Lessons on Causality

You merely look for any points that are not the right distance from the center.

How long do you have to look for a point that is not the right distance from the center?
You can keep zooming in on the shape. But for how long? When do you say enough?
If you never say enough you can never finish the test.
If you say enough then you’re testing a finite number of points.

You can never verify that an infinite number of points is the right distance from center.
You can only falsify that an infinite number of points is the right distance from center (provided that you find the point that is not the right distance from the center within the set timeframe.)

In reality, what happens is that people test a finite number of points and then make judgments based on that.
For example, you take a look at a thousand points that lie on the boundary of the shape and then you judge whether the shape is a circle or not based on whether every single point is the same distance from the center of the shape or not.
If even one point is not the right distance from the center, then you declare the shape is not a circle.
If you then perform a test that involves a higher number of points and realize that the shape does not pass it, you do not declare that the earlier test is faulty.
You simply declare that the shape does not pass the test of higher degree of circularity.

A word is supposed to be attached to certain phenomena (i.e. you should be able to point at some phenomenon and say “this is what I mean when I use this or that word!”) and detached from other phenomena (i.e. you should be able to point at some phenomenon and say “this is NOT what I mean when I use this or that word!”)

Testing phenomena is necessary if you want to determine whether this or that word should or should not be attached to it. In other words, testing is necessary if you want to determine whether this or that phenomenon meets the definition of the word or not.

That’s a manner of thinking that is detached from reality.

I see that James has succeeded in confusing you. Of course you can focus on a point. We do it all the time. When you take a ruler and place one of its ends at the center of the shape, and you put the ruler at some angle of your choice, then, if the ruler is sufficiently long, the ruler will cross the boundary of the shape at some point. That point at which the ruler crosses the boundary of the shape is, well, a point. That’s what is meant by the word point. The point is that the ruler can cross the boundary of a shape in many different ways. In order to determine whether any shape is a circle or not you must pick a finite number of ways in which the ruler crosses the boundary of the shape.

Yes, I am. We identify circles through perception. There is no other way.

Maybe you do. I don’t.

Defining circles means describing how we determine whether any given shape is a circle or not.

If definitions have nothing to do with perception then they are quite simply meaningless.

I can only do so much.

Technically, you only have to find one in order to know that you are not looking at a perfect circle. The degree of perfection is determined by relatively how many are at a wrong distance. If a shape is made entirely of straight sides, regardless of how many, almost all points will be at a wrong distance.

If you do not limit your search you might never reach the conclusion. What if you spend a lifetime looking for a point that is the wrong distance from the center?

Ultimately, it does not matter. What matters is that you can never prove that any given shape is a perfect circle. Not because there are no perfect circles in reality but because the concept is meaningless. There is no procedure, no test, that can prove that a given shape is a perfect circle.

And yet, that’s not how things work in reality. In reality, a chiliagon is perceived as a circle. This is quite simply because not all points matter. Only key points matter. All other points can be any distance from the center whatsoever.

The points that are not at the right distance are the easiest to spot. They literally “stand out”. But if you have to look for very long, you are probably looking at something that is close enough for your interests. It is merely your interests that limit your priorities.

That is obviously false.

Again, this is mere silliness. If the term had no meaning, you wouldn’t even be able to talk about it, much less debate whether it referenced anything that exists.

Your whole, “if it is abstract, it has no meaning” is just nonsense.

The ability of the mind to utilize abstract concepts is an essential element of intelligence. Even you unwittingly do it quite often. You just don’t know it. The ability to understand the use of abstraction is still a higher sign of intelligence. Apparently one that you completely lack.

They stand out if you are focusing on them. If you are not focusing on them, you will not spot them.

You have the chance to demonstrate to us the procedure with which we can determine whether any given shape is a perfect circle or not.

In fact, you had this chance all along and yet you didn’t take it.
Why is that?

You just said that there is no such a thing as meaningless words.
You just said that in order to arrange words in a sentence they must already be meaningful.
Which is what is real silliness.
And this coming from someone who declares to understand everything.

That’s not what I am saying.
That’s what you think I am saying because to you the word “abstract” means “meaningless”.

You are a moron.
There is no escaping it.
It does not matter what you think you are, what you have told yourself over the years.
The fact is that you’re a moron.

That would be a sign of severe attention deficit disorder (ADD or ADHD), perhaps even Autism.

Or perhaps:

That’s not a sign of a disease. That’s simply how things work in reality. Attention is limited. At any point in time, no matter how much attention you are paying, you are seeing some things (the ones you are focusing on) and you are not seeing other things (the ones you are not focusing on.)

When you’re looking at a chiliagon, you’re not seeing a polygon, you’re seeing a circle. This is because no imperfections are noticeable from such a distance. Even though the number of imperfect points is far greater than the number of perfect points, you still see a circle. You need to zoom in and you need to zoom in quite a bit before you can start spotting imperfections.

You are offering no counter-argument to what I am saying.
There is literally no substance to your posts.
What you are doing is you are trying REALLY HARD to disagree with what I am saying.
It’s pathetic.

No. You are seeing something that you are perceiving and assuming to be a circle or at least circular enough for your concerns. That is what Gib was telling you.

No. You are NOT seeing something that you are assuming to be a circle. Rather, you are seeing a circle and assuming that the shape will look exactly the same if you took a closer look at it.
Your logic is backwards.

The feeling of causality comes about due to the feeling of will and power. It feels like we have a will to make actions, and decisions.
We categorize things into events, objects, and entities.

If event X occurs then event Z will happen, and so forth.
There seems to be an identity, a structure, a coherence, lust and beauty for the thing-ness of these entities.

I think what is needed in order to advance this discussion is a deeper understanding regarding the distinction between words, concepts and things.
The three, although different, must be related to each other in a specific way.
Words must point to concepts which must point to things.
This means that every word must point to some kind of thing.
There is no exception to this rule.

Here, we can focus exclusively on written words ignoring all other types of words such as spoken words.
Words can therefore be thought of as a sequence of letters that can either mean something (i.e. point to a concept that points to a thing) or mean nothing (i.e. not point to a concept that points to a thing.)
The majority of the content of Internet posts is words.
I think we can all agree what words are.
It appears to be a bit more difficult to agree that words can be either meaningful or meaningless.
Some people obviously think that it is impossible to construct a sentence out of meaningless words.
I don’t know what to do about that.

That words and concepts are different is best observed in the fact that different words can point to one and the same thing.
For example, both “car” and “automobile” mean one and the same thing.

Concepts are a lot more interesting than words.
Concepts can be thought of as classes or categories of things.
They do not refer to any particular thing.
Rather, they refer to a class or a category of things.
They refer to any of the many different things that are usually related in some way.
In other words, many different things can be represented using one and the same concept.

For example, the following two images are two different things:

Even though they are two different things they belond to one and the same class or category which is that of cars.
In other words, the two different things are both cars.

Classes can be defined as a set of all things that they point to.
But this is generally not how they are defined.
More commonly, they are defined in terms of membership rules.
Every class defines a test that a thing has to pass in order to be considered a representative of that class.
Usually, things that belong to one and the same class do so because they share certain similarities.
For example, the two images above belong to one and the same class – that of cars – because they are similar in certain regards, namely, in that they both possess certain key features that define cars.

Concepts classify things.
They are NOT separate from things.
They are not things themselves but they are not separate from them either.
Things are classified based on certain membership rules.
This is why I demand that every concept is accompanied by a test that allows us to determine which things belong to it and which don’t.
When there is no such a test what that indicates is that the concept is meaningless.

Pretty much every meaningful concept you can think of, no matter how abstract, has a test that can be used in order to determine which things belong to it and which don’t.
Numbers, for example.
A lot of people will tell you that there is no picture that can be classified as a number.
They will tell you this is because numbers have no visual form.
This is quite simply wrong.

When we say that numbers do not have a visual form what this means is that numbers can have ANY visual form.
When you say that a concept does not have some feature what it means is that that feature is not one of the defining characteristics of the concept.
In other words, you cannot define the concept using that feature which means that that feature is not part of the membership rules.
The feature does not have an impact on deciding whether any given thing is a member of the class or not.

For example, we say that cars have no backdrop to mean that whatever surrounds a thing – and it must be surrounded by something! – does not change whether that thing is a car or not.
If we take one of the above two images and change the backdrop to whatever we want the image would still be that of a car.

We can also say that cars have no color because color is not one of the defining features of cars.
If we took any of the above two images and changed the color of the car to any other color we would still have a car.
However, in general, we say that cars DO have color because that feature, although not the defining feature, is often useful to us in a different context.
In the same exact way that we say that circles have straight sides even though straights sides are NOT the defining characteristic of circles (i.e. circles can have any kind of sides, they don’t have to be straight.)

I think this argument is getting circular.

Whether or not something is a circle depends on what definition you consider to be a circle.

The most sensible definition is that a circle is whatever appears to have a super symmetry (at least 2 dimensionally.) DIRECTLY TO THE SENSES (Consciousness.) Since this is the most direct to the senses, it is the most sensible.

James seems to say, the definition of a circle is whatever is a super symmetry no matter at what point in time, outside of the senses and consciousness, remains always a super symmetry. Since this does not exist in most cases then the only definition available is that circles are atoms, but this of course makes the definition redundant so why call atoms circles and circles atoms, perhaps call them microspheres, which have 3 dimensional super symmetry.

We could further refine our definitions and say there are different qualities of circles, visually perfect circles, pixellated circles, or polygonal looking circle. Circle being a simple pronoun, to be further fleshed out and defined using adjectives for precision.

James is right if the definition matches his definition of circle in his head.
Magnus is right if the definition matches his definition of circle in his head.

But I think Magnus is more right because his definition seems better.

Bottom line, James and Magnus are both right, just Magnus is more right.
Both can masturbate to their own glory and philosophical dominance in peace.

If there’s one thing for sure, everybody likes circles. boobs, wheels, butts, balls you name it. People are obsessed with balls.


[size=85]Mostly balls, however ALL are circles (including pucks) on at least the 2 dimensions.[/size]

Yes. I think James fails to understand this at times and at times just likes to feel like he won at an argument. And your post, although you post-ninja’d me, was very good and I hope James takes it to heart.

That is the opposite of Mag’s argument.

Mag argues that “a circle is this … what I see … regardless of any definition because definitions are meaningless unless they agree with what I see..”

It’s a “cart before the horse” argument.

That would be true for the non-philosopher, having already been given the idea of a circle (the geometric definition) by the philosopher(s).

The goal of the philosopher is to add clarity and reduce confusion…usually.
You are just adding confusion.

Mag’s post (with the car pics) was very clear. Go read it again.

Here are our priorities.

  1. Reality=Whatever is directly in our consciousness
    v
  2. Objects, entities, events, thing-ness
    v
  3. Pronouns, or a generally vague form of noun, meant to give a broad sweep categorization of something.
    v
  4. Adjectives, to further classify, categorize and reference nouns and pronouns. Nouns and pronouns are a reference to patterns, phenomenon, based on whether or not they fulfill a set of criterion.

A circle is a phenomenon which exists whether or not you have words to index it with or reference it to. There are perfect circles, imperfect circles, pixellated circles. Get it? You seem to be avoiding / missing step four and say something is not a circle, when it is a circle.

Just like how you say something IS OR ISN"T a philosopher. A philosopher…what type of philosopher? Maybe not your type of philosopher. What are the attributes of philosopher do they not fulfill…specifically?

Do you understand?

That would be your argument.
You are putting the cart (territory) before the horse (map.)
Biguous isn’t wrong when he says that you live in the World of Words.

There is such a thing as meaningless concepts or concepts that do not point to some sort of thing (i.e. phenomenon.) “Perfect circle” might be a meaningful concept provided that you assign to it some kind of meaning (i.e. if you make it point to some sort of thing) but in the case of James, and also S57, it is a statement without any meaning. Basically, it’s just a sequence of words. That’s all it is. Words must refer to something concrete otherwise they are meaningless.

Another thing, which isn’t much relevant, is that people have evolved a common manner in which they determine which shapes are circles and which are not. Definitions are supposed to REFLECT this process and to reflect it with as much precision as it is necessary. The popular definition isn’t bad. It’s pretty good. But it becomes problematic when people take it literally.

They don’t start with what is real. There are circles EVERYWHERE around us. But because they take words literally, they won’t acknowledge this. They don’t understand that when you take the popular definition literally that you strip it of all meaning. There is no way in hell that you can identify a shape that has an infinite number of points on its boundary that are equidistant from the center of that shape.

No. The goal of the philosopher is to pursue wisdom. And when truth gets too far off track, the goal becomes to resist the insanity and reestablish enough truth for wisdom to be pursued again. This all started with Urwrong and Arc arguing over what a circle is, thus I mentioned “definition” to clarify and resolve the issue.

The entire issue is about language and identifying things in accord with whatever language there is.

Mag’s mistake is in presuming that whatever language he inattentively picked up is the language that dictates the identity of what he sees. He now preaches that physical reality determines language. That is in exact reverse. Language is formed by giving portions of reality identities - defined names. It is then from definitions, usually merely connoted from family and society, that anyone has the urge to call anything by any particular name.

A circle is not what the physical universe says that it is. It is often not what the child associated with the word. The universe doesn’t make that determination. People choose what is to be called a circle, whether it is an abstract category of shape or a physically real object.

But that is only half of his failing.

In addition to not understanding that definitions inherently precede perceptive identifications, he has latched onto the idea that abstract notions (categories) “have no meaning”, even while he is using such meanings and categories. Using his theory (void of categories), the first crude “circle” that one sees determines what a circle is. Anything you see afterward not exactly matching that first identification, would not be a circle because it doesn’t exactly match the identifier. There could only be one circle, the first he ever identified. Of course, he hasn’t thought that far, so he merely re-designates whatever he feels like, as a “circle” “because it is what he sees” regardless of what it might really be.

He is merely a corruptor of language with a primitive, grunt-like mind (no doubt a meat-eater). None of this has anything to do with actual philosophy because without a consistent language, with children choosing arbitrary definitions of their words, there can be no communication. And communication is required during philosophical pursuit in order to build secure, enduring thought and the pursuit of wisdom.