Shinzo Abe visits Yasukuni Shrine

[axordil]

Of course truth is objective. Like, by definition. It's only our knowledge or perception of it that are subjective.

Does truth--does *anything*--have inherent objective properties? Considering the notion of "properties" is itself invented?

[yovargas]

The notion of "properties" is itself invented? The language and concepts that we use to help us discuss and think about the properties of reality are invented, sure, but the properties would be there whether we bothered trying to define them or not. The sun was still really, really hot way before anybody had bothered to formulate the concept of "hot".

[Primula Baggins]

If there's no such thing as objective properties, science is random guesswork. Yet it works, provably. Barring human error, space probes land on Mars, diseases are cured, bridges carry the loads they're supposed to, and we can all fly.

If something exists, it is possible to make true statements about it.

[Frelga]

Subjective doesn't mean not true.

[Primula Baggins]

Sure—you can have a subjective impression that's also objectively true.

[axordil]

But the thing is: without someone defining "hot" the sun isn't. And the definition is rather anthropocentric: there are far hotter things in the universe.

We can make "true" statements about what we observe* and define, because we have built an epistomological framework that is logically consistent. But the framework is a built thing. The universe behaves as it behaves, and we have come up with basic concepts to describe it: mass, energy, et al. But just as the picture of the pipe is not the pipe, the model of the universe is not the universe.

What we call "mass," for example, is a way of describing one property we perceive material objects to have. But our understanding of that property was initiated and shaped by our experience of it. Were we beings made of, say, stable standing waves of energy, the entire notion of what mass is might be roughly "that stuff that gets in the way sometimes."

We could still derive mathematical relationships between TSTGITYS and ourselves, but our notion of "massiness" would be fundamentally different, just as our notion of "hot" would likely be. It's more than "mere" (and the scare quotes are there for a reason) semantics. Before someone defined heat--the sun was really, really sun, and even that begs the question, because we can only define things by the degree to which they are not the same.

Maybe standing-wave beings see stars as "stuff that gets in the way but feels good" and all other mass as "stuff that just really, really gets in the way."

*Observation here includes that which we cannot directly observe, but can infer from observations made of secondary effects.

[yovargas]

But the thing is: without someone defining "hot" the sun isn't.

"Hot" was perhaps a bad example as a "property" of the sun, but regardless, the sun has a temperature (or I guess various temperatures if you wanna get nitpicky) and it has that temperature whether we know it or believe it or perceive it or measure it or label it or anything it.

[Primula Baggins]

Ax, you seem to be talking about how our perceptions of the universe might change as our nature changed. But that doesn't matter, to the universe. Reality isn't subjective because our perceptions of reality are subjective. The Andromeda galaxy really is 2 million lightyears away and really has all those stars in it, and right now one or two of them are probably getting ready to go nova and really will. And 2 million years from now whatever intelligence exists in our galaxy then will be able to see and describe them.

Constructing a framework of explanation doesn't mean what is described is what the framework says it is, or that it would actually be something different when viewed from a different framework. The Earth wasn't flat because some people believed it was. Frameworks are more accurate or less accurate, better or worse at predicting and explaining, according to how closely they approach what actually exists.

Agreeing that the physical universe does exist, and creating models that describe it accurately, is the business of a lot of people's lives. Our personal perceptions are colored by the sensory apparatus we've evolved with, yes—but using what we've learned from accepting the universe as objectively real, we can build devices that perceive and measure what we can't. We aren't bound to subjectivity by our perceptions. We can look at phenomena from many different angles at once, and use what we learn to understand the universe better and discover still more ways of studying it. (The image in my sig, of the center of our galaxy, is a composite of telescopes working on many different wavelengths. It's not just pretty; it contains much more information than our naked eyes could give us. In fact we couldn't see it at all; in the wavelengths human eyes can see, it's completely blocked off by clouds of dust.)

Maybe it's all subjective, all fake, and the universe exists only in the mind that's contemplating it. But that's not a falsifiable hypothesis, and therefore it isn't useful.

[yovargas]

And more to the thread's point - whether or not someone was killed during a war is a matter of objective fact regardless of however the history of it ends up getting written.

[axordil]

And more to the thread's point - whether or not someone was killed during a war is a matter of objective fact regardless of however the history of it ends up getting written.

Certainly--but how the history ends up being written makes the death meaningful in some way, or not.

The sun has a temperature (or I guess various temperatures if you wanna get nitpicky) and it has that temperature whether we know it or believe it or perceive it or measure it or label it or anything it.

Temperature is an exceptionally slippery concept for something seemingly straightforward. If you don't believe me, look at the Wikipedia article for it.

Prim--I don't deny the objective existence of the universe. I only deny our ability to experience it in some privileged, objective way, because that only strikes me as possible if the constituent parts have essential properties that exist without our defining them. That strikes me as the unfalsifiable notion, as we cannot test a universe in which we are not present.

[River]

Temperature is an exceptionally slippery concept for something seemingly straightforward.

Emphasis mine.

Temperature, like time, is something that is both fundamental and incredibly difficult to get a grip on. However, it is difficult to contemplate an ice cube, or puddle of water, or a puff of steam, and write the whole concept of temperature off as something that's just subjective. Even if there were no humans around to pin the label on the phenomena, these states of water will, in all likelihood, still exist simply because these are the things water does when the conditions allow it.

[Primula Baggins]

I "got" temperature when I understood that it's the concentration of heat per unit mass at a particular point, not any kind of absolute amount of heat.

I madly love thermodynamics.

[Primula Baggins]

Prim--I don't deny the objective existence of the universe. I only deny our ability to experience it in some privileged, objective way, because that only strikes me as possible if the constituent parts have essential properties that exist without our defining them. That strikes me as the unfalsifiable notion, as we cannot test a universe in which we are not present.

Well, Heisenberg was aware of that, too—we can't measure something without changing it, and we can't know everything about any one thing. Added to that, everything we see and measure is through the filter of our sensory and scientific apparatus. But how could it be otherwise? Of course our measurements are subjective—we're immersed in the universe and have the limitations of our physicality. But we believe they have meaning because we believe that they are at least proportionate, at least an approximation, to something objectively real.

[axordil]

Temperature is an exceptionally slippery concept for something seemingly straightforward.

Emphasis mine.

Temperature, like time, is something that is both fundamental and incredibly difficult to get a grip on. However, it is difficult to contemplate an ice cube, or puddle of water, or a puff of steam, and write the whole concept of temperature off as something that's just subjective. Even if there were no humans around to pin the label on the phenomena, these states of water will, in all likelihood, still exist simply because these are the things water does when the conditions allow it.

Oh, I fully expect ice would be what it is without anyone around. But what is that? How is ice different from rock? How is ice different from water? How is anything different from, or similar to, anything, except through classification, a subjective application of objective rules?

Prim--I don't deny the objective existence of the universe. I only deny our ability to experience it in some privileged, objective way, because that only strikes me as possible if the constituent parts have essential properties that exist without our defining them. That strikes me as the unfalsifiable notion, as we cannot test a universe in which we are not present.

Well, Heisenberg was aware of that, too—we can't measure something without changing it, and we can't know everything about any one thing. Added to that, everything we see and measure is through the filter of our sensory and scientific apparatus. But how could it be otherwise? Of course our measurements are subjective—we're immersed in the universe and have the limitations of our physicality. But we believe they have meaning because we believe that they are at least proportionate, at least an approximation, to something objectively real.

The problem as I see it is more epistemological than existential: how friendly is the universe, really, to modeling, either mathematical or simple gedankenexperiment?

The thing that got me going on this was the Hawking discussion about the nature of black holes, and the difficulty in reconciling the perfectly good, useful and valid model of quantum mechanics with the perfectly good, useful and valid model of general relativity, given how the universe seems to be.

Things like mass, magnetic polarity, electric charge, electron spin, and at the most basic (so far) level, quantum chromodynamics: they're all attempts to describe and differentiate phenomena and physical properties that function perfectly well without us, without labels, without equations, without models. The universe is neither orderly nor chaotic, it's simply the universe. Everything else is on us, because we insist on distinguishing a silk purse from a sow's ear and an up quark from a down quark.

Then I pull the camera back. Because the limits of modeling aren't just at the quantum/relativity frontier, they're the limits of understanding generally, whether in science or in history or in day-to-day life. Life happens; the universe exists; but any attempt to understand either is at once approximate, reductive, and to some extent arbitrary.

These are not ideas I dwell on normally, or else, like the bumblebee of urban legend, I would tumble from the air with the impossibility of my own operation. But it does strike me that epistemology, even more than ethics, is the branch of philosophy most deeply entwined with life--wait for it--as we know it.

[axordil]

While I'm grateful for the chance to twirl out into the aether, I'm going to let the conversation get back to historiography and what not, if people don't mind.

[yovargas]

All of which sounds to me like a round-a-bout way of saying that our understanding of things is incomplete, flawed, and highly susceptible to bias. Which, like, duh, man. But still we trudge on best we can and apparently get it right much more often than not because if we didn't, we wouldn't have been able to build much of anything out of ourselves.

[axordil]

I contest nothing in your statement, yov.

[River]

How is ice different from rock?

To the first order (not going into certain technicalities and quid pro quos about ice), nothing. Both are crystalline solids. However, your garden variety rock tends to have a mixed composition while water ice tends to be purely water.

How is ice different from water?

I could be a pendant and say that ice is water in the solid phase, but I'm going to be nice and assume you mean ice vs. liquid water. The difference is the phase of matter. One is a crystalline solid, the other is a liquid.
Liquid
Solid