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apokrisis

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OK. So that was the straw man you wanted to introduce here then. I've said a million times that the standard sociological story is that a social syste...
October 10, 2018 at 00:19
Which comes first - even for us pragmatists. The big ideas or the nit-picking?
October 09, 2018 at 23:10
Yep, nominalism is one of those absurd metaphysical extravagances beloved of those who like to warn against absurd metaphysical extravagances.
October 09, 2018 at 22:36
Rather it illustrates the contextuality of causation, the falseness of the presumptions of local realism. Your conventional notion of causality was al...
October 09, 2018 at 20:20
The obvious answer is that “you” are a developing process, an enduring structure. Not a thing, but a historically conditioned continuity. So is a proc...
October 09, 2018 at 20:10
Can’t offer you any particular book. But I well remember reading a history of Greek philosophy and realising how the standard story was told dialectic...
October 09, 2018 at 19:51
You queried the ball being at absolute rest. We can presume for the sake of the thought experiment it is in an inertial frame. So that would be a reas...
October 09, 2018 at 18:59
So apparently you agree that this inflated notion of having to make fiat-like goals to rule your own life is merely a modern socially constructed “fre...
October 09, 2018 at 18:11
Yeah, it is not that I’m arguing that regular cause and effect explanations are wrong. They are useful descriptions of how things generally are in a w...
October 09, 2018 at 10:07
If things can converge, then they can diverge. In one direction, the ultraviolet catastrophe. In the other, its matching infrared catastrophe. So in t...
October 09, 2018 at 04:52
Nope. I keep shifting the goal posts from atomism to holism. You keep trying to shift them back. But you need to then provide your account for how we ...
October 09, 2018 at 02:03
I call it you continuing to frame the situation atomistically and thinking you've said something worthwhile. Social construction is about the informat...
October 09, 2018 at 01:08
Social communities are smaller than the biological species. And "we" are the product of multiple levels of community. So let's not be simplistic. You ...
October 08, 2018 at 22:55
Maybe your mistake is to misunderstand the level at which language-based thinking, choosing and willing finds its natural meaning. You presume it is a...
October 08, 2018 at 21:33
The causality works the other way round. Life and mind rely on the functional trick of getting an informational grip on the material flows of the worl...
October 08, 2018 at 20:55
It is an inertial frame. And I’m not claiming that there is no accelerating force. I argue that the necessary force ought to be considered generic rat...
October 08, 2018 at 19:18
The modal distinctions I made were narratively different. Two would be general rather than particular. God would be fictional rather than factual. I w...
October 08, 2018 at 01:49
I think you are just being asked to justify your sweeping statements on the issue. You said sensations weren't meaningful. That would startle most psy...
October 08, 2018 at 00:39
Conceptions. Habits of sign. "God" and "two" exist as words in a language. And as such, they mediate some pragmatic conceptual relation we might have ...
October 08, 2018 at 00:31
...or demonstrably useful? (Again, is there a good reason to debate realism vs idealism for the billionth time when you have pragmatism as the better ...
October 07, 2018 at 23:22
Whoops. Off the rails already. Sure, language takes semiosis to another level. But sensation is also fundamentally semiotic.
October 07, 2018 at 23:17
What was your purpose then? (Pretty clearly, it was to suggest there might be a "dilemma" worth discussing. So given the familiarity of this debate, w...
October 07, 2018 at 23:13
I would instead say that to arrive at the classical situation, you would have to keep adding classical constraints. My argument is that indeterminism ...
October 07, 2018 at 23:07
I didn't quite complete this thought. As I am trying to make plain, my own interest here would be in the question of cosmic creation - the causality o...
October 07, 2018 at 22:59
Can you find a use for them? Is there a meaning beyond that use? The answer is the usual pragmatic one. Show that there is any actual mystery here. If...
October 07, 2018 at 22:58
Reflecting on things further, we do seem to wind up with the issue that there always needs to be some kind of probabilistic tunnelling process for the...
October 07, 2018 at 22:34
Yeah, it was my mistake to link to that paper for sure. I should have just left it at the gif I was taking. But still, Norton's dome is also its own i...
October 07, 2018 at 21:59
There is no need to worry about trying to fix Newton's laws if you just accept them as effective descriptions. They are how reality would work in the ...
October 07, 2018 at 21:55
The metaphysical reality of time reversal scenario's would also be in question here. If classical reality is actually the product of maximally constra...
October 07, 2018 at 21:44
Two different questions are being confused here. The OP was not intended to be about Norton's dome and its claims of Newtonian indeterminism due to a ...
October 07, 2018 at 20:53
Did you have any thoughts about a clearer account of Norton’s set up? Comments suggest to me that the cause of the sudden spontaneous motion is a conc...
October 06, 2018 at 04:22
Yeah. I think this is the next interesting case to dig into. Another slant on the OP would be the more standard example of a phase transition where a ...
October 06, 2018 at 03:14
This would be missing the point of the thought experiment. We can take it for granted the ball bearing is actually at rest on the apex in perfectly ba...
October 06, 2018 at 02:24
I would say you are missing the point. I am discussing how we might view the metaphysics of accidents - spontaneous or random events. On one view ther...
October 05, 2018 at 20:19
The experiment can contrast the statistics of coherent and decoherent systems.
October 05, 2018 at 19:13
My question was about a poised situation and how we think about its symmetry breaking. It seems a problem that we need a first cause to actually pop u...
October 05, 2018 at 19:09
I see now what you mean. It was a mistake to link to that paper as Norton’s dome is a special case. Do you buy his story? I don’t get where his sudden...
October 05, 2018 at 19:00
Quantum mechanics.
October 05, 2018 at 18:47
But that is the easy presumption that is under attack here. Most people probably do find no reason to even question the possibility of being able to e...
October 05, 2018 at 06:00
But that relies on the ball starting on a slope, not on the flat. It is only infinitesimally close to the apex and so also infinitesimally inclined to...
October 05, 2018 at 05:47
Yes, but this would be a case of innumerable accidents as you say. The "push" advocates would still reply that there would be one last event that fina...
October 05, 2018 at 04:48
How so? If the ball has mass, it has inertia. A push is required to set it moving. Of course, it the ball is already "in motion", then that accelerati...
October 05, 2018 at 04:44
But here you seem to both say the right answer doesn't really matter, and yet also the right answer is that there will be some particular triggering c...
October 05, 2018 at 04:37
Anyone here understand what @"creativesoul"'s position is? Someone care to hazard a guess.
October 05, 2018 at 04:24
I was just citing Einstein there. I think he knew what he was talking about. It is basic to pragmatism that you could say absolutely anything about th...
October 05, 2018 at 04:22
Logic arises quite naturally out of getting into the habit of imagining nature organised like a machine. So as soon as humans were building huts with ...
October 05, 2018 at 04:15
And so you dumbly repeat something that I never said? I said classical physics might give us one model of causality. QM might give us another. And I w...
October 05, 2018 at 03:50
In what way am I failing to distinguish between model and world by drawing close attention to the mediating role played by "the report"? The sign (or ...
October 05, 2018 at 03:03
Maybe you still just fail to understand pragmatism then? How could I be conflating the model with the reality when I am talking about our models of re...
October 05, 2018 at 02:18
QM undermines classical causality. QM puts forward its own causal story. Experiment determines which story we are inclined to believe. It's really sim...
October 04, 2018 at 21:20