For some weeks now, an underlying persistent debate on the reality of numbers has emerged in several discussion threads at UD. In part, it has been cast in terms of nominalism vs platonic realism; the latter being the effective view of most working mathematicians. Obviously, this is a first principles issue and is worth focussed […]
Author: kairosfocus
A Caribbean-based Christian thinker with a background in physics and a focus on strategic thinking towards truly sustainable development.
Logic & First Principles, 14: Are beauty, truth, knowledge, goodness and justice merely matters of subjective opinions? (Preliminary thoughts.)
We live in a Kant-haunted age, where the “ugly gulch” between our inner world of appearances and judgements and the world of things in themselves is often seen as unbridgeable. Of course, there are many other streams of thought that lead to widespread relativism and subjectivism, but the ugly gulch concept is in some ways […]
LoneCycler on paradigms advancing one funeral at a time, etc
LC also has some food for thought for Friday fun: LC, 18: >>From the OP “Today’s dominant school of thought can become tomorrow’s dead theory, often one funeral at a time.” This is true. Every time they find another fossil they have to re-organize their phylogenetic trees. Some trees have been changed so many times […]
Harry’s food for thought on “Materialistic Scientism Is Fundamentally Irrational”
This is the first of two food for thought pieces coming from comments in the scientism thread: Harry, 7: >>Materialistic Scientism Is Fundamentally Irrational In order to demonstrate how a given instance of functional complexity might come about mindlessly and accidentally, one must first know how to create it intentionally. Then, one can at least […]
Logic and First Principles, 13: The challenge of creeping scientism (and of linked nominalism)
There is a creeping scientism in our intellectual climate. We have been led to think that Science is the gold standard of reliable, substantial knowledge and that institutional science and its leaders are the curators of knowledge. This is of course deeply connected to the wider domination of evolutionary materialistic scientism, which compounds the above […]
Logic and First Principles, 12: The crooked yardstick vs plumb-line self-evident truths
Let’s propose a silly example, that a certain Emperor (maybe, just before he went out in his new invisible clothes) decides that a certain crooked stick is now the standard of length, straightness, uprightness and accuracy, a crooked yardstick. Suddenly, what is genuinely such things will be deemed the opposite. And then, suppose that somehow […]
Logic and First Principles, 11: The logic of Ultimate Mind as Source of Reality
After we headlined and began discussing PS on hearing and consciousness yesterday, H raised a significant issue: H, 15: >> . . . the invocation of a Creator who “beautifully designed what each sound should sound like” and “put the special program that can interpret each frequency pattern of air vibration into each sound, thus […]
SM on Gerrymandering of definitions and the breakdown of responsible discussion
Sometimes a gem of a comment gets overlooked, but is well worth promotion to headlined status. Here, let us belatedly highlight SM on gerrymandering definitions in the slippery slope thread: SM, 13: >>If three successfully interbreeding populations of finches on a single island are separate species then whenever a Japanese person marries a Sicilian we […]
Reader Pat Suwonpanich provides food for thought on hearing and consciousness
Pat Suwonpanich has made a comment on hearing and sound as a mental phenomenon leading to questions of conscious mind that I think is worth pondering by one and all, so let us headline (with slight edits): >>For those who wanna read less-technical article on hearing, I have tried to write my own article as […]
Reference: Fertilisation and Implantation
Thanks to Wikipedia, a summary illustration: For reference. END
Hearing, the cochlea, the frequency domain and Fourier’s series
In recent weeks, we have seen repeated attempts to suggest that Mathematics is essentially a mind game we make up as an aspect of culture. There has been a very strong resistance to the idea that there are intelligible manifestations of structure and quantity embedded in the fabric of the world (and indeed in that […]
The problem of anti-conscience, anti-theistic prejudice driving opinion, views and policy
In a current thread on the morality or otherwise on the Pagan practice of infanticide, frequent, objecting commenter BB gives us a summary of a common prejudice of our time: BB, 69: ” The fact that we no longer blindly accept discrimination based on the justification of freedom of conscience or freedom of religion is […]
The Fourier series & rotating vectors in action (with i lurking) — more on the mathematical fabric of reality
The Fourier series is a powerful technique that can be used to break down any repeating waveform into sinusoidal components, based on integer number harmonics of a fundamental frequency: Video: This is already amazing, that by summing up harmonically related sinusoids (with suitable amplitudes and lagging) we can analyse any repeating waveform as a sum […]
Simple demonstrations of how structure and quantity are embedded in the world
As there seems to be resistance to the point that the world embeds structure and quantity (thus, mathematical features) I think it is useful to provide some simple reminders. The Egyptian rope trick and the 3-4-5 Pythagorean triplet, thus a right angle forced through a numerical relationship (and note the power of the number twelve […]
Reference: pregnancy, week by week:
Video: Cf, here for pictures and descriptions. END