Right. It’s going to be an interesting campaign. BTW, speaking of ethics, I understand that she takes a strong stand for fiscal responsibility, but her own finances are a mess with owed back taxes and foreclosure on her house?
To have a set of formulas that can combine Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity requires the subatomic levels to be considered. All the force laws must be reducable from one set of formulas: strong, weak, electromagnetic, gravitational. Gravitational includes macroscopic and the microscopic Quantum theory of gravity.
O.K. Touch, in the absence of objective determinations or standards, please explain to me how one can evaluate your values vis-a-vis Hitler’s or Stalin’s values. Stalin too sincerely and ruthlessly believed he was working for the good of mankind. Again, if you argue for subjectivity, how can you condemn Stalin? You say we cannot copy “our” values to some other location. So those K.G.B. guards in the Soviet Union who ran the Gulags believing they were creating heaven on earth by imprisoning enemies of the workers’ revolution cannot be judged negatively in an objective fashion? It was just the sum of their experiences, I assume in your view. You really are on shaky ground.
Why subjectively, of course! Based on my values, my convictions, my desire to see a world develop that secures liberty and individual rights. You are doing a good job here in helping me with my point; this is the poverty of philosophy, and the more severe poverty of theology, insofar as it even farther removed from a shared starting point of scientific information.
What I said was we cannot copy our experiences – these are perfectly personal. Depending on what you mean by “values”, we may well be able to communicate them, transmit them, relocate them.
Welcome to the real world. We don’t confer reality on the universe. We adapt to it and understand it is as best we can – it is what it is. And all the more reason to esteem character and virtue – there is no “geiger counter” or cosmic magic eight ball that provides our value judgments like reading a meter. It takes courage, thought, will, subjective commitments. It’s shaky, fer sher. The real world is a hard place for sissies.
Huh. Look around! how many different and conflicting moral frameworks could you find, just examining the neighbors in your neighborhood? It is moral chaos, and pointing to the role of will to power as the outworking of philosophy and theology in human interesting isn’t even trivially challenging.
I don’t accept science as the sole measure of truth, and I understand the concept of “moral certainty” itself to be problematic, and the the belief that one is “morally certain” itself to be an immoral stance. That’s how you get to demonizing homosexuals as part of holy scripture, or flying airplanes into skyscrapers as an act of piety. Moral and ethical deliberation is hard work, subjective, complex, messy. Simplistic thinking appears to encourage tragic outcomes.
Much of philosophy is not at all abstract, but is instead viscerally practical. Deciding whether to lie to an SS officer looking for Jews under your floorboards is not an abstract context for thinking about values, meaning, priorities and truth. We, as subjects, are limited to subjectivity in our value formation, but that doesn’t make it an abstract process. Far from it. It’s the messy business of real life, and decisions and choices day in and day out.
Why not? I have my subjective convictions, and these have many different ways to be effective, forceful. I’m not a god, I’m a human. I think with my mind, and act according to my values and priorities. I’m necessarily subjective in my grounds for many of my stances, but I do have those grounds. It’s of little consequence to you what my grounds are if you mess with my kids, and I’ve found out, for example. The subjectivity there won’t save you from anything, nor me, if the roles are reversed.
There’s nothing to condemn. It’s just the real world. It is what it is. It would make as much sense to “condemn gravity”, and be angry that it’s ALWAYS TRYING TO HOLD ME DOWN. I’m not arguing for moral chaos any more that I would argue for gravity. It obtains regardless of what I desire or might advocate.
But why would you need to combine QM with gravity? QM works best on the atomic or subatomic level and gravity is negligible there. GR works best on the celestial level with large planetary masses and on that scale the effects of QM are negligible. So I don;t see where there is any need to combine them.
String theory may be nice mathematically, but is there any experiment which can either verify or falsify string theory? Does string theory make any predictions which can be experimentally verified? I don’t see where string theory would give us any deeper insights into the nature of space and time or how it explains the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass. The only reason for ten dimensions is not that some experiment has shown that we live in ten dimensions, it is that in string theory gravitons are contained in a ten dimensioal environment and that perturbative string theories are anomaly free in ten dimensions. Also, where is the experimental evidence for supersymmetry? The only reason that I know of for supersymmetry is because string theory has no fermions and no chirality without supersymmetry. Also supersymmetry is related to Poincare invariance. But I don;t see the empirical data behind this? I thought that in physics, experimental data was supposed to act as some sort of control on the theory being postulated?
Ironically it is not philosophers but **physicists **who are seeking a Theory of Everything!
BTW, thanks for the link, although it does not explain why you would need QG, since, as you know, the gravitational force is so small compared to the other forces at this level. For example, the strong force compared to gravitational force between the protons is on the order of 10^42 times greater.
It does not matter what the relative strengths are, the reason is to have one theory for Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity; it means Quantum Mechanics at low potentials (weak gravity) and large (strong gravity) and also where both effects are significant. They postulate a graviton wave-particle so that this can be used with quantum field theory.
How the hell can that be a strawman? I think the idea that anyone can know everything is an aburd fantasy. Who exactly am I misrepresenting in saying that, you linguistically challenged jobbernowl?:yawn:Same old straw-man.:yawn:
Correct.
We’re talking speculation, obviously.
Don’t you remember that little conversation we had about the strong nuclear force that left you utterly baffled?
“What is the justification for saying philosophy is dead?”
Theoretical physicists sometimes attempt to develop formulas without any experimental data. In this situation there are observations in the weak and strong gravity, but not yet at Plancks size (orders smaller that a proton). A theory to reconcile Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity (a.k.a. Quantum Gravity) would allow expression of the phenomenon that occur in space-time at that scale. No observations are available yet, but getting closer, for example, with WMAP probe.
This is interesting. What are the predictions of superstring theory ? How many of these predictions have been verified? If you are speaking of supersymmetry, you can have supersymmetry without string theory.
What do you mean by “progress”? I’m not trying to do some rhetorical roundabout but if you’re looking for “progress” then some definition should be given. The philosophy people do today is very unlike the philosophy done 100 years ago but this is such an obvious point that I don’t think this is what you meant by “progress”. If anything, philosophy is not stagnant.
Would it be fair to say that you’re saying that these philosophers just ‘piggy-backed’ on the currents of non-philosophical movements?
Now this is interesting, philosophy needs as its basis the objective grounding that science provides. How do you prove this? (I’m not trying to do some “Aha! You’re using philosophy” type thing by the way) You treat “perfect nihilism” and “perfect post-modernism” as if they are synonymous with “false” or “worthless”. Why is that?
‘Stagnant’ is fine as a term to use, I guess. What would you point to as evidence of philosophy’s “non-stagnation”?
My running contention here, if you read this thread, though, is just that – philosophy doesn’t produce knowledge, but remains just the playing field for rhetorical and political conflicts and developments. Marx certainly was an influential thinker, but the poverty of philosophy, and its step-child theology, is that it languishes in a political swamp, as proposition grounded of subjective valuations.
No, I’d say it was quite the reverse – these social dynamics are the outworkings of philosophy/theology. Marx is a good example. Lenin was philosophically driven – an ideologue – in his revolutionary and statist efforts to build a Soviet society. Stalin’s was a variation on the theme, infusing traditional Russian religious sentiments in styling himself as a kind of living god, but between them, what happened proceeded from the force and implications of their ideas. A lot of that is traceable to a distinct philosophy (derived from Marx), but even in cases where you have a despot who just seeks personal power and wealth, well, that’s a philosophy too, just a different flavor.
No, none that I can see. “Merchant wars” are “less ideological” in terms of core values than say the class overthrow thesis of Marxism, but this is still philosophy in action: my interests are paramount, and best served by deploying violence against those who threaten my (merchant) interests…
No, certainly not. I’m saying it doesn’t meaning anything apart from persuasion when they do. When Einstein assented to atomism, it didn’t change anything for the theories in question – they performed as they performed, no matter what Einstein thought. But at least in the case of science, the practitioners have an objective point of reference with which to align their understandings. They are (putatively) corrigible to empirical performance, and new objective evidence. Kant was not. Or, more precisely, to the extent he was (I can think of a couple examples of this, as it happens), he is a “scientific philosopher”, not your garden variety philosopher.
No, and my use of that word isn’t meant to suggest they are cynical. I don’t suppose they are/were, as a rule (while some surely were, but that’s beside my point). By political, I mean that conflicts and disputes are NOT resolved, or resolvable in some data-driven, objective way. Conflicts are only resolved through persuasion, volition, coercion, violence.
Science has no objective grounding in the sense of ultimate justification. It is a research program, a metaphysical gamble. Pure philosophy insofar as that goes. It’s only valuable to those who subjectively value performance and liability to real-world experience. If you don’t think evidence matters, as a value stance, then science isn’t gonna do it for you. Science only obtains in minds that philosophically value empirical performance, predictive power, and liability to falsification. It’s a juggernaut of progress and discovery the likes of which the world has never seen if you do, value those things, but if you don’t, science may just as well be astrology or theology.
I don’t. “False” is at least meaningful, a concept that says something concrete about the world. Theology and philosophy aren’t even ‘false’ in any non-subjective sense. Philosophy is “not even wrong”. Science can be false, and is the stronger for it. What is “wrong theology”? It’s whatever you subjectively disagree with, of course!
That would be a different kind of nihilism. In the “Bible or nothing” case, the fear was about (the more common sense of) ‘nihilism’ where all meaning and values were thus destroyed. Philosophy, per my thesis here, is epistemically nihilist, meaning that it denies knowledge. Every philosophy is just as “true” as any and every other (and the same goes for theology).
No supersymmerty validation yet, but it is hoped that a superpartner particle (squark, slepton, or SUSY force, SUSY = sypersymmetry) will be found as a result of the Large Hadron Collider experiments. The Standard Model (1967-1974) of fundamental particles is for the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces and has quarks, leptons, and force particles, but it is known that is does not cover all the observations like dark matter and neutrino oscillations, and the Higgs boson has not been observed, so it is incomplete. (Data is being analyzed now for the Higgs boson.)
Are you speaking here of the fuzzball model? It is interesting, but I don’t see how you can make high precision measurements inside a black hole.
No, the observations are not made in the black holes, rather the model used for the black hole makes some predictions of fluidity. Those fluid characteristics are observed in the Lithium and gold experiments I mentioned, so the string theory then gives hope to the physicists that they may have found a way to describe the observed effects predicted for black holes in the other situations: the quark-gluon plasmas of gold ions that act like fluids, and the Lithium ions at less than one micro Kelvin temperature that have measurable viscosity and entropy. The Li experiments are at Duke, and the Brookhaven National Lab has the gold plasma created in the Relativisitic Heavy Ion Collider.