here is my truth ....tell me yours

[zippitippitoes]

what is truth.........are there things which are universally held to be truths

if I have a truth which isn't shared by you is it a truth still

[compo]

have ou been on the sauce already

[QE]

Isn't that a bit like "if a loud bang is made in the middle of the desert and there's no-one there to hear it, is it really a noise?"

[zippitippitoes]

lol

just wondered how we ultimately prove something is true and what the difference between true and truth is

[zippitippitoes]

yeah also if a tree falls in the forest which I read on here yesterday has put me in philosophical mode

[Ledodgyherring]

This reminds me of a philosoohy lecture I once attended, the lecturer was asking if we put cheese in the fridge then shut the door of the fridge does the cheese continue to exist because we cease to see it?
Some cocky bloke piped up ahh yeah but we could put a video camera in the fridge and record the cheese and the lecturer replied Yes but will the camcorder exist once we shut the door.....

Here's another one for you. If brain transplants were medically possible and a member of your family was in an accident and needed a brain transplant and recieved a brain from somebody else's relative (who's dead) who would that person then be, the person who they look like or the person who's brain they have?

[QE]

Ledodgy - so glad you clarified your last post with "(who's dead)". Was having very disturbed thoughts til that point.

[Ledodgyherring]

pmsl QE

[zippitippitoes]

I had a scary german aesthetics tutor at university and there were just two of us in tutorials and we both scived a lot because we couldn't do the work and so we'd have to face him on our own!

He would say things like is there a coffee cup on the table and we never knew whether the answer was yes or no.

[Ledodgyherring]

My bil went for a job a interview at tesco the other day and the first question they asked hin was Number 1 or Number 2?

[Tutter]

ldh - what was that about then? what was he supposed to answer?

[Bugsy2]

Aren't there things that are considered "absolute truths" and then the rest is pretty much up to the individual?
Don't know much about this, so probably talking rubbish - but then maybe that makes me well qualified!
Has to be Number 1, doesn't it?

[chocolatequeen]

of course not. it´s number 2.

has anyone seen the philosophy book about the pig that wants to be eaten? Is it any good?

little brain struggling with true/truth thing. am going to ponder it and return forthwith with a golden nugget of wisdom for you all....

(sneaks off to do a furtive google search....)

[zippitippitoes]

what are the absolute truths then?

zippi regrets squandering her education (it was only 2 terms)

just found a picture of him on the internet he is a professor in Berlin now and he does look scary

[cornflakegirl]

chocolate queen - you're not thinking of the restaurant at the end of the universe, are you? :)

i'm a strong believer in Truth - that it is objective. i think it just dilutes the concept of truth otherwise. we already have a perfectly good concept of belief - why change truth so it means the same thing?

[chocolatequeen]

"all living things will die"

is that one?

what about things that are undeniable, such as i have a nose/child/blue car. if they are fact, does that make them true?

going to go and google the book cornflakegirl. thanks. are you tori amos? (would do a smiley but can´t find those brackets on new mac keyboard....)

[chocolatequeen]

the pig that wants to be eaten - julian baggani

[bummer]

What? I'm outta this one!

[cornflakegirl]

cq - no, but dh is a fan of tori (or tori-my-love, as he likes to call her) :)

restaurant... is the second in the hitchhiker series - there's a scene with a cow that not only wants to be eaten, but can communicate its desire clearly, thus removing all moral ambiguity. it's most amusing. the main character decides he'll just have a glass of water :)

in what sense are those things undeniable? you only believe them because of sensory impressions. how do you know they are valid? :)

[katzg]

DH did a philosphy degree and one of there exam questions was:

The transporter on star-trek would kill whoever uses it. Discuss?

[Blandmum]

If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is there except an unmentionable person and it hits them, would anyone care?

[Ledodgyherring]

Tutter yes he said I dont know you choose and they said no you choose, Bizarre.

[zippitippitoes]

if you swear in court to tell the "truth" then you are essentially lying because there can't be an objective "truth" to tell can there, in that instance? Only a"truth" as you see it and under questioning or presented with an alternative view point then you might change your mind


I'm trying to remember the cat theorem, I will have to look it up.

[zippitippitoes]

katzg is that to do with quantum waves or parallel universes

[Blandmum]

Schrodingers cat?

This from Wikipedia

Schrödinger's cat is a seemingly paradoxical thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger that attempts to illustrate the incompleteness of an early interpretation of quantum mechanics when going from subatomic to macroscopic systems. The experiment proposes:

A cat is placed in a sealed box. Attached to the box is an apparatus containing a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas. This apparatus is separated from the cat in such a way that the cat can in no way interfere with it. The experiment is set up so that there is exactly a 50% chance of the nucleus decaying in one hour. If the nucleus decays, it will emit a particle that triggers the apparatus, which opens the canister and kills the cat. If the nucleus does not decay, then the cat remains alive. According to quantum mechanics, the unobserved nucleus is described as a superposition (meaning it exists partly as each simultaneously) of "decayed nucleus" and "undecayed nucleus". However, when the box is opened the experimenter sees only a "decayed nucleus/dead cat" or an "undecayed nucleus/living cat."
The question is: when does the system stop existing as a mixture of states and become one or the other? (See basis function.) The purpose of the experiment is to illustrate a paradox; as Schrödinger wrote, "The (wavefunction) for the entire system (has) the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts".[1] Because we cannot get along without making classical approximations, quantum mechanics is incomplete without some rules to relate the classical and quantum descriptions. One way of looking at this connection is to say that the wavefunction collapses and the cat becomes dead or remains alive instead of a mixture of both.

The point of view that this thought experiment most clearly refutes is that the laws of physics are different for experiments than for other interactions. An autopsy would (if a thought experiment could actually kill a cat) show a time of death that would be before the opening of the box.

The original article appeared in the German magazine Naturwissenschaften ("Natural Sciences") in 1935: E. Schrödinger: "Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik" ("The present situation in quantum mechanics"), Naturwissenschaften, 48, 807, 49, 823, 50, 844 (November 1935). It was intended as a discussion of the EPR article published by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in the same year. Apart from introducing the cat, Schrödinger also coined the term "entanglement" (German: Verschränkung) in his article.

Albert Einstein was impressed; in a letter to Schrödinger dated 1950 he wrote:

You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality - if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality - reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.

[cornflakegirl]

katzg - we did this on my course. the scenario was - the transporter works by simultaneously separating / destroying your atoms and creating / assembling atoms in the same pattern at the destination. one day it malfunctions - the person is created at the other end, but the atoms at the sending end aren't destroyed. however, they are fatally damaged, so you will die in three days. but it's okay, because your copy, with all of your memories, brain activity etc, will continue to exist at the other end...

the lecturer was trying to argue that the idea of "me" being the sum of my mental activity was counter-intuitive - and that our identity is actually in our body. didn't really like that idea any more though... seems to lead to equally counter-intuitive conclusions...