The insecurity of ignorance

[GMT]

damn we are in agreement, appart from the chicken thing. At some point chicken needs to be defined, whatever definition you place on it, providing it's somewhere after T-rex, it was born from an egg. Whatever laid the egg that hatched into the first chicken, cannot have been a chicken or that would have been the first chicken, which itself hatched from an egg. However the term chicken is defined, I think we can agree upon what an egg is, and therefore the first chicken hatched from an egg that already existed. Therefore the egg came first. damn, now I think we're going to agree on everything.

 

[Underground Man]

That first chicken was a mutant, but then bred more succesfully than the ancestors did. Hence they died out and chickens became common place laying more eggs everywhere.

Sorry, I am going to nitpick here. It is not necessary for the first chicken to survive better than their ancestors. Both "species" (which BTW is a hard to define word) could have gone on surviving in different ecological niches or compteting within the same ecological niche.

I just felt I should point that out because it is a common misconception that evolution is always "progressing". For instance a human is no "more evolved" than a chimpanzee, or a chicken for that matter, they just represent a different branch of the evoultionary tree.

evolution is a tree, not a continuim

 

[mrwags]

My tag line should help ya out a bit. To bad it took me 30 years to learn it. Do your best and the rest will follow if it is suppost to.


Mr.Wags

Read Below:

 

[Verite]

Imo the error lies in the attempt to seperate math from nature. They are as intertwined as is the dual helix of dna. Nature does not need math as a form of understanding but it most certainly uses it.

 

[GMT]

Underground man, you are right, I oversimplified the story and may or may not have made an incorrect assumption. But it was an assumption and not a statement of fact.

Mr Wags, lmao, I will try to memorise it.

Verite, this is where I hope you and I can happily hold different opinions. I cannot argue that the universe/multiverse has no concious and continually calculating mind without infringing upon your religious views. I'm pretty sure that's not even the correct spelling of the word, and I would hate to fall out with you, so I'm just not going to start on that. But I will say that assuming man cannot know the mind of God, the maths we use is different than the maths he uses, even if it represents the same thing.

 

[Verite]

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Verite, this is where I hope you and I can happily hold different opinions. I cannot argue that the universe/multiverse has no concious and continually calculating mind without infringing upon your religious views. I'm pretty sure that's not even the correct spelling of the word, and I would hate to fall out with you, so I'm just not going to start on that. But I will say that assuming man cannot know the mind of God, the maths we use is different than the maths he uses, even if it represents the same thing.

?? Confused as you may have done a bit more reading into my avy then what its intent is, a joke. I have no religious beliefs common to anyone I know. My statement are pretty void of any religious conotations and merely pointing out that nature uses math constantly. Almost in the same form that computers use it, binary. Cells, nerves, DNA itself all constantly making on/off switches and changes based on reception of those switches. Programing one thing one way and a different part another. Adding, calculating, subtracting what it needs from what it doesnt. If that isnt the melding of math and nature Im not sure what is.

 

[Underground Man]

Careful, I think we are starting to venture into metaphysics. which is by definition outside the range of a physical explanation.

 

[GMT]

I just got knocked off as I was finnishing a long explanation of my views and lost the lot. Fortunate really as I then realised that there was something else to consider.
Verite, I think I imagined an entire thread that didn't exist about religion on here, but now I can't find it, it wasn't so much the avatar. I'll explain what I mean, and then counter it. When 2 people get on a seasaw, the seasaw doesn't make a calculation as to how it will react. When someone goes parachuting, there isn't a calculation that is made or a decision that the person will fall towards the earth rather than the earth falling to the person. We can create and discuss equations that will tell us that it will happen, but these are a form of language rather than the reason that it happens. It allows us to understand what will happen, but it's not the calculations that make it happen. Just as words are representations of things that we wish to communicate, which have no reality of their own beyond ontological reality, so are numbers and equations. Numbers are represented as 12345 or I II III IV V by us, or in many other ways, but I doubt plants count in this way. When I switch from long hours of light to shorter hours of light, the plants aren't counting the number of hours of light, but rather producing one chemical during the light periods and another during the dark.

Now I could go on along that path of reasoning, and I did last time, but then I considered how casinos work. The laws of probabilty state that each spin of a coin has an equal chance of landing heads up. Yet if you flip a coin 10000 times, the results will roughly equal 5000 heads and 5000 tails. Casinos rely on the universe ensuring that the white ball goes into 00 green overy so often. If the universe cannot keep track of these things then how does it keep eveything in balance or rather why do they seem to work out in balance after a long period of apparent randomness?
I will accept that something is going on in the universe that I dont understand, but if we are accepting that the universe can count, I still doubt that it counts in the same way we do. And therefore that our maths is not the same as the universe uses.
Metaphysics, great, how many angels can stand on the head of a pin?

 

[Underground Man]

When you start asking "what is physics" "how does physics work" you are talking about metaphysics.

the seasaw doesn't make a calculation as to how it will react.

Some philosophers, like Leibniz would disagree with you.

If the universe cannot keep track of these things then how does it keep eveything in balance

I'm not so sure that it does keep things in balance. I'm having a hard time following this argument but are you sure that you aren't succumbing to the gamblers fallacy? I mean If a coin comes up heads 100 times in a row the chance of it coming up tails on the next toss is still only 50%.

Soon we'll get into free will

 

[GMT]

OOOOO now we are talking.
Leibniz may disagree, and I have to state that I have not red his work and so can't argue with him without a direct quote. If you are familiar with his work then you probably know Plato's take on maths, and how Aristotle would view it all. Einstein said that God doesn't play dice, and Stephen Hawking disagrees. Now we have 5 separate views on maths in the universe with the viewers all being a part of nature, working in accordance with the rules of nature, and yet seeing maths in different ways. I still beleive that that is down to the separate concious minds though. Concious minds have a tendancy to interpret things and create representations of them. I still think that maths is a process of this. What the maths represent is a logical progression and quantitative measurement, but to utallise this, I still think there needs to be a concious mind at play. Therefore I believe I would have disagreed with anyone sying that a seasaw is capable of making a decision, unless you are proposing the Berkley view that the universe only exists in the mind of God and he is making the calculations for the seasaw.
Metaphysics is the discussion of that which exists outside of the physical world. Does a process of the physical count as physical or not, I have to admit to being unsure about that.
Believe it or not, people have succesfully asked for grants to build machines to flip coins to find out. It was the results of such experiments that I was refering to, that show although after 100 heads, another head is just as likely, over the course of large numbers, heads and tails do even out. How many casinos do you know of that go bust. Although there are lucky winners.
Free will? Just an illusion if you ask me. Sorry, I don't mean to be contraversial, I just can't help it.

 

[Underground Man]

I don't claim to know enough about liebniz to really defend his views, but they are not very far from the "mind of god" view. I've tried to compose a few sentences here but I keep on backspacing over them. Ok, he might say something like "what you call "deciding" is the manifestation the arrangement of the constituents of the universe, your decision happens in harmony with the way the universe is arranged, in the same way that the see saw totters in harmony with that order."

If understand you, I think you are saying that math is but a representation created by a concious(whatever that means) mind. And since it is a representation it is not the same as the thing it represents, in other words, the map is not the territory.
Kind of the opposite of a platonic view i guess.

I don't really know enough to have strong feelings about this, but I tend to agree with you about representations and free will.

Metaphysics is the discussion of that which exists outside of the physical world.

well that word "exists" is kind of akward in this context.

 

[GMT]

I agree that science is merely the latest form of Sophistry, however neither time nor gravity takes up space or have mass, yet both seem to exist, although I'm happy to accept that these may only be illusions or the effects of a deeper reality.

 

[Underground Man]

I can't take credit for the map/territory analogy. I heard about it through Robert A. Wilson ( a new-age guy ) books, it is apparently from some guy named Korzybski.

The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal."

Ideas have mass if you think ideas are the movement of electrons in your head. Just like a map is printed on paper.

 

[Verite]

I feel as long as the continued process of thinking of time and space as a solid constant man will continue to limit their understanding. Conventional thought has the idea of the universe as this hollow cube of sorts where the only way to get from one corner to the other is to pass through that space in X amount of time. Now what if the reality of that was that the cube wasnt comprised of hollow space but rather a dynamic fluid conduit? Going from point A to point B wouldnt mean as much as traversing the space between as would it to find the right fluid mix that brings point A closer to point B.

 

[GMT]

Well, I suppose if we think of the universe as existing in terms of wavelengths, we could retune into a new position, but I don't personally subscribe to it. I'm afraid I can't get my head around the fluid thing though. Surely we'd still have a long swim.

 

[Dan42nepa]

What about things like coffee? Eggs? For years we were told that coffee is bad for you but there are contradicting studies in alot of things. Its true maybe these studies are funded by lobbiests but basically you really dont know who to believe. Suppose you are a scientist and did a study and you believe the results are good but maybe another scientists finds a problem with your process. Both points could be right..

 

[Sativa_Fan]

I don't have time to read the entire thread so I apologize if I've repeated something.

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that most people, in general, are incredibly ignorant egomaniacs. The average person is uneducated, and when it comes to matters where a thought process is involved, are simply stupid. The complete and total absence of common sense, reason or logic is a sickness that has pervaded human-kind for some time now. People aren't taught facts, they're just taught to act like they know them. They aren't intelligent, they're taught to act like they are. If you don't believe me, get into an argument with any of millions of pseudo-intellectuals. They aren't very hard to find. You will come out of the debate with a lower IQ.

Moreover, people have undeserved ENORMOUS, yet extremely fragile egos. These are what I refer to as pseudo-egos, as they're delusions of grandeur that are held about nothing. It seems like I rarely even meet modest people anymore. Perhaps it's the area that I live in, an area that certainly isn't known for a large amount of highly intelligent people...LOL. However, I've always found it interesting to note that these kinds of people are the quickest to profess what they 'know'. It's difficult to even hold an intelligent conversation with anyone anymore. They're so busy trying to be loud with a bunch of 'facts' that don't make any fucking sense that I generally just have to end up ignoring them to avoid arguing with an imbecile.

I guess this is sort of a defense for them, though. As they say, the weakest wolf howls the loudest. I really wish that I could surround myself with more intelligent people, but I'm afraid this is the world we live in today where everyone is taught to hold a facade, not knowledge.

 

[GMT]

I'm starting to learn that not rubbing an egomaniacs nose in their ignorance can lead to an easier life. It can be considered giving up or going undercover, but it gives me more energy for more important battles. I think picking the battles is better than fighting them all. But those could be the words of a defeated man, I don't know. I'm suprised this thread made a comeback to be honest.

 

[PazVerdeRadical]

hey gmt, i think it is best to just keep quiet and let them be; if they are worth their salt, they should be able to self-examine and be self-critics, if they can't, how the heck can one help them anyways? the best one can do is then justbe quiet about certain things, give help if needed, and be cool, or something along those lines...

 

[Kirby]

I've just had a rather heated discussion in my real life. It seems that there are those out there, who are unable to alter their views when presented with a logical and reasoned argument. I was told that they are my views and that doesn't mean that others should agree. But there are facts in this world that can be reasoned rather than merely believed. I accept that no ones personal opinions are worth anything, but facts should be accepted by all, and to merely believe that they are wrong, and to hold on to your own wrong opinions in the face of reason is just wrong. It is why the world is still such a revolting place, filled with revolting people. Has anyone ever found a way to interact with this type of person without giving up? I need help in dealing with these people because when reason fails, I have nothing left. I refuse to argue on an emotional level as then it would jsut be my opinion against theirs. But I hate to walk away from someone leaving them to continue to act in ignorance. Yet when you try to educate these people, they feel like they are being personally attacked rather than being empowered. WTF is that all about? If someone explained to me that something I thought was true, was actually false, I'd be gratefull, not pissed off. Where am I going wrong with these people?

Hi, GMT.

It's called cognitive dissonance. Very common.


Wikipedia

Some good information in there.