BBella\'s Universe (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Friday, December 02, 2011, 03:11 (4719 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: There is ALWAYS a pattern. Always. We may not recognize it as such, but it is most certainly there.

DHW

I wrote that once you take into account the unanswerable questions, “there is NO fixable pattern.” Perhaps I should have written “no FIXABLE pattern”. There are lots of patterns, and no-one knows which is the right one. The closer you look at the points to be joined, the more flexible the patterns become.

And keep your hands off my chocolate.

Not sure what you mean by fixable in this context, honestly. I don't honestly think that there is more than one pattern to any given thing. I think we SEE different patterns because we can not separate the subsequent influences from the root.

I both agree and disagree with your words here. Firstly: If you know Calculus, you know that differentation and integration are really the SAME operation done in two different directions. In this sense, it agrees with your idea of only one pattern.

I get what you're driving at here. You're really talking about a kind of Nietzschean Perspectivism... the truth is revealed through looks at many different angles. This is both a symptom and a cause of our humanity and our ego. (We only see the things that make sense to us.)

Where I diverge is the idea that there is ONLY one pattern. A cloud can exhibit multiple patterns:

1. Weather--tells you about the state of the upper atmosphere.
2. Shape--might look like a rabbit.
3. It's direction, if visible, might indicate future weather.
4. How we should make our next cosmic decisions.

Clearly, the issue is WHICH pattern is really valid or pertinent...

To give it a rather lame mathematical expression(Xeno could probably do better):

y=X^2+Z^3

Don't give me too much credit. Einstein failing math in high school was a myth, but I retook algebra 4x before passing...

And then I end up working on mathematical problems for a researcher in Graph theory... FML...

X^2 + Z^3 will ALWAYS produce Y.. always. And if you knew Y & Z You could always figure out X precisely. The problem is that Y is what we SEE, and the other side of the equal sign has countless variables. It doesn't change the fact that there is 1 and only 1 correct value for Y given any set of variables. Even when we KNOW some of the variables, we do not know them all. The major downfall of science is that it takes a piece of a system and tries to make rules and laws to govern it without understand the system as a whole. In that respect, it is no different than the medical field. You can diagnose a patient with diabetes. You can even diagnose that they are producing not enough(or too much) insulin. But unless you can diagnose WHY they are not producing the correct amount of insulin, and continuously ask why until you have identified ever variable and gotten to the root of the issue, you will never be able to treat the disease, only the symptoms. Sometimes I wonder if Science is just asking the wrong questions...

You need to be a little more specific here... I get your overall meaning. I ask you the question, how do you know when you've reached an answer to your question? Medically speaking, you can just administer insulin without ever knowing that a faulty pancreas is the cause... you do raise a question I have asked constantly: At what point does a scientific question end?

I challenge: Never. Newton's equations work, but they don't explain gravity.

Just because you have a working model, NEVER means you've reached... "reality..."
"The thing in itself" as Kant would say.

(Sorry.. I know I got off track with my musings there... could you pass the chocolate :P)

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"