree that a relatively small number of people are responsible for a very large part of what we regard as civilized social order, and that it would fall apart without them. But I'm not sure it makes that much of a difference to everyone else in a way that really matters. Yes they would be poorer, and fewer, and more ignorant, and there would be more war and disease. But their basic loves and motivations would remain the same - in a way they would still live the same kinds of lives. Furthermore civilized moral arrogance can also lead to horrors like technological wars that we wouldn't have otherwise. And I don't think we've seen the full potential of that yet.
I also think that the state of the world, where a few people have a really big impact on societal development, is ultimately somewhat unnatural. Part of what will happen as the world improves, if it improves, is that kind of power will become more distributed. Fewer philosophical and political gurus and more people just thinking and making positive choices in their own lives. So although its a part of reality now, I reject moral elitism in the sense that its something I'd like to begin to move away from.
Maybe I also think that the lives of immoral people have more beauty and value than on the surface you seem to attribute to them. But I suppose everyone is entitled to whatever perceptions and values they want.
it is a simple inescapable fact of life that if you care and work for something that goes against vested interests, you will be nailed to a cross
Its inescapable because most people behave like unprincipled thugs. But the fact that people are inclined to behave that way is not justification for behaving that way. If he was trying to do what is right, that should be taken into account and weighed against his crime during his trial. There's legal precedent that says that soldiers have a higher responsibility than just following orders, and that circumstances and motives are relevant when considering sentencing. And it is perfectly reasonable for other people to advocate for him, and do anything they can to ensure that he gets fair treatment.
In other words, of course when we make moral choices we should be prepared to suffer for it. But that's a lame excuse to stand by why other people suffer for their moral choices without lifting a finger to help them. If we value 'higher' things, and most people do to at least some extent, we should stand up for them in relation to other people.
Yes. For brevity I didn't qualify my statement more carefully than saying it was 'my thought at that time'. I don't remember the details adequately now. There were no 'error bars' given on either of the two estimates, skewed or otherwise, to account for the disagreement though. And the disagreement between estimates was quite a bit more than a factor of 2, but I don't remember how much. My point was more that it was curious that the parent poster and I both thought of earth's core rotation in the same context, maybe having the same paper or similar.
magnetic core spin reversal.
Funny you should mention that. The first thing I thought of when I saw the headline was a Science paper from about 15 years ago about the rotation of the earth's core. The angular velocity they estimated differed from a previous estimate by more than a factor of 2, but they considered the two results to be in agreement because the spin was in the same direction. My thought at that time was that if results differ by that much, they're only a little better than noise, and rotation in the opposite direction would be within the same margin of error.
cat butt slaps down dog butt
Well, according to some guys on here last month, pi is dependent on physics, because 2*pi*r is the circumference of an Euclidean circle. But I see that there's a 2 in that expression also, so why not?
it's so utterly simple that we constantly overlook it.
Yes, hard to articulate and be understood sometimes though.
I view real beauty as something that is discovered, not envisioned.
When I said 'vision of beauty', I was following your earlier language of 'imagine a world where virtue is the norm'. Also I meant to indicate that I've often been most aware of beauty in contexts that might be said to be abstract, potential, or internal. To say its discovered and then found everywhere is a nice thought though, and it makes some sense to me.
Everyone's experience of this seems to me to be somewhat unique. Personally I started off by being more aware of beauty's apparent absence. Certain apparently unavoidable facts of life, for instance that many animals must kill other animals to survive, seemed to me to be not as they should be, somehow not as I expected. Then by grace the place where "I" stand when I think about things shifted, turned upside down in a way, and the meaning and apparent causes of things the world changed. I also dug for the source of the perception that some things are "not beautiful", and found there is always an awareness of some flavor of indestructible beauty at the root of that.
I've been inspired by other people's best thoughts. Practically everybody has some unique trait or awareness that's beautiful, and when I am able to recognize that my own awareness expands to include what I recognized, and generally stays that way. This has been a primary value to me of honest conversations with people.
I'm aware that there is considerably more beauty in my surroundings than I am conscious of. Being more aware of it requires a kind of emotional openness that I haven't learned how to do while maintaining my own emotional integrity. Attempting to explain what I mean will sound like gibberish to most people, and I have no idea if it will make any sense to you. I feel something crudely analogous to an atmosphere, or spring of water in relation to the minds of other people. If I'm open to it, it flows into my mind, and aspects of my mind which are usually dried up or 'off' come to life, and I'm aware of more. But other people have different motives than I do, and different desires and psychological conditions, and these generally don't interact well with my mine. To push the water metaphor further, I'm a deep, clear, demon infested well with a broken bucket. So is everyone, but it seems that most people have more going on at the surface, and may be far less aware of what's underneath. Given our imperfections, I think there's a natural tradeoff which tends to prevent people from getting into deeper trouble than they would otherwise.
One thing that has been particularly valuable to me personally is learning not to make firmer judgments than currently available information warrants. Many if not all things are partially imprecise, or undefined. Trying to make them more concrete than they naturally are in the present moment is an act of mental intemperance which ties one's feeling and reason in a tiny knot. I feel my personality to be a mess of a huge number of such knots. I'm not saying that its useful to for one's thinking to be all vague: we also need to be precise or definite. I mean that often there's a tiny half-lie when we say what something definitely is, and the accumulation of those half-lies contorts our minds and blinds us to all sort of things. To the extent that we relax this, and control it better, in stages things which we were blind to become apparent. This is another way to say what I tried to say earlier. When a person perceives something beautiful, or gains an insight, or builds a virtue, there is a temptation, often inescapable, to emotionally over-react and create a particularly big knot. Then we tend to form knots about those knots, and so on, like the sorcerer's apprentice chopping up broomsticks. But we can only proceed from where we are presently, and from here its just a part of the process.
Probably but you die on the inside every day you have to work up bullshit excuse why this was bound to happen and why it's a good thing.
Not too many people in this business seem to think that way. Zombie already maybe.
Many small defense contractors are pretty messed up also. If yours is honest and competent, you've done well.
The juxtaposition of my own ugliness with my awareness of beauty causes a kind of destructive psychological stress, both internally and in relation to other people. It appears that most people try to deal with the stress by denying the possibility of virtue, and also by denying their own imperfection.
If that psychological stress is destructive, then to whom? To your thought-idea of who you are and what your goals in life are about? To the notion that you are happy if you get what you want and miserable if you don't?
Its destructive to the actualization of my vision of beauty.
I've known several people who care deeply about virtue, or who believe they do. Decades later, all of them in significant ways seem to be less virtuous than average people, and not as measured by the values of 'the world', but by their own ideals. How does this happen? They seem unable to consider the possibility that their troubles are clues to limitations of their vision. They interpret their troubles as things that matter only to 'the ego', or sometimes as symptoms of pre-existing shortcomings. But to their vision of progress they cling like drowning men clinging to a concrete block. They believe themselves wise, far beyond ordinary men, but can not learn except along limited and rapidly constricting paths.
I think that when a twisted mind is inspired by beauty, its response is unavoidably twisted, and it skewers itself with it. Its not just 'the ego' that gets skewered, with an angel of perfection revealing itself from beyond the ashes. Its all ego, and the angel is a monster, not just to the ego but in an absolute sense.
Too much medicine is poison. If you could somehow take a person and force them to see perfection before they are ready, and in contrast their own imperfection, you would destroy them. And its the same if you do it to yourself.
Many people see no virtue beyond expedience. Argue with them for a lifetime and they'll never understand your point.
Agreed, though I would add something: that is only true because such people are not capable of imagining a world where virtue is the norm. Otherwise they'd work towards it and advocate for it knowing that they could never change the world on their own or anything like that, but satisfied that they as an individual are at least not part of the problem and appreciative that others must make the same decision.
I've met some people that do seem to be able imagine a world where virtue is the norm, and yet they still don't choose it. Maybe its because they intellectually understand what virtuous behavior would be and what the implications would be, but they are in some motivational sense unable to feel it. When the opportunity comes to betray for advantage, they can not resist.
I can't say I totally understand this, but I do experience something like it. I'm certain that its possible for a world to be vastly better than ours, and I know something of what it feels like. But another more vicious part of my mind still desires things that I'm pretty sure are inconsistent with that vision. And no amount of arguing with it seems to change its nature. Seeing how limited I am in my ability to change myself, I really don't know what other people are capable of.
The juxtaposition of my own ugliness with my awareness of beauty causes a kind of destructive psychological stress, both internally and in relation to other people. It appears that most people try to deal with the stress by denying the possibility of virtue, and also by denying their own imperfection.
For you to be satisfied 'not being a part of the problem' seems to me to imply some sort of awareness of or faith in beauty as a transcendent reality, unaltered by our current condition. Otherwise, when you see that your efforts for improvement are thwarted at your expense by others' dishonesty, you'd stop being a chump.
It seems that many atheists, if they can't find a way to understand something in a simple and concrete manner, just declare that it doesn't exist and don't try to deal with it at all. Its as if they have difficulty dealing with ambiguity.
I guess I would say the same thing goes double for most religious people though. They can't deal with ambiguity in relation to 'God', so they make a whole bunch of fantastic shit up, write it down in fancy lettering, and call it The Truth. The simplification-by-negation that militant atheists prefer is cleaner at least.
When I have an empirical proof that god exists, I will believe. For the moment, I have empirical proof that gravity exists, and Hawking simply extrapolated the laws of physics to the extreme, then came up with the big bang theory, and the theory still holds today.
Some things, while real, are much more difficult to prove empirically than other things.
I have no problem at all with the idea that something like gravity is eternal and inevitable as a principle, even if its manifestation is always local or temporary. In fact I can't imagine how it could not be that way. I don't believe in a Creator, because I have no awareness, understanding, or evidence of the existence of such, and I would not kiss the creator's ass in any case. But there are other things that I do believe about life that would be very, very hard to demonstrate in a rigorous, universally repeatable manner.
By way of analogy....Electrical engineers, particularly in decades past, tend to model nearly everything as being linear. Sort of by definition, a linear model often captures important first-order effects, and linear equations are really easy to work with. Non-linear methods are a lot more difficult, but will capture a lot that linear equations won't. At some point beyond that you're pretty much fucked, as far as mathematical modeling. But it doesn't mean that only the things that are easy to model or work with are real and important to our lives. Gravity, to use another metaphor, is a very weak force compared to the other ones, but it has important effects because it cumulatively acts in the same direction. Other intangible influences may be not only too weak to detect easily, but unlike gravity may also have results that are inconsistent or orthogonal to the kinds of lab experiments we are currently capable of. It doesn't mean that those things are unreal though, or that nobody can have any awareness or understanding of them. It seems that many atheists, if they can't find a way to understand something in a simple and concrete manner, just declare that it doesn't exist and don't try to deal with it at all. Its as if they have difficulty dealing with ambiguity.
Gluttony and greed are both regarded in Bhagavad Gita text and commentaries as serious sins.
Many people see no virtue beyond expedience. Argue with them for a lifetime and they'll never understand your point.