If God Ever Stopped Intervening In Nature....

Cartesian doubt is of no practical relevance but absolute truth is not a practical goal. It is an unachievable ideal exactly because things like Cartesian doubt cannot be absolutely eliminated. That is the point.

No I'm not.I'm actually trying to keep 'a statement of absolute truth' distinct from what 'absolute reality' is.I thought I was making two different points.As I said:

quote:

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I see two things here. One is getting down to the fundamentals of reality and the other is defining reality.

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The other point I was making is that bottom "line" is actually that white-to-black gradient. No, not dust on the stones. The molecules of stone at the edge of the wall, which are made of atoms, which are made of nucleons, which are made of quarks, etc. all the way down to quantum fields that are just probability distributions (so I think).Have you read my message Message 256?There is no absolute "edge", its actually a blurry gradient.Sure, that doesn't make the pyramid not-real, but when you get down to what it absolutely is, we find that it ain't absolute. Its fuzzy. I'm not sure I understand. I mean, sure, an atom in the sun is discrete from an atom in the moon.But the atoms, themselves, are not discrete. They're a blurry mess of probability distributions and wave functions n'stuff. There's nothing "absolute" about them.

I think that we are drilling down to what reality is and it is, in fact, not absolute.

Always.

Well, no. The problem isn't in finding a definition we agree with.
The problem is in confirming that "something in reality" actually matches any definition that we come up with.Even if we do agree on a definition, how can we ever confirm absolutely that the reality we perceive matches the definition?
Even if we simplify the definition of death to "there is a tombstone that says Lester Moore RIP." (Or whatever it was, sorry, I forget the text...)
Even if you and I are standing directly in front of the tombstone.
Even if the entire world sees the tombstone.
Even if we have pictures and video and infra-red and density readings and a probe constantly hitting the tombstone...How can we ever say there is absolutely no room for the smallest of errors?
Everything we observe about reality relies on our perception of reality. Our perception of reality is not absolute.Let me put it another way: Have you ever done statistics in science?When any experiment is done in science, it is always followed with a statistical analysis.
The basics of the statistical analysis are to take measurements of the possible sources of error, average them over however-many-samples-you-took, and then it lets you know the confidence of your accuracy for your results.Due to the nature of the math for the statistical analysis, as long as your error margins are reasonable... the more samples you take generally results in a higher confidence level for your results.
However... also due to the mathematical and realistic conditions... the only way to reach 100% confidence is to take an infinite number of observations. You can get 99.9...a-whole-whack-of-9's-....999% confident. But it is a strict impossibility to ever "be done" and reach 100% confidence."Absolute" = 100% confidence.Science, which is our best-known-method for 'knowing things' has a statistical system that can be mathematically proven to be impossible to ever reach 100% confidence.Therefore, even science says we can never be 100%, "absolute" in anything we know.The trick isn't in defining a structure.
The trick is in matching reality to our definition.
The process of matching reality requires some sort of observation or measurement of reality (the tombstone is x feet high by x feet wide...).
If we cannot know that the observation is absolute... how can we ever say that the conclusion-based-on-the-observation is absolute?We can certainly say that we are 99.9...whatever % confident that we are accurate in describing the existence of this tombstone and therefore we are 99.9...whatever % confident that death occurred.
...but that's not 100%, is it? It's not "absolute."You want to go from having a 99% accurate observation into a 100% absolute conclusion.
It just doesn't follow.
Not logically, and not even mathematically.We do not have direct access to reality. We only have a perception of reality.
Until we get direct access, we cannot take direct values.You want to say that the tombstone is absolutely there?
Then show me your absolute, direct measurements of reality that do not rely on our perception of reality and have absolutely no error margins of any kind in any way whatsoever.That is currently impossible.
That is why knowing anything 'absolutely' is currently impossible.

(lol) If something is dead then we can confirm with absolute confidence It is dead. That is again tautology as far as I am concerned and not some profound truth as Straggler stipulated until he rode one of his ethereal trumpeting elephants down the rabbit hole of brians in jars scenarios.
Now if the multiverse theory turns out to be true then there may be other realities. And in each of those a different set of facts.
But in this reality we deal with our data set.Now as far as analyzing data, statistical analysis, math, P values measurements and such I agree there are no absolutes. And I agree with CatSci that the edge of the razor if viewed with a electron microscope is not the discrete edge we thought. I agree with Straggler that if there is any instance where truth is relative it is not absolute.
But are these not limitations of our current abilities to perceive and not because there is not some underlying truth? I believe it is a we don't know question rather than a we can't know.If one has enough information one can mathematically recreate any event. If I drop a coffee cup, the physics that explains the cup falling and shattering can be reversed and explain the cup going the other direction and reforming to its prior state. Can humanity ever develop such complete understanding of reality? I believe so, unless there are pieces of the puzzle that are not in this universe.
If we do not have access to all the information then it will be a dead end for science and you guys will of been right.

If there are no absolutes then that is a absolute and a contradiction.[lizard] Heh heh heh~

You keep conflating usage of terms. Reality with absolute-reality and truth with absolute-truth.If you said that in reality it is true that Lester Moore is dead we would all just shrug our shoulders and agree with you. By any sensible standard of general usage of the term "true" you would be entirely correct.But when you start saying that it is an absolute truth that Lester Moore is absolutely dead you invoke all the philosophical reasons for doubt that people are confronting you with and which you seem to find so annoying. Adding "absolute" changes the meaning no?Can you tell em what the difference is between the following as far as you are concerned?

It is true that Lester Moore is dead.

It is absolutely true that Lester Moore is absolutely dead.

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If your answer is that there is no difference in meaning between the two then I would ask why you felt the need to join in a conversation discussing absolutes if you thinking adding the term "absolute" makes no difference at all?

OK so when I say that reality is all that exists this is not tautological and is in fact a profound and absolute truth that has been distilled from 10k yrs of figuring out what to call shit. I don't see how this impacts the argument. So what if reality is fuzzy? This is just another fact that we have been able suss out. The actual nature of reality is not the point. Our degree of certainty is not the point. The point is that reality has a nature. This must be absolutely true if anything exists at all.

Heh...
Whoops. I was supposed to delete that part.
I had a short paragraph about how I was speaking in general so I didn't agree with you, but if we do restrict the context down to "just death" then I do agree with you. But I thought it was too long and got rid of it for the sake of efficiency... and now I've just re-explained it which makes it awkward and unefficient... sending my OCD into a whirlwind tizzy it may never recover from I simply do not accept this statement.
You will have to how me how you can have absolute confidence in confirming any part of reality.
How do you take any sort of measurement or observation without an element of error? Is this what you're doing?
I agree that if we restrict ourselves to the data set we currently have, then yes... we can say that something is absolutely dead according to the data set available to us.But, still, I don't see how you can jump from this to "he's absolutely dead." It just doesn't follow. I agree, sort of.
I hope it is a we-don't-know (yet) question rather than a we-can't-know one. I completely agree. (Apart, again, from changing your "belief" that we can get there to my "hope" that we can get there..., but that's hardly a difference at all).I have tried to add things like "currently" or "so far" or "yet" to the claims I make about not knowing anything absolutely. But I may have stopped at some point in an attempt to not repeat myself too much.I still contend that, today, you cannot absolutely know if someone (anyone) is dead.
Simply because, today, we do not have the ability to gather all the concerned information without error margins.Add the ability to gather all the required information.
Find a way to remove the necessity for error margins....and you'll get your absolute knowledge for whatever-it-is you're looking for.

If it is true that Lester Moore is dead, then It is absolutely true.
Verum est ultima, Truth is final.Unless your a Buddhist then you would believe in the two truths doctrine.Just because I do not know if there is a Lester Moore living on some other planet Earth in some other universe in some other reality does not mean that this Lester Moore existing in this reality is not dead. Is he absolutely dead? What criteria would you like satisfied. If Lester Moore being a problem perhaps we could go to a local morgue and you could pick a corpse out that we could absolutely verify that person is indeed dead. Philosophically dead as opposed to what ordinary dead?
Thats a good one!

So we both agree that Lester Moore is dead. We both accept that this is true.But I don't accept that this can be described as an "absolute truth" whilst you consider "true" and "absolutely true" to be identical in meaning.Is that correct?If "true" and "absolutely true" are identical in meaning why would anyone bother adding the term "absolute" here?Why do you think we are discussing absolutes at all if the addition of that term "absolute" is entirely superfluous?

You do realize, I hope, that "confidence" isn't real. Faith has "absolute confidence" that God is going to poof her into heaven and fry the rest of us - but there's no reality to her belief. It may be true to some degree but there's no way at the present time to confirm it.

Because there are many instances where absolutes do not exist.
Death is not one of them.You said that other than saying, "something exist" there is no absolute truth or knowledge.
How can this be true if there is a instance anywhere in the universe that makes this false?Die ja oder nien, nicht in die mitte.

You make my point for me. By dismissing the possibility of absolute certainty we
invite the absurd.