Eise

From Wikipedia. But if Suits' definition really is enough... Shouldn't be a game voluntary?

Did he? How did he show this? Do you have references/sources?

That is true. But we know Mark got his information elsewhere. He uses some Aramaic phrases, which points to Aramaic sources, Jesus' own tongue, even that Mark himself wrote in Greek. His source could have been an eyewitness, but of course it could also be hearsay. But at least one step closer to the historical Jesus.

Of course that is not a coincidence! Many philosophical problems are based on shifts in meaning, subtle or not. Not every problem is (dis)solved under analysis of the terms in which a problem is formulated, but a lot of them are: e.g. if a falling tree makes a sound when nobody is there to hear it; if we have free will; if a cheese sandwich is better as God... Keep kidding! Weren't jesters saying the truth under a sauce of humor? Can you give your formal approach?

That means you already have a definition. So whatever a questioner means with 'God', you say it/he does not exist. That is a good way to produce misunderstandings. The difference in the case of God is absolutely minimal. Or do you really say 'Well, it could be that there is a God who created the universe, and who led the people of Israel through the desert, but unless I have proof I do not believe it'? From the above I read that for you 'God' means at least something supernatural. Don't you believe that something supernatural does not exist? What could be something supernatural, that would change your mind?

I think an answer to the question only reveals what somebody means with sound. If he means that it was heard by somebody, and it was stated that there was nobody there, then there was no sound. If he means perturbations (that could have been heard when somebody would have been there), then there was sound. So if somebody asks the question, the first thing you must do, and ask what the questioner means with sound. Same when somebody asks you if you believe in God. First you must ask what kind of God. Then you might be able to answer the question. That is also the reason one formally cannot answer the question if one is an atheist. First you must know which God the questioner thinks you deny.

My logical joke is getting a life of its own. OK, here we go. Let's take this one: Anything is greater than Nothing. (1) Nothing is greater than God (2) So: Anything is greater than God. Translate it to correct logical language: 1. [math]\forall x: x > Nothing [/math] (1) 2. [math]\neg \exists x: x > God [/math] (2) Instead of (2) we can write: [math]\forall x: God > x [/math] (2a) So: [math]God > Nothing[/math] (3) So when you leave out 'Nothing' of (2), and re-write it as 'not exists', the 'problem' disappears. Is this the solution you meant, overtone?

I like it. Isn't that close to my interpretation that 'Nothing' has no referen? O sorry, I interpreted you this way, because of the phrases I made bold..

I completely agree with that. I just think you choose your different meanings just as you please. E.g. I can rephrase your: Having a cheese sandwich is better than having the empty setto: Not everything is worse than a Cheese SandwichNow I also refer to everything, of course with a negation (of course, in the worst case above sentence refers to the empty set). (emphasis added) Yeah, sorry for the confusion. The facts expressed are the same, but their connotations are not. (E.g. It is a fact that the evening star and the morning star are the same object, Venus, but their connotation is different: you will never see the evening star in the morning, per definition.)

No. The sentences: Nothing is greater than God. Everything is less than God. may express the same fact, but their connotation is different. I just say the same as you say with the empty set: you say: Having a cheese sandwich is better than having the empty setI say: The set of objects greater than God is empty.So we have: [math] \emptyset \Rightarrow Cheese Sandwich \Rightarrow God \Rightarrow \emptyset[/math] AFAIK there is only one empty set. What do you prefer? A Cheese Sandwich without cheese, or a Marmalade Sandwich without marmalade? In which do the 'emptinesses' of both sandwiches differ? So my point is still: one cannot build such logical derivations with 'Nothing', because it does not refer to anything.

No, of course it is wrong. I reacted on PeterJ's posting of 'Nothing' to be a metaphysically empty concept. I agree with that, and wanted to show what great 'logical' constructs you can build using 'Nothing'. My position why the 'derivations' are wrong is because 'Nothing' has no referent. 'Greater than', or 'better than' only work when the objects are real referents. But the essence of 'Nothing' is that one means there is no referent. Say I put all existing objects on an ordered scale from 'better'. Past the worst there is nothing, put past the best there is also nothing. By saying 'A Cheese Sandwich is better than Nothing' is express that it is not the worst to have. By saying 'Nothing is better than God' I express that everything is less good as God. So both 'Nothings' refer to the empty set. But the empty set does not always works the same in argumentations, a bit similar why 0 does not always yield correct results when used in mathematics (division by 0, 0⁰, etc). (As an aside: Say I have [math]x[/math] and [math]y[/math] so that: [math]x^2 - y^2 = x^2 - xy[/math] [math](x -y)(x+ y) = x(x - y)[/math] [math]x + y = x[/math] Now e.g. take [math]x = y = 1[/math] (That fits the original equation). Then I get: [math]1 = 0[/math] End of aside) 'Nothing' referring to 'everything' seems a bit of overstretching of the usual meaning of 'nothing'.

It was a political move of Mohammed. He hoped he could unite Arabs, Christians and Jews under his one new religion. Obviously he did not succeed...

But these are both not the meanings in my 'syllogisms'. So what is it that makes my logical derivations invalid?

Why do you think so? What are the two different meanings?

Yep. Nothing is better than a Cheese Sandwich.

Hmm, yes.... A Cheese Sandwich is better than Nothing. Nothing is better than God. Conclusion: A Cheese Sandwich is better than God. Or: Anything is greater than Nothing. Nothing is greater than God So: Anything is greater than God.

dstebbins, I think you mix up a few things. In outer space the sun is not blocking the starlight. It is only that if something is lighted by the sun (the spaceship, the moon landscape, the earth), it is much brighter than the stars. So our eyes adapt to bright light and we so not see the stars anymore. Same when astronauts take pictures: the shutter speed becomes so short, that there are no visible stars anymore. If an astronaut blocks the sunlight with his fist, or just looks in a direction where there is nothing bright lighted by the sun, he sees the stars, much brighter than we do. On earth, on the other side, light is scattered by the atmosphere, especially blue, and there is bright light everywhere. It is brighter than all the stars. During the night, the stars themselves are not so bright that there is much scattered light. So now we can see the stars. On the other side, during the full moon, it gives so much light that we see significantly less stars then on a moonless night.Now the moonlight does not make the sky blue, just some kind of grey light. The reason is that it is not so bright as the sun. So only the more light sensitive rods in our eyes see the scattered light. But these are not colour sensitive, so we see the light as grey, instead of blue. Two more observations that might help to understand these phenomena a little: If you see far away mountains, they seem to be blueish. Of course they are not. There is just much more air between you and the mountains, and this air scatters the blue light the same way as it does above your head. During a total sun eclipse, the air turns dark, and you can see the stars. I was not prepared for this when I saw the eclipse of August 1999 and was totally astonished that more or less from one second to the next, I could see the stars, and Venus and Mercury high above my head near the (eclipsed) sun. Normally, you never see Venus and Mercury high above, but only close to the horizon. Example:

You can keep your sneers. Energy is an abstract concept, and I am interested in the historical question why people got interested in it. If that does not interest you then... That also misses the historical question. Historically the concept of conservation of energy was a slow discovery, smeared out over centuries, with Noether's Theorem as possibly the highest insight. I am interested to know how it began, and why there was so much confusion in the beginning between people like Leibniz, Chatelet, 's Gravesande on one side, and the Newtonists on the other side.

The point is: I do not quite get why people got interested in something that later was called energy. Hmm... googled a bit around, and found this. Is still not completely satisfying for me, but at least clarifies a little. Sounds nearly poetic...

I was very surprised when I first heard about Émilie du Châtelet and her experiments. Especially that obviously many Newtonian physicists defended that the energy of a moving object would be [math]mv[/math]: So what was in those days meant with 'energy'? Leibniz obviously had some ideas in the right direction: Was it originally derived from work? Force times distance? But if that is true, then a simple dimensional consideration should already lead in the right direction? [math]F = ma[/math] [math]W = F.d = m.a.d = m.d.d/s^2 = mv^2[/math] i.e. the dimension of energy is mass time velocity squared. Or did physicists in those days not have such a clear understanding of dimensions?

You are asking two different things here: 1. Is reality paradoxical? 2. Is our understanding of reality paradoxical? On 1 I would say no. There is no way that a thing or state of affairs can be the case and not be the case. On 2 I would say 'depends': the mathematical formalism of QM is rigid and consistent. As physicists work with QM, and technology is based on QM, reality is not ungraspable. However, if the question is if we can grasp quantum reality using classical concepts, the answer is clearly 'no'. In our daily life we only understand reality with classical concepts, and in this sense QM is paradoxical. But only in this sense. Exactly. If you translate 'normal' with 'with classical concepts'.

OK, sorry. But I think I stated it more precisely later. In a closed system in which there is no change, there is no time. Of course you can see why this must 'degrade' in a philosophical discussion: any observation about what 'happens' in the closed system contradicts the condition that it is a closed system. So we are talking about something we have principally no knowledge of. So yes, the question 'what is time?' is a philosophical question, and the answer one gives has, per definition, no impact on the empirical science that physics is. So I really don't understand why I get so much resistance. My answer has no impact at all on our daily life, nor on physics. But there are people who have this 'philosophical need', like the originator of this thread. I gave my answer (it is an abstraction, namely of change), I gave my main arguments (we cannot observe time except through change; time in itself causes nothing, so it is not a physical category in the sense as objects, fields are). Would you accept a dictionary of physics in which there are no lemmas for certain physical concepts? Mind what I said: defining in words is circular. And that is what we started about. You asked me to define change without use of the word time. I am not adding something to physics. But the question 'what is time?' is a philosophical one. I mean something like the 'Newtonian time', that together with space forms the stage on what everything is happening. I gave an example already. After one hour my CD stops playing, and I am left with only half of my radioactive substance. These changes are completely different, but under the single aspect of time, they are the same. They both took one hour, i.e. there were equal amounts of clock ticks for both processes, and I started the CD and my measurement of the radioactivity at the same moment. So under the very abstract view of 'how long did the processes take', both are the same: 1 hour. But you see, I left out all the details. There is no way that I can get back from the concept of one hour to the playing of a CD or some radioactive halftime. The other way round is easy. That's why I am saying that time is an abstraction of change, and that it is definitely not the other way round. No. We are not talking empirical science. If you think that everything that is not empirical is nonsense, then you are right. You could not better show me my points that definitions are circular, and that for an empirical science it is necessary to have operational definitions for enough of its concepts, so that it can assign values to all of its concepts. The discussion started with me saying that all definitions are tautological. Then somehow on the way you started me of accusing me of using rhetorical tautologies, pasting a Wikipedia article that does not apply, and that is vague as it can be. Its only reference shows many examples that are not propositions ('free gift', 'new innovation') and that in fact are pleonasms. But definitions are propositions, and given my definition, they are tautologies. Not because of their propositional form (A or (not A)), but because its truth is independent of empirical circumstances: its truth follows from the meanings of their words. So now please explain me where I am supposed to misread you. In my opinion just this: that time is not something we can tell about, but that we need to tell about anything else.

I hope others see the irony of your reaction. You seem to miss it completely. Obviously you define when something may be called a useful idealisation and when not. Exactly what I am saying all the time. If you define, in words, you get circularity. If you define operational, in the case of time you must refer to... change. No. I am saying that you add nothing to understanding of change by stipulating that change is change in time. We cannot understand change without reference to time: but we also cannot understand time without change. But where I have as many concrete changes as there can be, there seems to 'be' only one 'time'. It answers why we cannot imagine change without time. But there is no way to know that there is time because there is change. Great. You just made a longer chain of, or better another circular definition. (Just for the record: I think these Noether theorems belong to the deepest insights we have. But that is not what we are discussing about here. We are talking about circularity of definitions. Also don't forget: I am not critisising science for using circular definitions. The important point for scientific theories is that enough of the concepts are also empirically rooted.) Don't be so tiresome, elfmotat. Must I rewrite it for you? [Energy] = [ mass . distance²/time² ] I said, using the example of the definition of a bachelor, that all defintions are tautologies. I gave the definition of tautology I used: a proposition that is true in all possible worlds. Now show me that this concept of a tautology is a rhetorical tautology. You don't want to get the point. Say I measure the halftime of a radioactive substance (i.e. I count the clock ticks of my clock). It is one day. Then I measure how long it takes for a flower to open (again, I count clock ticks). It is also one day. So both processes are the same, when I reduce them to the aspect of time. There is however no way I can go back from '1 day' to radioactive decay or the flowering of a plant. That is what abstraction is: reduce to one of the aspects. But what I really did was comparing both processes to a 'standard changer': my clock. It seems to me you don't know what an abstraction is. Where do you want to get? Again, the question of the thread is 'what is time?'. I did nothing else than give my answer. Already very early in the thread swansont gave a quite good reaction: So is it a useless definition? For physics, yes, definitely. I only added of what time is an abstraction. And since then everybody is making trouble about this point. Including swansont himself. It seems I touched on the religious feelings of some people. You seem to think I deny the existence of time. I don't. I only say that its existence is that of an abstraction, of change. Compare it with this: I deny that 'whiteness' exists als independent object. And then all people struggle over me as if I deny that white things exist.

Yes. People started to believe that somebody resurrected. Funny, isn't it? But nobody investigated the case when it was still hot, so we can put the case ad acta.

You are right, they are not the same. Time is an abstraction of change, not change itself. It is the idea that some universal clock is ticking in every inertial system. Without change, there is no way to observe time. Comparision of what? I compare the two mice, and notice that after 5 clock ticks mouse 1 has reached the cheese, and that mouse 2 has reached the cheese in 15 clock ticks. There is an explanation of what temperature is 'behind the scenes', namely a measure of the kinetic energy of the particles of which substances are made. There is no such thing for time.