There are numerous truth theories. I prefer Quine’s disquotation theory of truth. Basically truth is an agreement between subject and object, or a way of abbreviating a list with quotes instead of enumerating all of the elements of a list. Someone asks if it is raining outside (paraphrasing one of Quine’s examples) and another replies, yes it is raining outside. Of course one need agree on what ‘outside’ means (such as locally in Pittsburgh rather than in the Amazonian rain forest), or one asks if all even numbers are greater than preceding odd numbers; one may say yes that’s true instead of enumerating all of the even and odd numbers that exist to prove the point. It is logically sound to say that Jesus is Truth, Biblically speaking, because as Creator of Everything God is the sole non-contingent Being. Everything else is relative and rather of a nominal character I would think since Universal monism is temporally divided into plural components aka ‘objects’ and event relationships.
Alaska has a new voting system that imay require a mathematical statistician to understand. It seems like a gaming platform with consequences of voting or not voting for “second choices” challenging to calculate. It seems like a way for incumbents with name recognition to have an implicit edge, and the ongoing, slow Alaska race for the U.S. Senate is an example of the corruption of the new system. The incumbent has an advantage in ranked choice voting. It seems like counting some votes twice.
The challenger Kelly Tshibaka took more than 43% of the vote in the state and nearly all Republican votes although she and Lisa Murkowski, initially appointed by her father the former senator and then Governor both claim to be Republicans. Murkowskiy took most Democrat votes and will get more support when the Democrat candidate is eliminated in voting counting as Murkowski was the second choice of the few Democrats that actually voted for their own party candidate. Murkowski votes Democrat on all important social issues and also is pro-global warming gas development through fossil fuels, and is female so she is the Democrat’s choice who runs as an independent or Republican. The state Republican party supported Tshibaka.
In an election the winner ought to be the candidate that gets the most votes plainly. The ranked choice system muddies that and leaves voters uncertain about how to calculate or game the system by careful picking second through fifth choices to help their own first choice win even though they hate the rest of the field. To not vote for alternate ranked choices in some way counts against one’s own first choice.
Plutocrats are converting democracy to plutonomy and corporatocracy by degrees. Apparently social media statistically bans far more conservative political posts than liberal to such an extent that they actually influence elections. Something like 20% of independent voters voted to the left in 2020 because of social media skewers to the left creating more left supporting content. *(the data are difficult to confirm)
In corrupting a Democracy ranked choice voting seems like a good tool to make it more difficult for outsiders ever to get elected. Not only is it too costly and selected by factors other than competence or suitability, now it is also muddy as votes count in lesser degrees for some in accordance with how they are ranked. It reminds me of U.S. Constitution categories for some classes of Americans before it was amended when some citizens counted less than others for population counting purposes of the states.
The
Republicans are loaded with good, traditional politicians that could
serve as President in 2025. Of course none, like Democrats, know what
ecological economics are and would flunk the curve of keeping
planetary goals for ecospheric survival within viable limits. They
aren't unique, even the U.N. that made the sdg's or sustainable
development goals numbers 9 through 17 (the first eight are
meaningful social agenda items that are irrelevant to measuring
impact on planetary boundaries for survival of humanity)) doesn't
know enough to profile the planetary boundaries for-themselves.
The
first eight goals are plainly social items that cannot be
accomplished generally by poor nations. Female equality in earnings
and education is a policy of developed nations that can afford cars
for all that let women travel as fast as men, and machines that do
most of the heavy lifting. In poor countries where so many scramble
about for subsistence that day may be down the road a bit,
unbelievable as that seems. Apparently even Europe as poor people in
it that have fallen through the cracks somehow. The grandiose
projects for ending poverty on Earth in a way that syntegrates itself
with environmental sustainability that conserves the world ecosphere
within the boundaries set for viability (like defragging the breaking
up of wilderness areas so they can tie in to form seamless,
contiguous areas, halting the anthropocene mass extinction of
species, keeping the ocean from becoming more acidic and eliminating
superfluous, deleterious greenhouse gas releases into the atmosphere)
would seem to require a political genius that humanity lacks, at
least in the United States. One of the problems is that wealth is
concentrated and social media that influences voters is owned by the
rich that have their own agenda to control the political thought of
the masses and sycophant politicians that support the agenda while
dissenting voices are repressed.
President
Biden is very skillful at using money as a lure and incentive to
voters to win elections and forgetting the promises after. He used
the low bid on ecospheric defense to boost his Presidential race and
then failed to accomplish that and in the 2022 mid-term used the lure
of free student loan debt relief to boost Democrats while after the
election courts put down the policy that was based on executive
action instead of congressionally approved spending. Wind-eggs, as
Socrates like to term such matters, comprise much of the national
response to environmental boundary survival challenges. With Ralph
Nadir gone from the scene national and global prospects are rather
bleak. Too bad there aren't any Mo Udals around anymore.
I had a chess acquaintance at a now defunct chess site gobbled up by big chess who jokingly referred on occasion to 'the knowledge' as a most precious item to aspire to.
Sometimes I post at philosophy spots and had the occasion to clarify a point about metaphysics and knowledge. Someone felt that belief is an unsound basis to attain 'the knowledge' and one should be limited to empirical observations, a priori judgments etc. Kant did write about synthetic a priori judgment though; fundamentally pure reason as a basis for making inferences about the unknown. Socrates also tried to show that some knowledge is innate and others that natural right and wrong for human behavior. Not to make the subject obtuse though...
I wrote and cited Stephen Moctezuma within this paragraph; The knowledge- a posteriori, is known, yet synthetic a priori judgments are inducted and fused "judgments that are known through pure reason alone, independent of experience, and they are ampliative to knowledge" aka metaphysics. ref
In using reason to make synthetic judgments concerning theoretical structures of the Universe(s) and its fields like one on Einstein general theory and gravity that are ongoing subjects of thought and testing when possible. the idea of abstract though prior to testing is exemplified https://theconversation.com/we-tested-einsteins-theory-of-gravity-on-the-scale-of-the-universe-heres-what-we-found-194118
Is the N.S.A. a lot of spoiled sacs of manure with attitudes that trim their fellow Americans? Is it a collection of brighter than average individuals that trample on average people with the glee of empowered juveniles? Should they be placed under the supervision of the F.B,.I."
When the N.S.A. corrupts the fabric of democracy rigging search engines, violating privacy and civil rights of Americans rather than just foreigners it is an agency that's gone to far with a vast budget to wreak their ideas of class supremacy on the nation.
It may be, of course, that they aren't such a bad lot of people that run no risks except getting fat paychecks and don't experience the grime of military service. Perhaps they should be required to learn humility by an annual session low crawling through a pig farm yard.
In my
opinion conflating a social agenda with physical material boundaries
is a disaster. The nine ecospheric boundaries should be separate and
distinct from the social eight development goals. The mixed bag of
goals and boundaries has a poisoned political pill for everyone. I
suppose godless atheists might all be happy with abortion for the
world’s poor women, and population growth does decline as women
have fewer children when they are prosperous statistically, yet those
are contentious political issues that won’t be treated well if
elite bureaucrats sit around a donut-shaped table generating a lot of
verbiage. God may have generated a Multiverse and predestined a
Universe- who knows? Darwinist-only votaries tend to be ignorant
about theology and metaphysics or hermeneutics generally and
associate faith with beliefs common in the 19th century concerning
creation- and that is very obsolete.
I couldn’t believe the piece on resilience; do people really
need to know what Cicero thought about it or what old french or
English variations were? It might be that the excess verbiage on
resilience and systems analysis could be abbreviated by fitting them
within parameters of Newton’s three laws of motion. Then one can
flowchart all sort of squiggly pointillist art with data bits that
show the way things flow and how the patterns go. Some whirlpools in
creeks return to form even if a boat engine disrupts them passing
through. Entropy does count.
Long ago I drew up a flowchart for the logical progression to one
world government. It's a jejune idea that youth have withoiut
realizing the problems with that (it's best suited for
dictatorships). The U.N. conflation of 17 sustainable development
goals that seems itself like an oxymoron since development makes
most people think of the current high-entropy economic system seems
jejune though the topics are serious for all 17. It's just a poorly
constructed item.
Free citizens tired of the communist threat; not because of
inequality but more so because bureaucratic elites of the communist
party dictated what people could or couldn’t do and the
dictatorship of the communist party was kind of a drag. It oppressed
religious ideas (“churches don’t work anymore”) and so forth.
Conflating the eight social points with none physical boundaries
debases the critical importance of the planetary boundaries so
seriously that they won’t get done. The nine boundaries aren’t
serious enough to merit separate and distinct objective evaluation so
nations and voters can decide what they want to do about them for
themselves?
Piketty’s ideas for remedies to the inequality of wealth are
good enough yet simple. Increase progressive taxation and put a tax
on capital. Concentrated wealth and power prefer to own the media and
internet and repress ideas that might affect their power and wealth
adversely and that is becoming worse all the time.
James Lovelock wrote in The Final Warning that humanity only has
about 200 years remaining before the big crash environmentally
reaches a very high level and world population crashes to 200
million. Jacques Cousteau estimated a similar paradigm. In the 1970s
and 80s it was written that global sustainable human population is
only about 2 billion. Certainly if the technology for agriculture and
living and zoning laws are as bad as political choices in democracies
and real practical applications of the techne toolkit the pessimists
probably are correct.
The electorate general has no idea of what the nine planetary
boundaries are, so coupling them with a left leaning, atheist social
agenda will just create such social divisions that few countries will
be able to agree even though the EU might like to export its social
agenda globally. Democracy can allow progressive tax rates without
requiring a socialistic economic. Basically though if people are too
dumb to be interested in saving themselves from ecospheric disaster
caused by their economic toolkit survivors living off-world for a
time may need to let the world fix itself up to use it again someday.
Maybe a remnant will survive.
I believe the social items of value to some can be accomplished
with an enlightened international on-line population of people
willing and able to help. The closure of publishing freedom because
of political and economic repression is a great way to let just
sycophants express themselves freely.
The idea of sustainable development goals seems an oxymoron in a world with finite resources that preclude development of classical economic methods. The U.N. conflation of a social agenda and planetary boundaries seems to necessarily force political conflict because of the social agenda. Getting everyone to agree on saving the ecosphere from reaching a point where human life isn't very sustainable on Earth is necessary. The social agenda is a million faceted and debatable cluster that could be solved innumerable ways. Corporatocracy seems a threat to democracy and free society while the sanguine futurism requires a hushed up and subjugated population.
I appreciate the effort yet a more circumspective philosophical examination would be an improvement over pure institutional donut-dipping verbiage. Realpolitk includes an awareness of human nature and short-sightedness in pursuit of economic advantage.
Consumers generally haven’t any idea about which products are safely made and harmless for global genetic biodiversity. It would be helpful to have an easily accessible on-line data base of products that aren’t harmfully contributing to mass extinction.
In my opinion not a single consumer out of a thousand, and maybe one in ten thousand actually checks out product status in regard to being harmless or harmful concerning mass extinction before they buy it. When consumers visit stores they look for good buys, items on sale and things they can afford. Virtually none even know how to find out if a bar of soap, a can of soup or toilet paper contributes to loss of land resources in regard to biodiversity, habit etc, or if the transportation used is polluting the sky or killing fish. It is simply too technical for non-scientists and the opportunity cost of making internet searches for each product is way too harmful in regard to time lost for the inquirer on-line.
Someone really ought to coordinate a unified product list of numbers to verify the genetic biodiversity status of each and sort them by categories and rank for easy on-line review.
With luck Donald Trump will decide not to enter the 2024 Presidential race and forego developing the nation into a banana republic. He could of course choose to wear a uniform coat with epaulets and ribbons while extolling the greatness he confers upon the public with so little reward yet the attraction of letting a more representative candidate- a guy with degrees from Harvard, Yale and a grad of navy seal school get put down with his withering wit may be irresistible. The nation could you a gerontocratic battle; mano y mano, of two old guys with remarkable few remaining skills in comparison to those they had a few decades ago.
Governor DeSantis is one quality candidate and the nation needs one or more of those. Joe Biden and Donald Trump should enjoy the wealth and satiation of their elder years and allow the nation to find actual quality leadership. The Roman Republic and Empire suffered quite a bit when they had a string of bad leaders. The fate of their nation like the well being, security and solvency of a nation suffers with bad leadership.
I appreciate the fact that President Trump was the sole realistic alternative to Hillary Clinton and maybe half of the nation is grateful that he kept the Clintons from seizing the day, and of course the Demo Party has punished him so far as possible ever since. If he chooses to run again and loses, or brought his unusual attitude to office he can only do the public harm (unless the sole alternative was four more years of Joe Biden). Americans don’t like to elect family dynasties much and plutocrats are not very liked either. The nation did revolt against the upper class to start with and don’t need another one established to wrench progress with an over-concentration of wealth.
Intelligent, sober old people are a blessing to the nation; intemperate individuals less so in public office. One may have strong opinions yet egoism and assertiveness go a long way to give the appearance of a lack of intellect and knowledge. President Biden and Trump each seem terribly afflicted with personal egoism. Trump’s is over and Biden’s is covert. The federal government needs better leaders. Even an older Ralph Nadir would be a better choice.
Brooklyn should trade Kyrie Irving for Russel Westbrook strait across and move on to the satisfaction of both teams. Westbrook hasn't played well for the Lakers for some reason and Irving has trouble with false consciousness concerning Jews and history. THe trade would benefit the league.
Corporatocracy silences people saying things that they believe won't help sales including entertainment league people like basketball players. Yet people shouldn't be forced to say things they don't believe in order to work a job- even if what they do believe is wrong.
Irving should be happy to return to L.A. and his former teamate Lebron James. Playing basketball instead of making bad history analysis and commentary on films that were as inflamatory to Jews as the Satanic Verses were to Muslims would be a better investment of time. Russell Westbrook at least doesn't believe Sasquasch and Donald Trump are conspiring with Russians to start an intifadah until Elvis is released from captivity.
It looks like Republicans will win the House, and there are just three Senate races remaining undecided that will determine if Republicans can take the Senate too. Adam Laxalt will add Nevada to the Republican column i.m.o., and Mark Kelly will take Arizona for the Demos and that leaves the fate of the Senate up to Herschel Walker vs a Rev. Warnock in what should be a runoff election.
Republicans have 49 seats and they need 51 to take control. I believe Mr. Walker should bust through the remaining Democrat line in the runoff as he did against opposition on the field. Rev Warnock probably supports Ukraine military arms shipments, abortion and homosexual marriage- another neo-Christian who disregards Biblical paradigmata for election and personal career advance purposes.
Can one be a Democrat politician without being a hawk on N.A.T.O. expansion, war in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia, abortion and homosexual marriage?
This is a day Democrats have warned about; evidence that Democracy is in peril by Republicans. Therefore my crummy search engine listings must be responsible for the danger to democracy too, and maybe other unknown factors are also imperiling democracy, like the green party that died after Ralph Nadir took votes from Al Gore. If the Green Party rose from the ashes democracy would be even more endangered than now, or at least the Democrat Party would be.
Are you familiar with the concept of a Multiverse? A Universe may be just one region of it, and I would think that various kinds of fields may exist that are larger than a single Universe. If a Universe is initially just a singularity it is contained within some volume. Parmenides and Heraclitus might have liked that kind of inquiry. There are different and scalar kinds of singularities just as some infinities are greater than others (re; Greg Cantor and trans-finite numbers).
If a Universe expands from a singularity that had all of the energy that would eventually become mass it is probable that some universes expanded from different sizes of singularity. Some black holes are larger than others.
You may be aware that mass and 'objects' are nothing more than apparent phenomena occurring in the Higgs field. Two-dimensional particles slow down in the field and pick up an appearance of a third dimension in the direction of travel. Massless two-dimensional particles seem to be close to the basic state of everything.
I would not guess the true state of Universes is simply singularity or mustard seeds that expand for a while into universes before spending all of their energy in thermodynamic processes. There may be more than that, yet I believe a singularity is a real object that is one and comprises an entire universe-in-itself. Some people prefer to call a Multiverse a 'universe' and that is reasonable I suppose. That reinforces the idea that none know what a Universe is well enough to set comprehensive boundaries.
Quine defined the concept of linguistic ‘universes’ rather well in Ontological Relativity. Each language lexicon is like a defined set of numbers that can’t be converted directly into a different set without corrupting the elements. The meaning of Universe exists in different lexicon/word sets and is part of the challenge of postulating metaphysics for cosmology, universes, Multiverse etc.
Information is conserved- Shannon Entropy, and isn't destroyed. Apparently no information is lost; not even if the Universe 'ends'. Matter and energy are convertible and were thought to be neither created or destroyed as well. That raises the point that if information is created yet not destroyed permanently (not even in black holes); was information never created (except by God) as well? Did the information of the Universe pre-exist the existence of the Universe? If determinism with free will is the fact the author of a deterministic Metaverse might not be required by anything he writes into being to rewrite it or ever be subject to the laws of a contingent universe. I believe it useful when considering metaphysics of universes to consider what God could do with universes to infer characteristics of singularity and universes for-themselves.
Metaphysics and faith are useful in many fields. That is one might
want to infer from what is known or use inductive reasoning to fill
in gaps of the unknown. That's useful in sailing, inventing things
etc. Sometimes what isn't known is necessary knowledge to have and
one must outline a mind map creatively to discover that bite of land
to put a boat in before dark. If one relied entirely on what is
well-known and didn't sometimes draw some sketchy inferences from it
so much creative thought that turns out to be right would be lost.
Faith that one's judgment or dead reckoning is correct is necessary
if one needs to act on one's belief. Sometimes life presents forced
options (as William James described) so one must make a choice. Even
the Bible (Romans 10:17) has faith based on knowledge. "17 So
then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God."
Metaphysics is the
leading edge of physics and especially cosmology. I doubt if Hugh
Everett’s many worlds conjecture developed as an alternative to the
Copenhagen interpretation would have been created without his
meta-physics thought about gambling (greater than physics) and game
theory. Recombining diverse and theoretical concepts in thought
experiments is a way that new and true ideas about physical cosmology
can be found.
Modal logic
universes can be theoretical universes or metaphysics used to test
the logical validity of relations within a set. Those relations could
be physical laws of a universe or even theological concerns such as
determinism that in turn can be exchanged with select concepts from
entropy and information theory. One populates a universe with a
criterion of members or elements and then may verify the logic of
their functions. Some universes may be non-functional yet others may
be valid though not exclusively valid. In my opinion that field is
metaphysics though technically it is modern logic and math, physics
or whatever goes into it.
Are you familiar with the concept of a Multiverse? A Universe may be just one region of it, and I would think that various kinds of fields may exist that are much larger than a single Universe. If a Universe is initially just a singularity it is contained within some volume. Parmenides and Heraclitus might have liked that kind of inquiry. There are different and scalar kinds of singularities just as some infinities are greater than others (re; Greg Cantor and trans-finite numbers). If a Universe expands from a singularity that had all of the energy that would eventually become mass it is likely that some universes expand from different sizes of singularity scaled like some black holes are larger than others. You might be aware that mass and 'objects' are nothing more than apparent phenomena occurring in the Higgs field. Two-dimensional particles slow down in the field and pick up an apparence of a third dimension in the direction they travel. I would not stipulate that the true state of Universes are simply singularities or mustard seeds that expand for a while into universes before spending all their energy in thermodynamic processes. There may be more than that, yet I believe a singularity is a real object that is one and comprises an entire universe-in-itself. Some poeple prefer to call a multiverse a 'universe' and that is reasonable I suppose. That just goes to show that none know what a Universe is well enough to set comprehensive boundaries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kixAljyfdqU
Throwing the first stone...Could God create a rock bigger than a Universe and lift it in zero gravity or would the special theory make the problem superfluous? If God lifted a Universe that is made entirely of one rock would the motion of the rock not be relative to the omnipresence of God; that is, would God need to move or lift anything at all for the rock to be one and all, and all in one? If God entangled all of the two-dimensional particles not entangled in the Higgs Field and converted those and all of the particles in the Higgs field that seem to be three dimensional into some sort of schist or a crystal rock- maybe a diamond, would it exist meta-universally within the field that contains all possible universes and would it be possible for anyone besides God to move it anyplace, though movement of the largest possible rock that is a Universe for-itself might be possible and impossible simultaneously?
Information is conserved- Shannon Entropy, and isn't destroyed. Apparently no information is lost; not even if the Universe 'ends'. Matter and energy are convertible and were thought to be neither created or destroyed as well. That raises the point that if information is created yet not destroyed permanently (not even in black holes); was information never created (except by God) as well? Did the information of the Universe pre-exist the existence of the Universe? If determinism with free will is the fact, is the author of a deterministic Metaverse required by anything he writes into being to rewrite it (such as lifting a gallstone that comprises everything that exists in the Universe because he doesn't find it very interesting?
The rock of infinite mass would compact to a black hole and be a singularity since it was everything of a Universe (super massive). Would expanding the singularity faster than light for a fraction of a second count as lifting it?
Information is conserved- Shannon Entropy, and isn't destroyed. Apparently no information is lost; not even if the Universe 'ends'. Matter and energy are convertible and was thought to be neither created or destroyed as well. That raises the interesting point that information is created yet not destroyed permanently (not even in black holes); was information never created (except by God) as well? Did the information of the Universe pre-exist the existence of the Universe?
I.M.O. the SDGs are a nice effort that are somewhat unrealistic in that they fail to take account of human nature and the will for power. Original sin may be the thermodynamic criteria that humans are embedded in seeking to consume energy and process it. Politicians seek power, as do consumers mostly allegiant to consumption economic voting at the polls. Free societies tend not to be too interested in altruistic voting over those of personal interest selections. In the U.S.A. for example moral issues and surpassingly race issues prevail as poltical topics over common sense about eliminating poverty.
People that construct global political paradigms concerning the ecosphere's decline tend to work within existing market economies and are subject to it, and I do not believe that market economics and capitalism has ecological interests as a primary concern; that is it will be late at reacting to external environmental stimuli and human crisis via market forces and values. On the other hand, authorianism is the temptation to the wealthy and influential in some ad hoc sort of way. Making environmental economic settings by decree would be the ad hoc tendency and that undermines the strength of non-plutocratic free enterprise to innovate solutions to ecosphere challenges.
President Obama cut taxes on the rich. He made the Bush II tax cuts permanent when all he had to do was nothing and the tax breaks would have expired. Americans are against new taxes because they somewhat rightly don't trust politicans to spend revenues on more than pork. Public debt is more than 30 trillion dollars in the U.S. with a floating currency and technical tax managment to benefit the ecosphere substantially seems not in the cards.
I am not too optomistic about the prospects for environmental economic policies being implmented globally. Just making intelligent green zoning laws and changing bad technology for good tech is nearly impossible. I am glad that some people are trying, yet even the improvments SDG goals can help make seem inadequate and a bit off target insofar as serving as sustainable economic ways of living for billions.
Trying to force moral paradigms of the decadent first world moral systems on 2nd and third world people- especially atheism, is divisive rather than constructive and does great harm to the focus on transforming the world economy to ecological sustainable, realistic methods. Some suspect the U.N. led by Europe and the U.S. are just using globalization to force homosexual marriage and abortion on the rest of the planet while driving them into total control by plutocrats owning most of the world's wealth.
I would think the United States is strong at developing new technology and slack at innovating zoning laws to conserve the ecosphere and biodiversity. People everyplace tramp on the environment- even ordinary people with a surfeit of off-road vehicles, small boats, fish finders etc. Illegal migrants will scour the land for things to sell including plants and rocks. That is survival economics; and economics of necessity. Necessity driving people to interact negatively with the environment isn't likely to end anytime soon.
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