Transgressing the Boundaries

[ygolo]

Yes, but problems come when chiseling away causes the foundation to change. The problem becomes non-linear. Then you can't chisel away and expect to find something that was always there to begin with. But instead you can frame an understanding of these changes by using relative foundations and throw out the idea of an absolute one.

The solution to that seems simple. If the sculpture crumbles, it was not meant to be (at least part of this world).

If you don't want anything to crumble, don't chisel. But if one refuses to ever chisel then one will never give any form. Seems like a good way to do nothing.

We don't need to appeal to things we don't understand to make a case for the points we want to make. If quantum mechanics or relativity (both introduced in freshman science classes) required completely abandoning objective reality, I think we would have been teaching this by now.

These particular things are indeed counterintuitive. But what parts of quantum mechanics are "non-linear"? What does "non-linearity" have to with abandoning the notion of objective reality? These points were certainly not made clear in "Transgressing the Boundaries".

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Please see my disclaimer, and my response to [MENTION=21835]Amalie Muller[/MENTION] (who may or may not be playing Devil's Advocate). I did not divulge the circumstances for publication so that people give their honest opinions of the subject matter. I doubted that people would engage in debate if they knew the circumstances.

Nevertheless, I did not expect someone living in 2014, when we are 3D printing organs, making computer chips with 10s of billions of transistors, and have found evidence of the Higgs Boson, to have a particularly good response to an article invoking the bogey man of "non-linearity" as a work of scholarship.

Again, my intention was never to embarrass anyone. This was meant as a test example of how to handle a situation where people are making ridiculous claims.

 

[ygolo]

Just to make clear that it is not the conclusions themselves that I find ridiculous but the means by which he reaches them, here is a video that I found much more reasonable that comes to similar (though not the same) conclusions:

How Better Register the Agency of Things: Semiotics | bruno-latour.fr
How Better to Register the Agency of Things: Ontology | bruno-latour.fr

This form of argument is coherent, and I find valuable. It gives food for thought, and consider things that I find reasonable instead of reasonable. Although there were some bombastic statements, they were made metaphorically.

 

[Amalie Muller]

Actually, it's because if you have 2 dollars and I give you 4 more, you now have 6; no more, no less. I would love to be able to make my 2+4 dollars equal 6000 instead, but reality just doesn't work that way. Mathematics based on emotional evaluations is no longer mathematics, but some other "discipline", perhaps numerology. Whatever its merits, it should not be called by the name of something that it is not.

To be honest, I just thought it was a funny thing to write, and I LOVE the fact you and a couple other people not only took it seriously, but were annoyed enough by my idea of "feminist emotion-based mathematics" (lol) to waste a few seconds of your lives seriously arguing against a strange idea that nobody actually believes in (probably).

 

[Amalie Muller]

i agree with you. and thusly our consensus makes it a social truth, and therefore equals objective reality.

what the dumb idiot writing the article is trying to speak of are in fact crimes of fallacy committed by the world public.
but he approaches the topic without really acknowledging his own assertion, and doesn't know how to write english

a lot of readers might think this is over their head because he uses a lot of 13+ word sentences [which cover 3 word concepts] and long words. be not fooled, friends. in fact this is plainly diarrhea of the mouth, at its worst

ygolo i don't understand why any energy is being spent on such an intellectually desolate article.

The author is not an idiot. He purposely wrote the article like this, as a test.

 

[Bush]

Actually, it's because if you have 2 dollars and I give you 4 more, you now have 6; no more, no less. I would love to be able to make my 2+4 dollars equal 6000 instead, but reality just doesn't work that way. Mathematics based on emotional evaluations is no longer mathematics, but some other "discipline", perhaps numerology. Whatever its merits, it should not be called by the name of something that it is not.

Behavioral economics. It's a hella neat field.

To be honest, I just thought it was a funny thing to write, and I LOVE the fact you and a couple other people not only took it seriously, but were annoyed enough by my idea of "feminist emotion-based mathematics" (lol) to waste a few seconds of your lives seriously arguing against a strange idea that nobody actually believes in (probably).

But almost everyone's time, including yours, was wasted. But mine wasn't, because I barely bothered to pay attention to the article in the first place.

 

[Amalie Muller]

Behavioral economics. It's a hella neat field.

But almost everyone's time, including yours, was wasted. But mine wasn't, because I barely bothered to pay attention to the article in the first place.

My time wasn't wasted, as I had fun writing these posts, and enjoyed reading the article. What's a better use of time than enjoying yourself??

It's a great article. You'd have a hard job finding a funnier pseudo-science parody than this. The author wrote it brilliantly.

 

[Coriolis]

But is that what science believes or what you believe? Honest question, first thing that came to mind after reading that.

It is not a belief, but rather an observation.

Okay, but this doesn't really address the distinction I made.

Then that distinction was not clear in your post. Please clarify. The distinction I am making here is that science concerns itself with absolute truth, inasmuch as that can be determined, and not relative truth. Science as a discipline does not need both.

To be honest, I just thought it was a funny thing to write, and I LOVE the fact you and a couple other people not only took it seriously, but were annoyed enough by my idea of "feminist emotion-based mathematics" (lol) to waste a few seconds of your lives seriously arguing against a strange idea that nobody actually believes in (probably).

It's probably a waste of my time to lock my doors when I leave each day, except for the day that a thief finally comes to call. Plus then I can set a good example for the neighborhood.

It's sad, but there are plenty of people who believe this kind of BS, and I say "believe" deliberately, to mean "accept in the absence of evidence". It is only slightly more subtle and less worrisome than this.

 

[Nocapszy]

The author is not an idiot. He purposely wrote the article like this, as a test.

that makes him even more of an idiot.

 

[Amalie Muller]

that makes him even more of an idiot.

I disagree. His aim was to try to get a nonsensical pseudo-scientific "left-leaning" article published by a "serious" intellectual magazine, in order to show how little critical rigor there was in these types of magazines. And it WAS published, so he did a great job, and made his point. You can (or could at the time) get just about ANYTHING published as long as they sounded good (ie. Intellectual), you were a recognized scientist, and the conclusion supported the "left-wing bias" of the publication.

 

[Bush]

It's a great article. You'd have a hard job finding a funnier pseudo-science parody than this. The author wrote it brilliantly.

His aim was to try to get a nonsensical pseudo-scientific "left-leaning" article published by a "serious" intellectual magazine, in order to show how little critical rigor there was in these types of magazines. And it WAS published, so he did a great job, and made his point. You can (or could at the time) get just about ANYTHING published as long as they sounded good (ie. Intellectual), you were a recognized scientist, and the conclusion supported the "left-wing bias" of the publication.

I finally wasted some time myself and read it.

I wasn't aware that it was a well-planned hoax until you pointed it out. I got had.

For those interested in the context (i.e. beyond face value) behind the article, there's an article about the "Sokal affair" in the grandest academic source, Wikipedia. Turns out that the whole thing is as neat as that one modest proposal that suggests that we eat babies.

Turns out that circumvention of established norms, to the point of absurdity, gets people talking about our own deep-seated assumptions. Raises fundamental questions that we're forced to address. Not a bad thing.

 

[Magic Poriferan]

I finally wasted some time myself and read it.

I wasn't aware that it was a well-planned hoax until you pointed it out. I got had.

For those interested in the context (i.e. beyond face value) behind the article, there's an article about the "Sokal affair" in the grandest academic source, Wikipedia. Turns out that the whole thing is as neat as that one modest proposal that suggests that we eat babies.

Turns out that circumvention of established norms, to the point of absurdity, gets people talking about our own deep-seated assumptions. Raises fundamental questions that we're forced to address. Not a bad thing.

Hah! I didn't bother reading who wrote the paper before I commented on it. If I had, I'd have known what I was dealing with. I never actually read any of Sokal's writing, and I didn't remember the title, but I was well aware of the project.

 

[Amalie Muller]

I finally wasted some time myself and read it.

I wasn't aware that it was a well-planned hoax until you pointed it out. I got had.

For those interested in the context (i.e. beyond face value) behind the article, there's an article about the "Sokal affair" in the grandest academic source, Wikipedia. Turns out that the whole thing is as neat as that one modest proposal that suggests that we eat babies.

Turns out that circumvention of established norms, to the point of absurdity, gets people talking about our own deep-seated assumptions. Raises fundamental questions that we're forced to address. Not a bad thing.

Haha I was hoping someone would defend the article and all its claims, but nobody did (except me for the fun of it haha, but that doesn't really count). XD

I think if the OP didn't mention how "absurd" the ideas were, and just said, "Hey what do you lot think of this?" it would have made a much more interesting conversation.

 

[Little_Sticks]

The solution to that seems simple. If the sculpture crumbles, it was not meant to be (at least part of this world).

If you don't want anything to crumble, don't chisel. But if one refuses to ever chisel then one will never give any form. Seems like a good way to do nothing.

We don't need to appeal to things we don't understand to make a case for the points we want to make. If quantum mechanics or relativity (both introduced in freshman science classes) required completely abandoning objective reality, I think we would have been teaching this by now.

These particular things are indeed counterintuitive. But what parts of quantum mechanics are "non-linear"? What does "non-linearity" have to with abandoning the notion of objective reality? These points were certainly not made clear in "Transgressing the Boundaries".

Well, I didn't say quantum mechanics or relativity abandons objective reality, but it does abandon notions of an absolute reality. And they are not the same things as I understand them, though I imagine we understand their meaning differently.

Basically, non-linearity relates mainly to computer systems where what you get out of a system doesn't solely depend on what inputs you give it, but on the state the system was in at the time of giving it inputs; however the state of the system changes when you give it inputs. The problem is that when this happens, the system is hard to verify in a scientific sense because there is no basic foundation for verification. You'd instead have to find a relationship that explains how the system is changing in its non-linear fashion. Now add to the fact that you don't know all the states of the system and it becomes very hard to know quantum mechanics with any degree of absolute knowledge - one oxygen atom may behave differently than another under the same conditions. And it does throw into question some of the basic assumptions we make about things. Because if two oxygen atoms can behave differently in quantum mechanics, yet function the same in classical mechanics, then whether they are the same or not depends on how you look at or use them. And the same goes for relativity, where classical mechanics works when Special Relativity becomes negligible, but doesn't apply when dealing with speeds close to the speed of light. And it throws some of the basic assumptions that there is an absolute reality into question.

The article doesn't mention this specifically, but it does talk about this somewhat haphazardly and indirectly, I think assuming the reader is already aware of what the writer is saying. It's not a very good article, but there is an argument for questioning the idea of an absolute reality.

 

[Amalie Muller]

Well, I didn't say quantum mechanics or relativity abandons objective reality, but it does abandon notions of an absolute reality. And they are not the same things as I understand them, though I imagine we understand their meaning differently.

Basically, non-linearity relates mainly to computer systems where what you get out of a system doesn't solely depend on what inputs you give it, but on the state the system was in at the time of giving it inputs; however the state of the system changes when you give it inputs. The problem is that when this happens, the system is hard to verify in a scientific sense because there is no basic foundation for verification. You'd instead have to find a relationship that explains how the system is changing in its non-linear fashion. Now add to the fact that you don't know all the states of the system and it becomes very hard to know quantum mechanics with any degree of absolute knowledge - one oxygen atom may behave differently than another under the same conditions. And it does throw into question some of the basic assumptions we make about things. Because if two oxygen atoms can behave differently in quantum mechanics, yet function the same in classical mechanics, then whether they are the same or not depends on how you look at or use them. And the same goes for relativity, where classical mechanics works when Special Relativity becomes negligible, but doesn't apply when dealing with speeds close to the speed of light. And it throws some of the basic assumptions that there is an absolute reality into question.

The article doesn't mention this specifically, but it does talk about this somewhat haphazardly and indirectly, I think assuming the reader is already aware of what the writer is saying. It's not a very good article, but there is an argument for questioning the idea of an absolute reality.

I agree that we should question the existence of reality, as there are no strong reasons to believe it exists. The only answer people ever seem to give is: "It must exist because it's OBVIOUS it exists. Look at it!"

 

[Kullervo]

Feminists mistrust science because too many straight white men are scientists, and clearly, that must mean that science will be biased against women?

What they don't understand is that science is not a political ideology inspired by ovarian floods of emotion, like feminism.

Whoever wrote that article needs to take a course on avoiding nominalisations in science communication, as well. Oh my fucking god.

 

[Nocapszy]

I disagree. His aim was to try to get a nonsensical pseudo-scientific "left-leaning" article published by a "serious" intellectual magazine, in order to show how little critical rigor there was in these types of magazines. And it WAS published, so he did a great job, and made his point. You can (or could at the time) get just about ANYTHING published as long as they sounded good (ie. Intellectual), you were a recognized scientist, and the conclusion supported the "left-wing bias" of the publication.

i don't know if that's true because i only read a few lines before writing it off, but your idea makes more sense.

also, why are "left-wing bias" and "left-leaning" in quotation marks? is there any dispute that the scientific community and almost all of its media has devolved into a liberal puppet?

 

[Kullervo]

I agree that we should question the existence of reality, as there are no strong reasons to believe it exists. The only answer people ever seem to give is: "It must exist because it's OBVIOUS it exists. Look at it!"

Try shooting yourself, then.

 

[Amalie Muller]

Try shooting yourself, then.

I don't think that would help. If anything, that would kind of prove my point. Where do you go when you die, once the illusion ends?

 

[Kullervo]

I don't think that would help. If anything, that would kind of prove my point. Where do you go when you die, once the illusion ends?

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

It is irrational to view death with either hope or fear.

 

[Nocapszy]

I don't think that would help. If anything, that would kind of prove my point. Where do you go when you die, once the illusion ends?

bro how do you even know it's an illusion though