Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit on NDT philosophy

 If all my mentions of ANW peak any curiosity about this 20th century giant among thinkers, here is a wonderfully clear and thorough (and brief) summary of his thought.

Burl

On Ein’s theory, ANW, my favorite math/phil guy, posited a strong challenge to Ein’s (easy art to skim and get the gist of the difference) http://www.andrewhyman.com/articles/whitehead.pdf

that is a dam intersting artice. I don't have a huge physics background, but if you chuck the maths around i am fluent and interested in a hurry..

Euler was a hugely clever man. What always interests me is how they kept track of all these dimensions without a computer. Trying to teach co ordinate systems in three is hard hard work. Now make that four (usually chuck in time) then you are in trouble... It is a great space to think of however. And we need that space to think of when we are dealing with animal behaviour...

Burl

On Ein’s character, it is highly rumored that he had mild autism  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2988647.stm

I was being scientific. IMHO i read a few of his letters to his wife and they seemed very non neurotypical and quite Asperger's. But i am not a doctor and not qualified to diagnose :)

 Playfulness is fictional (faking it). 

But so are our Jungian personnae, which is another way of trying to describe social temperament - masks.

 When Happy and Sissy were too ill to walk another step, they assumed a down with head alert posture as though they were just taking a break: maybe this means they have limited body language vocabulary; or, maybe it is a self-preserving maneuver when they sense they are very ill but cannot show it for fear of being overpowered violently.  This is why they prefer to go off to die alone. 

Don't bite the hand that feeds you...even if it is abusive?

The logical consequence of your statement: "Playfulness is fictional (faking it)" is that the more eratz the experience of play (versus the more real the experience of play) the more enjoyable the play. Clearly this is not the case. Children are more playful than adults precisely because they can suspend the norms of reality (by which the fictional modality would be construed) and "lose" themselves in the play just as if it is real. It's like going to the movies, the more one can get beyond that they are watching fiction so that the more real the experience, then the more enjoyable the experience. Also, to beat the gong of a familiar refrain, what evidence is there that play between animals is fictional in their mind? There is only one's interpretation of play as fictional. 

I also think animals perceive a disease state as a force acting on them, and that instinctively they attribute this to a "superior" (i.e. predator) being, and hence they seek "solitude" although the solitary nature of an animal is what we think about the animal's state of mind, not necessarily what it really is from the animal's perspective.  

Kevin Behan

The logical consequence of your statement: "Playfulness is fictional (faking it)" is that the more eratz the experience of play (versus the more real the experience of play) the more enjoyable the play. Clearly this is not the case. Children are more playful than adults precisely because they can suspend the norms of reality (by which the fictional modality would be construed) and "lose" themselves in the play just as if it is real. It's like going to the movies, the more one can get beyond that they are watching fiction so that the more real the experience, then the more enjoyable the experience. Also, to beat the gong of a familiar refrain, what evidence is there that play between animals is fictional in their mind? There is only one's interpretation of play as fictional. 

I also think animals perceive a disease state as a force acting on them, and that instinctively they attribute this to a "superior" (i.e. predator) being, and hence they seek "solitude" although the solitary nature of an animal is what we think about the animal's state of mind, not necessarily what it really is from the animal's perspective.  

Redo, or I say CRAP

Interesting to note that the one person who could grok what I was saying is an engineer (or, in this case, both an engineer and a professor of engineering.) Because engineers deal with reality.

Yes, I have read the revisionist histories, written by people refuting critics of Einstein. Such as "Space-time Physics" by Taylor and Wheeler. I would also suggest reading "The End of Physics" by David Lindsey (sp? It's in my pile of books, somewhere. I've only read it twice.) That's not to say that Einstein didn't get himself a grasp on math, later on. At least in using it to describe what he wanted. The problem was when it ran up against reality. The problem with math is that you can use it to describe anything. Evangelist Billy Graham once used the equation 1^3=1 to described the Holy Trinity. Problem is, the general function, 1^n, also describes pantheism, which I don't think he was intending.

As for Einstein seeing what Lorentz couldn't, well that depends on perspective. Lorentz believed in an aether. Einstein, summarily did not, based on the Michelson-Morley experiment. In fact, it is the null results of that experiment that led Einstein to think about relativity and I though it was ironic that he would use the math of an aether believer to state why he though there was no aether. But evidently, that irony and the comedy that ensues is not always appreciated by all. Oh well, I guess you had to be there.

In his autobiographical notes, Einstein often thought he would be proven wrong and stated that it would take only one person with a good, hard data field to provide the falsifiability to show what was wrong with his theories.But, to this day, many defend the positions of Einstein, though most of them are not always physicists. Many, however, are good at math and math is a wonderful field. Many are better at math than Einstein was. Einstein, himself, knew he could not conceive of that actual experiments needed to test his theories. So, he came up with thought models, thought experiments, mathematical constructs described by words.

Nothing as hard core as the metrics Burl provided. Nothing as provable as those metrics.

And, of course, my statement on fixed aperture radar mapping was totally lost in the translation. Let me try it this way. The new radar units that police use that can tell how fast you are moving, even if the police car is moving, work by ignoring Einstein's supposition that velocities are non-additive.

Any, after digressing, what I see in NDT reminds me of the early days of SR and GR from Einstein. No proof, whatsoever, merely semantics and causal links not verified by data and when those causal links are called into question, well, then, we just have to wait for "science to catch up." But that is the opposite of science. Holding a theory aloft and mashing data to fit the theory, as happens with the lorentzian transforms. That is faith, not science. I'm not knocking faith, I just don't see where it fits in science.

 Ron, you give me more credit than is due.  I have a very shallow knowledge of SR and GR and much of the physics surrounding it.  I just knew there were counter theories, and I was pleased to learn that perhaps the 1971 claim of disproof of Whitehead's was premature.

 Again I claim minor understanding of the stuff, but ANW innaugurated an impoetant field of math, mereotopology, which is about the nature of boundaries among things - like they are fuzzy and things overlap.  This is true of continuity over time as well.  ANW's focus on events over discrete substances along with french philosopher Bergson's ideas pf the elan vitale led him to see our being thru time as perdurance (see wiki).

 Since there is no proof that dogs have intention, for example they chase a car (to eat? to dominate? to put to flight?), the current models are as much predicated on faith as are any others, except in the case of modern behaviorism, its tenets don't actually square up with what dogs actually do. It will prove interesting to see the current neuro research defend the proposition that dogs can hide what they're feeling, or disguise a state of mind and which immediately contradicts the central tenet of dog training which is to understand a dog's body language as infallible indicator of stress, pleasure etc..Good science doesn't abide with internal contradictions, it discards such models as obsolete. That's the real value of Einstein, he could see certain truths of nature that others couldn't. That's how he advanced understanding. The rest is trivia.

 Because engineers deal with reality.

Oh ron that us until we have to deal with the triple hates **** acountants, *****lawyers and marketing ******* s. 

ron2

The new radar units that police use that can tell how fast you are moving, even if the police car is moving, work by ignoring Einstein's supposition that velocities are non-additive.

I don't quite get that ron2. To be really honest i am so practically based i don't spend a whole lot of time with Einstein and all that stuff, but i thought that at first glance their was no conflict if you used the lorenz trasnformations correctly. 

What i do get is

ron2

ny, after digressing, what I see in NDT reminds me of the early days of SR and GR from Einstein. No proof, whatsoever, merely semantics and causal links not verified by data and when those causal links are called into question, well, then, we just have to wait for "science to catch up." But that is the opposite of science. Holding a theory aloft and mashing data to fit the theory, as happens with the lorentzian transforms. That is faith, not science. I'm not knocking faith, I just don't see where it fits in science.

The difference is that Einstein had coherent believable thought experiments  to at least back him up.

Science in some areas is so so primitive yet. I deal a lot with magnetics. We still don't have a hugely great coherent model of magnetism, and can only predict by  empirical methods what the loss in a given material may be, and this loss is not linked to material properties. I always pick up any papers with great speed that suggest they can, but they usually are small signal properties.

Lets look at another area. We have difficulty doing state plane analysis of resonant converters yet these are becoming more neccessary as green power requirements hit us... I still see papers using outmoded analysis do the rounds over and over again.

In all honesty i can't tell you how to reliably predict the large signal behaviours of such converters. I have been trying to for years.... It will probaby involve using several bits of what i have talked about in these postings. Emotional states seem to be an intersting framework to get a solution.

What i am trying to say is that there is a huge amount unknown out there. We need to talk together, we need to work with the knowledge we have not the knowledge we hope to have. The way forward is to work with Science not romance it or ignore it in about even doses as far as i can see .....

 Well, we all know the earth sucks, or else we would all fly off into space.  We then name this thing that sucks 'gravity'.  My whole profession is founded on Newton's Laws and gravity.  Even traffic engineers use a gravity model to predict traffic flows between multiple centers of population density (so, I guess people suck, too!)

 But Newton had no explanation for what gravity is, and we still don't!

Ron, you may have found this site  

http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.htm

I just found it, and it is fascinating - it looks a lot like Whitehead's process, but on further reading, his assertion that particles alone exist in a space-less, time-less universe is similar to ANWs actual entities in process, but not the same.  He is more Leibnitzian with closed window monads.

 Kevin will love how he speaks of time as NOW.  He explains it as the immediate past and the immediate future, and time is merely the present in which we experience change  -- the future coming into being, experienced as NOW, and having become objective (brute) fact.  Something akin to perdurance, I think.  But definitely the description ANW gives for an actual entity = actual occasion = occasion of experience - these are momentary droplets of experience of unspecified duration.

 After explaining away time, I see he simply says matter is the sum of everything in the world - add all the +s and the -s to get zero.  This, too is not Whitehead's organic philosophy of actual entities (physical and mental - objective and subjective).  

Still fascinating ideas of rebel science.

Agreed, great site. Interesting list of crackpots

CARL SAGAN: As a youngster who was fascinated by the possibility of time travel in science fiction, to be in any way involved in, in the possible actualization of time travel is, it just brings goose bumps.

[Here Dr. Sagan is acting like a wild-eyed "Trekkie". I feel sorry for the man.]

If author is right, I'm proud to have flunked the Carl Sagan phony-baloney test. 

 Touche!  Well played, Kevin.

 I appreciate that Burl, thanks.