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Science: Wonders, causality and the indeterminable

Jonesboy said:
If you haven't come across gravity how will you know what the mathematical description is about?

And if you have come across gravity then that is what the mathematical description is about.

Which of these?
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Your weasel phrase about having "come across gravity" conflates the trivial observation we all make as infants, that stuff falls to the ground, with a universal principle of gravity. By pretending that they are the same thing you are deluding yourself that you instinctively understood what was not grasped until Newton.

So let's take the first of those choices. How do you imagine schoolchildren all over the world learn what the mathematical description is about? Don't you remember? They have the principle explained to them. Simple, eh?
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Your weasel phrase about having "come across gravity" conflates the trivial observation we all make as infants, that stuff falls to the ground, with a universal principle of gravity. By pretending that they are the same thing you are deluding yourself that you instinctively understood what was not grasped until Newton.

So let's take the first of those choices. How do you imagine schoolchildren all over the world learn what the mathematical description is about? Don't you remember? They have the principle explained to them. Simple, eh?
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My point was MUCH more powerful than that.
It broke the back of your question. How can I identify a mathematics as being about anything more than what I am familiar with? Yes?
 
godless dave said:
I've never heard of "mind/brain" causality or "form/no form" causality.
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I'll go against my advice.

The mind/brain myth is that conscuiousness is created by particular arrangements of matter. This causality is not Newtonian or quantum.

The form/no form causality is, as I already wrote, the creation of matter from nothing. This form of relationship is still expressed in quantum, etc, terms.
 
Jonesboy said:
I'll go against my advice.

The mind/brain myth is that conscuiousness is created by particular arrangements of matter. This causality is not Newtonian or quantum.
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How do you know this? It seems to me it would be Newtonian.
 
Jonesboy said:
My point was MUCH more powerful than that.
It broke the back of your question. How can I identify a mathematics as being about anything more than what I am familiar with? Yes?
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No.

I guess you never took a physics class.

Perhaps that explains why you never answered the question: what do you think gravity is?
 
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Jonesboy said:
My point was MUCH more powerful than that.
It broke the back of your question. How can I identify a mathematics as being about anything more than what I am familiar with? Yes?
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If I remember my history right, QM (just as an example) first began as a solution to the ultraviolet catastrophe. And yet, you probably have no experience whatsoever with the ultraviolet catastrophe. It's not explaining anything you are familiar with, but if you could understand the mathematics you could identify it's meaning.

One of the major difference between Newtonian gravity and older ideas of why things fall (see, for instance, Aristotle), is that under Newton everything attracts everything else. This is an important distinction even if we leave out "the heavens". So, ignore the fact that Newton explains the tides and the motion of the moon in orbit around the earth, the planets about the sun. Let's just look at the earth. Older viewpoints were that things had a tendancy to move toward the center of the earth. We can sum that up if we like (simply to create a paralel with Newton) that things are attracted to the earth. But completely lacking was the conception that the earth is attracted to those objects.

This is also completely lacking in any intuitive sense of gravity. We don't have a feeling that the earth moves toward a falling stone, but it does.

Now, if you don't disagree with any of that and are simply saying that we have to be able to identify a stone in order to say "a stone falls", that's obvious and not particularly enlightening. You seem, though, to be saying that we have to know what "falls" means before we can have a mathematical framework that includes it, but I disagree: we only need to know what motion is. Once you know that, you can create a mathematical framework that includes certain types of motion and what they look like can be deduced from the mathematics: in this way our mathematics can even include concepts that don't have real world examples. If that is possible then it's clearly not the case that we need to have an experience of a thing for the mathematics to mean something.
 
The majority of posts in this thread have been sent to AAH. They were each either off-topic, uncivil, flooding, or an attack on another member's sanity/sobriety. This thread is for the discussion of whether the "indeterminable" is a scientific concept that should be embraced more than the ... determinable. Anyone tempted to comment on another topic (or to repeat what has already been said word for word) is strongly advised to be less determined in his actions.

ETA: Sorry about the "his," but "anyone" is singular and grammar necessitates a gender-specific pronoun despite the fact that the future reader's gender is indeterminable.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Loss Leader
 
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Jonesboy said:
It's not Newtonian because it's not reciprocal causality - Newtonian is reciprocal - A affects B and B affects A. But mind doesn't affect matter.
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If the mind is simply a type of information processing, then, yes, it does affect matter.
 
What is your motive here, Jones? You never discuss any of these topics that I've seen, you merely make proclamations and announcements and wait for people to disagree with you so you can then tell them they are wrong.
 
Wait wait, he's saying that the mind = brain is a MYTH?! Well I'm trying to read what he implies and I can't find out why he's calling brain = mind a myth. The way I see if, you take away some part of the brain, and you take away part of the mind too and...well...read sig for further details...
 
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Jonesboy said:
I fancy The Indeterminable. Why? I will tell you.

The Interminable is a mystery. This is empty metaphysics.
The Indeterminable is infinity. This is empty mathematics.
The Indeterminable is lost meaning. This is empty grammar.
The indeterminable is lost results. This is chemistry.

God, there are ever so many choices. Hmm.
And that is why I just fancy The Indeterminable.
You should too. It's heaven ever so.
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Would you please clarify how what you fancy relates to Science, Mathematics, Medicine, or Technology?
 
Post-modern neo-Kantian stuff is easy to fabricate. Its use? Good to impress some pseudo intellectual esoteric-minded half-drunken, half-stoned chicks at pubs. A shortcut to their... Well, you've got the meaning.
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Hm...May have been useful in my pre-matrimonial years. I prefer the woman who was impressed by long discussions of actual data, and who considered going to a talk on using magnetite to gauge plutonic intrusion flow direction a good date myself.

Jonesboy said:
Crafts were passed down. Not science.
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This is what we call a "lie". It's information you know is false, yet are passing off as true anyway. See, scientists DO pass down information--for example, I know about spring deposits because of Quade and his cohorts, I know about alluvial fans in the Mojave thanks to Ponti (1985 and a series in 1981--just go to the USGS publications warehouse and type in "Ponti" to get a real education on the topic). I know about the Cambrian Explosion via Gould. The difference isn't that scientists don't pass on knowledge. There are in fact two critically differences between science and a craft. First, science advances by design. Knitting has stayed the same for many, many decades, with relatively few advancements. Pottery has remained essentially the same for millenia. Same with painting. Science, on the other hand, change as often as journals have issues published--by design. The second difference is that science requires all data--ALL data--to be independantly verifiable. Crafts MAY have data independantly verified, but they do not generally require it.

And if science, an ever-growing, ever-expanding method of learning new things about reality itself and composed of so many branches and sub-branches that most people don't have any incling of what they all are, is borring to you, how are crafts, which are almost by definition and certainly by general practice static, any more interesting? And that convoluted question is giving you the best of it: any real scientist knows that one's feelings mean nothing, only facts matter. If science is boring, DO SOMETHING ELSE. What you CANNOT do is use your bordome to condemn science, any more than I can say a play is bad because it had poor brushstroke techniques.
 
Jonesboy said:
Science has four types of causality:
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No, 4 corner days actually exist, and Cube 4x4 voids 1 & God. Imaginary Cubed Earth has 4 Days within simultaneous rotation. I CREATED 4
DAYS IN ON EARTH ROTATION.

Oh, and I almost forgot, Greenwich Time is a Lie.
 
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