4,577 karma · joined December 13, 2014
“In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth ― only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”
― C.S. Lewis
“In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“All people suffer, but […] not all people pity themselves.”
― Marcus Aurelius
"A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials."
― Chinese proverb
"Men's hatred for the one who has been unjust to them is trifling compared to their hatred for the one they have treated unjustly; every reminder of him brings a fresh twinge of pain."
― Paul Mankowski
"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk."
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Let your credo be this. Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“We should understand the meaning of statements from the reasons for making them, since speech ought to be governed by things, not things by speech.”
- Hilary of Poitiers
A great-great grandfather of mine was mayor of a town through which the front passed twice during WWI. All that survived were basements. Your father's account more or less describes the process by which the land was reparceled.
Sure, but what you're describing is not characteristic of the mechanical world picture. It's actually more Aristotelian. Of course, Aristotelian science is not content with mere observed correlations, but with their causes; modern science more often accepts the former, because it often suffices for technological purposes. In any case, in the Aristotelian view, things have natures. Here, the nature of a sphere entails the property you've described. Sphericity is itself an abstracted nature—you don't encounter spheres-as-such in the concrete—that we can analyze to discover properties like the one you've given (in the case of sphericity, this is the province of geometry).
> However, evidence is the only way to separate reality from make-believe
Is the claim "evidence is the only way to separate reality from make-believe" itself evident? If by "evidence" you mean strict empirical, scientific data, then this assertion is self-defeating: there is no empirical evidence that can scientifically demonstrate that "empirical evidence" is the sole criterion for truth. It is a metaphysical assertion, not a scientific finding. Your position would entail that it is itself make-believe.
I would take a more nuanced view of "evidence" here.
All human reasoning ultimately rests on first principles (such as the principle of non-contradiction or the principle of causality). These foundational truths are not known via empirical evidence in the modern sense. Rather, they are self-evident once the terms—themselves drawn from the senses—are grasped. Without these non-empirical, rational foundations, the very project of gathering and interpreting scientific evidence cannot even begin.
Furthermore, the view of "evidence" as a purely neutral arbiter of reality is naive. Evidence is inherently theory-laden. Consider that experiments never test a single isolated hypothesis, but an entire web of theoretical and background assumptions. When "evidence" conflicts with a theory, it merely tells us that something within our massive theoretical web needs adjusting. The data does not interpret itself. There is a parsimony in how we try to address such inconsistencies, but that's a practical decision.
Finally, the laws of modern physics describe highly idealized models operating in highly constrained environments. The "evidence" we gather in controlled laboratory settings relies on stripping away the complexity of the actual world. To accurately map what happens outside of these artificial models, we must actually appeal to the natures of things. (I would also add that science uses methodological and working assumptions a great deal. A big one is the uniformity of nature. Would those be "make-believe"?)
> and there is not one scintilla of evidence that anything exists apart from the universe we see all around us.
It sounds like you maintain that final causality is something external, but this is a view that the mechanistic picture encourages. In the Aristotelian view, the final cause of an acorn or an oak tree, for instance, is not external to it, but inherent to the kind of thing it is. Without telos, you could not even explain why a given efficient cause results in a certain effect. Why does striking a match consistently produce fire instead of elephants or arbitrary things or nothing at all? Because the match is causally ordered toward an effect.
One advantage of it being "dead" is that the meanings of terms are much more stable. They don't undergo the usual slippage and mutation of spoken languages. This advantage would be lost if it were to replace existing vernacular languages.
1. Poland at the time was an expansive, multi-ethnic state, and while Polish gained increasing dominance as the lingua franca of the state (other languages of the state administration included German and Ruthenian), Latin was for a long time the lingua franca even just within the Polish state itself.
2. Unlike other countries where education was concentrated exclusively in cities, Poland also had a dense network of parish schools that diffused knowledge of Latin among even the rural nobility and town-dwelling population. Later, there was also a network of Jesuit colleges that followed the Ratio Studiorum which included extensive education in Latin and made an elite education accessible not just to wealthy magnates, but to poorer nobles as well. Recall that the Polish szlachta alone comprised on average about 11% of the population, compared to the corresponding 1-2% in France or England.
3. Because of Poland's republican style of government, public speaking, oratory and debate were essential for political participation. This was all carried out in Latin. Sarmatian culture also saw the Res Publica Poloniae as a "spiritual successor" of Rome and saw the Latin language as part of its identity. Furthermore, during the era of the elected monarchs, kings were not always fluent or able to speak in Polish, but they would have known Latin.
Programs are a socially constructed artifact that help communicate and express a model (which is perpetually locked in people's heads with variance across engineers; divergence is addressed as the program develops). Determining what should or should not be done is a matter of not just domain knowledge, but practical reason, which is to say prudence, which is a virtue that can only be acquired by experience. It is an ability to apply universal principles to particular situations.
This is why young devs, even when clever in some local sense, are worse at understanding the right moves to make in context. Code does not stand alone. It exists entirely in the service of something and is bound by constraints that are external to it.
Natural law ethics grounds morality in human nature. A good action accords with the telos of human nature. An evil one frustrates it. Aristotle is perhaps the best known defender of it on purely rational grounds.
"Laying the foundations for integral calculus and foreshadowing the concept of the limit, ancient Greek mathematician Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 390–337 BC) developed the method of exhaustion to prove the formulas for cone and pyramid volumes.
"During the Hellenistic period, this method was further developed by Archimedes (c. 287 – c. 212 BC), who combined it with a concept of the indivisibles—a precursor to infinitesimals—allowing him to solve several problems now treated by integral calculus. In 'The Method of Mechanical Theorems' he describes, for example, calculating the center of gravity of a solid hemisphere, the center of gravity of a frustum of a circular paraboloid, and the area of a region bounded by a parabola and one of its secant lines."
"Bhāskara II (c. 1114–1185) was acquainted with some ideas of differential calculus and suggested that the "differential coefficient" vanishes at an extremum value of the function.[18] In his astronomical work, he gave a procedure that looked like a precursor to infinitesimal methods. [...] In the 14th century, Indian mathematicians gave a non-rigorous method, resembling differentiation, applicable to some trigonometric functions. Madhava of Sangamagrama and the Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics stated components of calculus. They studied series equivalent to the Maclaurin expansions of [redacted] more than two hundred years before their introduction in Europe. [...] however, were not able to 'combine many differing ideas under the two unifying themes of the derivative and the integral, show the connection between the two, and turn calculus into the great problem-solving tool we have today.'"
[0] https://culture.pl/en/work/dancing-through-history-the-polon...
This is neither here nor there, as the paper does not defend "creationism". The sole purpose of this paper is modest: to argue (or cite authors who argue) that natural selection cannot account for reproduction. The subjective suspicions, impressions or concerns a reader might have are totally irrelevant.
> reproduction is necessary for natural selection to take place. It's a precondition, not something to be explained.
Natural selection is taken to be the explanatory mechanism par excellence of evolution and the definitive instrument by which teleology may be eradicated from explanations concerning biological organisms and their origins. Reproduction itself requires an explanation, and as the paper notes, attempts to account for the origins of reproduction through natural selection have been made. What the paper argues, however, is that these attempts are fallacious and circular, precisely because they must presuppose reproduction.
Neither the author nor those he cites deny natural selection or evolution as such. They only argue that natural selection is not capable of explaining reproduction. Their argument allows room for some other explanation of reproduction, but those who reject teleology are now saddled with the burden of providing a non-teleological explanation that does not appeal to natural selection.
> "irreducible" is one of those words that is somehow never given a definition [...etc, etc...]
This is a well understood term in this context, but also not something you need to get hung up on. You can understand the essential argument without worrying about it.
> A philosophical or theological term that invariably gets misused in discussions of biology as a kind of disguised circular argument.
It is more definitely not circular, certainly not according to an Aristotelian understanding (the paper's arguments may be interpreted according to either an Aristotelian or a "Platonic" reading of the term, which is to say, according to either an intrinsic or extrinsic view of telos).
> I'm not saying that this paper is garbage disguised by a big vocabulary, but I would certainly be alert for rhetorical sleight of hand sneaking in creationism of one kind or another.
Again, the reader's vague, subjective worries and fears are of no relevance. The reader must actually address the arguments in the paper. The impression is that you've either not read it or have not understood it, and so you are not yet in a position to critique the arguments made. (I don't know where the accusation of jargon comes from. Very few technical terms are used, but even those that appear in the text are not esoteric, even if commonly misunderstood. It is also not the purpose of every paper to define established terms in a domain of discourse. It is the reader's responsibility to locate these in the appropriate literature.)
The author of the paper is well known for defending Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, and as such, rejects what often falls under the name of "creationism" or "intelligent design" on account of its bad metaphysics, so suspicions along these lines are gravely misplaced.
[0] https://felleisen.org/matthias/Thoughts/Developing_Developer...
> Let f:{0,1}*→{0,1} be the constant 1 function if God exists, or the constant 0 function if God does not exist. Is f computable? (Hint: The answer does not depend on your religious beliefs.) [emphasis mine]
The alternative is not part of the function. The function f does not branch based on the value of "God exists". The branch is in the metalanguage. We don't know whether f = 0 or f = 1, but whichever it is, it is computable because both possible functions are computable.
But, I would go further: if f did include the branch, and the domain of the function is 0 (God doesn't exist) and 1 (God does exist), then we still have a computable function in the sense that we can compute a result for each value of the domain.
The confusion effectively is a matter of pushing a free variable whose value is taken to be unknown into the branch condition in f.
What is a concept? It is an abstracted universal in the intellect. Consider the example of triangularity. We can predicate this concept of any concrete, physical triangle, but none of these concrete instances are triangularity itself, and triangularity itself is not a concrete instance. Indeed, any concrete instance is necessarily determined to be this triangle, but not that triangle, while a concept as abstracted form is true of all triangles. An analysis of the concept allows us to discover properties of triangles, e.g., the property that the inner angles must sum to 180 degrees. Such properties hold for all concrete instances. These properties are themselves abstracta, not concrete things in the world. Triangularity is a matter of semantics, because it is the essential meaning of a triangle, what makes it the kind of thing it is.
The same can be said of quantities. Just as you will never encounter naked triangularity, as such, in the world, you will never meet the number 3. However, you will encounter collections of three things, things measured to be 3, things with three sides, and so on.
Now take a physical machine that is simulating a Turing machine. Can the machine add? Well, strictly speaking, no! You can, however, simulate addition, to a point, by representing numbers using a system of symbols and using syntactic rules to manipulate strings of these symbols such that they result in new strings that correspond to the numbers that addition would produce. But these strings aren't quantities, they aren't numbers per se, but representations. Your Turing machine's tape can be relabeled, and the interpretation of the strings on that tape are inherently ambiguous. They can be read, for most practical purposes, according to an interpretation that assigns to them a consistent numerical meaning, but there is no numerical meaning in them per se, any more than the ink in a book arranged in the shape of "cat" is the concept of Cat. You could assign to them a completely different interpretation, and there would be no inherent reason to prefer one over the other. Only the interpreter's purposes fix the interpretation. But the meaning assigned, the concepts themselves, are just the meanings themselves. They are the intelligible content that the interpreter assigns to those symbols, and this intelligible content does not reside in the physical computer.
So, if there is any magical thinking, I claim that is rests on the side of those who claim, rather flippantly, that machines can think.
[0] https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jcp/article-abstract/122/17/174105/...