Pro-Life Women Shift to Majority?

[Legion]

i was going to comment but now i think i won't touch this with a ten foot pole.

 

[Sabastian]

Hi MFA,

I just got off working for the last couple of days. Right now I have been awake for 24H. Anyhow I do have a response coming but I am doing a bit of hunting for a particular news article that I read a year or so ago. It was about a woman working in quantum mechanics that has created a theory that debunks relativism entirely. What the basic premise was is that we are all (in life) experiencing and the same things. When I read the article it was supposedly quite a discovery but as luck (yours in this case) would have it I can't seem to find it. It basically made claims of what I had thought ever sense my involvement with relativism in university and there is no truth bullshit. Also "the Probability Axiom is dead" but that is a good thing. 8)

I am quite exhausted and I don't know when I will have the time over the next couple of days as my significant other is on a mini vacation, sos finding the time to compile my argument may be difficult.

EDIT: Something that has been irksome to me over the past couple of days was your reference to the idea that morals are intuitive. Just a nitpick here but more later, I always thought that intuition was too... femalien.

L8r

 

[horvendile]

I am doing a bit of hunting for a particular news article that I read a year or so ago. It was about a woman working in quantum mechanics that has created a theory that debunks relativism entirely.

From time to time people try to claim that they have proven something society-related with the help of quantum mechanics. As to my knowledge, all such claims have lacked scientific value - and that was a nice wording ! Often it also turns out that the person behind the claims has no schooling at all relevant for quantum mechanics. Dana Zohar is an example that comes to mind. That is no proof that this very article is wrong, but I know where I place my bets...

Furthermore: If the theory was correct it would be revolutionary. Definitely Nature stuff and probably a Nobel prize looming around the corner. It is the stuff that most newspapers would write long articles with huge headers about. Yet nothing such seems to have happened, which makes me even more suspicious.
But if you find the article, I'll be glad to (try to) read it (when I'm back from my next vacation). I know your post wasn't directed at me, but I'll be glad to read it anyway!

 

[MfA]

EDIT: Something that has been irksome to me over the past couple of days was your reference to the idea that morals are intuitive. Just a nitpick here but more later, I always thought that intuition was too... femalien.

I dont think it is feminine as such, but most men cannot take their intuition at face value ... they are just too rational for it. They need reason to everything. Of course the blatantly obvious fact that there is no fundamental reason to anything ultimately makes this kind of behaviour self defeatist and causes greater irrationality than what it tried to replace. The end result always being absolute Truth, usually personified in a god ... in your case it seems personified in a True set of morals.

If you are not religious in the traditional sense (which I dont think has been established, but for the sake of arguement) I must applaud you for taking this chain one step farther than your predecessors though They still needed God to hand down morals and the concept of sin to explain away that they were obviously not inherent to man. Religion can be internally consistent if it tries to stay out of the truth of the factual world, earth is flat and all that, but to believe in an absolute True set of morals without them being handed down by some deity and against overwhelming factual evidence is a tour de force.

There can be no capital t Truth without religion, and religion is a typically masculine invention. Absence of religious Truth doesnt necessarily mean we cannot all agree about things we see, just that judgement is a personal thing (you should drop the whole relativistic sidetrack you are on).

 

[Sabastian]

MFA, I don't deny the possibility that there may be a god. In fact physics suggest that possibly there is indeed a creation scenario when it comes right down to the question of if the universe is intentional or accidental the answer is 50/50 or in other words they don't know.

I would suggest however a grand unifying theory would indeed create a scenario where there is absolute truth and possibly even god. I don't want to go on and on right now I simply don't have the time, but I will.

horvendile, I don't need that particular article to make claims against relativism. Relativism defies logic, reason and indeed relegates science to an irrelevant study.

 

[MfA]

If we need a creator then so does our creator.

 

[notAFanB]

let's not go there.

 

[notAFanB]

horvendile, I don't need that particular article to make claims against relativism. Relativism defies logic, reason and indeed relegates science to an irrelevant study.

I'm sure you mean moral relevatism here is which case, care to restate why it defies the logic etc..
(I know you elaborated in the previouse post but I had trouble following them).

a brief overview would be appreciated thanks.

 

[Sabastian]

horvendile, I don't need that particular article to make claims against relativism. Relativism defies logic, reason and indeed relegates science to an irrelevant study.

I'm sure you mean moral relevatism here is which case, care to restate why it defies the logic etc..
(I know you elaborated in the previouse post but I had trouble following them).

a brief overview would be appreciated thanks.

No I mean relativism does indeed defy logic, reason and science. There is a difference between "philosophical relativism" and "methodological relativism". I take particular cause with the notion that we create our own reality despite the fact that nothing could be further from the truth. I believe that this is an interpretive error that was never intended by the creator of the GTR. My next post I will articulate that point. I hope that is sufficient enough an explanation for now.

 

[Sabastian]

If we need a creator then so does our creator.

We don't know that do we? We don't know a lot of things particularly the closer we get to the initial explosion of the big bang. One could argue that this thing that everything comes from is God.

 

[notAFanB]

If we need a creator then so does our creator.

We don't know that do we? We don't know a lot of things particularly the closer we get to the initial explosion of the big bang. One could argue that this thing that everything comes from is God.

while all very interesting I still think (for the purposes of this topic) this should be left well alone.

besides the problem of first cause isn't really too problomatic to resolve, some solutions require that time as concept is thrown out of the window altogether.

EDIT:

maybe that should have been time outside of space I was referring to.

 

[V3]

some solutions require that time as concept is thrown out of the window altogether.

How does that work ?

 

[Fred]

We've gone way OT with this thread, but the concept of time becomes quite precarious when thermodynamics, general relativity and quantum mechanics meet in the as yet untestable regime of the early universe (circa 10e-20 seconds after the big bang).

GR might end up making time completely indistinguishable from length, (ie the same signature and topology)

Quantum mechanics might blur the past and the future into something rather wiggly and the direction of time is no longer necessarily past to future microscopically, hell even the precise units of time might change (there might be a discrete unit of time known as Planck time.. so like a vcr)

Thermodynamics might contradict both, and claim another direction altogether (the planck entropy arrow, which amusingly enough always points to the future, even if you turn it around by sending t ---> -t)

 

[Sabastian]

Alright, if relativism is true ironically there is no truth, reason, logic or science. Heh. At any rate what I contend is that the truth will be found and relativism debunked. This relativism is a bit of opportunism on behalf of postmodernist. Einstein did not intend for social activist to use the general theory of relativity to suggest that there is no truth. Albert Einstein himself declared ‘God does not play dice with the Universe.’ and while in the end he could not say precisely why because of the Uncertainty Principle. This basically says that that the position and velocity of a particle cannot be simultaneously measured to an unlimited precision. But this contention is highly exaggerated by a few whom suppose that they can translate this into the human world never mind we are talking about considerably small things compared to the human body. Here is an example by Quantum Mechanics and Postmodernism Henry F. Schaefer III Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry University of Georgia Athens, Georgia of just how much the uncertainty principle has effect on the human world we live in though.

For the benefit of those who are neither physicists nor chemists, let me quickly point out that the effects of the uncertainty principle are so small for macroscopic objects (such as a human body) as to be invisible. Another example from my days of teaching physical chemistry at Berkeley will suffice. Suppose we take a Honda Civic automobile (weight about one ton) and specify its velocity to within one-billionth of a mile per hour (i.e., 0.000000001 mph), obviously much greater precision than currently measurable. Given this uncertainty in the velocity, what is the uncertainty in the position of the vehicle? The Heisenberg principle tells us that the position of the Honda Civic is uncertain by about one-billionth of one-billionth of one-billionth of a meter (i.e., 0.000000000000000000000000001 meter). This was my way of proving to the students that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle would never provide an excuse for their getting lost on the freeway on the way to class after a long weekend at home.

I would suggest to you that this is hardly a reason to propose that we are experiencing different worlds.

1. Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Louis de Broglie considered the uncertainty in quantum mechanics to be merely a statement of human ignorance. Their followers on this particular point continue to insist that events in the quantum world, like those in the world of classical physics, are fully causal and deterministic. Einstein spent a good part of the last thirty years of his life (without success) in search of such a precise theory. Einstein expressed his resistance to the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics with his famous statement "God does not play dice with the universe."

2. Niels Bohr was of the opinion that uncertainty is not a result of temporary ignorance, solvable by further research. Uncertainty is a fundamental and unavoidable limitation on human knowledge. Bohr thought that we must remain agnostic about the ontology of the atomic world and talk only about the results obtained under certain experimental conditions. Note, however, that when I gave this lecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Science and Technology (ETH Zuerich) in July 2000, Professor Hans Primas did not like Pearcey and Thaxton's description of Bohr's view. Primas has been studying the historical views of Bohr and Heisenberg for the past 30 years and insisted that Bohr had a different view of the uncertainty principle every year of his life after 1930 (Bohr died in 1962). So perhaps we should take the present description as the time-averaged Bohr interpretation of the uncertainty principle.

3. Werner Heisenberg ascribed uncertainty to nature. According to Heisenberg, nature is not deterministic, as classical physics assumed; it is indeterminate. When a scientist intrudes his/her measuring device into an atomic system, he/she forces a particular outcome to be actualized from what was before a fuzzy realm of potentialities.

4. I will refer to this fourth view as the subjective interpretation. Its proponents claim that when we choose which property will be measured via an experiment, this is essentially equivalent to saying that we "create" a particular property. This is the view of many of the postmodernists who have attempted to relate their ideas to quantum mechanics. The subjective view also resonates with Hinduism and with the popular Eastern/New Age books "The Tao of Physics" and "The Dancing Wu-Li Masters."

I would concur with the authors forth point here. There are some very disturbing ideas coming from these proponents of the uncertainty principle. Here there are a few that have been articulated.

Jerram Barrs (Autumn 1996 newsletter, Francis Schaeffer Instititute, St. Louis) has done a fine job in summarizing four key ingredients of postmodernism:

1. Postmodernism says that nothing can be known by reason. Reason is inadequate. There is no objective truth. This concept, of course, dovetails with a popular opinion, held long before the introduction of the term "postmodernism," namely "You have your truth and I have my truth, and that is all that matters."

2. One logical consequence of postmodernism is the rejection of authority. Postmodernism believes that there is no book, no idea, and no social structure that could command or deserve respect. If there is no authority which engenders respect, then all styles are equally valid. No art is better than any other art; there is no high culture. Andy Warhol's depictions of tomato soup cans (my friend Professor Carl Moser in Paris has a superb collection) are just as great as Rembrandt's "Night Watch." This follows from the conviction that there is no measure against which we can evaluate such things.

3. For the postmodernist there can be no transcendent or bindng commandments. No one has the right to tell another person what to do. The individual becomes the moral authority. Again, this resonates with the popular idea that long preceded postmoderninsm, namely "Who are you to give me instructions for my life?"

4. A fourth consequence of postmodernism may be practical idolatry. Though persons no longer have truth to provide meaning, they sometimes hunger for what might be called "idols of the mind." Certain individuals may thus be inclined to believe almost anything, no matter how irrational it might appear. In fact, some may not even ask the question "Is it reasonable?" If people have no objective values to direct their lives, they often demand idols for their wills. People usually live for something, whether it is achieving respect, making money, or being successful; and it may completely control their lives.

Oh bloody hell I could quote the whole article.

In "The Creator and the Cosmos" Hugh Ross has done an excellent job of summarizing the evidence against an observer created reality. With modest additions, deletions, and nuancing by the present author:

1. There is no movement from imprecision to precision in quantum phenomena. All that happens is that the observer can choose where to put the imprecision. If the observer chooses to measure the position of the quantum particle sufficiently precisely, he or she loses the potential for some degree of precision in measuring the particle's velocity. Conversely, if the experimenter decides to measure the velocity of the quantum particle sufficiently accurately, the potential for unlimited precision on the position of the particle will be irretrievably lost.

2. Experiments are obviously designed and directed by human beings. But this does not mean that the observer gives reality to the quantum event. One can always imagine a set of natural circumstances (involving no human being) that could give rise to the same quantum event. The observer can choose some aspect of reality he/she wants to discern in a particular experiment. Though in quantum entities, indefinite properties (see discussion below following point 5.) become definite to the observer through measurements, the observer cannot determine how and when the indefinite property becomes definite.

3. Rather than affirming the postmodernist view that human beings are more powerful than we might have imagined, quantum mechanics tells us that we are weaker. In classical physics (Newton and Maxwell, pre-1900) no apparent limit exists on our ability to make accurate measurements. In quantum mechanics, a fundamental and easily determinable limit exists. In classical physics, we can see all aspects of causality. But in quantum mechanics some aspect of causality always remains hidden from human investigation.

4. The time duration between a quantum event and its observed result is always very brief, briefer by many orders of magnitude than the time period separating the beginning of the universe from the recent appearance of human beings. Speculations to the contrary, for both the universe and people, time is not reversible. Thus, no amount of human activity can ever affect events that occurred billions of years ago. The idea that one can create his or her own universe receives no support from quantum mechanics.

5. An experiment designed with insufficient foresight or performed with insufficient care may be unintentionally disrupted. And there are observations that cannot be understood without taking the uncertainty principle into consideration. Nevertheless, experiments consistently reveal that nature is described correctly by the condition that the human consciousness is irrelevant. A properly described experiment carried out in Berkeley, California can be reproduced by a different group of scientists in Cambridge, England one year later. Furthermore, there is nothing particularly special about human observers. Inanimate objects, such as microwave, infrared, and ultraviolet spectrometers, are far more capable than humans of detecting quantum mechanical events.

Undeniably the author of this particular article is much of the same mind I am. It is virtually the position I take on the matter. The are some extremely good points made by the author with regards to postmodernist and relativism. Let me quote the conclusion of this article so that you may get the inspiration

We must conclude that the purported symbiotic relationship between quantum mechanics and postmodernism is a nonrelationship. For the reasons outlined here, very few scientists are sympathetic to the subjective (or postmodern) interpretation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Scientists believe that there is knowledge, not merely a collection of stories; there is a reality not contrived by human beings; and there is truth. These are not merely human constructions. These realist convictions were an important motivation for the pioneers of modern science, begining perhaps around 1500 with Copernicus. And it is not an accident that virtually all of these pioneers were persons of Christian belief. By their own testimony these individuals were driven in their scientific investigations by the conviction that, through Jesus Christ, God the Father had created a perfectly ordered universe. The resulting intelligibility of the universe is absolutely critical to the scientific endeavor.

http://www.westminsterhall.us/hfs3/qm_postmod.doc

What has been going on for the past number of years is that there is a growing rift between real scientist and the quasi scientist that postmodernist represent. Consider that while there is nothing wrong with attempting to interpret what potential scientific conclusions mean for mankind I believe that these interpreters have really gone amuck. For instance your conclusion MFA that

Godel showed that even with math you need an infinity of axioms to make it unambiguous

Godel is using the Probability Axiom to suggest that infinity is required even though if I flip a coin I know dammed well that the result will be one of two things. There are quirks in science that have yet to be cleared up so that these axioms match up with the real world. But if we leave the deciphering of reality up to the blithering postmodern left wing relativist then we will indeed be living in a different world. a quantity of sociologists want to give details how scientific theories unfold lacking the understanding of the science. Therefore I think it is important criticize certain portions of their efforts as they may well be dejecting the objective scrutiny of the world based on reason.

A man by the name of Alan Sokal (Professor of Physics, New York University) really stirred up this writhing nest of postmodernist when he released his "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" therory. This was posted in Social Text, the leading journal in the field of cultural studies. It was alleged to be an intellectual editorial about the "postmodern" theoretical and political implications of 20 th century material theories. Yet, as the person responsible himself soon after exposed in the "journal Lingua Franca", his composition was purely a phony of intentionally fictitious faux pas, blunders and bullshit, messed as one so as to look good quality and to praise the ideological prejudice of the editor. Following a analysis by five editors of the Social Text, Sokal's spoof was acknowledged for the journal as a serious bit of research. It materialized in April 1996, in a unusual issue of the magazine committed to refuting the accusation that cultural studies evaluation of science have a tendency to be inept. Imagine that, the Social Text was sighting incompetence in the critiques of postmodern thinking with this particular issue, little did they know even after scrutiny that Sokal was sending them a Trojan for that particular statement. Here are some thoughts that Sokal said about the hoax after it was publicized in the Social Text.

"My original motivation had to do with epistemic relativism," explains Sokal, "and what I saw as a rise in sloppily thought-out relativism, being the kind of unexamined zeitgeist of large areas of the American humanities and some parts of the social sciences. In particular I had political motivations because I was worried about the extent to which that relativism was identified with certain parts of the academic left and I also consider myself on the left and consider that to be a suicidal attitude for the American left."

"It was a parody, intended to be extreme. It comes out in the first two paragraphs, and says, without any evidence or argument – of course it says it in high-faluting language, but translated into English it basically says – "Most western intellectuals used to believe that there exists a real world, but now we know better."

"In some cases it’s not clear what their philosophy is and we don’t make any attempt to judge their philosophy. On the other hand the authors of relativism, we don’t accuse them of imposture, we accuse them of ambiguous writing or sloppy thinking, but certainly not of trying to misrepresent things. So they’re completely separate and the link between them is primarily sociological. There’s only a very weak logical link between them."

"The best thing about this whole affair for me, which has now taken about three years of my life, has been that I’ve been able to meet and sometimes become good friends with really interesting people in history, philosophy and sociology that I wouldn’t have otherwise met. From then I’ve found out both that things were worse than I thought, in the sense that some of the sloppy thinking was spread more widely than I thought and also that things were better than I thought in there were a lot of people within the humanities and social sciences who had been arguing against sloppy thinking for years and often were not being heard. After the parody and again after the book I got an incredible amount of email from people in the humanities and social sciences and people on the political left as well, who were saying, ‘Thank you. We’ve been trying to say this for years without getting through, and maybe it was necessary for an outsider to come in and shake up our field and say that our local emperor is running naked.’"

Interestingly enough Sokal is himself a leftist. You can read the full article here.

http://www.philosophers.co.uk/noframes/articles/sokalnf.htm

What has this done to the thinkers of the left. Well it has sense cause a veritable war between the postmodern and science in general, with postmodern ‘thinkers’ declaring science is dead and scientist pointing their fingers at the postmodernist with the accusation of shoddy science. In a sense if you absolutely believe in relativism then yes science is dead on the other hand postmodern thinkers have exaggerated various scientific findings for the purpose of political gain.

Take the words of another scientist in the same field as well.

Scientists themselves sometimes get philosophically confused (although sociologists will not say it, I believe that a lot of confusion can be found in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics) and they can grossly exaggerate the relevance, scope or level of confirmation of their theories. Scientists can also be selfish, arrogant and prejudiced. In case these descriptions do not apply to you, just think about your colleagues! Scientific research is a human activity, too human maybe. All this justifies subjecting it to careful and reasoned analysis from a historical, sociological and philosophical viewpoint. But it does not warrant sloppy thinking or radical relativism.
By no means do Sokal and I wish to fight what some commentators have called a "science war", which pits scientists against anti-scientific humanists of all sorts. But we wish to defend canons of rationality that are - or should be - common to all. And we do not want to let it be forgotten that the discovery of objective, culture-independent truths about the world has had powerful consequences as one of the sources of the enlightenment, and is one of the best remedies against the permanent short-sightedness of our cultural prejudices.

The whole article is here.
http://physicsweb.org/article/world/10/12/2

Paradoxically, it is left wing social activist whom support the notion of relativism. The right insists that there is truth. Now what I find absurd about this is that the left have a agenda that is not relativistic or the least bit tolerant. Indeed not only is nurture primary and human nature irrelevant but the left have also used illogical interpretations found in physics such as relativism to promote their agenda. Surely they think that they are correct in their politics and that they are at least thinking that their politics are good and right otherwise why the hell would we listen to them.

In reality the notion that there is no truth and ones opinion is equivalent to anyone elses opinion is for the weak minded. This only shows us how docile the human race has become. It is not that we are not entitled to an opinion but that it ought to be subject to critique rather then a veritable stalemate.

If I drop a rock on your foot, that foot will be injured. If I knock you in the eye with a stick, your eyeball will be hurt. If I throw a stone into the air, it will drop back to ground. I could go on with this listing indefinitely. Your existence is jam packed of absolutes from the day you are born until the date you die. Our humanity is built on them. If life were relative we couldn't do up our shirts, drive a vehicle or construct spaceships. Essentially, one of the first lessons we discover after we are born is cause and effect. Everything you do is founded on cause and effect. The first teacher to tell my kids that there is no truth will get to see how relative my foot is not so delicately placed between their bloody butt cheeks.

Another irony is that the Nazis prescribed much of the same sort of nonsense a kin to relativity. Further the new Nazis are welfare state promoters. Consider that Nazis were also in favor of privatized ownership but insisted on controlling the market, just like the welfare state does. Have the new Nazis learned a lesson from the old, most definitely. Instead of the brain washing of hate and might makes right the new mentality is to feed the students with the opiate of sex and general immorality rationalized with relativistic hogwash.

The laws of biology, chemistry, aerodynamics, electricity etc are all absolutes and if they were not we would not be able to live.

I strongly suggest this for a reading. The link is at the bottom of the quote I have taken from the article.

Modern physics has brought a new description of Nature. It is based on what is called: The Copenhagen Interpretation. We will see that this interpretation is just the opposite of the accurate rational description that one expects from science.
What exactly is the Copenhagen interpretation? It is an interpretation given to the formalism of modern physics in order to give a physical meaning of the terms used in the equations. Furthermore, the Copenhagen interpretation gives an interpretation to the mathematical result with respect to our physical understanding of nature. The Copenhagen interpretation has been written by a few renowned scientists at the beginning of the century. The main description comes from papers written by Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, M. Pauli and others.
Surprisingly, there is no precise agreement on what the Copenhagen interpretation really is. No document bearing that name exists and there is no agreement among scientists as to what precise documents are involved. Cramer [1.2] states:
"Despite an extensive literature that refers to, discusses, and criticizes the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, nowhere does there seem to be any concise statement that defines the full Copenhagen interpretation."
The set of articles considered as forming the best description of the Copenhagen interpretation differs, depending on the author studying the subject. Many different versions of the Copenhagen interpretation can be identified. Consequently, its definition leaves plenty of room for readers' own opinions. In this book, we use what appears to be the most frequently accepted version.
To use the most faithful description of the Copenhagen interpretation, we will give, as much as possible, exact citations from renowned scientists who first developed the interpretation. Exact citations are necessary because too many physicists are not aware of all the absurdities accepted in science. They just don't believe that these absurdities exist. The Copenhagen interpretation (whatever it means) has reached an ultimate importance in physics after more that sixty years. It is elusively known under several general names as: the interpretation of quantum mechanics, or the quantum interpretation of modern physics etc.
The Copenhagen interpretation leads to the most astonishing set of contradictions that ever existed in science. Those contradictions are usually presented under the name of paradoxes because that expression seems less absurd. In simple terms, the Copenhagen interpretation leads to observations that clearly imply three unsurmountable difficulties,
a) negation of causality
b) negation of realism and
c) involvement of infinite and imaginary velocities or masses.
We will first discuss causality because this fundamental concept can be more easily conceived. Causality is also an extremely basic condition in science. Points b) and c) will be discussed in chapter 4.

http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/HEISENBERG/Chapter1.html

There may also be a means of ending this dilemma of relativism. Surely there will be more then a few whom will have a bruised ego should science be able to find more precision in measurement. Here is a new theory using the Continuity Axiom. This new Axiom relegates the probability axiom to the dust bin and should it stand the test of time it will change the general theory of relativity significantly. This is simply one effort to find the truth using science. Should the probability axiom be discharged it will effect the theory because so many formulas utilize it. It is a very new way of thinking about physics I recommend reading the summaries and so on. Thinh Van Tran author of The End of Probability and the New Meaning of Quantum Physics ‘attended University of Southern California, Los Angeles (BS in Chemical Engineering 1976) and University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering 1981, thesis on fluid and particle dynamics).’ ‘worked in the semiconductor industry from 1981 to 2002 in various technical and management positions.’

Abstract: Motivated by the observation that the Probability theory violates the continuity condition at probabilities very close to 0 and 1 and therefore may be incomplete, a new Axiom (the Continuity Axiom) is introduced and compared against the Probability Axiom. It is shown that the Probability theory is indeed an incomplete description of physical phenomena, and its argument that events of very low probabilities cannot happen is a fallacy. It is shown that the Continuity Axiom leads to a more complete and faithful description of physical phenomena. It is suggested that the Probability Axiom is replaced by the Continuity Axiom.

Will you choose to stay with the Probability Axiom, which seems to be in conceptual conflict with reality, and has no ability to make quantitative predictions regarding convergence of trials with finite sample sizes? Or will you give serious thought to the Continuity Axiom, which is consistent with reality, and has a quantitative convergence theorem to help experimenters to predict future outcomes of tests with finite sample sizes? I believe you will agree with me that while the Continuity Axiom still needs to stand the test of time, the Probability Axiom is dead.

http://www.thinhtran.com/probability.html

Relativism says that an individual ought to act as the rules of the society in which he lives say. But there is one canon yet more excessive. Relativism also reduces morality entirely to the preferences of the individual. "What is right for one person isn't necessarily right for another person, regardless of the culture in which they live". If that does not confuse you it also indicates that objective appraisals are fantasy but then relativist offer their own objective assessments of the world. If that does not mystify you enough should everyone believe that there are right and wrong behaviors relativism by its own illogic would cease to exist as an expectable morality. I call it a morality because it is one, being ‘anything goes’. I challenge anyone to ask a wide variety of people if they themselves believe that there are right and wrong behaviors. Relativism is a embarrassment and it ought to be taught perhaps with extremely critical analysis and relegated to some strange error on behalf of misguided individuals of the past in advanced philosophy classes not as a legitimate science/morality in high school. The observation that individual sovereignty is in some cases an overriding good need not be based on moral relativism simple individualism does this well enough. One may hold it objectively true that autonomy is to be valued. None of these allegations are things I have developed on my own, there are all sorts of highly educated scientist that have problems with notions of everyone having their own truth and that everyone is living is separate worlds of their own choosing, I suppose if you were delusional it would be possible but that is not something shared by all. What is shared is the same world we all do know and experience every single day just like our neighbors do, we are experiencing the same world. Does all of this give us good reason by itself to question the validity of relativism? Most definitly.

On and on I could go. With regards to abortion though in terms of cultural relativism it would seem as though people should not have abortions as this is the cultural moral of our society, if it were not then there would not be such a fuss would there. In terms of a personal aspect it most certainly would be outlawed, personally they know bloody well what they are doing is immoral and so do the bloody abortionist. Look for yourself and see if you personally agree.

http://www.dadi.org/fetus2.htm

 

[notAFanB]

nice post

...I really can't understand most of it so can you please clarify your summary.

it's appreciated thanks

 

[MfA]

Im going to ignore the whole trip where you are trying to attack moral relativism by attacking other forms of relativism ... you are preaching to a one man choir.

For instance your conclusion MFA that

Godel showed that even with math you need an infinity of axioms to make it unambiguous

Godel is using the Probability Axiom to suggest that infinity is required even though if I flip a coin I know dammed well that the result will be one of two things.

Godel's most famous proof relied on propositional logic, not probability.

 

[Sabastian]

Im going to ignore the whole trip where you are trying to attack moral relativism by attacking other forms of relativism ... you are preaching to a one man choir.

No I did attack moral relativism, it is the one where you create your own realities, live in your own world and there is no truth except your own.

 

[MfA]

A small thought experiment ... what fundamental difference is there between esthetics and morals which makes your "reasoning" apply only to the second?

BTW all that pseudo scientific crap did acknowledge that in science there is always a small amount of indecidability, even in the presence of absolute truth. It might be there, but we can fundamentally not know it. Even if you want to extend thinking from physical reality to moral judgement this leaves an amount of undecidability ... true morals might be there, but within the margins of decidability your morals have as much chance of being true as mine (which is to say an infintisimal chance of being so).

 

[Fred]

Ok first off, there are some very subtle nuances and errors that are not discussed in some of those quotes, I choose not to get into them b/c it will complicate things to an extreme level.

Suffice is to summarize. Relativity, as defined by Einstein and others is a *physical one* not a moral or philosophical one. It has been tested over and over again, and has stood 100 years of scrutiny. All modern forms of Quantum gravity include it as an axiom.

The Uncertainty principle is valid, at least to the scales of energy and position that we have probed by experiment. Its interpretation however, is NOT certain, and extremely difficult to seperate. For instance, there is an interpretation known as 'many worlds' that was not discussed, that seems equally plausible as an interpretation.

Despite what any physicist claims, there IS logical problems with ALL interpretations of quantum mechanics, particularily when things are bumped into the more modern theory of Quantum fields, and who says that we are at the end of the road as far as that goes. I for one suspect strongly that in 2000 years, the objective, testable reality of the matter will be much more apparent and logical.

The Sokal hoax is one of my favorite papers, and I have parts of it posted in my office. However, by no means does it attack moral relativism (read his book, he says as much), feminism and other postmodernist views. It does however challenge the BOUNDARIES to which they are applicable. The second they are applied to the physical universe, the position becomes untenable (eg notions like human beings 'create' their own physical reality independant of physical law). It also pokes fun at the silly vocabulary and fuzzy logic that seems to have pervaded fields of philosophy and social theory.

 

[Sabastian]

A small thought experiment ... what fundamental difference is there between esthetics and morals which makes your "reasoning" apply only to the second?

Human nature connects to two. How come everyone would choose ice cream over.... wood chips? You still have not explained too me how your truth is different then mine. Must be living in another universe then I live in. You ignored all the problems with relativism over all and too attempt to disprove my arguments you try to go and use taste as some sort of proof that we are living in a world were there is no truth but your own. You never did address my example where I proved that murder and rape are indeed the wrong sorts of behavior. I don't need to worry if you like chocolate ice cream over vanilla, that is irrelevant. All I have to do is make you declare that yes there are shared truths and moral relativism is dead in the water. You already killed cultural relativism.... so now you are forced to argue for the idea that we have no truths at all on an individual basis otherwise you are dead in the water. I have given you numerous examples of how your truth is also mine absolutely. RE:Murder,Rape. But there are others were we could easily find correlations on massively wide scale with all humanity. If there is an instance were someone likes little boys and thinks that they ought to be used for personal sexual gratification do you think that we as individuals should dismiss that moral? Isn't it absolutely wrong for an adult to abuse an immature child? Or is that some sort of thing I imagined was wrong in my universe and not a part of yours?