Coming from someone who doesn’t know for sure what she means when she writes it…
… I’m not so sure that trying to read it would be a worthy endeavor.
=D>
Absolutely so.
Never doubt yourself.
You are a god.
You come here to prove the certainty of your omniscience.
Are you female?
Women are great with word games.
I’m glad you now changed the “absolutely either/or” for “doesn’t know for sure”.
It’s part of the growing pains.
End of story.
…but learn what a “strawman” is.
Sabina asked for a phenomenal absolute. I tend to agree with Sabina’s suspicious of absolutes and certainties, steering a middle course between nihilism on the one hand, and somethingism, if you will. However, I can’t help but think there might be exceptions.
For Satyr, Sabina’s mentor, I think he thinks the only thing absolute about phenomena is activity, because everything is, well, active, even if it doesn’t always appear to be so, hence appearances can be deceiving. Upon closer inspection under a microscope, even solid steel is revealed to be active, its internal particles are moving about, this way and that. So there’s no inactivity, it seems, only activity. He often referred to existence itself as little more than activity.
Initially it seemed plausible, but then being a bit of a doubting Thomas, I began questioning. What about height, length, width and weight, size, shape and density, does not all matter, all existence possess some degree of height, length, width and weight, size, shape and density? Could it not be said that existence is height/weight?
Perhaps the law of conservation of energy is another constant, but then I heard quantum physicists have long since disproven this “law” as an absolute. Still I wonder, what if matter is merely disintegrating so much, that we don’t presently have the technology to detect what quarks/whatever, are becoming when we divide them?
You could additionally say all matter has the potential or is being attracted by something and repelled by something else, so you could say existence itself is attraction and repulsion. What isn’t being attracted/repelled?
A strawman is when one creates a mental model of the other’s ideas, which do not correspond to his actual ideas, and then burns it in effigy, dancing about all happy.
Sort of like your certainty.
It’s this flimsy paper-doll desperately clinging to your ego, like a wet blanket.
I am honored to be in the presence of one who will solve the mysteries of the cosmos, once and for all.
And on ILP of all places.
Such an important mind wasting its time on the backwaters of internet mediocrity.
What a shame.
I once met a man who was certain he had solved the problem of cold fusion.
He was also a no-name, wasting away in obscurity.
Nighty-night sweetie.
The “expert” will give you words, based on dualism - linguistic ploys.
Take his particles.
Can he tell us of one which is not divisible?
Where is this god particle?
The outer perimeter of a phenomenon (surface), measured in whatever standard the organism bases on its own dimensions, is the always changing, ambiguous, point of interaction, between the phenomenon and the world.
The phenomenon defined as an emergent unity, held together by memory, Becoming in an endless cycle of change.
The outer perimeter interacts with light, or some other medium, some of it bouncing off of it and stimulating the sense organ.
It may be more dense, more substantial, because it is changing at a slower rate than light energy and the environment around it. This slower rate of (inter)activity is interpreted by the mind (inter)acting with the light energy, or the medium which has interacted with the phenomenon, as solid.
Solidity is an interpretation of rate of change.
Depending on how slow or fast this rate of (inter)activity is, in relation to the observing mind, solidity is established.
The outer perimeter of the phenomenon is also a spatial projection of the phenomenon’s uniformity. Similar materials will (inter)act in nearly similar rates, making them appear as one.
In organic matter, this outer perimeter, represented by the skin, is the representation of its aggregate energies and processes. The outer extent of its will.
I place an open challenge on the table:
Let anyone offer us a single absolute, which is not a reference to a noumenon, an idea.
A word must refer to a noumenon which refers to a phenomenon, and if it does not it is called, a fantasy, an illusion, a delusion.
Sensuality, empiricism, can only be our standard of deciding what is more or less probable.
Yes, and all these laws man establishes by observing consistent patterns of repetitive behavior, may hold true for a time.
This does not guarantee that they hold true for eternity.
We are told that right after the Big Bang the four forces of nature were actually one, and that electromagnetism is probably going to split into two.
This indicated that chaos is increasing, turning the ordered into random.
Eventually the human laws of nature may not hold true.
One can say all kinds of things (such as some QP geek thought he disproved the conservation of energy) and suspect the possibility of all kinds of things. But until you know how to know something, you can’t say that something can’t be known… or not without contradicting yourself.
How to know does not mean absolutely so.
How refers to increasing your accuracy.
Science is a method of how to increase one’s certainty.
Saying I am uncertain because this proposition has never been proven, is a position of skepticism, which establishes a probability of truth based on the past.
I cannot know for sure if Aliens are abducting humans, but I can establish a probability by sampling what I know of the past (nature, history, human behavior etc.)
No absolutes, only approximations based on probabilities.
Anyone promising you absolutes, is a charlatan, especially when he uses crap like this guy did, to intimidate.
Like:
“You don’t know who you re talking to”
The either/or scenario is a ploy used by dualistic thinkers.
I can say God is most improbable, and Evolution Theory more probable, but when you say “I know for certain” then you are a simpleton trying to compensate for self-doubt.
Short/tall are relative, height is absolute, light/heavy are relative, weight is absolute, weak/strong are relative, strength is absolute, fast/slow are relative, speed is absolute. There’s not a thing in this universe that doesn’t possess some measure of height, weight, strength, speed and many, many other qualities. You could say things differing according to what degree of characteristics they have, but they all have the same characteristics. Things are essentially the same, hence there’s a unity to everything. What should we call height, weight, strength and speed on the one hand, to distinguish them from tall/short, heavy/light, strong/weak and fast/slow on the other? I suppose you could call the former absolutes and the latter relatives, but that does quite do it for me. Maybe we need new words?
When I say height I am comparing my dimension with that of another. I am not saying that I am absolute tallness.
I am saying that relative to you I am more or less in this dimension, given a gravity. Because in space what is height and what is width?
The speed of unobstructed radiant affect (aka “speed of light in a vacuum”) is another absolute, if you are looking for absolutes.
Or…
“Whatever something is, is whatever it is”, is another absolute. Whether you can figure out what it is or what to properly call it, is another matter entirely.
Or…
A box is either large, small, or something in between. There are no alternatives (which btw, is “how to know something”).
There are absolutes all over the place.
… absolutely.
Something in between is not precise.
Speed of Light in a vacuum does not mean it will be so for eternity.
A vacuum is something I do not believe in.
The speed of light has not been measured to an exact point:
Meter, second, human constructs.
The word “about” is used.
That doesn’t sound absolute. It sounds like an approximation, within the limitations of human understanding and technical means of measuring, and within the time-space continuum we are in right now.
The “now” also being an imprecise allusion to an absolute point.
Notice the definition of exactness. The definition is this approximation and it is “exact” because all have agreed upon the measuring approximation.
The constant is a product of universal expansion. This expansion is increasing in velocity, perhaps at a constant rate.
No absolute void. An absolute void would be absolutely nothing.
There is no space/time lacking some degree of energy.
Some more "amateurs, for your godly expertise:
Absolute Vaccume
Your certainty is similar to that of a religious fanatic. You, the high priest of modern scientific certainty. But, from what I understand science deals in theories not absolute certainties, except for a few insecure weirdos who are omniscient but anonymous.
Science is still questioning its own constants, wanting to understand them, but some have already found certainty.
We call these what?
The “this that or “something” in between”
Something in between is infinitely divisible.
Particularly the word “some” and “thing” combined.
Not exact at all.
A box is a human construct.
There are no boundaries in space/time.
Your word games lack precision. This is how they remain absolute for you.
You have convinced yourself that human words, symbols, abstractions, are reality itself.
“It is, what it is” remains ambiguous, as is and it remain undefined.
It is circular reasoning.
x = x, when x does not require definition because what is constant is the symbol.
is = exists
it = thing
You have yet to define ‘1’, let along ‘exists’ and’ thing’.
How is the inventor of absolute certainty to be taken seriously when he cannot define, with absolute precision, what a fundamental part of mathematical language is?
Try the other version of the singular one, the particle. Show us one indivisible point in time/space.
Here is what I know, yet remain skeptical about, or what I think is most probably the case:
Anyone who uses “you don’t know who I am” as an argument, or a method of intimidating, has got to be a very charming fella.
I got wet when you did it.
Adding stipulations?
If you want absolute precision, you’ll have to change languages.
In the mean time, the concepts were exactly precise in being absolute facts.
There is no alternative… eternally.
Note that I only referenced the common verbiage. I didn’t assert it in those words (because they were too imprecise).
As stated, to know what it is or even what to properly call it, is an entirely different matter.
The fact remains that it can never be anything other than what it is, whatever that speed is.
And more importantly, by the logical mind, can be known with absolute certainty to be unalterable.
The fact that you do not know how to know, doesn’t mean that no one does.
You seem to have some worship of the absolute certainty that if a human thinks it, it must be wrong.
You won’t get much argument from me concerning the inability of Science to be certain (as I noted earlier). Yet you do seem to refer to Science as though it was the holy church of the only truths.
And what makes you think that it is “expanding”? Another supposition from the same holy church?
Again, you won’t get any argument out of me on that one.
It is a known (and thus knowable) absolute fact.
My, how presumptuous. No wonder you lose all sight of certainty.
I used to find it interesting that insecure, ego sensitive people so fear the confidence of a challenger and thus see him only as egocentric or arrogant. Confidence, egocentricity, and arrogance are three distinctly different concepts… well, except to those who can’t see through the clouds of fear.
…and totally irrelevant.
There you go again with the “human construct” and thus somehow certainly wrong.
Yet again, “Man are you kibitzing the wrong guy.”
Can I suggest the attempt to avoid jumping to conclusions based on your experience of probabilities concerning whoever you are talking to?
It might help if you learn what some of these accusations you make really mean.
“X = X” is not a “circular argument”.
It couldn’t be more “precise”.
And everything is ambiguous to the uneducated in a subject (in this case being; metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology).
The “word games” of which you accuse?
…interesting how often people accuse of their own guilt, not realizing that it will catch them. It comes from Sabina not studying Satyr as much as is needed.
…and again as above.
A “particle” is not “one indivisible point in time/space”.
… “imprecise”, “ambiguous”, presumptuous, “undefined”, “egocentric”.
… made of everything you have accused.
…and again blindly kibitzing the exact wrong guy concerning such matters (not being able to recognize friend from foe, “self from other”, or inability to “Know Thyself”).
Is there a magical language where all is absolutely certain?
From what I understand of language it uses metaphor, imagery, it simplifies and generalizes …it refers to mental abstractions.
But I am only a poor human girl.
You must live beyond time and space to be so certain. You’ve reached the end of knowledge and there, you’ve found yourself waiting.
To exist both at the beginning of time/space, and at its end, must be interesting.
I’m sure than in the words of gods, these things are as clear as oneness.
Your usage of words exposes your mind to the cold air.
Heat contacting cold, creating steam, or a liquid smokiness clouding reflections.
“It is what it is” sound very precise.
Like one is a singularity.
x = x.
What is God?
He is Himself.
Brilliant!!
=D>
1+1=2 when 1 is taken for granted as a thing.
What hing?
Exactly!
Nice to see the logical and scientific enter into the realm of religious fanaticism.
No it doesn’t.
But the fact that you cannot define how you know what you think you know, does not mean that you do know. It only means that you think you know.
You can’t prove a positive by using a negative.
My ignorance is not your gnosis.
Not knowing all does not mean you know something.
God is not proven by our ignorance.
From your explanation about the box and how large or small or “in-between” it is, I sense that you live in abstractions.
No, I seek out it’s validation, as I do in the case of God, or any absolute for that matter.
If all you have is metaphor and imprecise verbal allusions, then you can worship your God of the shadows.
I remain unconvinced.
But then, you are the “expert,” right?
I think I now know who I am dealing with.
Scary.
And yet it is you who uses science when it suits you, and so carelessly that your expertise is put into question.
I stated that my opinions though presented as being superior, are still questioned by one such as I.
I doubt my own superior positions.
That is called “Intellectual Integrity.”
The opposite of buffoonery.
You are the one proposing certainty and absolutes, and all you have are wrong allusions to absolute vacuum, some imprecise measurement of a constant speed of energy, we call light, which you claim to know is eternal, and a metaphor with the word “something” in it, and then, finally, the intellectually lazy “It is, what it is”.
If this is what you base your certainty, your absolute certainty on, then, dear sir, you are easily convinced.
No, it’s a hypothesis I am told is based on observing how galaxies are moving away from one another.
This is where your straw-manning becomes clear. Having posited absolute knowledge, which you now cannot deliver with accuracy and certainty, you accuse me of claiming to follow absolutes.
The church of one is yours, and you are both priest and devoted follower.
When you write your science paper proving how knowledge can be made absolutely certain, I’ll congratulate you.
Until then 
No, it’s a hypothesis.
I love arrogant boys.
All opinions are perspectives of reality. If you are a god, please let us know, for certain.
Sometimes fear has the effect of sheltering itself behind delusional arrogance.
A pompous ass is one who says “you don’t know who you are dealing with, tuts” and then expects to not have his shorts pulled up his anal crevice.
Under the hypothesis that we can only know who we fight with, I think I am getting a good idea of what and who you are.
The “a box is large or small or something in-between” was brilliant.
It has that joie de vivre of a child’s psychology.
It is this or that, or something else.
I know, who cares?
Trivialities.
Certainty demands declarations of truth.
I am, what I am!!!
“I”…“Am”?
Who cares?
Nice declarative statement. I am impressed.
The divine nature of your knowledge is coming through.
Impressive.
I use behavior to come to probability ratios.
What do you do?
Prey for divine inspiration and then declare it perfect?
Use words without defining them and hope nobody notices?
Do you know who I am?
It is circular when it is used to define something which is itself.
Saying one is a singularity, or heat is hot, or I am I, is saying nothing.
X is a symbol, an abstraction, used to refer to anything.
It has no meaning outside the human brain.
Therefore, it is a human construct, as all linguistic forms are, including your holy mathematics.
Man tries to harmonize his abstractions with reality.
Bring the ideal as close to the real as possible.
I know.
:-&
Oops, why am I so pompous and insecure:
I think I know, within a reasonable doubt.
See reason includes self-doubt.
But not for gods or religious fanatics. They always KNOW, making them dangerous freaks.
Ah, now you are a fiend.
If you know for sure, then you are not my friend.
To “Know thyself” is to know as much as possible, the pleasant and, more importantly,the unpleasant, of your past.
The exploration of self is never completed.
To know more of yourself than the other guy, is to be more aware than him - it is to have a stronger sense of self.
This presupposes acceptance of this knowing, or this probable past. Because flattering ourselves is damn easy.
Nice reversal though. It followed the editing move you tried to hide yesterday’s boo-boo with.
Well played.
I’ve learned a lot.
Your effort to dance, dodge, and flit around whilst sparring, is doing you far more damage than favor. People notice the tripping over one’s own feet in an effort to be clever.
Perhaps you think all people are like you, concerned about the image and right and wrong getting decided by a popular vote. I’m not.
Bruises and licking one’s wounds are in any case part of the learning process; you must fear failure - explains your need for absolute certainty; yet all language is an abstraction and certainty but another one.
Denying the image you see in the mirror?
… not surprised.
Recognizing why they happened is a bit more relevant.
There is a substantial difference between fearing something and wisely avoiding it. Not being able to discern that difference will keep you as alone as you have been.
Absolute certainty allows one to take on the challenges where history has failed.
It allows for the confidence to discern when to hold’m and when to fold’m.
As stated earlier, being an abstraction or a man-made, “human”, concept has nothing to do with being true or false.
Having skimmed the above dialogue, now I can safely stay within philosophycal intuitionism, and fearlessly declare that Ochams’ razor will never be able successfully cut out the heart of the matter: and as much as I admire Witgenstein, I feel resemblance will never get to the point of confirmation.
Fear is challenging, for most, if not all, as the basis of exclusion, whether it be one kind or another, however, approximation never successfully extracts the notion of security, although it puts a limit on insecurity as the measure of inclusion.
Six of one half a dozen of the other.
Sabina
I think it’s unlikely we’ll ever find one. If everything we know thus far is divisible, it’s unlikely the next thing we discover will be indivisible, but then, that itself may be an absolute, everything is absolutely divisible. Of course we can’t say that with absolute certainty, because the next thing we discover may very well be indivisible, but we could say it seems like an absolute or it’s probably an absolute, that everything is indivisible. Of course that fits in nicely with Satyr’s position that existence is activity, since being indivisible would mean a lack of internal activity.
I understand where you’re coming from, that how tall a thing is, isn’t something static, and that a things height is undergoing constant change, even if it doesn’t always seem that way to the naked human eye, and the separation between x thing and y thing is ambiguous as particles between the air and the table overlap, so there’s no precise point where the table begins and ends. I understand that a things height like 6 foot 6 is not an absolute. However, that’s not what I’m arguing. What I’m saying is that all things possess height, so everything has a portion of height, even if there portions differ. You can counter, as you have, by saying height only makes sense on planet earth, in outerspace the word is meaningless, and thus it’s not an absolute. However, what about size, could we not say all objects have some degree of size, and that there are no objectives that do no have a size, or a shape of some kind, even if there size and shape is always changing, they always have a size and a shape, same with density, weight, power, speed.
Yes, it’s an interesting challenge, and I’m doing my best to offer you a good one. I agree with what you said about the speed of light, not being constant, that it too varies, and that we use measurement systems which are only so precise, if we used a more precise measurement system, we might find that speed varies more, but my challenge is that everything possess some degree of power, speed etcetera.
Yes, but then that could be true for Satyr’s notion of activity as well, it may turn out that not everything is active, that some things are static, however unlikely such a scenario may be. I’d say attraction/repulsion and collision, as I understand them (things are always colliding, you can’t pass through a thing without resistance), are absolutes, as they apply to all everything. Everything is attractive, everything is repulsive, everything is colliding, everywhere.
I’m not particularly against intuitionism (so long as we’re not speaking of something supernatural here), but I’m not particularly for it either. I try to be as rational as I can be, whilst acknowledging the limits of reason, that it can only afford us probabilities, not omniscience. In addition, I acknowledge the necessity of supplementing reason with intuition from time to time, intuition being a more complex/emotive/innate/subconscious way of knowing and understanding.
I would go even a step further than Sabina, and declare we can’t even have absolute knowledge regarding our own constructs. A schizophrenic thinks it has absolute knowledge of its constructs, but it’s constantly internally contradicting itself, even it doesn’t know what it means by x word or y. To extraterrestrial intelligences (hypothetical), more precise with their language/thought we may seem like schizophrenics.
When we say X sign/symbol always = X phenomena, we may be so stupid that occasionally/often we forget precisely what mean by X. Furthermore, the meaning of X is dynamic, forever changing, we’re forever assigning different meanings to X, and even the symbol itself is changing, the way we pronounce it, the way we write it.
Definitional logic isn’t absolute, it isn’t even closer to absolute knowledge really, as an absolute remains infinitely beyond the comprehension and reach of limited beings such as ourselves and every being we’ve encountered thus far. X phenomena can’t be anything other than itself is equally ambiguous, as when we decide to assign a new name to a thing undergoing constant change, is ambiguous.
What we mean by constructs is as equally ambiguous as the phenomena they refer to. We may think we know what we’re talking about, but in actuality, we may fail to know ourselves and what we mean (even failure/success in comprehending ourselves is ambiguous, we never absolutely know/don’t know what we’re talking about) when we say X, Y or Z. Thought is no escape, we cannot escape the ambiguous, forever changing, dynamic cosmos, even our heads is no safe haven.
Plato and even Aristotle were wrong, dead wrong, all is flux, which is not to say there isn’t patterns/nothing can be uttered, we don’t want to go to the extreme of Heraclitus’ disciple, Cratylus, but we have to continuously update our knowledge and understanding of our own constructs, too, and even that, is no guarantee. A middle course between Heraclitus and Cratylus is necessary.
I agree with Sabina in that everything is flux, however I’m not convinced the universe is disintegrating, I tend to view it as more cyclical, but perhaps not absolutely so, and I think there may be certain manifestations of flux, like attraction/collision/repulsion, which are absolute, but we can never know for absolute certain.
Furthermore, I don’t believe knowledge is necessarily ascending, at least eternally so, it probably too goes through cycles, as societies do, and we forget things as we learn others, hence dark ages preceded by light ages, and even in dark ages, man has different constructs and different knowledge/wisdom suited to those times.