a toe, a theory of everuthing... il minestrone !!!!

Dear Obscured this is also the last time I try to make you understand some philosophical problems because the impression is that it is not you who are trying to understand complicated issues but rather an older devil, motivated by ignorance, arrogance and malice; this older devil may well be used as an example of envy in our poll on the blog. So let me pretend that you suffer from a multiple personality and I will address the old davil inside you rather then you. I will also choose only some points that are relevant to my position and to the dispute in general, because behind the apparent argumentative points in this answer there is a sad conceptual emptiness - and not everything that has been written here to impress people who know nothing about philosophy of science, has any dignity of argument. After that, you are on your own, I am not willing to help people who do not deserve my explanations. Let’s start from the alleged sameness of my problem of entities and properties and the problem of blue. Believe me the two problems, mine and the one mentioned by the devil have nothing, but really nothing in common!. It is a demonstration of the arrogance and the ignorance mentioned above and nothing else. In 1905 a British philosopher by the name of Bertrand Russell published an epoch making paper, by the title of ’On denoting’ that addressed a serious philosophical problem that dates 4000 years: it started with Homer’s Iliad, and philosophy has addressed it for centuries and centuries but I will just mention it in the later years. In the 19th century, Lewis Carroll, a logician who exploited his ability to express himself in literature, in Through the Looking Glass make Alice say “ I see nobody on the road” to which the king replied” I wish I had such eyes as to see Nobody…”. The problem of linguistic expressions and terms that allegedly refer to something has found, along the years, different forms to nag thinkers. In its general nature it was known as the problem of Platos’ beard and it was often used by religious thinkers to defend the existence of God. Because if terms ( of a categorematic nature as opposed to syncathegorematic nature) always refer and you say “God does not exist” the Theologician of those days would say “ what are you denying here? “ -god” - and he would say “therefore god is something that you are denying, this is a contradiction!”. Philosophers have invented all sorts of inadequate answers to this problem for centuries, making improbable distinctions between existence and subsistence and finally Russell gave a satisfactory answer to the Plato’s beard. He could do that thanks to the great works of a German mathematician, Gottlob Frege who had laid the ground for the Russellian answer by providing the theory of quantification ( the theory that introduced quantifiers in the analysis of sentences, you would better study these things if you like philosophy and you want to go on, for the devil it is too late, but not for you!), In short Russell’s analysis of any sentence containing a noun, a name, or an expression that seems to refer to something, provided the elimination of that referring linguistic item in favor of a neutral variable, call it X, that stands for the neutral word ’something’ in English and everything you want to say about that something is said by a predicate and the predicate refers to universals corresponding to properties. ‘ A man’ becomes something like “ exists something and it is human” Russell also believed that he had provided a reading of the hidden structure of the human mind, that does not commit itself to the existence of anything when it says things like” The round square does not exist” ,”god exists “, the fomer is a true sentence and the latter may be true or false, the use of the term ' round square' is not a commitment ipso facto to any reality, and so on . If you are careful you see that in this analysis there are no names of categories, classes or species anymore, that are all reduced to properties, attributes rendered by predicates. Now in my modest view properties are abstractions, because you do not see size, dimensions, shapes and other things you can predicate of objects, And what or who is capable of making those abstractions? The human mind! Hence the epistemologization of ontology!!! Now how the devil may have seen the problem of blue in all this is a mistery !Since this is an objective problem concerning logical atomism or the alleged isomorphism between reality and mind while the problem of the color is a different question : you and I both agree that that color is ‘blue’ but inside your mind you may see blue what I see green and vice versa and there is no way of knowing how we really see those colors. I will not waste my time to expose this arbitrary ignorant arrogant mistake, you can decide if I am right in holding that what makes my case is completely different from the color case; just a hint: 'it is blue' is a predicate which stands for a quality or a property, my problem was the disappearence of entities substituted by properties! The impression is that the davil lacks knowledge of grammatical categories, like nouns and adjectives and the general distinction between subject and predicate! Now, what the devil does not grasp, is that semantic problems are not alien to scientific problems, he does not see the connection because his mind is blind to the fact that scientific language just stems from natural language. If my point of view is correct following Russell, there are no entities like particles or waves, but just things that may have the properties of particles and waves simultaneously. Are those qualities contradictory? Given an object X in space time, is it a problem to say that it is both here and there at the same time? That something starts as a particle and becomes a wave is not a problem after all, we live in a world of change, the problem is the simultaneity; electrons orbiting aroung nuclei behave, undisturbed by experimentators, like waves ( it is in the theory and I doubt it can be observed but i confess my ignorance here) but I am not willing to help the old devil any further so my explanation ends here. Suffice to say that his claim that the subatomic universe must be considered immune to semantic or syntactical analysis is a religious arbitrary claim of a devil who for some obscure reason is convinced that the problem will be one day explained by people like him and we shouldn’t pooch on the terrain of science ( ma va a CAGARE VA!) Lets’ come to the problem of the appointment at 3 o’clock that is so reassuring for the devil ( you would be there at three? Are you sure? Ahahahahahahaa) . Now the 3 OCLOCK PROBLEM “ you and I have an appointment at three o’clock at Harvard square and we do meet there at 3’ o’clock! Wowwwwww what a success! Suppose now you need to communicate with an alien who has a perfect understanding of the number three and of p.m., but he has a different view of what ’I’ and ‘you’ mean, Suppose that her notion of the self includes the entire species to which she belongs, suppose furthermore that there is no future in his weltanschauung because everything is already happened. You see the problem of translating your simple sentence is of the utmost difficulty, If you are not a philosopher you tend to take for granted what we share within our culture, the future, the meaning of ’I’ and ’you’ and it may well be that the translation of this simple sentence requires a revolution in your understanding of reality. If ontology is at stake, the fact that we will successfully meet at 3 o’clock p.m. is totally irrelevant to the problem of how much reality is included in our understanding of the agreement to meet there at that time!!! The devil is philosophically too rozzo to understand the gap existing between language and reality, As when he talks about evidence confirming a scientific hypothesis, he knows nothing of the problems that characterize the role of evidence in science: no matter how many experiments confirm your hypothesis, the theory must be left open to revision because there may well be an experiment in the future that will falsify the theory. Tell him to read Hempel, Carnap, Quine, study underdetermination of theories, holism, indeterminacy of translation …no it is too late, forget it, tell him just ti live us alone!. All this overlooking shows a religious attitude towards science!!! Lets’ come to the problem of creativity. Very well Einstein’s relativity is compatible with Maxwell’s theory of the propagation of light. Since the devil is ignorant, he believes that only science requires a conceptual framework in which a hypothesis can take place , cannot be the product of a fantasy ! If you look at the history of art you see that each period is characterized by the evolution of a preexisting conceptual framework: music, literature, poetry, painting all are pieces of a puzzle characterized by an underling rational and diachronical structure. Art like science is asymmetrical: you could not understand Einstein without starting from Newton just as you could not understand the notion of infinite in teh baroque if you did not first understand the Renaissance evolution of that art. Now both the devil and I don’t know what creativity is (because nobody knows it, we use the term intuitively) but I would never make the mistake of undermining scientific creativity by calling it ’productivity”. In fact productivity is used to refer to the product of a company that uses machines to produce!!! Or the work of a farm… but let’s see productivity at a more sophisticated levels. The work of a computer may be called productivity and the mathematical productivity of a machine like a computer is based on algorithms; algorithms are properties of mechanical procedures and I think that if Einstein were alive would tell the devil to “ andare a cagare’ because there was no mechanical procedure in his conception of relativity. If it were otherwise, all we needed to do was putting in a computer all the data and develop new scientific theories. The evolution of theories is assured by ideas and postulations that are absent from the data available at any time, they are new and therefore creations) He is annoyed by the fact that I dare to speak about what may have gone through the mind of Einstein when he conceived of relativity by watching history channel : the fact the history channel mentioned the bus, the clock, and Geneva, must necessarily come from some autobiographic notes written by Einstein, and he must know it (or not?) , it was just another opportunity to express his sick attitude towards controinfo! But these are just details of a larger religious attitude of the devil towards science and this is his real problem. Like Lamark, Laplace, Freud and even Darwin he believes in reductionism and the idea that there is only one theory of the word to which everything must sooner or later be reduced. While those people were justified by the times they were thinking in believing that there must be a global science of the universe, now days nobody shares this attitude anymore. With the advent of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle nobody really believes in a universe governed by laws of a single theory.Obviously some branches of biology have been reduced to physics because biology is based on chemistry which deals with molecules which in turn are made up of atoms. But to imagine, in the light of what we know today in physics (pardon you know! Does this correction make you feel better?) that one day physics can explain the purposive behavior of even the most elementary living organism such as a worm with 3 hundred neurons is an act of faith no less arrogant than a belief in GOD. How mass, spin, particles and their properties, and the four forces of the universe : gravitation, electromagnetism, strong and weak atomic forces may one day explain the normative content of a mind with no echo in natural sciences is no more absurd than believing that God in person gave the ten commandments to Moses.Keep in mind that even within physics itself there is no unification, the four forces mentioned above are explained within different theories.One last thing before I close this annoying dispute. If you are a physicalist, one who believes that everything is physical, you must face the problem of the human mind. Let's see: I say to my butler "Please Osvald get me a glass of water" and Osvald goes and comes back with my request satisfied, he bows and leaves. How a phiysicalist must try to explain this? I have put in motion another object of the universe by simply uttering a few words, and I could have also predicted with a certain degree of probability his behavior. What among the four known forces of the universe this can be explained? Certainly none of them. The physicalist must hope that one day physics will find an additional force or more than one, with which these events in the universe may be explained. To believe that this will ever happen is an additional act of faith, not justified by other than a great faith in the human intellectual ability. The reductionist has an addditional problem to solve: the unification of the yet to be discovered forces that explain human behavior, with the known forces. I don't find this impossibile to happen, but if a religeous individual makes me notice that this faith is quite similar to the faith in God, with some differences I must agree that she is right. Of course in favor of science there is a so called 'argumentum ad verecundiam' : science has proven its ability to cover more and more phenomena... But the argument has limits as it is dismissed in Courts of Law as fallacious. A person might have been a great person for her entire life but this does not mean that she is not the killer! Now leave us alone. Thank you The athor