If God Ever Stopped Intervening In Nature....

Adding the term absolute implies it is non relative. In the case of Lester Moore this is true. As previously stated using our reality and our frame of reference it is absolutely true that Lester Moore is dead.
Or would your prefer the term practically dead? Or tentatively dead?
Sleeping? Awaiting judgement day?

I actually would not agree with that. And now that I don't I can kinda see where there may be some conflation on my part.First off is that I don't think you can determine that reality is all that exists. In one sense, since we're constrained to be within it, we'll never know if there's anything existing outside of it. It is Begging the Question to say that there is, in fact, something outside of it, but that doesn't mean that there isn't. And I don't think that's something we can determine.Now, one way to arrive at the conclusion that reality is all that exists, is to define everything that exists as being all of reality. That, I would argue, is tautological and doesn't really provide us with additional information. My point there was that reality, itself, is not absolute. What if reality has multiple natures and we're only seeing one of them? Wouldn't you be wrong to say that it absolutely must have a nature?Or, maybe this nature that we're discovering isn't actually reality?

I think we can simply say that we know that Lester Moore is dead rather than pointlessly asserting that it is absolutely known that he is absolutely dead when this isn't philosophically justified. If you define reality as a single non-relative frame of reference and "absolute" as that which is non-relative then you have achieved a form of tautological absolutism-by-definitions. Nothing more.

So you would say that it is false that the lumber yard has any 8 foot boards?None of them are absolutely 8 feet long, so it cannot be true that they are.Isn't that simply impractical? Well, it turns out that reality actually is absurd, so these "unlesses" that you mention may not be all that unlikely. What, like light behaving as both a wave and a particle?

When I was young... you got an "8-foot" 2x4 that was actually a half inch or so over 8 feet because the mill didn't square the ends for you. We'd have to square one end, then measure 8 feet and cut it to length. Nowadays of course, the automatic machinery that makes 2x4s can cut an "exact" length just as easily as not. Some youngsters seem to be hypnotized by our modern culture of exactness.

The 8 foot 2x4 may be pretty close to 8 feet but it isn't 2 inches by 4 inches. And in an industry where computer chips have tolerances of .000001 inch or better, the dimensions of a 24 inch monitor is not 24 inches wide but 24 inches diagonally (WTF) and a Megabyte is not a million bytes. Mass hypnosis.

Would it be absolutely true to say that all bourbons are whiskeys but not all whiskey are bourbons?
We set our criteria, and then agree when things meet that criteria .
If the lumber yards board equaled 8ft on my tape I would say it is a 8 foot board. Dead nuts. Which means absolutely. It isn't me who is being pedantic I accept that things can vary, and measurements are not exact. The measurement is only as good as the instrument. But is it logical to say since there are no perfect instrument there can be no perfect measurements and hence no perfect dimensions.Just because we do not know where Pi's decimal finally rest does not mean Pi has a infinite value. Perhaps, but if that where true then wouldn't there be more absurd things taking place on a macroscopic scale? I read once that Dr. Heisenberg walked the streets of Munich shortly after realizing his uncertainty principal muttering "nature can not possibly be this absurd." But this is on a quantum scale. From a quantum level there is caos and frothing quantum foam of virtual particles popping in and out of existence, cancelling each other out before any laws are violated. It is true we may never know what the strangeness of our reality truly holds. But that does not mean something is not there. And it most certainly does not mean we can never know. Would that not be a absolute ya'll are howling about?
The universe may be unstable but the LHC may yet provide more information that confirms the standard model even more. Dependant on what is observed/measured.
The interference pattern eventually evolves into a distinct predictable pattern.
*I am more vexed by quantum entanglement than duality of light.Edited by 1.61803, : *added

Um... the second one. Which is exactly what I clarified it to be if you read the sentence immediately following the first sentence you quoted: The two quotes of mine you mentioned are not the same.
One is speaking of the existence of absolute certainty, the other is speaking about knowing of the existence of absolute certainty.But if you are failing to see the distinction I'm trying to make here, then this is a good place to stop and clarify. Just let me know if you still aren't following.

Absolutely.And with that final joke, now I can die happy

Exactly.Proof positive that the actual reality behaves in a consistent manner so far.
Not proof positive that the actual reality will always behave in the same consistent manner in the future.Therefore, our 100% past consistent testing does not give an absolute prediction for the future.
Mathematical statistical analysis of our results will tell you that it only allows us to be 99.99(lots of 9's)999% confident that it will continue.That's not 100%.
That's not absolute.In fact, the same mathematical statistical analysis will tell you that it's impossible (with our current understanding) to get to a 100% confidence level for future observations of anything.That alone should tell you that we cannot know anything about reality with absolute certainty. No, it's not.
It's not absolute proof.
It's just extremely confident proof, that's all. I totally agree in general, but not in theory.Because in general things work fantastic when we act in this manner.
But the theory says that we cannot know that it will work forever using our current methods of understanding.It's very simple:Our observations of reality come with error margins.
All observations.
Any time.
It's (currently) the nature of being human.In order for you to know something absolutely about reality, you have to show how you can make an observation of reality without any measurement error at all. Otherwise you're just ignoring the small error.And if you want to ignore the small error, I agree that this is how we should live our lives.
I just don't agree that we should call something "absolute" while we're ignoring a small error-possibility that we know is there. Sounds kind of silly to me.

I would say that it is true, and adding the qualifier "absolutely" is unnecessary and only adds confusion. And you would be wrong. There is no absolutely 8-foot board in existence. I'm not basing the lack of perfect dimensions on the lack of perfect instrument/measurements, I'm saying the actual dimension, itself, is non-absolute and can never be perfect. Because its fuzzy. Right, it just doesn't have an absolute value. No, because even if you take the diameter of a circle and times it by just 3, you'll get a circumference that works well enough in many applications. The fact that Pi has no absolute value just doesn't impact us that much on this macroscopic scale. But that doesn't mean we should reject that it isn't absolute. Sure, something is there. I'm saying that it, itself, is not absolute. It is?

How very true. I find that there can be up to 1/4" overage. We don't even want to discuss 8' wall studs which are 92 5/8.

Oh man. My cousin and I were building a project out of MDF board. I used the edge to mark of a bunch of lines and we were using those lines to square off some more lines. As I got down away from the edge, it started to look not-right. When I stepped back and looked, it was all off and nothing was square.Come to find out, the edge of the board wasn't even close to square to begin with (well, not bad enough that I noticed it with my eye), but I had to redo all the work just because the board wasn't cut square and I had assumed that it was.Never again.

I admit that I cannot follow very much of this discussion. But the two of you have here reached the point of talking nonsense.Pi has an exact value. Pi is both transcendental and irrational. But we know its value precisely. We can express it exactly in a number of ways.Two ways we cannot express pi is as a finite series of decimal digits or as the ratio of two rational numbers. But we can express pi exactly in a number of other ways. For one thing pi is exactly the circumference of a circle with radius one. That knowledge alone allows us to express pi mathematically using expressions having only rational numbers.And to golden ratio's comment -- it is not correct to express our knowledge of pi by saying 'we do not know the final digit of pi'. There is no last digit of pi. One might also say that we do not know the name of the person who assassinated Nixon. I'll leave you two to work this out. But I will point out that despite the fact that the electron of a hydrogen atom might be found anywhere including an infinite distance away from the nucleus, we do have a definition that allows us to specify the radius of a hydrogen atom. We also have a way to define the surface and boundaries of a board despite the fact that the surface is formed by electromagnetic fields. Perhaps any discussion of how long a board is ought to take those things into account.But if there are any absolutes, surely mathematical concepts are among them. Leave pi, e, and the number 2 for Bert and Ernie to work out. They don't belong here.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : it's v its

The value of pi is "absolute" because it is (can be) defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to is radius. That's what I called a "trivial" absolute truth elsewhere - not trivial in the sense of unimportant but in the sense of not needing to be (mathematically) proven.As for its "absolute value"?