Using the Young’s Modulus of spacetime itself calculated from the recent detection of gravitational waves, I’ve done some rough calculations to come up with a potential quantization of spacetime and a regularization cutoff for quantum field theory scattering calculations.
Continue reading “Quantized Spacetime and a Possible QFT Regularization Cutoff”
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously talked about language as an interconnected assemblage of language games that make up a world-picture. A world-picture are all of the assumptions, norms, and grounds that a community holds as certain, and from there certain propositions in the language games the community employs will be either true or false. While I somewhat disagree with Wittgenstein’s conclusion that the truth criteria of any proposition is its proper usage within a language game, rather than the proposition’s correspondence with reality, I think his analysis gives a good framework for examining the epistemic disunity in the culture of the west.
In my most recent post, I argued for the coherence of analyticity by proposing that concepts are things that exist out there in the real world (i.e. are mind independent). I’ve come to rethink this ontology of concepts.
What are the laws of logic, and are they universal? Are the laws of logic something that exists “out there” and our symbolic and syntactical conventions merely a way of describing it? Or do our logical propositions and assertions dictate the truth? This may seem like an easy question to answer, but not everyone agrees.
Continue reading “Truth by Convention or Truth by Description?”
Cynical Theories, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Copyright 2020, Pitchstone Publishing, 352 pages.
Continue reading “Cynical Theories: Review, Commentary, and Discussion”
Lately I have been teaching myself higher level physics and mathematics – reading books and watching youtube videos on the subject. Here I am going to post some links to the resources I have been using for anyone else who may be interested. These resources are obviously not exhaustive of all the resources out there, but they’re the ones I’ve found to be very helpful. As I continue learning about these subjects, I will periodically update this post.
When we speak of a property or trait instantiated by an object, we take two assumptions into account: the object in question has a property Bo which causes it to interact with the surrounding world in a particular way, and the perceiver has the property Bp which causes them to perceive those interactions in a particular way. This is an asymmetric relationship between perceiver and perceived.
When we say that we possess a table, then we have a tangible idea of what this means: I own an x, such that x is a table, and that specific table present to me now is the referent for the name “table” where x = table. But what about something non-physical, such as love? Or numbers? Or freedom? Or boredom? And so on.
Continue reading “What is Love? Application to the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God”
A possible world is a way in which it is logically possible (does not result in contradiction) for reality to exist. There is a possible world in which everything is exactly the same, but it is 1 degree warmer than it is now; there is a possible world in which COVID-19 never existed; there is a possible world in which everything is exactly the same, but there is +1 more person existing right now. What is the nature of these possible worlds, and specifically, what is the nature of my relationship to myself in these possible worlds?
Critical Theory is a methodology of critiquing power relations within society. It takes as axiomatic the new-Marxist analysis of oppressor-oppressed dynamics being inherent in all human relationships. As such, Critical Theory is not about whether such power dynamics exist, but in what ways they manifest. There is little talk about why these dynamics manifest.
The late 19th / early 20th century philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege famously came up with the Sense and Reference distinction in order to clarify issues in his logical system. Briefly put, the reference of a word (I’ll use my favorite example of “table”) is the actual object that the word signifies: the referent of the word “table” is the actual, physical table existing out there in the real world. The sense of a word is the way in which it exists as a psychological representation: the sense of “table” is how I conceive the table in my mind. This was important to Frege because examples where we have two (or more) words that signify a single referent can have a different sense, and therefore lead to different inferences, even if the referent is the same. How, though, might we relate these ideas?
When someone utters a word that reaches your ear, the sound gets broken down into component waves via Fourier transform which vibrate within cochlear fluid and cause the movement of mechanoreceptor hair cells at the organ of Corti to produce electrochemical signals in the form of neurotransmitter release whereby the movement of the fluid stimulates the filaments of individual cells receptor cells to become open to receive the potassium-rich endolymph, causing the cell to produce an action potential which is transmitted through the spiral ganglion to the auditory portion of the vestibulo-cochlear nerve to the the brain, which signals to the cortex with new information that is then compared to predictions based on prior experience in a Bayesian fashion to produce the phenomenology of the experience of hearing, interpreting, and understanding the word. But where (and how), in all this, does the phenomenology of meaning arise?
Continue reading “Semantics and the Phenomenology of Meaning”
