What you are trying to get across is unrelated to 2+2=4
Specifically, not some million year development of intuition or mind/body, exactly how does evolution inform me how I perceive?
NOT, how did we evovle to become a perceiving being, I know that story. Now that we are here, now that we are living our brief decades, how do we perceive whatever it is we are living in?
You can make 5 from 2+2=4 if we agreed on it. It’s not a natural law at all.
Dude it’s pretty much a fact that we did make it that way, it’s not an objective fact of the universe. That’s all that means. I’m not saying all knowledge is indoctrination, but we did make numbers up.
Reasonable adults don’t want you to use your reasoning to go beyond the previous generation, especially since we haven’t really gone that much beyond it. The same logic still is being used and the same assumptions, etc. The only way for humans to really go beyond the indoctrination is to accept nihilism as the truth of the universe, that being there is no meaning to things even that which we assign. A painting is just ink or paint on canvas and a book is just marks on a page. So much of our lives is making things out to be more than what they really are.
I’d also be careful about “way out of the indoctrination of your childhood”, I truly think you don’t understand what that means and where it leads.
It’s also ironic you use Kant for that example as his work is famously known for being dense and incomprehensible.
That also makes me take your counterpoints a bit less seriously, like you’re just denying an obvious fact at that point.
No 2+2=4 is literally an invention of society, because we made numbers up. Outside of human society it doesn’t exist.
There’s nothing more to say about that, I used to think that way because I didn’t know better.
Garbage in → Garbage out.
WE don’t control universal mathematical functions! They control us, whether we agree or not.
All we can do is “read” and translate how mathematics guide our very existence.
Universal mathematics are axiomatic. And we can symbolize these functions, which makes us able to use universal functions for our purposes.
I think you are confusing the symbols with the thing they represent. As Hendrix said, “what if 6 turned out to be nine?” I’m talking about the fingers on one hand, not counting your thumb. That is a common experience, before language, before arabic numbers. We now represent that with the symbol “4”.
I start with the premise that there is a reality that can be described. That’s what language is. Not some arbitrary collection of symbols that somebody in the past developed.
Demonstrably false, in fact there is still an ongoing debate as to whether mathematics refers to actual things out there in the world or (like logic) it’s a model we impose on reality to navigate it. You should know at least that much.
Also the irony in calling universal mathematics axiomatic.
" We also build our physics on a recognition of the limits of perception. The whole point of theories such as relativity is to separate objective features of the world from artifacts of our perspective. One of the most important books of the past two decades on the physics and philosophy of time, Huw Price’s Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point, argues that concepts of cause and effect derive from our experience as agents in the world and may not be a fundamental feature of reality."
Well language is an arbitrary collection of symbols that people in the past developed. There is no objective definitions or inherentness to things in the universe (even the notion of “things”). This is back to my point on nihilism.
I’m going to assume you are joking at this point. Even if you were funny, you are in violation of the rules. They are arbitrary and developed by someone in the past, so, sorry nothing can be done.
This is your first warning. There is no rule that says I have to tell you how many warnings you get.
[quote=“write4u, post:264, topic:10083”]
Garbage in → Garbage out.
WE don’t control universal mathematical functions! They control us, whether we agree or not.
All we can do is “read” and translate how mathematics guide our very existence.
Universal mathematics are axiomatic. And we can symbolize these functions, which makes us able to use universal functions for our purposes.
Demonstrably false, in fact there is still an ongoing debate as to whether mathematics refers to actual things out there in the world or (like logic) it’s a model we impose on reality to navigate it. You should know at least that much.
No, you have this backwards.
First, mathematics is not a thing. It is a universal “ordering principle” as described in Chaos Theory.
Mathematics is not an object. But all objects are mathematical in essence.
Also the irony in calling universal mathematics axiomatic.
" We also build our physics on a recognition of the limits of perception. The whole point of theories such as relativity is to separate objective features of the world from artifacts of our perspective. One of the most important books of the past two decades on the physics and philosophy of time, Huw Price’s Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point, argues that concepts of cause and effect derive from our experience as agents in the world and may not be a fundamental feature of reality."
I’ll argue that the Fibonacci Sequence is a universally observable self-ordering function of spacetime laws.
This objective universal logical sequence existed since the BB created spacetime.
Just look at a spiral galaxy.
You are arguing from an anthropomorphic argument, but we do not control anything. All we can do is observe and wonder. We are the product of natural causes and effects, evolved in accordance with certain logical interactive mechanisms that can be “understood” and “used” by humans (mathematics). The Higgs Boson is but one example of artificial implementation of spacetime field mechanics.
The combustion engine. The atom bomb .
“Natura Artis Magistra” ---- “Nature is the Teacher of the Arts (science)”
Wondering if you can help me out with that book,page 264:
“The diagnosis of the previous chapter finds attractive expression in terms of the conventional asymmetry of counterfactual conditionals. However, the conventionalist view seems to make the asymmetry of dependance- the fact that the future depends on the past, but not vice versa-insufficiently objective, in two sense: it seems too weak, in making the asymmetry conventional, and too strong, in ruling out backward causation by fiat.”
That sounds more like humans and their propensity for pattern identification than any reflection of reality itself. We are prone to projecting order and meaning onto things around us.
That was more to illustrate the main point that we build this stuff on our intuitions.
My main thing is how learning more about the world is effectively bad and doesn’t lead to wonder. I already gave my point with nihilism and how our lives are effectively one giant pretending game. The bit about sensation and how what you experience already happened so you aren’t in the present and how that presents implications for further irreality, and then the bit about emotions how nothing you feel is real or genuine because it’s just the product of influences outside of you. You feel happy over a gift because that’s how you’re “supposed to feel” same with a hero saving people in a movie, even caring about others and their well being is “the right thing to do”.
And that sounds like a human rejecting reason. We do see order. And yes, we sometimes mistake what we think is order. So what? There is order in the things around us. Curious, intelligent minds looked at circles. They measured them. They identified real order in these two dimensional objects. They weren’t prone to projecting order on them. They observed order in them. They saw features like circumference, radius, and diameter. They observed the constant ratio of circumference and radius in every circle they found or could create. Constants get names and we call it pi. We have discovered, not invented, such constants.
I agree that we are entirely too quick to assign meaning. Assuming there is meaning in anything is suspect. But order is there all around us. And yes, so is chaos and randomness.
But we have shone light on much darkness. Some refuse to see it.
Building stuff on our intuitions is different than being told how we should feel. So you should be able to describe something built vs something told. You need to do that soon, or your account will be deleted.
Well, sure that’s a part of it - the thing you are deliberately missing,
and what makes it more the personal fantasizing,
is that serious science bounces our ideas off of nature (Physical Reality) -
honesty and falsifiability are science’s cornerstone,
but you ignore that, so you are free to come up with your own personal “vision”.
ditto - but we bounce it off the evidence Nature provides, ideas that harmonize with natural evidence are considered more reliable.
You also overlook that science is self-correcting, mistakes and dishonestly gets weeded out with time. It’s not perfect, but it is still much better than simplistic ideas brainwashed into people by smarter people who want to control people.
Learning/Knowledge is power.
Blind greed is effectively BAD.
Ignoring the other side of the coin, is BAD.
But that is your own personal view.
Makes me wonder about how constrained and limiting your upbringing was.
I was fortunate. My parents, grandparents, Uncle Julius all contrived to instill the wonder of the world into me along with a desire to keep learning more about it. Then as I stepped into living my own life where most everything wound up reinforcing that passion and joy for learning and discovering things I never imagined before.
Then with the decades I was able to gather and order those pieces into a harmonic awareness of our Physical Reality, that remains within the limits of the Science, that educates us about the reality we’re embedded within.
Oh top of all that, it’s created an incredibly rich mindscape that I inhabit, that brings an internal contentment that seems tragically rare among old folks.
Sadly you seem stuck in a spiral that will lead to nihilism and that doesn’t seem particularly healthy or fun for me. I rather revel in my understanding and kinship with it Earth and people, though many of them drive me nuts.
Those are intellectual mind games, don’t give them so much credit.
a few millisecond delays here and there, some buffering that lasts into fractions of minute, etc.
To me it feels like being frustrated with an internal combustion engine because it can’t take you from 0 to 60MPH instantaneously.
This seemed like a good thread to interject this. It just came out yesterday. The first 15 minutes are the most relevant to the thread, but the rest is also awesome. I put my thoughts in bold. If you can’t speak to thousands of years of people who questioned authority and society, and the modern science that affirms that questioning, then it’s hard to accept that you have some new idea about what reality is. This is a forum for inquiry, not for telling people that they need to awaken.
As the intro page says, ideas about identity and purpose have stood the test of time. The Greeks had some intuition about evolution, but they didn’t approach scientifically, so it never became what we now know. But the Allegory of the Chariot maps perfectly onto brain research today. The mortal horse is our appetites, the immortal is noble, spirited, and honorable but just as driven by our evolved animal instincts. The charioteer is the logical brain, a more recent product of evolution, the part of us that we think of as ourselves, but it’s not really in control.
As it is with podcasts, it takes 10 minutes to get going. If you aren’t familiar with Socrates’ history, it is a good review. He asked people to question what they were taught, and that got him in trouble. He did not accept the judgment that he was smarter than others. His strength was in knowing the limits of human knowing and he was honest about it.
9:30: First mention of modern studies of unconscious behavior. There is science on apparent motivation and actual explanations of what we do. “We are opaque to ourselves.”
This is the point of wisdom that many wrestle with it, and many “influencers” and “gurus” throughout time have mixed up. The fact that we have trouble knowing ourselves does not translate to a theory of us not having feelings, or that we are blank slates that society writes values upon. That is a leap of logic, not connected to the reality of why we are what we are. It’s a leap that someone who wants to manipulate you would ask you to make. No one knows fully what is outside us or inside us but beware the person who points that out and then tries to tell you what “really” is true.
13:30 At any given moment, question why.
14:15 Tamar makes the inquiry fun, like, “Why am I feeling irritated right now? Are my socks wet or is the world full of injustice to which I am appropriately sensitive?”
17:00 She admits her addiction to shoes. It’s a setup for the next section, where she talks about rational thinking, and “obliger rebellion”, where we enjoy not doing what we should.
20:00 She uses the phrase “Incoherent Fantasy”, that we can accomplish things in our life, despite the limitations of physics. She’s discussing Freud’s idea that part of us is infantile, that believes the impossible can happen.
23:00 Leantaas story of staring at a dead person on the side of the road.
24:00 The Charioteer analogy. Reason, spirit, and appetite. Reason is the story we tell ourselves, keeping in line with our reflection on everything. But that’s just a small part. It’s driving the chariot, but barely in control. One of the horses is responsive to social norms and approval, the spirited part of us. The other is animalistic, survival, procreation, food and sex. Traditionally, we call the charioteer the part that makes us human, but Plato questioned that, and so does modern science.
28:30 System 2 is the charioteer, the slow reasoning. System 1 is the autonomous systems that operate fast, without much thought involved. And more on modern neuroscience, based on evolutionary biology.
32:00 We should try to get what we to do in line with what we are inclined to do. So, how? Interesting discussion on how to form habits.
42:30 “Act as if you already were that which you want to become.” Shakta says it’s tautological, but Tamar points out that our actions are controlled by different aspects of ourselves. So, the part of us that believes that something can be, based on reasonable consideration, can cause the parts of us that are autonomous, that think fast, to act differently.
46:00 To use the Charioteer analogy, you train the horses. An easier analogy, teaching your cat to stay off the couch, you can’t reason with them, you come up with an association with a consequence. Or trying to explain catching a ball to someone by drawing out parabolic motion, but it doesn’t train the hand. I almost did this with Ava when teaching her to play pickle ball.
49:00 All modern science on habits are the same as what Aristotle said; what we practice is what we become. Then she brings in religious traditions of habits, like the Jewish tradition of expressing gratitude and the habits of a monastery.
It begins with Chaos Theory.
Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, and were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities.[1]
Chaos theory states that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnection, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization.[2]
Literally tons of psychological research shows how humans are prone to imposing patterns and order where nothing exists.
As the linked quote showed we build this stuff on our intuitions, cause and effect could literally just be a human thing. Even reasoning and the rules behind it are nothing but a human invention.
Which was made by humans, doesn’t prove there is an order to things. Try again.
This isn’t true.
This is also not true. What we practice isn’t what we become because like the quote I mentioned about emotion says a lot of our reaction is just us responding to what society says we should do.
No it’s pretty much also backed up with research into it. Your parents were naive to think wonder is equated with learning, which makes me think they didn’t know enough then.
For example, Physical Reality is an assumption we make which we build upon, there isn’t a way to truly verify it.
As I have already shown your sense of wonder is rooted in ignorance. You still never gave a solid response to the posts challenging the notion of life being a thing that exists, you just kept drawing back to evolution which shows me you don’t get it. It’s not about what is healthy or fun, truth is neither of those things.
This also shows me you don’t understand the implications of living in a world that is behind what is actually going on and what it can say about reality.
We have intuitions about what the world IS. That is external, independent, outside of our direct control as in no a dream, and where cause and effect rule.
How we feel about things and what we care about is cultural. If you were born somewhere else you’d be a different person, that’s just facts. Everything you take to be you came from outside of you, so it’s not really your own. Thoughts, desires, wants, all these are instilled in you by influences out of your own control. So you are effectively just a puppet. We love family because society says to, same with friends and partners. We value knowledge and learning and development because society says so and so we do. In the end you’re just manipulated by forces out of your control. Nothing you feel or think is really you or your own.
Literally tons of science texts, oh never-mind. 
Literally, those images where it changes depending on what you’re told it is, the “triangle” that your brain creates by filling in the spaces between, it goes on.