Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

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Iwannaplato
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Iwannaplato »

Flannel Jesus wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 12:52 pm
Iwannaplato wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 12:35 pm IOW one does not have to use something other than the FSK itself to change the conclusions.
I get what you're saying, but sometimes FSKs change in fundamental ways - "we were doing this wrong before, we need to change operationally to do it this way now" - and also, we all agree that some FSKs are bullshit.
LOL. Yes, FSKs change over time. Also. At least astronomy changes over time. Models, technology, epistomology even and certainly conclusions. I mean, I have never known for sure what VA means with Fsk. Just noticed how poorly he responded and I thought I could perhaps clear up something. I don't think talking about FSKs is necessarily silly, but a lot of the descrptions he uses leave open the possibility that I do not understand what he means or perhaps more likely he doesn't.
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Iwannaplato wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 12:35 pm
Flannel Jesus wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 12:27 pm Well sure, the truths rational people think they know usually come from FSKs. As a statement, that feels to me like a far way away from saying "THE truth is conditioned upon an FSK" or "all truths are conditioned upon FSKs".

If we accept that FSKs can be wrong, even the most scientific ones can sometimes be wrong, then we MUST have some idea of truth that runs deeper than the fsk, that is not "conditioned upon" the fsk.

"The astrology fsk says this star is 5 billion years old, so I believe it's about 5 billion years old, but we could be wrong, maybe it's closer to 8 billion years old." <- this implies that my belief is derived via the fsk, but that the fsk is NOT the final arbiter of truth, and that therefore there are truths that are not "conditioned on" fsks.
Can't we say that many fsks, including that one for astronomy, allow for revision?
My point earlier is that many fsks, and certainly astronomy, can revise, using it's own fsk, earlier conclusions. The new conclusions are conditioned on the same fsk. The methodology itself can lead to new conclusions (with more data, for example, or the confession of guilt of some astronomer over reseach cheating, etc.)

IOW one does not have to use something other than the FSK itself to change the conclusions.
Is the data there about some sort of real universe, or just about the innards of an FSK thing?

There is a reason why VA describes the hard sciences as the "standardrd bearer" of knowledge, which is to do with those sciences not being considered dogmatic. But this is undermined by his description of how such FSK things work, which implies that they are entirely dogmatic in practice.
CIN
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by CIN »

Is Proxima Centauri behaving unethically in sending us light waves?

Are astronomers behaving unethically in turning their telescopes on Proxima Centauri?

If VA thinks the answer to either of these questions is 'yes', then perhaps he would like to explain his (doubtless startlingly original) ethical theory to us.

Here are a few more questions. Is it unethical to post questions that have fuck all to do with ethics in the ethical theory part of the forum? Is it perhaps inconsiderate to other members? Does it perhaps show a certain unwelcome arrogance?

That sounds altogether more likely.

Maybe people could post in the right place from now on, so that those of us who want to discuss ethics aren't bothered with a lot of irrelevant crap.

How about it, VA?
Flannel Jesus
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Flannel Jesus »

Iwannaplato wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 1:47 pm
Flannel Jesus wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 12:52 pm
Iwannaplato wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 12:35 pm IOW one does not have to use something other than the FSK itself to change the conclusions.
I get what you're saying, but sometimes FSKs change in fundamental ways - "we were doing this wrong before, we need to change operationally to do it this way now" - and also, we all agree that some FSKs are bullshit.
LOL. Yes, FSKs change over time. Also. At least astronomy changes over time. Models, technology, epistomology even and certainly conclusions. I mean, I have never known for sure what VA means with Fsk. Just noticed how poorly he responded and I thought I could perhaps clear up something. I don't think talking about FSKs is necessarily silly, but a lot of the descrptions he uses leave open the possibility that I do not understand what he means or perhaps more likely he doesn't.
Fsk is probably a red herring in the end. Google "fsk framework system knowledge", first result is this forum. I think he would be going on a better track if he dropped that in favour of just talking about models instead of fsks. Model dependent realism - that was a more coherent track.

He'd also do well to drop the talk of "human conditions" in relation to realism, considering that the only reason he adopted that wording was to appease PHs alleged pedantry and PH has expressed that it in fact is NOT his preferred wording either - as a phrase it doesn't accomplish the goal it was intended to accomplish, and it's basically become a playground for layers and layers of straw man.
Iwannaplato
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Iwannaplato »

Flannel Jesus wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 1:58 pm Fsk is probably a red herring in the end. Google "fsk framework system knowledge", first result is this forum. I think he would be going on a better track if he dropped that in favour of just talking about models instead of fsks. Model dependent realism - that was a more coherent track.
Models are sort of a part of a discipline. But also, astononomy isn't separate from math, physics, the philosophy of science, philosophy....are all climbing in and out of it. Likely other disciplines also. There's no wall between it and the rest of science or separate set of methodologies and models. Changes in other disciplines will affect astronomy and the reverse. Yes, there will be trends in terms of methods, scale, measurement, epistemology, models. I mean, shit, the guy thinks a realist

SHOULD!!!!!!

view a goat as a collection of atoms and molecules. That that's more real than the biological, everyday goat.

But he has this discrete separate category astronomy fsk. Talk about hallucinated entities.
He'd also do well to drop the talk of "human conditions" in relation to realism, considering that the only reason he adopted that wording was to appease PHs alleged pedantry and PH has expressed that it in fact is NOT his preferred wording either - as a phrase it doesn't accomplish the goal it was intended to accomplish, and it's basically become a playground for layers and layers of straw man.
I suspect there's a simpler way of saying whatever he means there, but I haven't invested time in it.
Iwannaplato
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Iwannaplato »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 1:56 pm Is the data there about some sort of real universe, or just about the innards of an FSK thing?
I'm not dealing with the realism/antirealism issue above, just the infallibility issue. VA was utterly unclear. I think there are problems with his position, but he didn't manage to clearly talk about one area that I think is less controversial, despite FJ's patient questioning.
There is a reason why VA describes the hard sciences as the "standardrd bearer" of knowledge, which is to do with those sciences not being considered dogmatic.
that certainly could be his motive. I think his motive is to use science as a way to battle PH. Science is best. Physics is the part of science that is the bestest, QM implies, possibly, in certain lights that maybe antirealism is true. I need antirealism because I had no other way to counter PH's ideas about facts.
But this is undermined by his description of how such FSK things work, which implies that they are entirely dogmatic in practice.
Well, kudos to you for getting a single clear message about them, at least, perhaps you deserve kudos for understanding what he meant. I find it very hard to follow. And he's certainly dogmatic.

Realists are a greater threat to humanity than antirealist - a conclusion that, of course, cannot possibly have been drawn using a scientific fsk. Some unnamed fsk was used.

And it should be noted that when asked what fsk he uses to determine the rank of fsks he actually has used Chatgpt's short essay on how many people consider science very credible. He has also said that intuition leads him to this conclusion.

So, if one digs enough, VA's intuition is the meta-fsk.
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by FlashDangerpants »

CIN wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 1:57 pm If VA thinks the answer to either of these questions is 'yes', then perhaps he would like to explain his (doubtless startlingly original) ethical theory to us.

Here are a few more questions. Is it unethical to post questions that have fuck all to do with ethics in the ethical theory part of the forum? Is it perhaps inconsiderate to other members? Does it perhaps show a certain unwelcome arrogance?
Ah, most of us have seen him .... develop? .... this line of reasoning over a number of years, but if you are blissfully new to the weird world of Vaginal Aqualung, allow me to insert the context for this dogshit thread...

Sometimes real philosophers will attempt to take scientific realism about natural properties of objects and apply that to moral realism about the natural moral properties of decisions and outcomes etc. And sometimes others will do something using the philosophy of maths to argue for a very indirect form of real numbers that can also apply to real virtues...

VA seems to have heard of those efforts, but not to have understood how the arguments work, and so he has gone in an opposite direction. If you assemble his rambling shit into a minimal form of coherence it would roughly be that...
  • all knowledge is constructed via consenus and it is literally absurd to look for anything beyond that or to suppose any knowledge is discovered
  • the consensus depends upon form, some FSK things are constructed using more credible forms than others. things beleived by experts have superior form to things believed by normal folk.
  • among and between different FSK things, there is a strict hiearachy of thruthiness that is defined by their credibility (this appears to be a measure of how many people believe in this FSK and how hard they believe it - but for some reason religions are all uniformly low cred, aspects of this part are unclear)
  • if you adopt a FSK form similar in appearance to a science for the evaluation of morality, then you have a moral FSK that is a near peer to science.
Thus the point of going on and on and on and on about his antirealism obsession is that he needs it because he wants ot reduce science to a mere self-referential FSK thing and from there he can feel like there is some value in promoting his self-referential moral FSK thing to a science.
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

Flannel Jesus wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 12:27 pm
Iwannaplato wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 12:14 pm To say conditioned on the fsk means that we arrived at the conclusion using the fsk.
Well sure, the truths rational people think they know usually come from FSKs. As a statement, that feels to me like a far way away from saying "THE truth is conditioned upon an FSK" or "all truths are conditioned upon FSKs".

If we accept that FSKs can be wrong, even the most scientific ones can sometimes be wrong, then we MUST have some idea of truth that runs deeper than the fsk, that is not "conditioned upon" the fsk.

"The astronomy fsk says this star is 5 billion years old, so I believe it's about 5 billion years old, but we could be wrong, maybe it's closer to 8 billion years old." <- this implies that my belief is derived via the fsk, but that the fsk is NOT the final arbiter of truth, and that therefore there are truths that are not "conditioned on" fsks.

So if fsks are not the final arbiter of truth, what is?
A realist has a pretty normal looking answer: reality.
If an FSK is wrong, it's wrong with respect to reality.
That's true even if we don't know what the true answer is in reality.
That's true even if that aspect of reality is even in principle inaccessible to humans.
We can be wrong even if we could never possibly find out we are wrong, because reality is the bedrock of truth, not fsks.
FSKs are the bedrock of our ACCESS to truth, perhaps, but not truth-itself.
I argue there are two senses of 'reality', i.e.

1. FSK-ed reality
2. Philosophical Realism mind-independent reality.

I have presented here, why Philosophical Realism mind-independent reality is not realistic, thus illusory;
Why Philosophical Realism is Illusory
viewtopic.php?p=646073#p646073

Elsewhere I have presented the two senses, i.e FSK-ed vs P-realism, where the FSK-ed reality is most realistic and pragmatic;

There are Two Senses of 'What is Fact'
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39587

Two Senses of 'Objective'
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39326

Now we are getting somewhere;

You think your P-realism mind-independent reality is the truest-reality.
But I have demonstrated above, your sense of reality is not realistic but rather, you are merely grasping a reality that is illusory.
What you are grasping at are merely speculations and thought-objects inferred from experiences.

I argued the FSK-ed reality [science being the most credible and realistic], despite its weaknesses & limitations and degrees of objectivity,
is the most optimal reality we can have and work with to facilitate survival optimally to maintain progressive well-being.

Why P-realists are so dogmatic with their ideology is due to very painful [subliminal] cognitive dissonances arising from an existential crisis and because P-realism emerged as an ideology from an evolutionary default.

Btw, humanity at present can do away with P-realism [mind-independent reality] and still can be progressive with FSK-ed sense of reality.
That is why Hawking implied in his Modal-Dependent-Realism, i.e.
'the sense of true mind-independent objective reality of the P-realists is useless and can be fucked off'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism
Flannel Jesus
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Flannel Jesus »

Fsked reality looks pretty meaningless and inconsistent in the way you use it. If it has weaknesses and "degrees of objectivity", it's not reality. If it were reality, it wouldn't have "degrees of objectivity", it would be objective.

The only way for fsks to have "degrees of objectivity" is if there is something outside of the fsk that they are "objective" with respect to.

Realists call this thing that an FSK can be more or less objective with respect to, REALITY. I don't know what you call it, you apparently don't call it reality, but you clearly believe in something deeper than the fsk, more real than the fsk, with respect to which you can describe FSKs as "more or less objective". I suspect it's honestly a lot like the reality realists believe in, based on the way you speak of things.
Skepdick
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Skepdick »

Flannel Jesus wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 7:47 am Fsked reality looks pretty meaningless and inconsistent in the way you use it.
If it’s useful to use it like that, so what if it’s meaningless and inconsistent?

It’s not like it’s objectively wrong, or something.
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

Flannel Jesus wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 7:47 am Fsked reality looks pretty meaningless and inconsistent in the way you use it. If it has weaknesses and "degrees of objectivity", it's not reality. If it were reality, it wouldn't have "degrees of objectivity", it would be objective.

The only way for fsks to have "degrees of objectivity" is if there is something outside of the fsk that they are "objective" with respect to.

Realists call this thing that an FSK can be more or less objective with respect to, REALITY.
I don't know what you call it, you apparently don't call it reality, but you clearly believe in something deeper than the fsk, more real than the fsk, with respect to which you can describe FSKs as "more or less objective". I suspect it's honestly a lot like the reality realists believe in, based on the way you speak of things.
It looks like you have not grasped what I said here.
I have presented here, why Philosophical Realism mind-independent reality is not realistic, thus illusory;
Why Philosophical Realism is Illusory
viewtopic.php?p=646073#p646073

"Realists call this thing that an FSK can be more or less objective with respect to, REALITY."
I argued your sense of Reality [P-realism] is illusory.
Can you counter that in the link above.
I don't know what you call it, you apparently don't call it reality, but you clearly believe in something deeper than the fsk, more real than the fsk, with respect to which you can describe FSKs as "more or less objective".
For you there is an "it" which I argued is illusory, albeit can be a useful illusion for idealization purposes only.

For anti-philosophical-realist, there is no "it" [as you refer] at all.
What emerged, realized and experienced is all-there-is.
In this case there can be as many 'realities' as there are humans alive, >8 billion at present.
This is why we need FSKs [science the most credible] to enable FSK-ed shared realities to emerge, be realized and experienced.
The FSK-ed shared realities are all there to it, there is no deeper reality beyond that [this is groping with METAphysics.]

The science-FSK is the most reliable at present, [mathematics aside] what other [FSK or mode of reality] is more credible?
Note science is empirical dependent, i.e. human-based and cannot certify any other reality besides what the human-based science FSK can confer.

Some will assert science is getting closer and closer to "that" objective reality.
Realists tend to believe that whatever we believe now is only an approximation of reality but that the accuracy and fullness of understanding can be improved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_realism
But that at most is an assumption, not a reality.
Even then, this is basically problematic, if science does not know what is the final absolute REALITY how can it ever confirm it has closed the reality gap? i.e. found the final reality?
Point is science is human-based, therefore science will never ever reach the REALITY that is not human-based, i.e. mind-independent.
Flannel Jesus
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Flannel Jesus »

Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 8:23 am The FSK-ed shared realities are all there to it, there is no deeper reality beyond that [this is groping with METAphysics.]
Then fsks can't be wrong, and they can't be more or less objective. If you say they are on a sliding scale of objectiveness, with say astrology being on the low end of that scale and astronomy being on the high end, then that presupposes something you are comparing them to, to make one more objective and one less objective. Despite you insisting there is no deeper reality, the words you use consistently, implicitly, make reference to a deeper reality.
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

Flannel Jesus wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 8:29 am
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 8:23 am The FSK-ed shared realities are all there to it, there is no deeper reality beyond that [this is groping with METAphysics.]
Then fsks can't be wrong, and they can't be more or less objective. If you say they are on a sliding scale of objectiveness, with say astrology being on the low end of that scale and astronomy being on the high end, then that presupposes something you are comparing them to, to make one more objective and one less objective. Despite you insisting there is no deeper reality, the words you use consistently, implicitly, make reference to a deeper reality.
As I had stated many times, the objectivity of the astrology-FSK is contrasted with the science-astronomy-FSK where the science-FSK has the highest credibility and reliability.

Why the Scientific FSK is the Most Credible and Reliable
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=39585

The scientific FSK is not compared to some other FSK, but rated based on various criteria.
Flannel Jesus
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Flannel Jesus »

Yes, criteria external to the FSKs themselves. FSKs are clearly, for you and for me, not the ultimate arbiters of truth. You say things like "The FSK-ed shared realities are all there to it", and then admit that FSKs can be incorrect. If the FSKs are all there is to it, fsks can't be wrong. If they are wrong, they are wrong with respect to something else.

And that something else is reality.

You keep on repeating "I argued your sense of Reality [P-realism] is illusory,," as if the fact that you've tried to argue against it should itself compel me to reject it. Anybody could argue against anything, the existence of an argument is itself not compelling. It's especially not compelling if the argument isn't very good. And in this case it's also not compelling because you keep on using language implying that you yourself don't even agree with the ideas you want to replace "philosophical realism" with. You want to say FSKs are where the buck of truth stops, and yet you agree FSKs can be wrong. If they can be wrong, clearly they are wrong with respect to something. You sound like a realist. Your arguments aren't overcoming the completely unsatisfying inconsistencies of your own language in this conversation.
Peter Holmes
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Re: Is the Star, Proxima Centauri Real?

Post by Peter Holmes »

Here's the VA rub.

Premise: We humans can know reality only in a human way. [True.]
Conclusion: Therefore:
1 We humans can never know reality-as-it-really-is / reality-in-itself / the noumenon; or
2 There is no such thing as reality-as-it-really-is / reality-in-itself / the noumenon.

It seems to me that both conclusions are non sequiturs.
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