If God Ever Stopped Intervening In Nature....

Isn't that just a tautology? I was talking about the actual value, which I maintain is not absolute. Aren't they just defined into absoluteness though? I agree. I've been arguing that tautologies aren't helpful when discussing absolutes.

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.

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.

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.

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. What would qualify as absolute proof? You have defined it into an absolute impossibility by demanding that we observe it for an eternity. Even then you reject what we observe as evidence. This is even worse than the creationist position of saying that we cannot know anything that we did not personally observe by adding the caveat that we cannot know anything that we do observe. I mean according to this logic we don't actually know anything.

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. 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. 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.

I seem to remember that as an exercise in computer programming (way back in the days when computers chugged almost audibly). Indeed. Absolutes do exist when defined as such.

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?

You could do with a platonic 2.

Sure, concepts are not tautologies, arguments and statements are what can be tautologies. But its not just the scale and perception, the fuzziness is actually the state of existence. As I replied in Message 467:

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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.

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. If you zoom in on the font, the edges of the letters are a fuzzy gradient and not a fine edge. 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.

I don't know what that means.

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. 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. Proof that does not rely on observations that have error margins. 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. 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. 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.

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.

duplicate...Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.