tar

Just the solipsism argument. It seems to me that the reality of others is unquestionable. I don't see how someone can say there is no proof of others when there is nothing but proof. So I was wondering if you had any reason to doubt that others exist. As for examples of something not being the best fit I would say things like epicycles, that explain the behavior but are too convoluted to be really the way things work. Personally I think dark energy and dark matter, are not a very good fit. Science had a pretty good series of explanations without what appears to be 95 percent of the place accounted for. I do not see where dark energy has been "fit" into our understanding of our immediate surroundings. Regards, TAR

SwansonT, As a person who was taught logic and who has mused about life and meaning quite considerably, I have always thought what is important in ones own worldview, ones own philosophy is that it be internally consistent. A consistent worldview does not mean it is the best or the only worldview, it just means it is consistent. I see a direct analogy to the science that we talk about on this board, from various angles, in that​ ​a scientific model does not have to be the best fit, or the only fit, it just has to work theoretically under the constraints and assumptions agreed upon and be useful in predicting how reality is going to behave next time we encounter it, applying the same combination of variables in the way we did last time, when it behaved in a recorded manner. So in both cases one looks for agreement. One looks to please something, to match something, to find something fits. My insight into this situation, that I have not, up to now, properly shared, is that we as humans want to please objective reality by agreeing with it, and we want to please ourselves by having a model that securely fits the world. We want the model to fit the world and the world to fit the model. If this is the case, then philosophy and science are married. It is not a situation of philosophers are like this and scientists are like that. It is a situation where both philosophers and scientists are human. Regards, TAR We want to please ourselves, we want to please those we consider part of our feeling of self, and we want to fit the world, and we want the world to fit with us.

Yes interesting. Do you, as a scientist believe that other scientists are real? By confirm I am not talking confirmation bias, where you look at things in a way that confirms your preconceptions. I am talking about looking at things and confirming that they look the same as they did last time you looked. Confirming that your model matches reality, or importantly that your model and reality do not match, informing you of a change in reality. That is, a very important component of human consciousness is pattern recognition. Being able to see a whole deer hiding in the woods, even though only a piece here and a piece there is visible through the brush. We fill in the blanks with deer parts we only know are "supposed" to be there because we have seen whole deer.

Strange, I was trying to show that using more than one sense was how we operate and each sense helps complete the model of the world that we build internally. I understand that hallucinations could involve multiple senses, I was saying that if someone gave me a real example of this occurring I would believe it, because a report of this happening would be an example of taking someone else's word on what is real. I would not need to actually interview the guy that had such experience, I would trust that he told somebody what he experienced, knowing in retrospect it was a hallucination, or the person he was with at the time determined what he was experiencing was not real. But in either case somebody would have to make the determination that there is a difference between experiencing reality, and having a very real feeling hallucination. 5 years ago at work one day I had a situation for about 3 minutes where I saw edges and colors around everything. I experienced it as if it was actual. No difference between what I saw that I knew was the way the world looked and what I saw that I knew my brain was manufacturing. It looked real, yet I knew it wasn't because I knew from prior experience what these things looked like, and the fringes "made no sense". I looked it up later and my experience was much like the reports of "visual migraines". So visual migraines are real, but they are not as true to reality as the way a thing looks to me, when I am not having a visual migraine. Kant believed that you could not know the thing as it is. But you could say something about the thing. That is all we can do as individuals, and that is all science can do as well...but since that is the best we can do, and we all have the same limitation, AND we are able to, through language tell each other things about the world, then the things we tell each other about the world, as long as we are not lying to each other, are true. They are at least true things you can say about the world. Even if we don't have access to the thing as it is, and we only get the "image" of the thing, there is still something casting the shadow on the wall and we can talk about what might make such a shadow. The thing casting the shadow is still real. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave Regards, TAR

charony, "such as reduction of fundamental research vs applied​" This is an argument that realistically goes on in every institution, and why most successful companies apply considerable funds to Research and Development. Our universities are already in the research and development business, and they receive considerable funding from students and alums and business and military and NASA. I am satisfied that good science will still be accomplished, without specifically directed federal funds. The big federal push under Obama was to concentrate on STEM to stay competitive with the rest of the world. Mostly applied science by the time the rubber met the road, anyway. Regards, TAR your average citizen might want to sacrifice to pave the roads, or to gain protection from an enemy or a disease or starvation, or exposure, or even to fly to Mars, but few care about finding a neutrino, or a gravity wave, or the Higgs We found the Higgs a while back anyway, and things look pretty much the same around my neighborhood as before. Maybe Iran and North Korea have a better idea as to how to create nuclear weapons, but that would be an argument against nuclear ​​physics expenditures, not an argument for.

saw a piece on the news where a governmental entity out west rejected the findings of a university study because it did not align with their narrative on the issue, so they questioned the methodology and commissioned another university to do the study so the results might come back in alignment with their policies the results happened to be contrary to the progressive narrative, but judging by the politics of the majority of members of this forum, I do not think they, the members, would be in favor of our current president cherry picking studies, anyway, so I don't think that closing down a politically motivated office is entirely a bad thing for science...in fact it is potentially a good thing, if funds continue to flow toward scientific pursuits that are important to science and industry and not flow toward pursuits meant to "fix" people that don't have the president's political views

imatfaal, My daughter was at a university for the last 5 years pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry which she now has. She was not in love with the grant process...but private industry grants were as important to acquire as government grants. We have the same 320 million people in the country now as we had before the election. Same Nobel contenders as before. Perhaps our president does not wish to tell scientists what they should be investigating, and the decommissioning of the office was part of his deregulation idea. That is, let people regulate themselves and do what works. If you think about it, you wouldn't want to be forced by the federal government to study a particular thing, would you? What good is a bunch of people telling you what to think, when you can tell yourself to do the right thing and cut out the middle man. Regards, TAR

I can have a dream where I taste and smell and see a thing, yet I can still call it a dream because I know I was asleep when I had those experiences and they do not have to align with the waking world. My thesis is that EVERYTHING we experience is an analog model of reality. Some of it firsthand, some of it from memory, some of it from the experiences of others we trust. That we have more than one sense allows us to match our model to reality in more than one way, thus "making sense" of the place. In regards, to science, and many of the arguments I get into with scientists, it is more important to me that what I sense matches my model, and I immediately update my model to include changes to reality of which my senses inform me. It is always the match between my model and reality that makes my point of focus consciousness of reality, real. I don't need to do a transform into Hilbert space, to imagine a photon traveling from a nearby star taking 4 years to get here, and what implications as to the reality of that star, that has. dimreepr, I was responding to what I thought Strange thought I was saying. There is plenty of "you shouldn't think you know what the other is thinking" to go around. Regards, TAR dimreepr, I do however admit I often think I know what another is thinking, and I am wrong. However, there are plenty of times in my life when I thought I knew what the other was thinking and I was correct. I still tend to put myself in the other person's shoes, and figure I can converse with that unseen other, hypothetically, but based on human tendencies I know they must have, because they are human. So sometimes I overthink, but I do not appreciate being accused of "not reading" someone's post. I read the post, I read between the lines, I take into consideration other arguments that the poster has presented to attempt to understand what he or she is thinking. I do not pull my considerations out of thin air. And of course I confuse and conflate ideas presented by different posters and take the figurative literally, and forget and misremember and such, but I do read. What the subject is, is often misconstrued. Regards, TAR

and if it is not absolutely false enough for you based on the confirmation of all the member's participation, then there is no thing that the members can absolutely confirm which is not notably helpful to scientific enquiry The logical conclusion your argument comes to, is that science does not attempt to confirm reality, where I am rather sure that the confirmation of reality is the point of science. If we are, in Klaynos' opinion, not good absolute judges of the place, so what, point me to someone who is a better judge than another human. dimreepr, Strange thinks I was saying people can't have hallucinations. I never thought that. Regards, TAR

Strange, I was pointing out that we are sitting here discussing halucinations with other real people that because we are having the discussion, are obvioulsy considered other real people by each of the members. Any discussion of the non-reality of all the members but one is absolutely proven false by the existence of the discussion. Regards, TAR

God I believe IS real, in the sense that he/she/it is the anthropomorphic unseen other that we converse with, when we wish to engage the absolute. Guy hears a commotion in the chicken coup. "hey, anybody in there" "nobody here but us chickens"

dimreepr, Sure there is. I am confirming that solipsism isn't real. My joke in college philosophy course was that I wanted to start a solipsism club. Regards, TAR besides, who are you looking to for confirmation? if its only you, and you know there are other people to go to, you already have proof enough that you are not a figment of your own imagination to consider yourself wrong to think you are alone if its only you, and you know there are not other people to go to, you already know there is no hope of confirmation

Absolutely they exist. And probably In more than one way. That is, while you are experiencing a "good" feeling, there is actually more dopamine in the synapses between the cells in your brain. I have no doubt that Mohammed conversed with an unseen other in the darkness of the cave, because we actually have a region of our brains that allows us to converse with unseen others. The same ability that allows us to pick up an extra thing at the market, because we know our significant other would like it, without making a cell phone call. Or to do a thing that would have pleased Grandma, even though she died 25 years ago. But to Klaynos's "absolute" requirement. I think it is "good enough" to get consensus of your peers. There is no more absolute judge available. after all, any unseen other you conceive of, that does not exist in objective reality is by definition imaginary and therefore not absolute...at least another scientist, or a pastor is a real human being, that is not you, and therefore a member of objective reality isn't it convenient that we can turn to objective reality and ask it what is real

klaynos, Well yes its frustrating, but you are setting artificial limits as well. For instance you believe it is true that people sometimes hallucinate something that effects multiple senses. If you were to give me an example of this, I would believe it too. We both make a distinction between what is real, and what is going on in our model of reality that is not accurate. That is we can both discern between what is peer reviewed, waking reality, and what is due to mental breakdowns, dreams, drugs, and common beliefs. I for instance cried when the place that put my dog to sleep sent me a postcard about meeting Shady again, running across the field to greet me as I crossed the rainbow bridge. I know there is no such bridge, in reality. Regards, TAR (yet I have real tears running down my face right now) and you, Klaynos, know that there is not a rainbow bridge in reality, but you also know that I am real and I once had a real dog named shady, and that there is a vet that sends out cards about the rainbow bridge that can verify my story you know its true, because it is true in more than one way peer review is what we go to, to check we have not fooled ourself into believing what we wanted to believe but we are already pretty sure the thing is real because it satisfied all our tests and senses and we already checked that it was true in more than one way Peer review would be pointless if we did not believe that other scientists were real and could run the same checks that we ran and get the same results, because the thing we were modeling actually was out there to be tested against our model, for a match.

Except how can the pellet experience less time in one direction than the other? If you fired a highly polished and reflective spherical pellet through an evacuated track, to a very tiny degree it should look like an oblate spheroid to the rest frame, right? Could you not aim various lasers from various angles at a point in the track where the pellet will cross, and judge by the landing spots of the reflections, on screens very far from the pellet, for leverage, the oblateness?

So is there any miniscule amount of length contraction/time dilation that the pellet will undergo in the direction of fire that would not occur in the vertical direction, that could be measured and determined shorter and quicker for the pellet that traveled?

String Junky, I am sorry for interrupting and deflecting the question from its purpose. Was is more about the simultaneity of decent, where the video ignored your question by dropping the bullet where the fired bullet landed? ​Regards, TAR As in, does the velocity cause any length contraction/time dilation?

Right. Not to any large degree. Just for answering the question yes or no as to whether the bullets hit the ground at the same time, you have to say no. Any intuitive shooter elevates above the tangent automatically, after seeing the level shot fall short, anyway. And as soon as you have elevation, you go up before you fall, and the fired bullet does actually spend more time in flight then a dropped bullet, and the firer may well consider a sight elevation "level". So right, the problem does not suffer from the problems I stated to any large degree Regards, TAR

Well wait, my thinking is a little off, as the M16 muzzle velocity is 2900 ft per sec, and an object falls 16 ft in the first sec, so the round will hit the ground before the pole. So lets shoot the thing from a 30ft platform and have the laser mark at 30ft 8 inches. And at the pole where a tangent line has also been marked at ground level, the mark is 8 inches off the ground, so when the bullet hits the ground at the muzzle it will have fallen 30 ft at the pole, and still be traveling. I can accept a spherical cow as a general case, but we actually live on a sphere, and if common sense would have a person think it would take an M16 round longer to hit the ground, and that is actually true, why attempt to show they are wrong by dropping out the very element that makes it true? What is interesting is that in order to actually hit a target a mile away you have to adjust your sights so the barrel is elevated above the tangent. you have to make a parabolic shot...a tangent shot, from eye level will hit the ground prior the mile away target, which is what the general case law is meant to illustrate

Except if you set a tangent line with a laser at 5 ft high and marked a pole a mile away (on the salt flats with no hills or walls) and put an M16 level on this tangent line, and fired it, while dropping a round from muzzle height, the round has to lose 5ft 8 inches of height to hit the ground at the pole where it loses 5 ft of height to hit the ground below the muzzle. It obviously takes longer to fall 5.67 ft than it takes to fall 5 ft. Nothing to do with relativity yet, but gravity is gravity and curvature is curvature. If your thought experiment was on a very small spherical asteroid, and not the Earth, the tangent shot (oxygen injected to facilitate the explosion) would possibly miss the asteroid and go into elliptical orbit.

Studiot, I wonder why, in the exercise, the curvature of the Earth is dropped from consideration. In the intuitive consideration of the problem, it seems to make sense, that because of the distance from the launch and the Earth curving away, the bullet will take longer to reach the ground, because in actuality the vertical trip IS longer. In fact, if you start high enough and fire a projectile horizontally to the ground the bullet will take a very long time to hit the ground, as it could continue to miss the ground and be in orbit. Regards, TAR

Could but not likely it happen that way in every case of a sensed human. That is, we each have our own model of the place, and that model is by definition imaginary or illusory and prone to error and differences, but in all cases of model building, the model is of something, and according to everything I have read, everything I have heard and everything I have seen, smelled, touched, tasted, and everything you and I have conversed about, the reality that science seeks to model is real and is something that we both have in common. besides a person can not be a creation of his own mind, because he would need a real mind to be the creation of, in which case the mind in question exists

Strange, Well all the proof that is required is for one person to "sense" another and for the other, at the same time to "sense" the one, and then for the two to compare models. If the "common" model has it that there is the one and there is the other and there is an entire universe common to and outside the both, then the one, the other and the rest, are real. Regards, TAR

except the solipsist has the problem of determining the "real" population of reality if it is only her that is real and all else, other than she is deemed by her, to be illusion, then the total number of entities that exist in reality is one This can only be the case if such a wonderer is reality itself...in other words, it can only be the case if all that we are calling the waking world, or reality, is occurring in the mind of God and she, the solipsist, is God. I don't think this is the case, nor would it provide any discussion points, since she would already know she was alone and had no one to talk to, or any entity to run into, that was not created in her own imagination. I think it more reasonable to assume that reality exists and we each build our own model (image) of it, from what of it we sense. now it is possible that God got lonely and invented the world, and we are each just a piece of her consciousness, and it is our job to be a single point of consciousness, pretending to be separate from her, in order to witness the rest as "something else"...but in that case, I would have to say she is a great illusionist, and we might as well just play along, being that the alternative is to tell her she IS alone

Perhaps something makes "sense" when it is confirmed by more than one sense. Then it is true, in more than one way. Add peer review, and you have confirmation from someone else's senses. It then is confirmed as making sense because it all fits together in the waking world, and has its own, non illusion type reality, without ANY requirement that any particular individual thinks its true. knock on wood