To Philip Lloyd Lewis (88/6) : My point was that if you accept that there is a "‘raw material' of objective reality" (86/14) then it smacks of inconsistency to claim that there are "no objective truths" (ibid.).
I fear that I edited out a necessary qualification before sending my reply to C86. At first I wrote "once a physical law is writ upon the universe", meaning that those patterns of universal behaviour to which we can find no exceptions, such as gravity; and which contribute form to the evolving panoply of events which form our world, are not open to us to "revise" or "reject". We can, of course, revise our models of them.
To Theo's reply to PLL (88/6) : On the assumption that you are not claiming that all scientific theories make correct predictions then are not all proven scientific theories bound to make correct predictions - e.g. Fact: apples fall to earth; Theory: gravity causes things to fall to earth (note that the term gravity here is no less metaphysical than God, merely more focused); Prediction: oranges will fall to earth. Wow !
O.K., I'm guilty of outrageous over-simplification. Looking at the obvious and reflecting on its implications (in the above case that the moon is a big apple) is fun. I am a fan of scientific investigation, but its postulates, hypotheses, theories, and laws can only ever prove themselves. I think you're getting into hot water by claiming "the measured universality of the speed of light". The Michelson-Morley experiment merely failed to find the ether that it was designed to detect, as I am sure you know. Can I reserve further comment for my reply to Rick Street.
To E. Ron Kermode (88/13) : I hope that I wasn't being "holier than thou" in opposing abortion. I used to be a member of S.P.U.C. but left because I could not agree with their over-emphasis on making abortion illegal. I could not reconcile the implied belief of many religiously motivated S.P.U.C. members in a God-given free will with their enthusiasm for taking it away. I felt that the only religiously legitimate way to combat abortion was in ways such as that currently promoted by Cardinal Winning - offering counsel, practical assistance, and funds as uncritically as practicable.
To Michael Nisbet (88/17ps) : Quite ! I've always puzzled over how Brahma counts the thousand years he sleeps between creations. However, if time is relational then the time between longer spaced events measured by the shortest spaced events is a multiple of zero and time does not exist. Is this a problem which demonstrates faulty thinking; or faulty mathematics ? The only number which relates fully to any real situation is one. There exists no thing which is two or more; and zero is as unlimited as infinity, both being basically nonsense. Thus all mathematics is imaginary, which must be some comfort to anyone struggling with i. Does this mean that any scientific theory which relies on mathematics must be flawed ?
To Rick Street (88/18) : Having seen the documentary in question, I'll back you up on the photons, though I think they were tunnelling through the metal (wormhole stuff, you know), rather than breaking the speed limit, and I think there is some dispute as to what was actually being measured. As I interpret the postulate of the speed of light it is the imposition of a fixed reference upon the universe - a measure to which other variables can be related. Its advantage is that it enables more events to be added to the model. It may not be true but to question it is to miss the point. Who is to measure the measure?
In the matter of abortion the unique DNA evidences the individuality of the fertilised egg; and the lack of independence extends even beyond babyhood. If the state, representative of the majority, wants to legalise murder - fine - but why not call it what it is ?
Hatstand ? Adminiculum ad pilea ? - sounds like "keep taking the tablets" - quite appropriate really - how about KT3, Ed.?
To Theo's reply to me (88/27) : Your "somehow" sounds like your search for consciousness within the brain gurgling down the plughole of despair.
Ditto (88/29) : "Boo" could be interpreted as normally acceptable behaviour and thus fail to constitute an offence of violence on the grounds of implied consent. Is there such an illness as kleptomania ? Confirmed cynic that I am I strongly suspect that it was invented by some trick cyclist to get a wealthy client out of a potential jail sentence, though mental illness could be a defence, given compulsory treatment.
To assist the apprehending of four-pointers perhaps a capsule of a suitable drug could be incorporated into the trackable device and released remotely.
To Alan Carr (88/31) :
It's suggested that we're clever, so the ideas that we deviseAnthony Owens
must be the best there's ever been, until others these revise;
when then we come to realise: replies can make us wise.
Getting back to PLL, while Newton was a product of his culture, and the modern appliers of his laws are products of their’s, these laws are in a sense culture-free. They work when competently applied in any culture. When the Russians launched Sputnik, the Americans couldn’t just write it off as a Russian cultural event that couldn’t happen in America or that could be denied as a bit of Russian propaganda; it happened in the public domain for all to see. Similarly, Hitler might reject Relativity and Quantum Mechanics as "Jewish Physics", but, if he’d been around at the time and an atom bomb had been dropped on Berlin, he’d have been forced, if only briefly, to revise his views.
I don’t know how tongue-in-cheek your response to Michael Nisbett was, but the suggestion seems to be a variant of the various paradoxes of Zeno (eg. "Achilles & the Tortoise", etc.) designed to show that change is impossible. All fail because they fail to see that infinite series of infinitesimals can sum to values that are finite, zero or infinite depending on the terms in the series (and their signs). What are you on about in your brief foray into the reality of numbers ? Incidentally, let no-one be deceived into thinking that imaginary numbers are "imaginary" any more than that quarks are "strange", "charmed" or "coloured".
The speed of light isn’t constant by convention by the way,
though it may superficially appear so. Since this fact was discovered,
it has been used to redefine the meter, defined in 1983 as the distance
travelled by light in vacuo in 1 / 299 792 458 seconds. A recent
edition of New Scientist (Issue 2106, 1st November 1997)
had a series of interesting articles on time, by the way. One of
these pointed out that the second was redefined (in 1967) as the time
taken for 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the resonant frequency
microwave radiation required to cause a hyperfine transition in
a ground-state electron in caesium-133. Hence, it now makes sense
to measure how long a second lasts (and this has now been done to
1 part in
I think it’s premature to despair in the search for an explanation of conscious events as brain events. It’s a hard problem, after all.
Thanks for the practical advice on how to track down our desperate,
if invalidly-clinicalised, kleptomaniac. As Stef Gula points out later
in this issue, a bit over the top [OT2; or should it be
Theo