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Member (Idle past 96 days) Posts: 10333 From: London England Joined: |
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Author | Topic: If God Ever Stopped Intervening In Nature.... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
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. Isn't that just a tautology? I was talking about the actual value, which I maintain is not absolute.
But if there are any absolutes, surely mathematical concepts are among them. Aren't they just defined into absoluteness though?
Leave pi, e, and the number 2 for Bert and Ernie to work out. They don't belong here. I agree. I've been arguing that tautologies aren't helpful when discussing absolutes.
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Isn't that just a tautology? I was talking about the actual value, which I maintain is not absolute. The actual value of pi is just as concrete and absolute as the number 2. Your inability to express the value in your chosen form does not change that.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
That's what I called a "trivial" absolute truth elsewhere I know. We can also define pi in ways that are not easy tautologies. The sum of the following infinite series is pi. (4, - 4/3, + 4/5, -4/7, ... 4* (-1)^n/(2n+ 1) ). Warning. Converges very slowly. We might still uncover the trivial nature of the tautology even expressed in that way. Still does not justify saying that the value is not exact or absolute. Not arguing that it is not trivial.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
The actual value of pi is just as concrete and absolute as the number 2. Oh, I dunno.... I can hand you 2 of something but I cannot hand you pi of something.
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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Oh, I dunno.... I can hand you 2 of something but I cannot hand you pi of something. Can you hand me pi inches of circumference? Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 379 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
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, So an absolute truth must be true for all time? That doesn't seem right. Surely it is absolutely true that the sun exists now even if it hasn't always nor will it forever. Today is the 28th of Sept and it will be forever true that the sun existed today. I reject the idea that we cannot know what is absolutely true because we cannot know what will happen in the future. The sun was an absolute reality for those who have lived and died and this will never change. That which happens in the distant future cannot be true for me. As corporeal and finite beings it is not reasonable to expect that we can have first hand knowledge about matters concerning an infinite expanse of time. I don't need to know anything about the yr 2525 to know what was absolutely true for my span of existence.
PT writes: No, it's not. The fact that when we get to the moon and there is something there to stand on is proof positive that the moon actually exists.It's not absolute proof. It's just extremely confident proof, that's all.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 379 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
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. What it does is to provide us with a symbol to represent the concept. Surely the concept of everything that exists is not a tautology.
PT writes: My point there was that reality, itself, is not absolute. I don't see how this impacts the argument. So what if reality is fuzzy? To which I replied that the fuzziness is a result of scale and perception and not actually a state of existence. As I get older the letters look more fuzzy but it is not the letters that are changing. If I take my micrometer and measure the diameter of a globe to be 1.0000" then I know that the circumference will be 3.1415". If I measure the diameter to be 1.00000" then I know that the circumference will be 3.14159". A sheet of graphene is not fuzzy until you start looking at subatomic particles.
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? If I get hit in the head with a rock I do not need to know anything about the molecular bonds within the rock to know what the absolute results of being hit in the head are.
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ringo Member (Idle past 442 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
NoNukes writes:
I seem to remember that as an exercise in computer programming (way back in the days when computers chugged almost audibly).
The sum of the following infinite series is pi. (4, - 4/3, + 4/5, -4/7, ... 4* (-1)^n/(2n+ 1) ). NoNukes writes:
Indeed. Absolutes do exist when defined as such.
Still does not justify saying that the value is not exact or absolute.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
Can you hand me pi inches of circumference? I don't think I can. A circumference is a property that some object has, not something in and of itself that I can hand to you. So, I could draw a 1 inch circle on a piece of paper and cut it out and hand it to you, but then, the circumference would really only be an approximation of pi rather than actually being pi. If I could hand you pi of something, then wouldn't that require pi to be a rational number?
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Larni Member Posts: 4000 From: Liverpool Joined: |
You could do with a platonic 2.
The above ontological example models the zero premise to BB theory. It does so by applying the relative uniformity assumption that the alleged zero event eventually ontologically progressed from the compressed alleged sub-microscopic chaos to bloom/expand into all of the present observable order, more than it models the Biblical record evidence for the existence of Jehovah, the maximal Biblical god designer. -Attributed to Buzsaw Message 53 The explain to them any scientific investigation that explains the existence of things qualifies as science and as an explanation-Attributed to Dawn Bertot Message 286 Does a query (thats a question Stile) that uses this physical reality, to look for an answer to its existence and properties become theoretical, considering its deductive conclusions are based against objective verifiable realities.-Attributed to Dawn Bertot Message 134
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
What it does is to provide us with a symbol to represent the concept. Surely the concept of everything that exists is not a tautology. Sure, concepts are not tautologies, arguments and statements are what can be tautologies.
To which I replied that the fuzziness is a result of scale and perception and not actually a state of existence. But its not just the scale and perception, the fuzziness is actually the state of existence. As I replied in Message 467:
quote: .
As I get older the letters look more fuzzy but it is not the letters that are changing. If you zoom in on the font, the edges of the letters are a fuzzy gradient and not a fine edge.
A sheet of graphene is not fuzzy until you start looking at subatomic particles. I think its fuzzy at the atomic level. The carbon atoms, themselves, are fuzzy. You can't even really tell where one carbon atom begins and the other ends. The carbon-carbon bond (yes, I understand I just went subatomic) is just a big ol' blurry cloud:
And that's not because we can't see real good, reality actually behaves in a non-absolute manner.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
I don't know what that means.
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Stile Member Posts: 4295 From: Ontario, Canada Joined: |
ProtoTypical writes: So an absolute truth must be true for all time? That doesn't seem right. No, that's not right.I thought you had asked about the probability that a stone will fall. For the absolute truth of that, then yes... you need to know all the falls for all time. But in general? No. It would depend on the specific question in mind.
The sun was an absolute reality for those who have lived and died and this will never change. This, however, is not true. All measurements of the sun and it's properties include a margin for error.You have yet to remove those error margins completely. Therefore, you have not yet reached an absolute observation in order to make an absolute conclusion about the sun. Again, you're ignoring your limitations.Those limitations are what's keeping you from making an absolute conclusion. What would qualify as absolute proof? Proof that does not rely on observations that have error margins.
You have defined it into an absolute impossibility by demanding that we observe it for an eternity. No, you're confusing the context of the discussion. I've never said this. In fact, I've said the exact opposite a few times.
Even then you reject what we observe as evidence. Again, I do not reject what we observe as evidence.I reject that when we observe evidence with error margins that we can somehow call our conclusion "absolute." I reject that because it doesn't make any sense. You have yet to make any head-way into attempting it to somehow make sense. I mean according to this logic we don't actually know anything. Don't be silly.My argument is that we don't actually know anything absolutely. There's no need to remove all my painstakingly added qualifications, and then say that the resulting argument doesn't make sense. I would completely agree with such a thing... although I have no idea why we would do that. I do not require conclusions to be absolute in order for them to be useful or dependable.
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Dogmafood Member (Idle past 379 days) Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
And that's not because we can't see real good, reality actually behaves in a non-absolute manner. We can take a bunch of fuzzy gas molecules and altogether they act in an absolute manner. When we squeeze them in a bottle they act in a very particular and predictable and absolute manner. So all of this microscopic fuzziness has absolute macroscopic qualities and if I get run over by a train it really wont matter how fuzzy the train molecules are. (The quantum blur is only blurry if you look at it.) So there is some kind of illegal mixing of scales going on here.
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
duplicate...
Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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