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I don't get that, if there is no unambiguous link of cause and effect, what is there left to describe, or even observe ? I think that if someone is completely

I don't get that, if there is no unambiguous link of cause and effect, what is there left to describe, or even observe ? I think that if someone is completely unable to justify an observed truth to others, then it might not be a truth at all.

equanimitivity 3y ago
I used to think similarly, but learning about the proven incompleteness of sufficiently rigorous analytic systems has moved me towards appreciating less rigorous ways of interfacing with reality. Veritasium has a nice video on Godel’s incompleteness theorem. It’s quite ironic that it was mathematically provable that analytic systems can never be complete, and can’t be provably coherent. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo&pp=ygUUdmVyaXRhc2l1bSBob2xlIG1hdGg%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo&pp=ygUUdmVyaXRhc2l...
- thrance 3y ago
  Oh I studied this, I'm well aware of those theorems, and I don't think they are the death bell of logic some make them to be. If you somehow find an unprovable theorem (quite rare), you can always try with a different set of axioms. Mathematics are not about proving absolute truths of the universe but rather of pushing reasoning over a set of axioms the furthest possible. Also as a nitpick, analytic systems that don't contain arithmetic can be complete and proven coherent. As for the real world, facts that can neither be proven true nor false (existence of an immaterial soul for example), I think should be left at that. It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of. I leave that to religion/spirituality.
  - Ecoste 3y ago
    "It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of." And how do you know which things we can know of and which we cannot? Trusting your gut instinct on that isn't scientific. And why is speculating about immaterial things useless? I'm sure many great mathematicians heard some form of "what you're doing is useless and has no use or relation in the real world" especially in the realm of pure mathematics. You bring up the soul which is a convenient example, but let's instead use a concept which YOU know exists for yourself which is consciousness. Can we ever know anything more about the mystery of consciousness or life or why any of this world and universe exists? Are those unknowable? Should we not talk about them? Should we only try to apply the lens of science here and for some reason not try to advance our understanding using philosophy even though it might not be as formal and unambiguous as math?
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Yea, the previous posters take is just outright crazy to me.... Imagine reality as the problem space of all things that could exist within the constraints of physics. The problem with observational evidence that it is only providing a tiny window into what is possible, really only the most probable are going to be what you see for the most part. Philosophy gives a means of meta views of systems and simplified system views that allow us to find otherwise unreachable islands of what can exist in our reality.
    - thrance 3y ago
      Here is my reasoning: immaterial objects (such as the soul) are by definition outside of the material world, and thus unobservable. We can't ever (dis)prove the existence of an unobservable object. As for the other questions you mentioned, I still haven't found any reason to believe their answers are unkowable. If anyone disproves my first reasoning, I will have to consider the question of the soul as worth pursuing again. Just like in mathematics, if you have sufficient proof that a theorem is unprovable, it is useless trying to prove it! So no, I don't trust my gut feeling about wether or not to seek the answer to something.
  - gradus_ad 3y ago
    Consider turbulent systems, or systems which are affected by random processes. Such things exist in the world. The sorts of things I'm talking about as being beyond cause and effect or our ability to consider analytically are not merely the "big questions" but are real physical processes!
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    "death bell of logic some make them to be" Not death of logic, since logic is still consistent. Gödel didn't say math was wrong, just incomplete. So philosophy might step into the space beyond where a current logical set of axioms can reach. To explore something un-provable and maybe find a new set of axioms that were not reachable through logic built on the previous axioms.
Ecoste 3y ago
> I think that if someone is completely unable to justify an observed truth to others, then it might not be a truth at all. What if the observed truth that someone is trying to communicate is paradoxical and hard to communicate in and of itself? What if the truth is ambiguous? What constitutes ambiguous or unambiguous? At the end of the day ambiguity is a real concept, so is a paradox, therefore there will exist things that are ambiguous and paradoxical and pointing that out does have value.
- Kranar 3y ago
  There is no reason that ambiguities or paradoxes can't be expressed analytically and formally. Math and computer science are full of such things and they are celebrated. Being hard to communicate is precisely why it's important to communicate rigorously and formally.
  - Ecoste 3y ago
    We have a ton of examples of great mathematicians who also happened to be great philosophers and vice-versa. Some philosophers also tried to incorporate mathematical symbols and such into their work. We value both their philosophical works and mathematical works. They were smart people and chose different mediums to express different concepts. How can you try to explore the ego, consciousness, unconsciousness, dreams, suffering, life's purpose, subjective beauty, symbolism, truth, religion, god, ethics and whatever else that is not easily formalized? We might very well arrive at a formal and unambiguous description of these sometime in the far future, so are we not supposed to at least try to talk about these concepts now? You use different tools for different concepts, and science and philosophy is just 2 of those tools. At the end of the day philosophy undeniably changed the world, so there is at least some value to it. Philosophy is not anti-logic, it is very much for logic.
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    What is a person? It is a practical question. Sometimes we need to have or choose a hard answer to make a decision. It inevitably isn't going to be solved formally. Any more than what is the dividing line between a chair and not-chair. Many patterns we encounter have fuzzy non-formal edges. Perfect consensus is impossible, but any consensus is valuable. So we invent and argue about the "best" way to "understand" these things. These arguments are partly objective, partly subjective, partly emergent, and partly just farmed out to favorite "authorities" or social pressure. But important and unavoidable. -- At the highest level, even how we percieve reality is important. It impacts our values, our motivations, our ethics, how we cope with events, etc. Trickling down to every day choices. "What is real?" ends up being an important question, no matter how lacking in formal rigor the answers we each have are.

equanimitivity 3y ago

I used to think similarly, but learning about the proven incompleteness of sufficiently rigorous analytic systems has moved me towards appreciating less rigorous ways of interfacing with reality. Veritasium has a nice video on Godel’s incompleteness theorem. It’s quite ironic that it was mathematically provable that analytic systems can never be complete, and can’t be provably coherent. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo&pp=ygUUdmVyaXRhc2l1bSBob2xlIG1hdGg%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo&pp=ygUUdmVyaXRhc2l...

thrance 3y ago
Oh I studied this, I'm well aware of those theorems, and I don't think they are the death bell of logic some make them to be. If you somehow find an unprovable theorem (quite rare), you can always try with a different set of axioms. Mathematics are not about proving absolute truths of the universe but rather of pushing reasoning over a set of axioms the furthest possible. Also as a nitpick, analytic systems that don't contain arithmetic can be complete and proven coherent. As for the real world, facts that can neither be proven true nor false (existence of an immaterial soul for example), I think should be left at that. It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of. I leave that to religion/spirituality.
- Ecoste 3y ago
  "It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of." And how do you know which things we can know of and which we cannot? Trusting your gut instinct on that isn't scientific. And why is speculating about immaterial things useless? I'm sure many great mathematicians heard some form of "what you're doing is useless and has no use or relation in the real world" especially in the realm of pure mathematics. You bring up the soul which is a convenient example, but let's instead use a concept which YOU know exists for yourself which is consciousness. Can we ever know anything more about the mystery of consciousness or life or why any of this world and universe exists? Are those unknowable? Should we not talk about them? Should we only try to apply the lens of science here and for some reason not try to advance our understanding using philosophy even though it might not be as formal and unambiguous as math?
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Yea, the previous posters take is just outright crazy to me.... Imagine reality as the problem space of all things that could exist within the constraints of physics. The problem with observational evidence that it is only providing a tiny window into what is possible, really only the most probable are going to be what you see for the most part. Philosophy gives a means of meta views of systems and simplified system views that allow us to find otherwise unreachable islands of what can exist in our reality.
  - thrance 3y ago
    Here is my reasoning: immaterial objects (such as the soul) are by definition outside of the material world, and thus unobservable. We can't ever (dis)prove the existence of an unobservable object. As for the other questions you mentioned, I still haven't found any reason to believe their answers are unkowable. If anyone disproves my first reasoning, I will have to consider the question of the soul as worth pursuing again. Just like in mathematics, if you have sufficient proof that a theorem is unprovable, it is useless trying to prove it! So no, I don't trust my gut feeling about wether or not to seek the answer to something.
- gradus_ad 3y ago
  Consider turbulent systems, or systems which are affected by random processes. Such things exist in the world. The sorts of things I'm talking about as being beyond cause and effect or our ability to consider analytically are not merely the "big questions" but are real physical processes!
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  "death bell of logic some make them to be" Not death of logic, since logic is still consistent. Gödel didn't say math was wrong, just incomplete. So philosophy might step into the space beyond where a current logical set of axioms can reach. To explore something un-provable and maybe find a new set of axioms that were not reachable through logic built on the previous axioms.

Ecoste 3y ago

> I think that if someone is completely unable to justify an observed truth to others, then it might not be a truth at all. What if the observed truth that someone is trying to communicate is paradoxical and hard to communicate in and of itself? What if the truth is ambiguous? What constitutes ambiguous or unambiguous? At the end of the day ambiguity is a real concept, so is a paradox, therefore there will exist things that are ambiguous and paradoxical and pointing that out does have value.

Kranar 3y ago
There is no reason that ambiguities or paradoxes can't be expressed analytically and formally. Math and computer science are full of such things and they are celebrated. Being hard to communicate is precisely why it's important to communicate rigorously and formally.
- Ecoste 3y ago
  We have a ton of examples of great mathematicians who also happened to be great philosophers and vice-versa. Some philosophers also tried to incorporate mathematical symbols and such into their work. We value both their philosophical works and mathematical works. They were smart people and chose different mediums to express different concepts. How can you try to explore the ego, consciousness, unconsciousness, dreams, suffering, life's purpose, subjective beauty, symbolism, truth, religion, god, ethics and whatever else that is not easily formalized? We might very well arrive at a formal and unambiguous description of these sometime in the far future, so are we not supposed to at least try to talk about these concepts now? You use different tools for different concepts, and science and philosophy is just 2 of those tools. At the end of the day philosophy undeniably changed the world, so there is at least some value to it. Philosophy is not anti-logic, it is very much for logic.
- Nevermark 3y ago
  What is a person? It is a practical question. Sometimes we need to have or choose a hard answer to make a decision. It inevitably isn't going to be solved formally. Any more than what is the dividing line between a chair and not-chair. Many patterns we encounter have fuzzy non-formal edges. Perfect consensus is impossible, but any consensus is valuable. So we invent and argue about the "best" way to "understand" these things. These arguments are partly objective, partly subjective, partly emergent, and partly just farmed out to favorite "authorities" or social pressure. But important and unavoidable. -- At the highest level, even how we percieve reality is important. It impacts our values, our motivations, our ethics, how we cope with events, etc. Trickling down to every day choices. "What is real?" ends up being an important question, no matter how lacking in formal rigor the answers we each have are.