A side is where two points meet but a circle does not have any points
An infinite is not a number or quantity or place either but also just something unimaginably large
Just when you think the level of conversation cannot drop any lower…
“Infinite” merely means “ENDLESS”
If you multiply an endless thing by anything, you still get an endless thing. It does NOT mean that they are the SAME thing, but rather that they merely have the same quality of being endless, not equal.
It can also be unimaginably small (infinitesimal).
If you multiply an endless thing by anything you still get an endless thing it does NOT mean that they
are the SAME thing but rather that they merely have the same quality of being endless not equal
This is true as long as the number in question is greater than one
You multiply an endless thing by only zero then you will get zero
You don’t know what a side is? Do you know what a triangle is?
Google it or ask your Kindergarten teacher.
Okay, so tell me, oh wise one, when it comes to circles, where does each side begin and end?
At what point would you perceive a side?
Is perceiving the side of a circle as simple as that of a square or triangle or rectangle or trapezoid or pentagon, hexagon, octagon, ad continuum?
If a circle stands for infinity, how can it relate to the above shapes? Not speaking geometrically.
What if someone did not know how many degrees were in a circle and how to measure them? Where would the sides be to them?
All standard closed two dimensional shapes are 360 degrees regardless of their shape so it would not be necessary to measure them
Squares and rectangles and triangles and parallelograms and rhombuses all have the same number and so logically circles would too
So the fact that a circle has no sides would not be a problem if one could calculate the number of degrees by that simple deduction
"surreptitious75
So the fact that a circle has no sides would not be a problem if one could calculate the number of degrees by that simple deduction
That is basically what I was saying. lol
But I was originally speaking of perception.
Back to elementary school, children?
This is a hexagon with 6-sides:
This is a decagon with 10-sides:
Guess what happens as shape increases its sides, or hypothetically to infinity, what shape does it become?
A star to whomever gets this question correct.
And what does “in this sense” mean, context is required. You are quoting Russel out of context.
What “in this sense” means is “in this meaningful sense”.
Here’s Russell’s paper for anyone interested:
hist-analytic.com/Russellcause.pdf
It’s free and it’s only 21 pages long.
This is what Russell says right at the start of the paper:
In the following paper I wish, first, to maintain that the word “cause”
is so inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its
complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable; secondly,
to inquire what principle, if any, is employed in science in place of the
supposed “law of causality” which philosophers imagine to be employed;
thirdly, to exhibit certain confusions, especially in regard to teleology and
determinism, which appear to me to be connected with erroneous notions
as to causality.All philosophers, of every school, imagine that causation is one of the
fundamental axioms or postulates of science, yet, oddly enough, in advanced
sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word “cause” never
occurs. Dr. James Ward, in his Naturalism and Agnosticismo makes rhis
a ground of complaint against physics: the business of those who wish to
ascertain the ultimate truth about the world, he apparently thinks, should
be the discovery of causes, yet physics never even seeks them. To me it
seems that philosophy ought not to assume such legislative functions, and
that the reason why physics has ceased to look for causes is that, in fact,
there are no such things. The law of causality, I believe, like much that
passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving,
Iike the monarchy, only because itis erroneously supposed to do no harm.
My argument, in response to you is, provide evidence, or even reasoning, for your hypothetical “uncaused event”.
It’s obvious. I don’t have to provide evidence for something that is obvious.
And just because something appears random to one person, doesn’t make it so to everybody else.
I know this. This is called apparent randomness. What you don’t understand is that not all randomness is apparent.
That’s humorous because your dead philosophers don’t side with you.
Yes, they do.
I am right, it is at an end.
No, it’s not an end, and no, you are not right.
Incomprehensible to you does not impossible to everybody and everything.
I am talking about information theory. What I am telling you is that there are bit strings, i.e. sequence of 1’s and 0’s, that cannot be compressed. No amount of intelligence can help you compress them. You are the one who is not listening.
The universe includes all sets, all that is known, all that is unknown.
Whatever you say must be true. That’s an indesputable fact.
Good because you don’t have it, petulant child. It is a task to break through your solipsistic, autistic bubble though. I may as well do it, or, reality will pop your bubble for me, either way is fine.
That must be the case.
I said that infinity is a process of change, not that change is infinite. This must be another of your reading mistakes.
I say it is neither.
You obviously have no explanations nor deep knowledge about causality.
In fact, I understand it far better than you do.
You believe that “if I cannot know, then nobody must know!” This is flagrantly false and why you need to give up your points.
That’s not what I am saying.
Most humans are solipsistic and believe that if something is not seen (the darkside of the moon) then it must not, or cannot, exist. Thus most humanity define existence according to experience and knowledge. “If you don’t know something then it doesn’t exist.”
There is no other way to “define existence”. That’s what you do not understand. You have an unrealistic understanding of intelligence. When we say “God does not exist” we do so because we do not see him. That’s how it works. That’s not solipsism. That’s simply how intelligence works.
I do not deny that there is such a thing as apparent randomness. What I deny is that all randomness is merely apparent. In other words, I am denying the denial of real randomness.
There are two types of apparent (a.k.a. subjective, epistemic) randomness.
The more superficial type of apparent randomness is due to lack of intelligence. The information that is being processed by the brain is not random. However, the brain processing it lacks the intelligence necessary in order to see this. The problem can be solved, in theory at least, by making the brain more intelligent.
The less superficial type of apparent randomness is due to lack of information. The information that is being processed by the brain is now truly random. No amount of intelligence can help you reveal the underlying order because there is no underlying order. The problem can only be solved by taking whatever steps have to be taken in order to find the missing piece of information. The number of steps that have to be taken – it must be noted – must be finite. Otherwise, if the number of steps is infinite, the claim that randomness, in this particular case, is merely due to lack of information can never be proven wrong. In other words, it becomes unquestionable – dogmatic.
When these two explanations are ruled out, what we’re left with is real (a.k.a. objective, ontic, true) randomness.
Unless you want to be a dogmatist. If you want to be a dogmatist, all you have to do is make a claim and then claim that that claim requires no evidence – that it is beyond evidence. Just declare that “all is order” and never ever bother with evidence.
How much time do we have to spend searching for the evidence of God before we can stop and judge whether He exists or not?
I am pretty sure many will say “keep searching until you find the evidence of God”.
But isn’t that a textbook example of dogmatism?
The claim that God exists can thereby never be proven wrong.
No amount of evidence can prove that God does not exist.
I am pretty sure that many will claim “just because you didn’t see God in thoses place where you looked for Him does not mean He is not located at one of those places in the universe that you did not check”.
Now we enter the territory of extreme skepticism: the future is under no obligation to mimic the past, so no number of observations can tell you what’s going to happen in the future.
Knowledge is impossible. Induction is a problem.
We need a solution or we have to stop making conclusions (which really means we need to stop thinking.)
It does not occur to these people that they are failing to understand what intelligence is.
That they have an idealistic understanding of it.
If we are bold enough to simply judge based on what evidence we have, which in pretty much all cases, I am sure, means concluding that God does not exist, then we risk facing the charge of solipsism.
How we DARE to make a claim as to what exists and what does not when there still remains a possibility that we are wrong!?
I admit. Just because I say “God does not exist” does not mean that at some point in the future I will, in response to new evidence, change my position to “God exists”.
I don’t deny this. But as it is, I have no choice but to say “God does not exist”.
With that, any charge of dogmatism goes out of the window. For my conclusions are not independent from evidence – they are strictly dependent on evidence.
It is EVIDENCE that determines what I am going to think.
You can take the above and modify it so that the word “God” is replaced by word “cause”.
It will still be correct.
Most people have no trouble understanding what a “headless monster” is. Even though none of us ever physically interacted with one. But once you mention a concept such as “uncaused event” people are immediately confused. Even though these two concepts have quite a bit in common. Headless monster is a monster without a head. It’s a monster that has no head and this means that we do not see its head – we do not see a head associated with this monster. That’s how we KNOW that any particular monster has no head – by not seeing it. Our resident smartass would scream “SOLIPSISM!” He will tell us that just because we do not see something does not mean that that something does not exist. In this particular case, he will tell us that just because we do not see a head does not mean that there is no head. How can we be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that this particular organism, this monster, has no head? For example, its head might simply be too small to be visible to the naked eye. We need to zoom in. Okay, we decide to give him a chance, so we use whatever means we have to get a closer look in order to test his claim. We do the experiment and we get a negative result: there is no head. Our smartass, however, is not willing to give up. He insists that the head might be even smaller than what we assumed so we need to zoom in further. Just to be sure. Okay, we give him another chance, we zoom in further, and once again, we get a negative result: there is no head. But the smartass won’t give up. He wants to keep zooming in. He’s never certain. He’s clearly afraid of being wrong. Like a paranoid person, or a hypochondriac, he is constantly worried about something – in his case, about being wrong. This is a paralyzing condition because without imposing a time-limit on your research (i.e. without establishing how long you’ll keep looking for evidence) you can never do anything else in your life other than do research. The effect is you spend more and more of your time doing research and less and less time taking action. All because you’re afraid of being a “solipsist”. As if there is such a thing as “absolute certainty”. It’s interesting that our smartass understands what a headless monster is but has trouble understanding what an uncaused event is. An uncaused event is simply some event A for which there is no some other event B which is causally related to it. In plain terms, it’s an event for which we see no cause. Words “cause” and “effect” are simply attributes we assign to those events that are in a specific relation (i.e. that have certain set of similarities and differences that represent what we call “causal relation”.) Our smartass thinks that the universe cannot function without such relations. Apparently, in his own little world, the universe is some kind of organism that must act in a certain way lest it die and disappear out of existence together with existence itself. Whatever that means. I am sure he “understands” what that means. If he thinks or feels he understands it, he must be understanding it.
Do I have to say that “uncaused event” is not the same as “self-caused event” or what is otherwise known as causa sui? The class of concepts that have the form self-[verb] are very tricky to deal with. On one hand, relations can exist only between two different things. A thing cannot be in relation with itself. It’s meaningless. On the other hand, self-relations, if not treated literally, can refer to relations between two different events that belong to the same category. For example, suicide is a form of self-relation – a self-destruction – that refers to one event from the category “self” destroying another event from the category “self” e.g. one’s brain destroying one’s body. I have no idea what self-causation can possibly mean. Either way, when I say “uncaused event” I mean any event that is literally not caused by any other event including itself (if that were somehow meaningful.) There is a breed of morons who think that if an event is not caused by some other event that it is caused by itself. This is just plain stupid. It betrays that they have no clue what casual relations are. And that they think that behind every event must be a cause. And that if there is no other event that is the cause of some event X that the event X is caused by itself.
No amount of intelligence can help you reveal the underlying order because there is no underlying order.
Underlying order means that a pattern, phenomenon, natural law, like gravity, predates your human perspective.
The universe was around before you were born, and will be after you die, despite your infantile urges to believe that the universe begins and ends with you. It doesn’t. And despite your childish tantrums where you claim that you must see something before it can exist.
Underlying order means discovering and re-discovering all the laws of nature which precede human consciousness.
I’m still right. You’re still wrong.
Magnus, do you believe that you can get something from nothing?
Guess what happens as a shape increases its sides or hypothetically to infinity what shape does it become
It becomes a circle and this proves that it has infinite sides so I was completely wrong when I said it had none
You speak with great authority so I will pay more attention to you and hopefully not say anything stupid again
Back to elementary school, children?
This is a hexagon with 6-sides:
This is a decagon with 10-sides:
Guess what happens as shape increases its sides, or hypothetically to infinity, what shape does it become?
A star to whomever gets this question correct.
math.stackexchange.com/question … on-vs-infi
I am still not getting the logic of it. Can you not drag the hexagon at a certain point to make it infinitely larger but at the same time, it will not become a circle but an infinitely larger hexagon.
This is what I see when I look at it. I think it all just comes down to one’s perception.
Underlying order means that a pattern, phenomenon, natural law, like gravity, predates your human perspective.
You are not paying attention to what I am saying.
By “underlying order” I mean “order that is not immediately apparent”. Whatever piece of information your brain is analyzing there is a degree of order contained within it. The degree of order contained within the information does not become apparent until one employs intelligence. Intelligence DISCOVERS how much order there is in information. If there is very little order in the information that your brain is analyzing then there is simply very little order in the information that your brain is analyzing. No IQ can help you see a degree of order that is not contained within the information your brain is analyzing. That was my point.
The universe was around before you were born, and will be after you die, despite your infantile urges to believe that the universe begins and ends with you. It doesn’t. And despite your childish tantrums where you claim that you must see something before it can exist.
I never said or implied that the universe begins and ends with me. This is something you made up. And you made it up because:
- you are too stupid to understand what I am saying
- you are too arrogant to admit that you are too stupid to understand what I am saying
- you are too desperate to prove me wrong
You need to stop projecting your psychology onto me.
You are the one with the childish tantrums.
I’m still right. You’re still wrong.
If that makes you feel good about yourself, then fine, you are right and I am wrong.
But I will take the chance to show you how confident I am in most of what I’ve been saying in this thread by making a bold statement that with regard to this particular subject I show far more intelligence than you do.
You are quite simply an arrogant moron.
That’s what you are.
That’s subjective existence and I agree with you on that, but I mean objective existence. In order for existence to exist, it would have to come from a state of nonexistence and it will return to a nonexistent state. But nonexistence doesn’t mean a state of complete nothingness, but the polar opposite of what existence is.
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” Tesla
The concept of “objective existence” is meaningless. If you’re asking what is “objective existence” then you’re asking a meaningless question and that means a question that cannot be answered.
You have a chance to prove me wrong by DEFINING what “objective existence” means and that means explaining to me what it refers to.
Note that words must refer to what was previously experienced.
If they do not refer to something that was previously experienced, then they are MEANINGLESS.
In other words, they do not refer to anything.
It is US who determine what exists and what does not exist.
The only question is HOW.
There are many ways to determine what is true and what is not.
In other words, there are many different PATTERNS OF REASONING.
I agree that we can say that there is a division between SUBJECTIVE patterns of reasoning (that are based on personal preferences or are otherwise counter-factual) and OBJECTIVE patterns of reasoning (that are evidence-based.)
Evidence simply means personal experience.
When your conclusions are in alignment with your personal experience, then we say they are objective (or more precisely, reached through an objective pattern of reasoning.)
When your conclusions are in contradiction with your personal experience, then we say they are subjective (or more precisely, reached through a subjective pattern of reasoning.)
I don’t know what you’re looking for.
Maybe you’re looking for an “underlying order” too?
In other words, maybe you’re looking for a theory of everything i.e. theory that can explain all experience?