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

[JoolsToo]

well Joolstoo will die - I may come back as a meerkat but I won't be Joolstoo and that is a fact!

[MrsBigD]

my head hurts

though I love the Schroedingers Cat thing.

truth? if you're born you die?
matter of perspective isn't it? some people believe in reincarnation
also if you die does your soul?

Absolute truth?
eating lots of asparagus + drinking lots of water = very active bladder? and in some cases = very active bladder and pongy pee

Ergo truth is relativ which brings us back to that cat

better go and grab an ice pack for my head now

[cornflakegirl]

are you suggesting that's an absolute truth joolstoo? because i'd want to disagree? i think it's in the same league as "the sun rises every morning" - it always has so far, but that doesn't mean it always will...

[JoolsToo]

drat

if you're born you die

[JoolsToo]

if you're you die

[cornflakegirl]

i meant the point about telling the truth in court - should have made that clear! :)

[cornflakegirl]

btw - zippi - an hour and a half ago - i thought that was a really good point about truth! maybe we do have a use for a concept of truth that isn't Truth, after all :)

[QE]

if this thread is an explanation of truth then I am lying through my teeth for evermore!

[katzg]

i never got any of it!

[cornflakegirl]

zippi - don't think it's a choice really. numbers / maths can only express truth if truth really exists. they can't solve that philisophical point. it's just that if truth doesn't exist, the mathematicians are all on dodgy ground! :)

[cornflakegirl]

yeah, my lecturer pretty much discounted the soul. on the grounds that we intuitively feel that if there was another being who didn't have my body and didn't have my memories/thoughts, it just wouldn't feel like it was me. leaving no room for the soul as a separate entity.

wasn't convinced - identity seems to me to be such a tenuous concept - so hard to pin down - that i like the idea of something a bit mysterious that it resides in!

but - the car thing kind of throws a spanner in that - because identity there is also a tenuous concept, and i don't really want to say that the car has a soul!

[katzg]

the additional debate for the matter transporter is the soul - the transporter only moves matter and as the soul has no physical being it can't be transported and the person dies because their soul is ripped from their body.

The other one he had me, a materials scientist, trying to fathom is:

if a man repairs his car and throws the parts over his fence and his neighbour rebuilds the car as each piece is thrown over the fence, assuming that every piece is replaced and the neighbour uses only the original parts which is the real car.

[zippitippitoes]

so you have the choice of finding the absolute truth in maths/numbers or believing in god as an embodiment of absolute truth by which any other truth is measured?

[Tinker]

This is one of those threads where I'm able to read the individual words but can't understand them when put next to each other.

[cornflakegirl]

i think the bit about philosophy / physics was kind of where schroedinger was coming from. physicists express stuff precisely in equations, but they can't always tell you what it looks like in words. schroedinger was pointing out the discrepancy between the equations and our experience...

[zippitippitoes]

now truth seems to have been pushed aside by reality

[Blandmum]

hmmmmm, i think if you said 'soft end' to a physicist (the 'hard' end of science) they would beat you to death with a stick made of 'Dark Matter'

Just because they do it with maths you see!

[Tinker]

Someone reads my posts.

[zippitippitoes]

Iknew as soon as i posted that that you would say he wasn't a philosopher! But quantum physics does morph into the soft end of philosophy ..doesn't it?

[FlameBoo]

Brain has now turned to mush and is trickling out of my ears.....

[Blandmum]

Well, shroedinger was a physicist and was really interested in quantum theory, the cat bit was just by way of explanation i think

Best question and Answer from an exam that I have heard about was

Q. What is courage?

a. This is

[FrayedKnot]

I think I need to lie down in a darkened room afetr reading these few posts.

[zippitippitoes]

yes mb that's the one ...looking for it also came upon the interestingly elegant falling cat theorem and the cat with tails


why are philosophers so interested in cats?

[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...

[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.