Pretty much.
I am going to take a terser and more blunt tone without directly insulting you or anyone else; this is because I feel that, after having been asking to provide arguments for things, people have then simply avoided them and just went about going more into their own case.
“Progressives attribute this to white racism (the extrinsic, abhorrent behavior or limitations of minorities are wholly the result of the intrinsic, abhorrent behavior or limitations of the majority i.e. reverse discrimination) and/or their environment.
Individualists will write it off as statistical noise.
Real conservatives will attribute it to their biology and/or culture, their clannishness, deceitfulness, low iQs, poor impulse control and so on, attributes progressives will either try to deny and/or also attribute to white racism.”
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You then temper your statements with this: “Only a simpleton is an absolute individualist, or an absolute collectivist.”
That… doesn’t mean anything. This is one of those cliches people use to cover their tracks epistemologically, that doesn’t actually do anything. Individualism already incorporates the insights from both the progressive and conservative camps,- (rendering that comment redundant) simply investing in a metaphysical foundation (free-agency) that permits a much more robust overall philosophy to develop, that is: a genuine ethos, thereby escaping the pitfalls of reductionism and ideology.
(To Gloom) Did you not hear me say a few posts back that your little taxonomy was arbitrary first of all, because individualists don’t believe that; and more importantly, while recognizing BOTH the structural component of marginalization that progressives emphasize, AND the element of biological, cultural, and familial attributes like IQ and genetics, as well as epigentics, which conservatives emphasize; the individualist recognizes also that human agency is the most important factor, on a purely metaphysical basis, which trumps all else- for the reason demonstrated in my goddamn three-step modal sequence that I’ve repeated ten times and nobody’s rebutted because there is nothing to rebut. That is what makes the individualist perspective philosophically viable and renders the other two as mere ideology. [Not to Gloom, but to Ecmandu, who began this thread: I see, going through your user posts, that you like to talk about the importance of IQ: I think it’s important too. (Though I would prefer my works and actual statements to speak for themselves: that is why I’ve never disclosed the actual number, except that it is ‘yuge’.) So unless you want us to both go get some evidence together for our IQ tests, or even the name of the psychologist and administrators under which they were conducted and analyzed, so that we can compare and determine who has the bigger IQ-dick, I would very much enjoy you in particular to, more than skirting the periphery of my posts as some have done, actually deal with something I’ve said. Like this post regarding the metaphysical tenability of individualism vs. its two alternatives. ]
“I believe in moderation, in balance between individuality, liberty, hedonism and materialism with collectivity, authority, health and nature.”
Moderation is a bullshit philosophy. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
Is math a social construct?
Why of course it is.
What is math but a series of concepts in our heads, etchings on paper or chalkboard and sounds in our mouths?
It’s a quantitative language, more about how much of something there is than what it is and does.
Is it more objective, which’s is to say do these concepts, etchings and sounds represent the world more accurately than other languages, like say the English language?
Not necessarily.
Math and English are binary, simple, the world is fluid, variable.
Our symbols can only approximate or relatively represent the world, they can’t perfectly capture it, especially binary, simple symbols.
The arts are more objective than math and English in a sense because they’re fluid and variable, like the world, but even still, they can’t perfectly capture it, nothing can.
Representation is always inferior to the represented, in terms of objectivity, definitionally.
Take geometry, are there Euclidean shapes in nature, tetrahedrons and so on?
Absolutely, no, there aren’t, no shape in nature is a perfect tetrahedron, only approximately perhaps, or relatively.
Examine a tetrahedron under a microscope and you will find all sorts of bumps and curves, fluidity, variability.
Even shape itself is a bit misleading.
Even a rock is a process, rather than a static thing with a shape.
The trillions of, or infinite processes taking place are too subtle for us to notice, but they’re there.
Rocks are energy, everything is, every part and the whole of it is interacting with everything within it, and without, even with the whole cosmos indirectly and directly through gravity and radiation.
There isn’t a spec of it that’s static, not in motion.
All things are eventually broken up and recombined again and no two things are identical.
Nature never repeats herself, but she rhymes.
However from a distance things can give the appearance they’re identical.
Strangers can’t tell twins apart, but to those who know them intimately, they can’t help but notice details distinguishing them.
Arguably the quantum world works this way.
We’re dealing with the smallest sorts of things we can perceive, we don’t possess instruments capable of distinguishing them, yet, but I suspect some day we will.
I think matter/energy, space and time are infinitely divisible, every whole is part of a greater whole, and every whole made up of parts.
From what I gather, the quantum world is full of stuff that has particle/wave duality, so they’re not the discrete units some philosophers and scientists like Democritus imagined.
Quantum objects can be cut, but they explode when you cut them.
To a being trillions of lightyears across in dimensions, galaxies, stars and planets may be the smallest things it could perceive, and if he were able to cut them, they’d explode into what he supposes is pure energy, but what is energy?
All is energy, in motion, affects and is an effect.
"Our symbols can only approximate or relatively represent the world, "
Our symbols don’t represent the world. They represent an abstraction of the world, and other symbol-systems or mathematics represent an abstraction of that abstraction, and an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, all the way up to the infinite. These supra-physical abstractions, outside of space and time, can be used to deconstruction both the world and any other symbol-system lower than them on that hierarchy, which is useful as much as in philosophy as in the sciences.
So I guess this was at least equally addressed to your own szzelf?
Also, you mentioned moderation, but when I asked you who you represent, you said ONLY yourself. Only is, well, relatively absolute as I reckon.
“We’re dealing with the smallest sorts of things we can perceive, we don’t possess the instruments capable of distinguishing them, yet, but I suspect we will some day.”
What does it mean to “see” something for example, either with your own eyes or through a camera? It means to bounce a photon off an object and capture it via reflection. Well quantum particles are so small and fragile that the photon actually fucks them up, and distorts or destroys them. So we can’t measure them for that reason. There is nothing magical or spooky about it.
Yeah, that’s why it kills me when QPicists say “when we look,”.
Treating us like retards.
So you see colours when you hear words?
I don’t have Synaesthesia, but I recently saw purple haze drifting around in front of me a few times in an almost galaxy-like fashion, and ultra-violet is another colour I often see hovering over and behind objects… but I think these phenomenon are caused by brain chemistry and neural over-activity… and yes, it is very pretty indeed.
And what causes THAT?
I’m a drug-free zone, and avoid all toxins at all costs… for health reasons, so it seems to be a naturally-induced phenomenon, probably triggered by endorphins, which are the body’s natural opioid.
“perceiving” comprehends more than sight
Yeah, but when we are talking about sub-electronic dynamics of matter, we really aren’t talking about smell either, or intuition.
Yeah ok, but what triggers the endorphins? And I mean, endorphins are a pretty large proportion of brain chemicals, by themselves I don’t think constitute any kind of answer.
But what triggers that?
Yah, I’d like to know why sounds cause me to see fireworks too, particularly loud noises? For a split second I only see white fireworks.
we are talking about anything we can quantify before and after a given point in time, and determine if anything changed.
in any case
1/2 of the scientific process is intuition
the other half is basically finding ways to prove it
Yeah, 90% imagination. But the imagination still has to be fed by concrete and careful scientific methodology.
What is being discussed is what methods may glean some information about those dynamics, and their limitations. It is an outright lie to say you are “seeing” anything, just by virtue of how difficult it is to measure anything at that scale.
So they say things like “a thing causes another thing far away before travel is possible.” But meanwhile they sneak by that we have already identified a discreet thing, and that its measurement is concrete enough to determine causality.
As if we were talking about atomic dynamics or something. If even a photon can throw the thing off, clearly we need to step back and ask “what even is a quanta?” It is certainly not a “thing” in any way such as an atom or an electron are a thing. Or even like gravity and the force that holds nuclei together. Those things can actually be discreetly identified and measured, because tools can be used on them that don’t dramatically alter its dynamics in any way we cannot account for in equally concrete and discreet measurements.
QP is largely the refusal to admit that those things are really fucking hard to measure.
Einstein had a concrete enough grasp on what elements he was working with to deploy his imagination on it. Extensive work had been done on electricity and atomic dynamics before he could come up with his theories.
In the case of sub-electronic dynamics, we are extremely far from having good enough methods of measurement or understanding of what we are measuring to apply any nearly comparable level of imagination to.
They have done some nifty things. You could probably make a small computer with their computations so far that could crash most supercomputers at once in a short second. But they have not done what they say they have done.
Worst part is, they say they have done it largely to justify their mystic sense of fundamental universal uncertainty. They say they have done it, just so they can say the universe is broken.
Fuck your agenda. Give me a sub-electronic reactor.
Another interesting thing to say about both Einstein and Newton is that both came up with imagination, with theories that explain only dynamics, based on an understanding of what you might call particles.
QP and string theory do the opposite. They use imagination to conjure particles, based on observed dynamics.
In this sense, you could say Newton and Einstein are not atomists, in the Democritan sense. To them, particles are just an excuse, a stable arrangement to measure dynamics.
So QPicists and string theorists are atomists. To them, dynamics are just an excuse, a stable arrangement to measure particles.
The importance on one hand is fundamentally based on utility, on the other on security.