Welcome to DU. Enjoy your stay.

And besides logic can only be used in our 4 dimensional world of matter...and any existence of a god would be beyond that.limited scope.
And if you believe that matter and a 4 dimensional world is all there is no one can convince you otherwise.

You might also want to look up "mater" on Google.

Now you know just how stupid I am.
And it is because of special pleadings no argument can be made...it is restricted by what we know is "real"
Sure hope I spelled it all right.

Ridicule....it makes you feel so superior...and cheep too...just a few lines and a smiley and you are done...and so much easier than saying something on the topic.
And BTW I was referring to time as the forth dimension...But you knew that.

Educate yourself so you can express your thoughts in an intelligent, coherent manner.

Here, this can get you started:
[div class="excerpt" style="border-left: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-right: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius: 0.3077em 0.3077em 0em 0em; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"][font color="red"]I[/font]t never fails to show up.[div class="excerpt" style="border-left: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-right: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius: 0em 0em 0.3077em 0.3077em; background-color: #f4f4f4; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]Ridicule[font color="red"]: I[/font]t makes you feel so superior and che[font color="red"]a[/font]p too[font color="red"]. J[/font]ust a few lines[font color="red"],[/font] a smiley[font color="red"],[/font] and you are done and [font color="red"]it's[/font] so much easier than saying something on the topic.
And BTW I was referring to time as the fo[font color="red"]u[/font]rth dimension...But you knew that.

BTW, there aren't numbered dimensions. A bag may have five pounds of rice, but you can't say, "oh, that bit there is the first pound, that bit's the second" and so on.

e.g. in n-dimensional Hilbert spaces refers to the number of dimensions.

Minkowski space is usually expressed as variables x, y, z, t, the 4th dimensional variable referring to time. The meaning was clear and your condescending snark added nothing but confusion.

By informing me that time is variable as if most people don't know that?
Sorry for the snark but that is the only way I know how to deal with ridicule.

ridiculing you.

I guess I am gun shy and just expect it in this forum.

of many atheists (or "True Atheists" aka positivists) who know their Bible better than most Christians and use Science (with big capital) mainly to bash their perceived enemies, not knowing really that much about scientific theories, how they interrelate and on what philosophical presuppositions they are built upon.

They have turned the bible and the story it tells into a thing to fight over instead of what it really is...a history and allegory and philosophy....not one book but a series of books that taken together can inform us about the past and a philosophical view.

Try this little thought-experiment: Point out the direction of the first dimension.

I've done it thus: I imagine myself at the origo and extend my hands to both sides forming a one dimensional line (or real line) that continues from the tips of my fingers to infinity on both sides.

Of course one could do the pointing in number of other ways - which I guess is your point - but this thought experiment is most natural for me.

You could mime a line and say "this is the first dimension," but that line is only one of an infinite number of spatial possibilities and since time could also be assigned the first ordinal, the problems compound. There's no logical way to derive which line would constitute the first dimension and no reason that "the first dimension" must be spatial.

To refer back to the analogy I used earlier, we can determine that a bag of rice weighs five pounds, but there's an infinite number of possibilities for the "first" pound. Similarly, supposing there are an infinite number of dimensions, identifying the first would be like having an infinitely large jug of water and pointing to the first molecule.

that your condescending snark - or stupid ridicule - to zeemike just added to confusion instead of clarifying anything relevant, as the usual convention is to call the asymmetric t of Minkowski space (+x,+y+z,-t) the 'fourth dimension'.

Sure, it could be as well called the 1st dimension, and I just found interesting analogical asymmetry from tetrahedral numbers which have parity pattern of odd, even, even, even.

And it seems that my point about assigning ordinals to dimensions has still eluded you.

There are also (?, ?, z) and (r, ?, ? ) for spatial dimensions

and you don't get to decide that THE point is YOUR point.

But your point is also interesting. The question about direction of 1D-line presupposes an embedding space of higher or same number of dimensions where coordinates can be assigned, otherwise the question is meaningless. In the embedding space of infinite real line a subspace of finite length could have e.g. coordinates -1 and 1, but the question of "direction" wouldn't mean much. If we add another dimension, the "second" dimension to construct a plane, it is by definition orthogonal to the first dimension, in terms of complex numbers the real part remaining the same and the imaginary part as variable covering all the values of real numbers. Adding 3rd and 4th dimensions to the number theoretically non-trivial construction leads to quaternions:

I what to give you the opportunity to blow off anything I say with spelling and punctuation errors..I want you to know how stupid I am...I have compassion for your need to feel superior.

So length, breadth, depth, and time are all in the same bag and you can't tell one from the other?...I did not know that.

If the impact is that you think less of me for it then so be it....I am not hear to make you like me or think that I am smart or to convert you to anything.
But I will complain about ridicule because it is used to intimidate and there is no need for it in any discussion like this and tends to limit the free flow of ideas.

that's the standard or common definition, form Wikipedia: "Matter is anything that occupies space and has rest mass (or invariant mass)."

And according to Standard Model, mass is emergent property of mathematical models that predict Higg's field. And according to Victor Steiger 4D spacetime (and thermodynamical arrow of time) is emergent property of quantum fluctuation of zero energy state singularity and spontaneous symmetry break into inflation cosmology and negative energy of graviational fields, which enrichens the standard notions of causality, if Steiger's supersymmetric proposal is to be taken seriously.

And according to the strict definitions, quantum fields and vacuum fluctuations are not material objects but mathematical objects. Which I guess is the real reason why believers in materialism object to every proposition containing the word "quantum" and thus to current science with negative emotional mechanisms.

And I guess anti matter would be something that does not occupy space and has no motion.
Which is what eastern mysticism has said for thousands of years...that creation is a duality of matter and it's opposite and creation is held in balance by these two forces.
Is that a fair statement?

or what is usually meant by antimatter is just like ordinary matter consisting of antiparticles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

Quantum mechanical vacuum fluctuation refers to virtual pairs of particle-antiparticle popping ouf of and back to "nothing". The dualistic symmetries of modern physics reminiscent of eastern philosophies go even deeper than that.

The nature of reality is far more complex than we can understand.

...or logic takes every other Tuesday off. I suspect you imagine you're saying something profound, but it's just jibberish, and it shows you don't even really know what a "dimension" is.

so logic of materialism operates there too.
Tell me how logic operates in a black hole or in the concept of aether or in a non material world.

And who says that, other than in our imaginations, there is any "aether" or "non material world" for me to worry about?

(A | B) = !(!A & !B)

Is a proposition of logic, not a proposition of chemistry or physics. If you want to imagine that somehow the logic goes away when the protons and electrons and neutrinos go away, knock yourself out, but you can't do anything but wonder briefly at that concept, and move on.

Even though humans by and large suck at logic, they're totally incompetent to say anything about what happens in the absence of logic. You can't make one thought follow another thought in your brain without a little bit of logic. Take away even a minimal provisional reliance on logic and there's no way to know you haven't gone completely insane, that this conversation is taking place, that I'm not saying the same thing and its opposite at the same time.

The "logic" of superstition and supernatural beliefs is ordinary logic, only with some steps conveniently skipped and some contradictions conveniently ignored. Believers don't actually propose any bold new worlds totally free from logic as we know it, only worlds of where the logic lacks rigor or accountability, worlds suspiciously slanted toward ordinary human hopes and fears.

A and B are all physical properties...(imaginary number | imaginary number) = illogical number... but I am open to it...tell me a logical conclusion formed by a non material aspect.
So it all boils down to one thing...that you think that matter is all there is...that nothing is nothing and matter is all...and that is where we run into problems in discussing things like this.
And If you want to believe this I am fine with it...but you are in error when you think that it is the only fact that can be and the only logical conclusion that can be made and that anyone who thinks otherwise is just stupid.

And if you can actually conclude such a thing... What can you, or anyone, then tell me about these worlds? Is there anything more you can do besides acknowledge, "There might be worlds that operate without logic", and then move on?

There is no world without logic or a world with one...it is a device of our mined with which we try to rationalize our world.
It is like hope faith and love...has no matter and occupies no space but never the less exists because we have consciousness and a mind.
And I am not talking about other worlds...I am talking about other dimensions to this one...the unseen dimensions that we have yet to discover...like the unseen world of EMF forces that we know exist because we see the effects of it but not the substance.
The rest of it I can't figure out...Don't know what you mean by your reference to boolean algebra...which is used to figure out things in the physical world...I have no idea how one would use it to describe thing in the non physical world.

If so, did logic exist before writing or before language?

Our brains are relatively poor at logical and numerical operations. It takes a lot of hours of conditioning to be proficient at the symbolic processing needed for reading, writing, math, and formal reasoning.

Brains are better at analog than digital processing. Even my dog can project the trajectory of a thrown ball and plan and execute a complex series of muscle contractions resulting in intercepting it in mid-air. But I doubt that he does it with the aid of math and logic.

can logic and math exist independent of brains and time (or some notion of time)?

I don't know who first described logic...but I suspect it has always been used in some form or the other.
We only know about the past from what survived from it...and that is very little...and so we know very little about the past.

But I think there is a difference between the "logic" your dog's brain uses, (or ours for that matter) to catch the ball and what we use to consciously use to determine what is true and false or test a philosophical point.

Last edited Tue Apr 17, 2012, 08:33 PM - Edit history (1)

...than hope and faith and love, and you can explain (no, not to every last detail -- but that would be a red herring) a lot about hope and faith and love using logic.

As for "other dimensions to this one (world)"... dimensions are just convenient conventions, just like you seem to be taking logic to task for being a "mere" tool or convention. If you start treating "other dimension" as if it means "hidden realm of unknown wonders", and if you assume that the logic and math and reason we apply to the "dimensions" we know about don't work there, then what you're talking about would essentially be a totally different world, whether you call it that or not.

Temperature, humidity, pressure... there are three dimensions, just as much dimensions as width, height, and length are dimensions.

Other than the ones we know and can see feel and experience with out physical senses.
And that is the point.

The narrative goes like this...we are the most advanced civilization that has lived on the earth...and we know all the science that is...therefore there is nothing else and has never been anything else.
I question that....all of it.
And I started question it when I read the Gita's...and ancient Indian text that predates the biblical text...and I found that they described the black hole that exists in the center of our galaxy...at the time I read it we did not know that...now we do.
And they also said that there were millions of worlds revolving around stars out there in that galaxy...something else we did not know in the 70s...and other things that are accurate and from other sources as well.
Lucky guess or did they know a lot more than we think they did thousands of years ago?
I think there is lots of evidence that they did...but you think it was all just some fantasy made up by superstitious people and told around camp fires...and there we are, just more things to scoff at.

I am not reaching any conclusions....just saying that I am open to other explanations and other possibilities.

Who is daft enough to claim that we "know all the science that is?"

As for the Gita's, can you link to specific passages? I've heard similar claims about the bible that were basically people making a HUGE stretch in the translation in order to justify their opinion that the bible contained all this vast knowledge that predated modern science, so I'm very skeptical when similar claims are made of other holy scriptures.

To include the Bhagavad Gita.
For me this was a stepping stone to other things...I did not read it and become converted to it...it merely opened my mind to other things.
And by the way I read the whole bible for the first after reading many other things...such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and other eastern and western literature...

Oh I forgot to answer your question of what narrative goes like that...the narrative of the ridiculer.

...it's nearly always the case that he/she has some very particular "other possibilities" in mind that he/she wants people to be particularly open to.

In areas where our ignorance is profound, however, there's nothing to recommend any of the essentially infinite possibilities over any of the others, and quite a bit of reason to suspect the emotional bias of those who attempt to fill the voids in our knowledge with ideas which suspiciously reflect human hopes and fears.

I'd also ask you the same question another poster asked you about this narrative you talk about: What narrative goes like that?

Maybe there are a few people out there absurd enough to live up to your parody, but mostly I think that impression is created when Person A strongly doubts what it proposed by Person B, then B takes A's doubt as if it were a claim to knowledge of the opposite of what B claims. That's frequently reading between the lines something that isn't actually there, something that isn't being said or even implied (and being petulant about it to boot).

As for ancient texts having correspondence to modern scientific discoveries: For one thing, if you count all of the misses along with the hits, the hits no longer seem as impressive. For another, when you look at the poetic license people are willing to engage in to consider a hit a hit, the alleged hits don't hit so well.

And if there's anything left over that really is impressive, then we don't yet know how that information might have been obtained, but once again, our ignorance is not a good excuse to get strongly attached to one speculation or another about how such knowledge is gained, and it certainly isn't a good reason to radically alter one's epistemology or standards of evidence in a misguided effort to "be open".

However, the claim of materialist reduction, to put simply, is that math and logic are emergent mental properties of nothing but physical 4D objects that have mass and don't exist outside of brain (I'll leave e.g. electromagnetic fields out of the materialist picture for the purpose of the post). At least for me the steps conveniently skipped and contradictions conveniently ignored are blatantly obvious. And as you say, "you can't do anything but wonder briefly at that concept, and move on."

One of the most famous logicians of the world is Nagarjuna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjuna), a Mahayana Buddhist whose logical-philosophical skepticism refutes also the Law of the Excluded Middle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle) and the Law of the Identity "A->A" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_identity) that Western thought usually accepts as matter of faith and/or convenience, despite the fact that on physical level, the Law of the Identity is not consistent with the no-cloning theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem). This non-attachment to the Law of Identity may be one of the main reasons why Eastern philosophies have less troubles of interpreting QM than Western thought that usually presupposes Law of Identity.

I very much agree on what you say about ordinary human hopes and fears and that applies of course also to materialism and the Law of Identity and the Law of Excluded Middle. But as for the absence of logic, we humans are not incompetent to say anything. I can say for example that there is a simple test of mental exercise that has relatively good success rate which anyone can try. I goes like this: Consentrate on the question "What might be my next thought" and keep on repeating the question excluding all other thoughts.

are mathematical logical concepts as is also infinity, and it is a good question how finite 4D creatures can think about higher dimensions and infinities. There are some mathematicians that call mathematics 'God's thoughts', and theological interpretation of Platonic realism is certainly at least possible.

Last edited Mon Apr 16, 2012, 09:27 AM - Edit history (1)

Called "123 infinity"...can't remember who wrote it...but it inspired my thinking on many things like this.
And the thing about Math it is free of speculation...it either computes or you have made a mistake.

freely speculate conjectures and hypothesis all the time as well as expand the field of number theory with concepts like 'imaginary number' which usually meet first lots of conservative opposition.

But I do understand the concept and it's usefulness...in fact all imagination is very useful

don't really understand the leap to imaginary unit and complex numbers...

certainly philosophical arguments cannot be debunked simply because there is no objective proof one way or another. However, the ontological and teleological arguments are very good and certainly logical. Nonetheless, they are 'un-debunkable' as well as 'unprovable.'

2. The classical arguments (ontological and teleological) are only internally consistent, and make absolutely no sense if they are treated as anything beyond supposition, especially in light of current knowledge.

knowledge, other than theory and hypothesis, that comes close to disproving the arguments.

They are unfalsifiable arguments, so there will never be something available to disprove them, which makes them bad anyway. The nice thing about what we currently know about our world and our universe, though, is that we know such arguments for God are just plain supposition. They're no better than the supposition that a giant bird-man-gone-wrong-thing rules the universe.

....with closed minds fail to see the beauty of the garments.

...is show that it isn't conclusive. If a question supposedly addressed by a given alleged proof remains unanswered, the proof has failed, it has been debunked. Proving the diametric opposition is not required.

objective "proof."

Already debunked. That was easy.

of only accepting evidence that approaches the point of 100% objectivity is that statement correct. However, in the real world events are not always so clear.

...to the extent that they're even meaningful enough to assign a probability, don't even achieve the goal of "more likely than not".

'probably' true.

...to open up my mind to the wonders of fuzzy thinking. Terribly narrow of me.

to change their minds. You won't find any of those on THIS forum. (Myself included.)

I know what I know and I have no intention whatsoever of changing my mind, and no intention whatsoever of trying to convince anyone else to change theirs. I used to think it was important that I get others to agree with me, but now I see how utterly futile it is, so from now on it's live and let live.

Why are you even here then?

I've changed my mind on various issues over the years I've been on DU.

Most posters come here looking for confirmation of what they already believe. And yes, we may well change our minds on some particular detail of our political or religious beliefs as the result of being exposed to new ideas here, but even that is more the exception than the rule.

In other words, a liberal posting here on DU is not going to read some post that suddenly motivates him to become a conservative. Nor is a true believer or true non-believer going to change their minds as a result of anything anybody posts here. We come here to be validated, or to show off our knowledge or wisdom, or to brag about our accomplishments. We come here to tell the other person they are wrong, not to discover whether or not we, ourselves are right or wrong.

This forum serves a social function, not an intellectual one. It's a place to preen and prance and show off to others. To claim otherwise is just self-deception. And there I go again, wasting my time trying to use this social forum as an intellectual one. How silly of me! (Are you impressed by the depth of my wisdom yet? It doesn't matter, of course. I've shown off my deep and transcendent understanding of philosophical issues and that's all I really come here to do.)

And here I was, just thinking you must be a masochist and came here to be punished.

for the Hong Kong Fooey shirt.