Skepticism and The Normal

[WWHP]

Kopji,

Thank you for your thoughtful rebuttal. I hope to get to all of it, but it's also late, so let's see what I can do here.

Y. Without critiquing your comments on Popper, the idea he promotes for examining questions that make 'true or false' assertions is by applying the concept of falsification to them. He offers an excellent example: that of a climber who is attempting to scale a peak, but it is lost in fog. Since he cannot 'know' he has reached the top, he attempts to ascertain it by other means, means that would show he had NOT reached the peak. Popper proposes that all science is like that - we don't ever absolutely KNOW something, but one way to proceed in scientific knowledge is to propose a theory and then attempt to refute it, or at least parts of it. The new 'falsified' theory becomes the basis for a newer theory, with new questions to ask.

That makes sense to a limited degree, I just think it's a heuristic. I'm more in step with Thomas Kuhn here, which probably doesnt surprise you. However, my opinion here is just that, I can't say I have had the oppurtunity to really explore this in dialectic with someone, and my opinion could change.

This forms what you mentioned earlier as a 'dialectic triad' (Kant I think). Theory - falsification - new theory - etc. And so our knowledge progresses.

I believe it was Hegel who had the triads in dialectic. I also know Popper was highly critical of dialectic in general, or maybe it was philosophical dialectic that he didnt like.

This is where your position of Jolie seemed to confuse me. If I began a dialectic triad with the 'theory' that 'Jolie was beautiful', I am quickly forced to argue that there is something that exists that is not beautiful.

It depends upon how you are defining her beauty, and if you are staying consistant with that definition. So if you phrased it such as "angelina Jolie is a beautiful women, and beautiful women tend to possess alluring symmetrical features", then of course there would exist women who do not naturally possess alluring symmetrical features. I just saw Rosanne Barr on Bill Mahr, for example.

Beauty is simply not a falsifiable idea.

If you define beauty specifically, then yes it is. If i define objective beauty as symmetry, there are indeed many things that are not symmetrical. If you define beauty philosophically, then no, it's not falsifiable in the scientific sense, because beauty in the philosophical sense is BOTH objective/subjective, and science has a limitation there.

There is no way to 'approach' the truth of the matter, no matter how many pages we (or at least I) type.

There is a way to approach the truth of the matter, indeed there is, just not scientifically. We include the science, but we dont limit to it. To approach the truth of the matter, it must be discovered subjectively, as well as objectively.

And that path is paved with rationality.

The problem is that there is no way to approach the truth of it one way or another. I could simply assert, even from a philosophical pov, that there is a sense that all things have beauty.

yes, and that could be true and still not contradictory to what I write.

Beauty is discovered, right? So for the sake of argument, assume for a second that beauty does have an objective component, symmetry. Well, symmetry is not always percieved when it's there. I take the natural center line in the body for example. Most people can't see it, or sense it. Great atheletes sense it, and certain people can literally see it. Great artists and sketchers can see it. I worked recently with some animators, pretty top notch artists, did Spongbob, Samarai Jack, etc etc. Amazing art, and it's amazing to watch artists perfectly sketch around the center line of the body. Samarai Jack, have you seen it? There is symmetery all over that cartoon, utterly beautiful graphics.

Yet most people cannot see it or relate that information well enough to draw like that. It still effects them though, they just can't identify it.

Personally, I go with the artists on this one just as much, or more, than the scientists. An artist can set out to draw a beautiful woman who does not exist. Take Jessica Rabbit. What makes Jessica Rabbit a sexy cartoon character? An artist can point out, exactly, every single objective detail that gives her that form, and can reproduce that form over and over and over, and everyone in the audience will agree that Jessica Rabbit is the seductive and beautiful rabbit in the movie. That doesnt mean that we are attracted to Jessica Rabbit subjectively!

Can you give me an example of a thing that is not beautiful, or is ugly in every sense?

war, starvation, disease, hunger, poverty. ideas that support those solutions are ugly things.


here is a photograph that is BOTH beautiful AND ugly.

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/3/35/250px-Nagasakibomb.jpg

How's that for another coupling?

The artist part of me would say that beauty lies in imperfections as well as in 'symmetry'. I draw human faces, and this seems an inescapable truth. To define perfect beauty as complete symmetry succeeds only if it denies an important truth about beauty.

ahhh, so you are an artist too, wonderful. Me too, but in a different media than drawing. I agree, an artist can see that imperfections are beautiful and they relate to a higher symmetry that most will indeed miss.

And I think what 'imperfections' are is really chaos of order. Now, chaos and order, that is another symmetry, another coupling. Sure, too much order breeds redundant patterns, so we need to balance that visually with some chaos.

I use these things all the time. I love making crackly, old, visually poor looking/sounding media beautiful.

Philosophy of Logic is harsh on statements that claim to objective while being both 'true' and 'false' at the same time.

I know, that's because they can't account for them. I know I am making a grand claim here, I know what this sounds like when i say it, but I do say that bivalent logic has produced the worst philosophical errors historicaly and continues to this very day. I really do think that bivalent thinking is a main source of all confusion, and the philosophy of logic thus far doesnt seem to be helping!

It will help though once it upgrades to ternary, and I will predict that will happen at some point, it has too.

Kopji, that's it, my eye lids are heavy, I want to be clear on this, let me get to the rest of this later.

Great discussion so far, by the way, I really appreciate it.


BF

 

[pv+]

"Bubblefish will no longer rationally engage magical arguments"

Respectfully,
The Management

Disrespectfully you mean. Bubblefish is still trolling.
Laughable isn't it when a Los Angeles plagiariser and drug addict accuses others of advancing "magical arguments". You have no argument now and never did have. In 50+ pages all you have managed to do is butcher the English language and make yourself look decidedly foolish. Now you can't be bothered to mine Wikepedia any more you reveal your true self in your pathetically infantile responses and grizzling to the forum mods.
Grow up Bubblefish.

pv+, stop personalizing the issues.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Patricio Elicer

 

[pv+]

You are welcome. There may be some summarizations around, Stanford University is a good source. Without critiquing your comments on Popper, the idea he promotes for examining questions that make 'true or false' assertions is by applying the concept of falsification to them. He offers an excellent example: that of a climber who is attempting to scale a peak, but it is lost in fog. Since he cannot 'know' he has reached the top, he attempts to ascertain it by other means, means that would show he had NOT reached the peak. Popper proposes that all science is like that - we don't ever absolutely KNOW something, but one way to proceed in scientific knowledge is to propose a theory and then attempt to refute it, or at least parts of it. The new 'falsified' theory becomes the basis for a newer theory, with new questions to ask. This forms what you mentioned earlier as a 'dialectic triad' (Kant I think). Theory - falsification - new theory - etc. And so our knowledge progresses.

This is where your position of Jolie seemed to confuse me. If I began a dialectic triad with the 'theory' that 'Jolie was beautiful', I am quickly forced to argue that there is something that exists that is not beautiful. Beauty is simply not a falsifiable idea. There is no way to 'approach' the truth of the matter, no matter how many pages we (or at least I) type. Tarski might be a little more harsh and call it a nonsense idea.

I hope I answered this with the example above.



The problem is that there is no way to approach the truth of it one way or another. I could simply assert, even from a philosophical pov, that there is a sense that all things have beauty. Can you give me an example of a thing that is not beautiful, or is ugly in every sense?



The artist part of me would say that beauty lies in imperfections as well as in 'symmetry'. I draw human faces, and this seems an inescapable truth. To define perfect beauty as complete symmetry succeeds only if it denies an important truth about beauty.


Philosophy of Logic is harsh on statements that claim to objective while being both 'true' and 'false' at the same time.



Beauty is an idea we judge by, like morality. Creatures on a different planet might have different views of both. To our limited perspective they can both appear objective, and even seem useful that way. They are subjective in the larger perspective though, regardless of our desire for them to be otherwise.



Truth may exist as an absolute, but we only know it by an imperfect painting of what it is not. Falsification seems like a very artistic sort of idea to me, considering Popper was a scientist I think it is a fine philosophical insight.


I demonstrated how in a scientific dialectic your position on beauty meets these conditions of sophistry.

Kopji, I predict you will be patronized and insulted just like everyone else who has ever tried to engage Bubblefish/TM in every thread on every forum in which he has participated. If you think you are going to persuade Bubblefish he is anything other than the king of rational thinkers and the crown prince of logic then you are in for disappointment. He has been doing this for a few years, and being "open minded" is his hobby.

Buon lavoro.

 

[Professor Yaffle]

Eureka!

I think I have solved it!!!

The things that we call subjective almost always have some sort of reference to external reality. Therefore they are by BF's definition both objective and subjective (or true and false to him) and therefore in his terms mystery. I really can't think of anything subjective that doesn't at least have some reference to external objective reality (help me out, can anyone think of anything?). So the only thing left in his False/subjective category are things that we would call false objective. The only things in his True category are objective true items. Therefore if we translate from bubblefish language to english:

True = objectively true
False = objectively false
Mystery = subjective

 

[sinnikal]

Kopji, I predict you will be patronized and insulted just like everyone else who has ever tried to engage Bubblefish/TM in every thread on every forum in which he has participated. If you think you are going to persuade Bubblefish he is anything other than the king of rational thinkers and the crown prince of logic then you are in for disappointment. He has been doing this for a few years, and being "open minded" is his hobby.

Buon lavoro.

pv+, I'm prepared to be proved wrong, but I have a sneaky feeling that Kopji is on top of his game.
It fits with the pattern of Bubb's overestimation of his own abilities and his regular underestimation of his 'opponents'

 

[Professor Yaffle]

Damn, almost had myself convinced there until I remembered that in the mystery category, BF would also put statements which are objective but we don't know whether they are true or false. So in one category he combines statements like "fish is delicious" and "the coin is in my right hand". Which obviously isn't a useful category. We can sort the second one out by looking in my right hand and resolve it into true or false, but we will never resolve the first, as it will differ in truth value between individuals.

 

[Mojo]

Eureka!

I think I have solved it!!!

The things that we call subjective almost always have some sort of reference to external reality. Therefore they are by BF's definition both objective and subjective (or true and false to him) and therefore in his terms mystery. I really can't think of anything subjective that doesn't at least have some reference to external objective reality (help me out, can anyone think of anything?). So the only thing left in his False/subjective category are things that we would call false objective. The only things in his True category are objective true items. Therefore if we translate from bubblefish language to english:

True = objectively true
False = objectively false
Mystery = subjective

I was thinking something along these lines, with the added point that, as you said in your next point, he has also managed to lump objective statements of which we don't know the truth in with subjective statements. Remember, though, that he is also trying to place subjective statements on which he holds an opinion in with either true or false objective statements, e.g. the statement "Angelina Jolie is beautiful".

I was a bit puzzled by this: he's been advocating this "third value of truth", but when he comes across a statement that genuinely doesn't fit into objectively true or objectively false, which appear to be his first two categories, he tries to shoe-horn it into a definition (e.g. beautiful = symmetrical) that allows him to place it in one of these categories.

Perhaps this is simply because he can't bear the idea that someone who disagrees with him might not actually be wrong, even in terms of a subjective statement. Alternatively it could be because he's realised that his three "values" actully correspond to the categories that everyone else already uses, once you realise that "objective but unknown" is still objective. He therefore needs to do something to make his idea distinctive.

I think the categories we have in OS 012 are actually

True: statements that Rome thinks are true (whether they are objective or subjective);
False: statements that Rome thinks are false (whether they are objective or subjective);
Mystery: statements that Rome doesn't know the truth of, or about which he doesn't have an opinion.

Note that this means that all statements are effectively subjective, as their status depends on Rome's opinion or belief.

 

[Professor Yaffle]

So to use BS123, you have to be wearing Rome tinted glasses?

 

[flimflam_machine]

The things that we call subjective almost always have some sort of reference to external reality. Therefore they are by BF's definition both objective and subjective (or true and false to him) and therefore in his terms mystery.

Yup, this is a fairly straightforward truth which I think Bubb is trying to hold up as a mainstay of his argument. Of course we find external objects beautiful, in this sense the feeling of beauty can be prompted by the object. We can even make a statistical argument that certain physical or physiognomic aspects of those objects make them more likely to be judged as beautiful. But the perception of beauty is still entirely internal and subjective as is shown by differences in culture and taste. If you broke AJ down into her tiniest components you wouldn't find one iota of "beauty". If you broke a London bus down into its smallest pieces it would still predominantly reflect light of wavelength > 650nm. That's the difference.

Also, personally I've always found AJ's mouth a bit freaky.

I really can't think of anything subjective that doesn't at least have some reference to external objective reality (help me out, can anyone think of anything?).

"I'm sad"? "I feel sick" (in the intransitive form)?

Damn, almost had myself convinced there

You're not alone Prof! Like I said before, I spent quite some time thinking about this and on several occasions I got to a point where I thought I understood how such a system could be valid and useful. On every occasion, within a few minutes I'd realised that actually it was flawed in ways similar to what you have described. Of course none of this is helped by the fact that after several months of arguing with us "yahoos" Bubb has still not explained how OS012 actually works.

(that wasn't an MC move, I'm waiting for the next round)

Gven that Bubb has described himself as a man of average intelligence, and in the light of the paper that Mojo found that shows that dim people overestimate their own skills, I think it's a reasonable assumption that Bubb got to the first stage, didn't bother thinking it through any further and is now fighting tooth and nail to defend a pathetically weak position. I'm actually impressed that he has stepped his prevarication up a gear; "symmetry" appears to be the new word of the day to be given a proper Bubb-style mangling.

 

[Professor Yaffle]

"I'm sad"? "I feel sick" (in the intransitive form)?

But we can correlate feeling sad or feeling sick with objective things. There are things that happen in the world that make most people sad, and food poisoning makes most people feel sick, so wouldn't they be both objective and subjective in Rome's world?

 

[flimflam_machine]

But we can correlate feeling sad or feeling sick with objective things. There are things that happen in the world that make most people sad, and food poisoning makes most people feel sick, so wouldn't they be both objective and subjective in Rome's world?

Yes you can find things that would be very reliable elicitors of those two feelings. But that's not what you asked for. You asked for "anything subjective that doesn't at least have some reference to external objective reality". The only reference to reality in those statements is to "I", which is the subject. Yet more technically, those statements are reports of the raw qualia of our experience. Again, objective things could be found that elicit those qualia but the statements don't refer to those things.

 

[Professor Yaffle]

Yes you can find things that would be very reliable elicitors of those two feelings. But that's not what you asked for. You asked for "anything subjective that doesn't at least have some reference to external objective reality". The only reference to reality in those statements is to "I", which is the subject. Yet more technically, those statements are reports of the raw qualia of our experience. Again, objective things could be found that elicit those qualia but the statements don't refer to those things.

Yes, that wasn't really thought through, as I was just musing off the top of my head - and I am still unsure if Rome would consider "I feel sad" to be purely subjective, or whether he would consider it to be both objective and subjective. What I am really wondering is whether in Rome's World, anything would be considered purely subjective and whether he could supply an operational definition of it.

 

[Mojo]

I'm actually impressed that he has stepped his prevarication up a gear; "symmetry" appears to be the new word of the day to be given a proper Bubb-style mangling.

What's happened with "symmetry" is that Rome needed an objective criterion for beauty, and Googled information that indicated that people are more likely to find symmetrical faces beautiful. He then latched onto "symmetry" as a sole criterion, ignoring the fact that there are a large number of other factors, many of them subjective, which come into play when someone decides whether they find a particular symmetrical face beautiful. It was also pointed out that the only perfectly symmetrical body is a perfect sphere, and we don't assess how beautiful a face is according to how nearly spherical it is. Faced with this, he retreated into defining "symmetry" in terms of ideas such as "inner harmony between thinking and feeling", which, of course, brings him back to square one as far as producing non-subjective criteria for assessing beauty is concerned.

 

[flimflam_machine]

Faced with this, he retreated into defining "symmetry" in terms of ideas such as "inner harmony between thinking and feeling", which, of course, brings him back to square one as far as producing non-subjective criteria for assessing beauty is concerned.

What?! You mean he deliberately obfuscated in order to retrospectively justify his poorly thought-out arguments, to give his system a veneer of validity, and try to make himself seem a whole lot cleverer, honest and insightful than he actually is?

I'm shocked! My faith in humanity has taken a severe blow and I'm going to have to go and lie down for a bit if you'll excuse me.

 

[JonnyFive]

Wait, BF is now claiming the sum energy of the universe is 0?!

Before, when talking to me about physics, he claimed the universe had infinite energy. By simple logic, that would make the sum of the energy in the universe [latex]$\infty$[/latex].

I don't think he knows the definition of "energy" anyway. He might be thinking of heat death, but that's the free energy (that's "free" as in "available", not "free" as in "crazy energy you can just get from nowhere") of the universe approaching (and possibly attaining, we don't know yet) 0.

Of course, heat death is hardly a set concept in physics, and even in a state of heat death there would still be potential energy.

 

[Professor Yaffle]

The energy of the universe is both 0 and infinite.

Therefore

= 0.

0 = mystery

is a mysterious concept.

WOW it is all so clear!

 

[flimflam_machine]

By simple logic, that would make the sum of the energy in the universe

.

When was "simple logic" or even just "logic" a key feature of Bubb's posts?

 

[aggle-rithm]

So paintings hold the same value for beauty as do faces?



No, you would have elephantitis, and have proportions which are ASSYMETRICAL to beauty.

Radial Symmetry, like Geometric Symmetry, is not the sole definition of 'symmetry', rather symmetry, indeed, perfect symmetry is beuaty, who hold symmetry to extend to all planes and axises relative to FORM.

Again, are you going to argue with science and math now? A computer can correctly pick a beautiful face. This is impossible if beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Your argument is irrational

BF

Beauty is based partly on subjective taste, partly on culture, partly on genetics. Humans react positively to people of the opposite sex who are likely to be good progenitors. Bilateral symmetry is a good indicator because it generally means the person is healthy. Faces that are wider at the top and narrower at the bottom indicate youth, which is also a good indicator. Strong, muscular men are attractive to women because this is an indicator not only of health but of the ability to provide for and protect the offspring. Wide hips and large breasts in a woman mean that she is able to bear and nurture children. Evolution selects for individuals who find these traits attractive.

To this extent, a machine can recognize beauty in a face, but it is simply recognizing evolutionarily beneficial traits.

 

[Mojo]

To this extent, a machine can recognize beauty in a face, but it is simply recognizing evolutionarily beneficial traits.

Or possibly just recognizing those traits that its programmers have told it to recognize as "beautiful".

 

[pv+]

So to use BS123, you have to be wearing Rome tinted glasses?

A Rome by any other name would smell as sweet. A skunk? (Aplogies to Ambrose Bierce)