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22nd May 2018, 03:50 PM | #281 |
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There is a considerable grammatical difference between the two statements. If I use the phrase "as a naive realist" I am suggesting that I am a naive realist, and what I am doing is being done in the context of being a naive realist. On the other hand, saying "like a naive realist" implies that I am not a naive realist, but what I am doing is being done in a way that is similar to the way that a naive realist would do it.
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22nd May 2018, 10:15 PM | #282 |
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23rd May 2018, 12:13 AM | #283 |
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Well what is your point then? Because it is If you want to obtain the most accurate and detailed understanding of anything in the world around us, and want to avoid being deceived by your senses and your previous beliefs (inc. beliefs from ancient philosophy), then mankind has learned from hundreds & thousands of years of study, that the only viable & "proven" successful way to do that is through science, and definitely NOT through philosophy (or by theistic beliefs) ... ... so your point should have been to say that it's science that overwhelmingly achieves what you are asking for, and in stark contrast it is philosophy that has failed totally & utterly to achieve, discover, or explain any of that at all. |
23rd May 2018, 12:38 AM | #284 |
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Well you are now reduced to just talking about what the lable "philosophy" meant to people in the distant past (starting from thousands of years ago). But we are not talking about whether early "scientists" like Newton or Dalton, or even Darwin were usually called "natural philosophers" ... we are talking about the difference in the approach, the methods, and the principles which those people used compared to the way earlier philosophers had attempted to determine what they believed to be the "truths" about the world around us ... ... the difference is that those people started to use experimental analytical & mathematical methods, by which they attempted to remove factors of bias and pre-concieved beliefs of the experimenter. That was a huge difference in approach from what most philosophers had done before, and it was that difference of approach that eventually became refined and improved to provide what we now call "science". And the reason why it now has a separate description/lable as "science" and why it's no longer called "natural philosophy", is because it was eventually realised that the new approach of science was, and is, fundamentally different to the earlier approach of most philosophers ... and it is that fundamental, and actually quite enormous, difference that lead to science succeeding beyond anyones wildest dreams, whereas philosophy, for all of it's thousands of years of effort, had in fact failed utterly and completely at ever truly discovering or accurately explaining anything at all about the world around us. |
23rd May 2018, 01:37 AM | #285 |
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Well, more specifically it's the genetic fallacy: evaluating something based on what it used to be, or what it originated as, or what it's long past merits may have once been.
Thing is, "astronomy" also branched out from "astrology", but, well, they're no longer equal alternatives. "Chemistry" branched out from "alchemy", but, well, same deal. Not saying philosophy is yet on par with those, but there is no shortage of people treating philosophy even less rigorously than astrology or alchemy were treated in, say, Newton's time. |
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23rd May 2018, 03:15 AM | #286 |
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The idea that appearances or sens data are not reality is not an invention of science. It was a commonplace in Greek philosophy. The problem was whether human knowledge is limited to appearances or has a method for reaching the thing as it is.
To answer this question, one must have studied philosophy, because science is not in charge of solving it. |
23rd May 2018, 05:00 AM | #287 |
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Actually, to answer the question, we built machines that show us what we're missing. The ancient greeks did have the questions, but it turns out that answering out of the ass was not always giving the correct answers.
Look, unlike Ian, I actually like philosophy for its asking the questions. But when it comes to answering those, it's all over the place. I think some of us can be excused if we like our answers tested against reality, or if we like an honest "hell if we know, and it doesn't matter anyway" if there is no measurable difference that that answer actually makes. |
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23rd May 2018, 05:02 AM | #288 |
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It's not that academic philosophy (i.e. the ideas taught in university courses and which are associated with famous named philosophers over the last 2500 years) is the worst thing ever to be proposed, supported and acclaimed in mans history. But what has happened, is that the discovery of modern science (“modern” as opposed to the rudimentary ideas of science which some philosophers were using even in biblical times) has really “pulled the rug away from under the feet of philosophy” …
… what was once hoped to be achieved through philosophy, but never actually achieved at all by that means, was in the end achieved, and achieved far beyond anyone's wildest imagination, by switching to a more objective & analytical approach that we now know as science. And really to the extent that it's now hard to think of anything at all that could be better studied or more correctly understood by any other approach that is not scientific. On which point it seems to me that claims saying “oh, but X,Y & Z are outside the remit of science … science cannot tell us the answers, it cannot tell us what we “ought” to do … these are questions for philosophy and not for science...”, are just bogus and quite pompous nonsense – there is rarely if ever any genuine honest reason why any of those questions/things are somehow “outside the remit of science” as if there was/is some inherent fundamental reason why such questions cannot be answered by science but where (it is claimed) that philosophy is the way to discover the right/true answers. That does not mean that scientists in general are willing to spend their valuable reseach time, research facilities (equipment and expert technicians), and research $£-grants investigating every claim made by such philosophers, because, frankly, most real research scientists have far better things to do than debunking things like solipsism. But what it does mean, is that if philosophers or others really want to know why scientists do think the world as we detect it is indeed “real”, and is almost certainly close to being exactly as we perceive it to be and/or as science detects it to be, then scientists can show you the results from literally hundreds of thousands of papers that explain in the most astonishing and irrefutable detail exactly why we do think all the major theories of science are indeed correct. |
23rd May 2018, 07:06 AM | #289 |
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Maybe the answer to the quest for a universal method to know the things such as they are is that we have not any answer. But this answer is the result of no scientific enquiry, but the conclusion of centuries of philosophy. Whether it is true or not.
It is curious to see how certain scientists claim for the end of philosophy... writing books on philosophy. |
23rd May 2018, 07:23 AM | #290 |
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23rd May 2018, 07:31 AM | #291 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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23rd May 2018, 08:20 AM | #292 |
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23rd May 2018, 08:33 AM | #293 |
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To my way of thinking, the aim of philosophy is conceptual and phenomenological cohesion.
Given that neither science nor philosophy possesses an epistemological foundation, but rather consists in circular processes of justification that involve psychologically relating to the world, I do not recognise an ultimate distinction between science, psychology and philosophy. |
23rd May 2018, 08:36 AM | #294 |
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Philosophers of the past have posed problems that science cannot solve? Well, guess what … any of us can pose countless “problems” (i.e. ask questions about the universe) that science does not at present claim to entirely “solve”. That was never the issue.
The issue is – what does philosophy produce as answers superior to science, for anything that anyone could honestly claim as a “real” (or even “apparently” real) process, event, or object/thing in the known universe? For example – science does not yet claim to have a universally agreed answer for exactly how the first living organisms appeared on this planet (though there are a number of very good tentative explanations, all backed by varying amounts of solid experimental data and all extensively published in the research journals … so it's not as if science has no answer to that question) … so what is the superior explanation/answer from philosophy? Or … until about 50 years ago scientists were not all agreed on the so-called Big Bang as the most likely origin of the universe, and similarly in the 1930's the age of the universe was thought to be about 1.8 billion years (based on estimates of the Hubble Constant). Now of course the Big Bang is universally accepted as very likely indeed, and the calculated age of the universe is close to 13.8 billion years (and that is expected to be fairly accurate). So … what were/are the philosophical estimates for any of that through the 1930's until today, and what do those philosophers show as their calculations and methods for how they arrived at their alternative answers? |
23rd May 2018, 09:00 AM | #295 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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23rd May 2018, 09:44 AM | #296 |
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Science does not have a physical definition for what problems are, let alone for philosophical problems, that is necessary to pose the question objectively.
I therefore must interpret your question as being conceptual and a priori, and hence as being a philosophical question concerning the nature of philosophy. So your own question should be a suitable exemplar for answering your question. To my mind, the only pertinent scientific task concerning the nature of philosophy is to give a description of philosophical behaviour and to identify its causes. In particular, it is the task of behavioural neuro-psychology to explain the order and predictability of philosophical discourse that is shared across many cultures over thousands of years. |
23rd May 2018, 10:18 AM | #297 |
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Actually, you'll find that
1. If you want to find out what's common among cultures, you'd be better advised asking someone who actually studies those cultures. You know, an anthropologist. 2. There isn't much in common across cultures when it comes to philosophy. A formal system of logic to use in philosophy, for example, actually appeared in exactly one place in human history: Greece. And only because they had a kind of trial by jury where a good sophist could get you convicted of being TOO gay (not a joke; it happened verbatim) or whatever. So it became kinda important to find a way to argue guilt or no guilt that didn't depend on who's better at appealing to emotions and consequences or is just more popular. But even otherwise, for example Chinese philosophy was a very different beast than Greek one, even before everything else than Confucianism was suppressed. (And afterwards, frankly Confucianism is to philosophy what Trump's pining for the good ol' 50's is to philosophy.) |
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23rd May 2018, 04:01 PM | #298 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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23rd May 2018, 09:46 PM | #299 |
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But what kind of philosophy are you talking about? Looks like you has stayed in Aristotle. I repeat: why don't you take a look at Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy and update yourself a bit. Especially Chapter XV: “The Value of Philosophy”. You will easily find it online.
Contemporary philosophy doesn't interfere with science about facts. Its function is analytical and critical. Philosophy is not “superior” to science —what a strange idea! It is different. NOTE: I speak of Western philosophy. I don't know the so called Eastern Philosophies, but I think they are other different thing more like religion than philosophy. |
23rd May 2018, 10:03 PM | #300 |
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From the Table of Contents of Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy:
I. APPEARANCE AND REALITY. II. THE EXISTENCE OF MATTER . III. THE NATURE OF MATTER. IV. IDEALISM. V. KNOWLEDGE BY ACQUAINTANCE AND KNOWLEDGE BY DESCRIPTION. VI. ON INDUCTION. VII. ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF GENERAL PRINCIPLES. VIII. HOW A PRIORI KNOWLEDGE IS POSSIBLE. IX. THE WORLD OF UNIVERSALS. X. ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF UNIVERSALS. XI. ON INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE. XII. TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD. XIII. KNOWLEDGE, ERROR, AND PROBABLE OPINION. XIV. THE LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHICAL KNOWLEDGE. There are more —Russell doesn’t enter in aesthetics or ethics because he focuses on epistemology— but this gives an idea. |
24th May 2018, 12:02 AM | #301 |
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It's quite worthless for philosophers to make lists of questions about the universe which they themselves cannot answer. That is utterly trivial, and even school children can do that all day long.
The difficult bit is to accurately study the world around us and discover real explanations and answers to such questions. And so far science has been astonishingly successful at doing precisely that … whereas philosophy has been an abject 100% failure. Though here, the main role of philosophy seems to be nothing more than trying to talk every subject into oblivion with the utterly childish aim of getting the last word in every possible discussion. |
24th May 2018, 01:10 AM | #302 |
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24th May 2018, 01:14 AM | #303 |
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Surely "the nature of matter" is very much a question of science? One that's led to all sorts of answers, the most recent of which (of which I'm aware) being the existence of the Higgs boson. I'm pretty sure a big particle accelerator was required to establish the existence of that, and that no amount of philosophy by itself ever would have.
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24th May 2018, 01:15 AM | #304 |
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I don't trust atoms. They make up everything. |
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24th May 2018, 01:15 AM | #305 |
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Sorted out quite some time ago - reality as perceived at human scale and sensitivity of our sensory organs only encompasses a small part of reality.
What's the problem? If it is "why is there matter" - the answer would depend on what your definition of "matter" is. If the question is more fundamental "why is there anything?" philosophy will have to first of all show that is in fact a valid question. If it is what is matter then again sorted out some time ago, we now know the building blocks of "matter". That's not a question for science as idealism is a philosophy not (as many people try to pretend) an explanatory/descriptive theory of reality that has predictive power. Going through your list as just titles is very hard to know what the problem is, I've had to make too many assumptions above so I think you need to provide some more detail on what these "problems" are that "science" can't deal with. |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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24th May 2018, 01:19 AM | #306 |
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In context of this discussion at this moment it is something that science can "answer", outside of that I'm not at the moment interested in other meanings and context. It is up to people who claim that philosophy deals with (to paraphrase) "problems science can't deal with" to provide the evidence for their claims.
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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24th May 2018, 01:46 AM | #307 |
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No of course it's not "merely a description of history". That's just about the most daft thing I've ever seen posted here. And no, we are not going to "raise your stakes" ... where what you really mean is "lets all talk about philosophy, let us drag you all into a "me, me, me, Look at Me! Look at Me" obsession with the useless talking-shop that is academic philosophy" ... ... no, instead you go and do some real work and actually discover and explain something about the world (e.g. try designing some experimental way to observe and explain how a Higgs Field can form during the inflationary stage of the Big Bang). |
24th May 2018, 01:48 AM | #308 |
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24th May 2018, 02:43 AM | #309 |
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I don't trust atoms. They make up everything. |
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24th May 2018, 02:57 AM | #310 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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24th May 2018, 03:10 AM | #311 |
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Ah yes the "Everything is philosophy, ergo you can't argue against any philosophy" argument.
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24th May 2018, 04:38 AM | #312 |
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The immediate assumption that "Methodology X must be flawed/incomplete because it can't answer Question Y" is a common one that Woo Slingers hide behind.
It is possible to formulate a meaningless question, it's not even a particularly impressive and it's certainly not proof that methodology is wrong. "Science is flawed/incomplete because it can't answer <insert woo here>" is as meaningless as saying cartography is flawed because it can't tell you what's North of the North Pole. It doesn't mean cartography as a concept is incomplete because there's obviously something North of the North pole that some entirely new methodology has to come along and answer. It means there isn't anything North of the North Pole. |
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24th May 2018, 04:48 AM | #313 |
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Well, as I was saying, I'm not opposed to having some guys who are good at asking the non-obvious questions.
Just at some point you have to realize that the reason a question can't be answered is that it literally makes no difference. E.g., is matter just a simulation? Well, if we can't answer that it's because it literally makes no difference. As in there is no difference you could measure between X and a completely accurate simulation of X. I which case, really it doesn't matter. It makes no difference either way. |
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24th May 2018, 04:52 AM | #314 |
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Indeed.
To what degree "Science" is accountable (by things other than "More science") for "questions it can't answer" is... debatable at best. To what degree it is accountable to distinctions without difference is not. Zero. The answer is zero. |
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24th May 2018, 07:07 AM | #315 |
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Only if you think that all babies are born as instant philosophers on the basis that from day one they automatically begin thinking for themselves and making logical considered decisions. IOW - you are just trying the perennial philosophers dodge/deceit of trying to claim that scientists and everyone else are all relying on philosophy merely because we have the brain capacity (and sensory system) to be consciously aware of our surroundings (like all other mammals) and to make logical reasoned decisions about all that we do from one moment to the next ... ... if that is all that philosophy is, then it's not something that any of us ever needed to be taught in a university degree course. And nor do scientists need any philosophy professors to tell them what questions they should be asking about the nature of the universe. However, on the contrary, all philosophy professors have been in 100% need of scientists explaining to philosophers (and to everyone else) literally hundreds of thousands of important questions and hundreds of thousands of the most astonishingly detailed answers, explanations & solutions, none of which any of those philosophers had even foggiest notion of or any comprehension of at all. |
24th May 2018, 07:20 AM | #316 |
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There is no unified scientific concept of matter. Different branches of science operate with different concepts, often incompatible to each other. But if you want to take a position on dualism or idealism, you need a unified concept of matter. Things are so intrincate that Heisenberg -- you know, Werner Heinsenberg, a scientist-- came to think that matter could be a mathematic form similar of Plato's ideas. Amazing, is it not?
Philosophy will not give you an empirically verified answer. That is not its intention, although you seem to think so and speak of a prehistoric philosophy. But it will help you to maintain a coherent position so that you don't talk nonsense and commonplace as naive realism. That is something. Oh yes; you don't need philosophy to speak about baseball or pretty girls. Or perhaps, yes. It depends of your level of abstraction. |
24th May 2018, 07:33 AM | #317 |
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That is totally untrue, we know what the building blocks of matter are and can use those ideas to make predictive models that allow - for example - us to communicate on our semi-conductor based devices.
Well we do have such a unified concept of matter but that aside. If you want to say idealism or dualism are possible descriptors of reality you need to provide the evidence for that. "Science" can and does provide overwhelming amount of evidence to support its understanding of how, what and why reality works. Lots of people have lots of ideas, did his ideas pan out, did they work at modeling and predicting the world around us? I know - which is why I said "idealism" is not a descriptive model/predictor of reality despite people making the rather naive assumption it is, it's a philosophy - a thinking about thinking. The day you can predict/model/control the world better via a philosophy than via what we currently have I'll be the first to jump on the bandwagon. It has had literally thousands of years to try and show it can model and predict actual reality, and not one "philosophy" has - granted I can only say so far - done that. As a way to understand reality philosophy fails, as a way to understand some forms of thinking and argumentation it has some good uses. It is when folk try to take it beyond what it claims it can do that it appears to fail. That isn't the fault of philosophy that is the fault of those that don't understand what it can do and what it can't do. |
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24th May 2018, 07:34 AM | #318 |
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There is not a single scientific study about the nature of the whole universe.
There are studies on partial aspects of the universe. There are scientists that study galaxies. There are scientifics that study protons. ADDED: Different fields of science use the term matter in different, and sometimes incompatible, ways. Some of these ways are based on loose historical meanings, from a time when there was no reason to distinguish mass from simply a quantity of matter. As such, there is no single universally agreed scientific meaning of the word "matter". Scientifically, the term "mass" is well-defined, but "matter" can be defined in several ways. (From Wiki). |
24th May 2018, 07:37 AM | #319 |
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24th May 2018, 07:52 AM | #320 |
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Heisenberg:
"I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language". You can work on this basis. Easy, is it not? Mybe this add: A list of different scientific objects that would fall under the concept of matter (difficult to encompass in a single concept): Waves of probability points of singularity in space-time corpuscles mass energy force fields atoms and subatomic particles electromagnetic waves photons antiparticles black holes vacuum etc., etc., etc., etc. |
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