Lessons on Causality

A circle has NO “straight sides”.

An integral is used in calculus to calculate the circumference by assuming that there are sides and then calculating as if there are an infinity of infinitely small sides. The problem is that infinitely small sides was just a tool to use in the calculation process. It works only because infinitely small is close enough to zero to allow the integral to produce a precise answer.

But the real question is resolved only by the definitions involved, not the tools that mathematicians use to calculate measurements. And the definition of a circle forbids any straightness at all, as in zero straight sides.

Yes, you suspect that. But you’re wrong.

I am not conflating them. And yes, it’s enough.

I didn’t confirm what you said.

And I didn’t screw up.

No, it does not. It was never implied.

Yes, it does mean that the Sun changes. But not in the way that you think. You are the one who is confused here. If you want, I can explain it to you all. But given how little patience you have, I don’t think that you want it. In fact, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that you would understand anything.

The degree to which plants grow changes in response to a change in one of the parameters of the Sun – its position in space. If you change the position of the Sun by placing it far away from the Earth, you can be sure that plants will stop growing. And if you revert it back to the original position, you can be sure that plants will start growing once again.

What EXACTLY is your problem?
You enjoy pretending that you have no problems.
And you enjoy projecting them onto others.
Your job description.

Very relevant.
It is an imagination in your head that argues on your side.

That’s not true.

You ask IRRELEVANT questions.
When someone asks me an irrelevant question, I ignore them.

My “problem” is that you seem to not be able to read.

… not to mention avoiding answering direct questions.

I think Performance with Butler in Wikipedia:

The myth of the given is the experience, that new structures and concepts in science Comes to us like an unconscious process. An alternative model of this is to deduce natural relation as in Schelling or Hegels philosophy of nature. My questions didn’t arise from an academic Situation like a Seminar. It is my way of thinking. Performance of gender is in opposite to the myth of the given in biological gender. The last is a category of causality.

James,

Precisely - and doing the reverse of what Unwrong did - he drew a circle around the hexagon, showing how it could then become a circle, does not quite cut it. Yes, in Kindergarten it might. lol

This is what we humans do with belief and assumption - we draw our own little lines in order to create what we feel to be reality - yet isn’t very often.

I’m no mathematician but I do understand this.

Well, it is a good thing to be able to stretch our minds by seeing a thing in more than one way.
I tend to be a stubborn literalist at times.

“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

That too. Freddie

There are all kinds of personal lessons to be learned on how we tend to view things to the exclusion of other ways in which to view things.

Clarification:

I did NOT draw a circle around the DECAGON. I found images of many sided shapes and that one of the decagon was the best one available.

If I find a shape with 24 sides then it only serves my point better that a many-sided shape becomes ‘circular’ as it increases in sides.

Something can be infinite within a finite space. For example there are an infinite number of numbers between I and 2 as many real numbers have decimal
places extending to infinity. And so a circle has an infinite number of sides even though it is a finite shape of finite dimension. If it did not have an infinite
number of sides then it would not be a circle as not every point on the circumference would be equidistant from the centre. Since that is how it is defined

“All things are subject to interpretation.”

You’re wrong. Arc, like Magnus, you cannot hide behind petty quotes of philosophers, without context, and then falsely believe you’re making some kind of grand point or counter-argument. You’re not. First of all, all things are NOT subject to interpretation, as if, interpreting something differently changes the thing. It does not. If you “interpret” a rock as a piece of fruit, and try to bite it, then that’s your prerogative and error. Your interpretation, does not change the rock into a piece of fruit.

How you FEEL does not change reality. Rather it merely identifies emotions and the causes which triggered them, in your environment. How you FEEL is relatively powerless. Unless you have strength, conviction, willpower, your feelings are “equal” to the feelings of an infant or child. Feelings do almost nothing, within reality. Instead, it is action and cause that affects and interacts with reality.

How you BEHAVE is the interpretation. What you ACTUALLY DO is the point. Not words, not imagination, not pretense, not feeling. None of that matters, really. It’s light, like air, weightless, no force or power behind it.

The point about interpretation is that intelligent people, who are rarer, interpret reality more correctly and accurately than others. But accurate interpretation of reality requires COURAGE. It requires opening up to the possibility of being wrong, being mistaken, and being humiliated, publicly too. Like how Magnus can be publicly humiliated for claiming there are “uncaused” events, without then immediately providing examples of what he’s talking about. Like how you Arcturus can be publicly humiliated for not knowing the definition of a circle, or that a shape with 1000 sides is equivalent to what people perceive as a “circle” although it technically has many sides, edges, ridges, and is imperfect.

Reality is imperfect. The human mind, and other brains of mammals, has a cognitive program that “fills in the gaps” of imperfections. It’s a mental, cognitive blind-spot, no different than blind-spots in vision.

This is a 1000-sided shape by the way:

Is it a “circle” yet or do I need to show you a 1,000,000 sided shape to end your rebellion of errors?

You keep saying this but it is still wrong. Mathematics is a deductive discipline that uses proof to validate truth claims. It does not deal in probable truth
like science but absolute truth. And it is absolutely true that a circle has infinite sides. If you perceive otherwise that does not make it true. Perception
is completely subjective and less than entirely reliable. Whereas mathematics by contrast is completely objective and the most rigorous discipline ever

100 side at best, but you seem to be missing the point.

That shape is “circular”, it is NOT “a circle”.

If there are any straight sides at all, then it is not an actual circle, but rather merely circular - close to being a circle.

There is no room in the very definition of a circle for straight sides. It is a part of the language.

Not where mathematics is concerned because more than one way means most of them are wrong unfortunately

I already stated that a circle has infinite sides or “points”.

Mathematics deals with absolutes, which are abstractions. Infinity is part of the process of determining shape, size, and dimension. Calculus is predicated on the ideal of infinity, that, as a number becomes absolutely large or small, it approaches any “whole” number, which is also an abstraction. In fact any whole number is predicated on the abstraction of infinity.

There is no such thing as a “real” whole number. Here’s what I mean explicitly. Let’s say you have “one” (whole) rock. And then you add another, second, (whole) rock. How many rocks do you have? 2. You have two rocks. But are the rocks equal? Are they the same? Do they have the same weight and shape? Or aren’t rocks different? They weigh differently. They have different shapes. They have different qualities. No two rocks are exactly the same, although some are similar.

Therefore the ideal of “one whole rock” is an abstraction, a premise of measurement. That humanity can use “this” (or that) rock as a standard, by which to measure all other rocks.

So basically, mathematics is abstraction, approximation, and absolutism. Perfection is idealism, and Artifice. It is unnatural. It is anti-nature. Math is unreal, a human imposition upon reality/nature. The functions, processes, equations, and algorithms humanity uses are all artificially imposed, by mankind, to understand, manipulate, and control natural processes.

Mathematical sophistication is directly aligned with heightened intelligence. A “smart” person understands math easier than “stupid” people. Thus mathematics, a reflection of human intelligence, represents the ways in which humanity uses knowledge, education, information, and formulas (algorithms) to ‘leverage’ reality and nature. Using math, science, and every other intellectual tool, mankind has developed severe power differences, giving exponential advantage compared to other (less intelligent) mammals.

Show any animal a quadratic equation. It doesn’t understand it. Because it lacks the sophisticated evolutionary developments and educational procedures that humans have, over generations.

TLDR:

Humans continue to develop sophisticated mathematics (as abstraction) to give us an evolutionary advantage over every other (less sophisticated) life form.

This is Artifice/Artificiality, away from Nature, far “above” Nature, top-down. But most humans forget the foundations, and from whence mathematics originates.

A point is not a “straight side”. Straightness requires at least 3 points combined with infinitesimal distance between them. Having an infinity of points is different than having an infinity of sides. And that is the crux of the disagreement.

I agree with that.

I can agree to most of that, but every word refers to an abstract or conceptual idea used to reference some portion of reality. I think that you missed the concept of “whole”. The word “whole” refers to a complete item as however it is defined in the language, not necessarily identical to any other complete item.

No, that’s not your problem. Your problem is that you suffer from Autistic Spectrum Disorder which means you have difficulties understanding colloquial language. Is it any wonder that you place so much emphasis on language? I don’t think so. You take words way too literally. Whenever I talk to you I always feel like I am talking to Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory.

Let me remind you. Your point was this:

In other words, your point was that A acting upon B, or more precisely, that B changes “in response to” or “due to” A, does not mean that when A changes B changes.
That’s wrong.

You did not explain why you disagree with my claim.
Not at all.
You provided no counter-argument whatsoever.
Instead, you do what you usually do – you just make declarations.
Which also happen to be empty.

Is the following your argument?

You call this an argument?
There is something I can respond to?

You’re full of shit.

Perhaps you were never told that reading involves comprehension of content. My argument was with Brando.

The real world Problem of causality is perhaps a flaw. It is something like Kants critique of metaphysics: there is a drive to speak of it but it can never be captured. Perhaps we must Change the Frame to Performance. I quoted something on it regarding Butler. But in history there was a practice of Performance, which wrapps the formula: A is a cause of B. This is the imaginary (Spencer Brown would love it) - so tragedy in old ancient Greece. We see something in imaginational works, and draw a conclusion to the real world. This Connection may be the real sense of the Problem of causality. And it is performative, critisizing the myth of the given.

This is a bunch of bullshit.

Humans know that off-shore earthquakes cause tidal flooding. For you to ignore the cause or pretend causes don’t exist, when you could have used the information and prevented thousands of people from dying, is irresponsible and imbecilic.

Here I was not speaking mathematically.
I was speaking of many things which we might be able to see/interpret in more than one way.
I was one of those who said that a circle actually does not have sides.

Aside from that, depending on how one looks at it, some will say a circle does not have sides and some will say that it does.
Literally speaking, it does NOT.

mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/54816.html

Arc is clinging to her ignorance and falsities, playing language games and semantics to cover up her humiliation.

You ought to be embarrassed to be so wrong.

Bury your head deeper in the sand. Tell me again how a million sided shape is not a circle. Here’s the image by the way: