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Illusions
Qingu
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
1. The world is flat.
2. There is an ocean above the sky.
3. The sun revolves around the earth.
4. The stars are tiny lamps.
5. Motions on earth are different from motions in the heavens.
6. Complex things must have been created by more complex things.
7. Matter is solid.
8. Space and time are absolute.
9. Space and time are different structures.
10. A descriptive theory can be both complete and consistent.
11. Life is fundamentally different from nonlife.
12. There is such a thing as "nothingness."
13. You have a soul that is separate from your brain activity.
14. A "code" representing reality is different from "reality."
Discuss: what are some of your favorite illusions? Preferably metaphysical illusions (as opposed to magic tricks).
2. There is an ocean above the sky.
3. The sun revolves around the earth.
4. The stars are tiny lamps.
5. Motions on earth are different from motions in the heavens.
6. Complex things must have been created by more complex things.
7. Matter is solid.
8. Space and time are absolute.
9. Space and time are different structures.
10. A descriptive theory can be both complete and consistent.
11. Life is fundamentally different from nonlife.
12. There is such a thing as "nothingness."
13. You have a soul that is separate from your brain activity.
14. A "code" representing reality is different from "reality."
Discuss: what are some of your favorite illusions? Preferably metaphysical illusions (as opposed to magic tricks).
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15. The flat earth rests on the back of a giant space tortoise.
I have been known as a jester.
Religion doesn't have to enter into this thread. I mean, the first illusions I posted were codified in a number of religious texts (including the Bible), but they were also widely believed by non-religious philosophers for a long time. Plus, not many religious people on D&D anyway.
I'm hoping to hear from people who actually have a scientific or mathematical background. There's got to be lots of cooler math illusions than just the Godel Incompleteness Theorem.
Brandeen! The computer box man say it's okay!
For any time, there must be a time just before it.
Causality exists (because it doesn't, according to some 4-dimensional theories!)
We have/don't have free will (this one is hard).
Consciousness never permanently terminates (seriously, it's hard to imagine how it does).
We can know the world around us through our sense perceptions (this one is also hard!)
Already have. Though its a second cousin, but still I would like the taboo gone.
I actually sympathize with the Calvinist-style religious claims about free will—or lack thereof—with this one. Because I'm basically a materialistic determinist; on a non-quantum scale, everything is determined by physical laws, and there's no evidence that our brains operate on a quantum scale. So this would seem to preclude free will.
On the other hand, it's possible to think of our consciousness—including our perception of "choosing"—as something like a mirror being held up to our brain activity. When I make a choice, that choice isn't so much an illusion. Rather, it's a simulation of a mechanical process going on inside my head. We "experience" choice in the same way that we "experience" hunger or other sensory experiences our brains manufacture. That doesn't mean that I don't make choices—it just means you have to change the location of the "I." My choice-maker "I" exists in the material structure and activity of my brain—not my brain's simulation of that activity, which I experience as consciousness.
Oh yes please can we debate free will again?
I think that this one, at least, treads on an equivocation on the meaning of the term 'solid.' Matter is solid, in the everyday sense. The only sense in which it is mostly empty space is one employing molecular theory--and that latter sense has no obvious reason to correspond to our workaday use of the term.
So, you think that time is more than a human creation thought up to measure how things "age" and change?
Do you therefore believe that there was a "beginning" to everything, and that there will at some point be an "end"?
Apparently most of the people he talks to along the way ask him about whether or not you're allowed to marry your cousins in England; how far removed the cousin has to be; how much you have to pay your cousin's father to marry her, etc. It was funny, but it also makes sense since these people live in tiny social groups and marrying your cousin is probably impossible to avoid for them.
I agree insofar as I think that the free-will debate hinges on questions of personal identity--namely, what "I" am, and what it means for an action to have been done by me.
Beyond that, it is very complicated.
I think he means it in the wave-particle duality sense.
Why do you disagree that they're illusions? I mean, I'm happy to debate them.
It's funny because I was a republican before I started debating on message boards.
Edit: And a catholic.
Sort of like what Omar Khayyam said:
'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
Welcome to relativity. Old news. The laws of thermodynamics only really work on certain scales.
Maybe you should leave out the crap about heliocentrism and sky-oceans and pick whichever one of those latter items you really wanted to talk about and flesh it out a little more. As evidenced by many posts above, a lot of people aren't even sure what you meant by some of them.
I meant that what we perceive as "matter" is actually empty space with a scant few particles of matter. A table seems solid because of electromagnetic forces that repel the atoms in my hand from the atoms in my table. So in one sense, they don't actually ever "touch" each other; touch is an illusion.
But in another sense which Mr. Mister points out, this is simply what our perception of "touch" is. Our brains have evolved to represent the physical phenomenon of electromagnetic repulsion in the form of "touching" and "contact"; our eyes have evolved to perceive matter as "solid," and in the sense of human experience, this "illusion" is perfectly functional.
One huge area in which human reasoning tends to fail is understanding statistics. The Harvard Medical school case is a good example of how hard it is to understand base rates.
I'm actually neither a physicist or mathematician, but I'd like to discuss it none the less.
Matt: So what are you saying then? Just because you answered the second question with "if" the conservation of mass law is true doesn't mean you are right or that you have proved anything, and I don't think that's factually based. You also didn't answer the first question.
The first law of thermodynamics is conservation of energy. Are you taking that and adding mass/energy equivalency and arriving at conservation of mass?