Here lies one of your worst sins against rigor: claiming that the weight of the evidence comes down “much more significantly” to one side or another requires rigorous, formal analysis via e.g., Bayesian statistics. So does statements like
The bolded part requires rigorous analysis to support. It could very well be that in the end the evidence is not good enough on either directions, i.e., your prior dominates.
I don’t have much interests in arguing with you on where the weight of the arguments lie (or whether your arguments are even valid to begin with), so don’t involve me in them, but the others seem to be interested in this.
I agree that there is a mind independent reality. But I don’t see what the sun has to do with it. When we talk about the sun, we single out a portion of reality and name it “the sun”. And those operations all seem mind dependent.
I think the argument I laid out provides a reasonable case for the significant amount of evidence concerning the metaphysical position of absolute space. It may not meet your requirements as a professor for rigor, but in my opinion it’s rigor is sufficient to establish that it’s a reasonably good probability.
That’s all the rigor I require, and I would argue all that most reasonably educated people in general would require. If all the empirical evidence points in one direction, I think it’s pretty safe to say that following that evidence where it’s leading is a pretty reasonable position to take. Anyhow, thanks for the input.
Location: a particular place or position. Would you agree that it’s reasonable to think that there are particular places or positions that exists?
Oh, OK. Thanks for the thoughtful and relevant questions you asked.
Good question. I guess the first thing is to establish if it is an object as a whole or not. On the whole it seems there are individual electrical and magnetic waves that are located at every point in the visible universe. I’m not sure you could consider them interconnected to each other to make up one object overall as in the case of a solid object where the atoms and molecules are all interconnected to make up one object overall. How do you see it?
Is a cloud an “object” or a collection of water droplets?
Is a wall an “object” or a stack of bricks?
Is a star an “object” or a gravitationally bounded ball of plasma?
Is a magnetic field an “object”?
I think that you need to sharpen up your definitions.
Object: a material thing that can be seen and touched.
By that definition all of your examples but the magnetic field would be an object, although a star would only be touchable in principle, not in practice. That definition I think would exclude the CMB as well.
So if something is real, exists, is easily observed and tested, but cannot be “seen or touched” (I assume by human senses) such as radio waves, etc., but is not an “object” - what is it?
You seem to be talking about a place that you cannot reliably locate because it is moving; a place where you cannot specify its coordinates or other particulars because it is moving. Yet you want to say that this is a particular place or location that exists.
Maybe I’m just confused, but I am having difficulty making sense of this.
As so often in these discussions I see immense confusion between things (‘objects’) that independently exist out there in the physical world, and things that exist as thoughts in our minds. Reification is alive and well and living in Paris (1500 paces to the left of the Eiffeltower, to be precise).
Locations are one way in we, humans, decribe relations between objects. Locations don’t exist as things, and they don’t exist independently from human thought and conventions. Leave the humans out, and what remains is Nature going about its business, something that works very well without anyone bothering about what is where.
If it’s something other than what can be defined as an object then it would obviously have to be defined in some other way. Just because it doesn’t fit a particular definition doesn’t mean there’s no other way to define it. And unless you see something I don’t, it seems to me the standard definition of object works fine for the argument I’m making. That’s really all that is required is it not?
As far as I can tell the confusion is coming from getting mixed up as to what the question is that’s being asked. It’s not about what I, or anyone else can or cannot do. It’s about if and how something exists. Just because I can’t locate something due to limitations does that entail that no location exists? Just because I, or anyone else can’t see beyond the event horizon does that entail nothing exists beyond that point?
We cannot empirically verify whether or not absolute locations exist. So the first place to look for clues as to if and how they exist is by looking at things we can verify that are relevant to what we’re investigating. And what we can verify is that there are objective locations. And the fact that we can only verify objective locations seems to me to be a pretty good indication that absolute locations exist.
Given how you have defined the terms Objective and Absolute, I have a problem with premise one, which leads to a problem with premise two.
I think premise 1 should say:
All empirical evidence is of objects existing in objective relative locations in space
That is to say, the positions of objects are objective in the sense that we can each independently verify them, but those positions can only be determined in relation to other objects. Hence all objective positions of objects only make sense as relative positions.
This then leads immediately to a problem with premise two, because now it is not at all implied that there are absolute locations in space, exactly because the positions of objects are relative.
With this correction I think your argument fails to establish that space itself is fundamentally absolute. It might be that space really is absolute, that is to say (given your definition of absolute) that space’s existence is not dependent on any relationship, though I do not think your argument can establish that.
I’m afraid I fail to see what the problem is with your objection in regards to the argument I’m making. Just because as humans we can only make sense of locations of objects relative to the position of other objects doesn’t change the fact that if they are verified locations they are therefore objective.
Either they are or they are not verified regardless of the method used to verify them. And if verified, that makes them objective. Unless you want to say that in the practice of relativistic mechanics, or even Newtonian mechanics for that matter, objectivity doesn’t exist, or that verification isn’t possible because of relativity of positions.
So as far as I can tell, unless it can be shown that it’s not possible to verify locations, or that verification doesn’t entail objectivity, then as long as it’s a verified location, it’s an objective location, regardless of the methods used in the verification process.
I’m not questioning their positions being objective facts, but their absoluteness (their non-dependence on relationships).
Their positions in relation to other objects, is what is objective. But that does not make their positions in space absolute. And your second premise (which is taking the first premise as it’s basis) is saying there is good evidence that there are absolute locations in space, but this doesn’t follow from your first premise when the empirical evidence for the objective positions of objects consist of measurements done in relation to other objects.
Hmm. It seems to me the reasoning here is a little unclear. So you’re saying that the locations are objective facts, but they’re not really because they’re arrived at through measurements in relation to other objects.
Seems to me that either they are objective facts or they are not objective facts. Not sure how it can be both ways? That seems a bit incoherent to me. The question is, are they or are they not objective facts. If they are, then the argument is still intact. I don’t see that you’ve shown otherwise.
Just because the objectivity is arrived at through measurements relative to other objects doesn’t seem to me to negate the fact that they are objective. That can be used as evidence in an argument against absolute locations, but that’s not relevant evidence against objective locations. Sorry, I just don’t buy that.
No. I see that my previous sentence can be understood ambigously, so perhaps I have expressed myself unclearly. I am not questioning the objectivity of their relative positions. I am questioning their positions being absolute. This is about relative vs absolute, not about objective vs subjective.
Their relative positions are objective facts. I would completely agree with you there. But it seems to me that their absolute positions in space are not, exactly because we can only establish their positions in relation to other objects. Thus the evidence we use to establish their positions cannot be said to constitute evidence for absolute positions in space, only evidence for relative positions in space.
Again I must also emphasize, their positions in space really might be absolute (I can’t really say I have any prejudice against that). But we cannot derive that conclusion merely from observing relative positions in space.
OK. I’m not claiming that absolute locations are objective facts. The argument I’m making is not a deductive argument so I have no problem with that. I’m saying that objective locations are evidence to support the position that the ontology of locations is absolute.
I still cannot see how objective locations are any evidence of absolute locations. Are you saying that there is some primal, absolute cosmic benchmark from which all other absolute locations derive?
I suspect that you have not delved deeply into the mathmatical bases of the concepts of space, points, locations, distances, directions and higher-dimension geometrical objects (triangles, rectangles, cubes, spheres, vectors, tensors, etc.).
Two key elements of spatial understanding and analyses are manifolds and metrics. A manifold is like the blackboard we use to do our math (a plane, a sphere, a torus…) and the metric is the mathmatical tool kit we use to describe and manipulate geometrical objects.
This metric can be applied to any smooth, differentiable manifold.
If you walk into this mathmatical forest, first explored by Leonhard Euler in the 18th century, you will never find any “absolute locations”. No such animal exists in these woods.
As I’ve pointed out before, this is not a physics question, it is a metaphysical question. It’s not about how to measure movement relative to locations. It’s about existence. Do locations exist because of the relations they stand in, or do they exist in an independent way from those relationships?
That’s a metaphysical question, not a physics question. It is something beyond our capacity to access in an empirical manner so it can only be investigated by looking at the evidence. Mathematical equations are not evidence in themselves. They are not observations. They simply describe what’s observed.
That definition I think would exclude the CMB as well.