frank harley

Well, i believe thatthe original question was , "What are the implications of existence re plasma? So if your answer is that plasma is an 'existant' just like anything else, you've mooted the question itself. Better asked, then, would be "Plasma is what type of existant"? At tempratures far too hot for the natural world of earth to survive, gasses ionize. This indicates that said 'fourth state' of astrophysical matter is not a 'life-existant', so to speak.

Well, yes, re Marx: his 'Transformation Problem' is the quantitative conversion of labor values into prices. Working backwards, we can inquire as to what's really the value of something other than its stated price? As money enters into the issue because money is what we measure prices by,the issue (for some) becomes 'what's the value of money'? In pother words, if it has a deeper reference that 'represents' labor, worth, or whatever,it's highly advisable not to padoddle around with the quanity in circulation. OTH, saying it's just 'purchasing power' permits you to adjust the quantity to fit what you want to see as depletion of stock, consumation, etc...

Several points, please: * usable energy is created by a given technology. It is not in any way a constant. * the energy used to produce energy (itself a variable) must be calculated out. * You have to develop an exotic daffy-nition of 'money to see it as anything other than available purchasing power, ostensibly depending upon many factors...

yes...in any case, to return to Quine, i'd say that there's a 'consensus' that his 50-ish article 'Tow dogmeas of empiricism' is extremely impoerant, or even seminal. * Because all knowledge is synthetic, analytic has never existed. * The introduction or rejection of small facts can alter whole systems (his ontology).

The Woody Allen parody of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; 'Love and Death'.

Let's just say for the sake of argument that children pick up on their partents' world view fairly easily, but in a way that cannot be explained by the children themselves due to a lack of linguistic skill. What we seem to presently see among adults is a feeling of self-entitlement, or an 'it's all about me' attitude that makes a parody out of Rand's virtue of selfishness. Why, then, would we not expect children to behave in the same manner? The same is true, BTW, of bullying. Love, then, in part seem to exist as a type of acknowledgement that children are bent and mutilated by a zeitgeist over which individual parets have little control.

Debt to GDP reflects a nations basic capacity to repay what it owes, In this sense, smaller nations borrow against their ability to repay as a sort of credit report. Richer nations, however, can simply print their own money to repay debt, or extend credit to themselves. The assumption here is that money itself has no intrinsic value, rather serving no purpose but as 'ability to purchase. OTH, Austrian School Philosophy, by maintaining that money represents real value, obviously finds serious fault with padoodling with the money supply. The problem, with the Austrian POV, as it were, is their refusal to enter the empiricist fray with numerical-based proof; This is why it's advisable to call their work 'Philosophy' rather than 'Economics'. For better or worse, what's normal, paradigmatic behavior for economists is to use math to fight out their positions.

Please remember that Heisenberg himself did not derive any 'uncertainty' principle. All the equation says is that measurement (dT/dD) can go down to h/2. That it can't go lower means there 's nothing smaller in nature than a photon (wave) divided by 2. Yet to a working Physicist, the fact that the measurement can go this precise is a holy grail of opportunity, not a stopligh of 'indetermanacy. For more, please see 'Bose/Einstein equations. Bosons, or massless particles that emit energy because of theie whole spin, can be studdied and classified. 'Indetermanancy', then, is a set of interesting metaphysical issues that are extrinsic to how physics is really done.

Time space is indeed determinate down to h/2, per the Heisenberg. As to 'metaphtysically' determinate, welll....uhhh...h/2 means workable down far beyond the level of the smallest subatomic.

I can't disagree. Rather, if that's all there is to the randian/epistemological issue regarding concepts, then i'm afraid you're the talking hore with nothing interesting to say. In other words, you're not doing 'pholossophy', but rather using philosophical-sounding language to describe the commonly-held notion that we create mind-onjects. Rather ilke putting lipstick on a pig.

If keyboards and democracy are equally 'real' then there's a poverty of distinction between thoughts, sociasl constructs, and material. Re plasma, of course it's an existant in the sense that ionized gasses exist. Here on earth, however, that's not the natural state: In other words, truth or falseness is not the issue.Rather, ontologies should offer disctinctions that are in some way meaningful, as the word implies--the best, or 'fist' way to divide things up. To say, therefore, that everything is mind-dependent is a rejection of the ontological issue altogather.

I If you have a 'linguistic agreemen't as to what things are (ie whale is mammal, not fish), then asserting that A=A is redundant. Logic, on the other hand, assists you in discovering what A's are by clarification. But again, no clarification is neede if there's prior agreement.

One normal way of understanding particle behavior of photons is by matrix algebra. This was first developed, btw, by Heisenberg, et cie in 1925, I believe. Wigner and Heisenberg developed further, nore complex matrices, the D & S models. Present models refer more to Feynman's Path Integral... The problem is that the math of particle description simply doesn't 'talk' to that of wave; Copenhagen, then, is far more a pragmatic reality than a philosophical posture.

The most famous Physicist who took a decidedly mentalist view of his science was Wigner, who said that the confluence between math (a mental construct) and observable data was \far too close to be naturally coincidental. For him, our mind was indeed a causal element....

De Broglie/Boem was proven wrong by the application of Bell's Theorem. The behavoir of photons--including 'spooky action at at distance' --are predictably consistent; therefore no hiden variable is needed.

If you say that 'existence' means 'all that exists' and yet you fail to (ontologically) distinguish mind-dependent from mind-independent existants, you're created a bad infinity; the mind can conjure up an infinite number of entities. Yes, i'm aware that standard textbook- cum- Wiki defines ionized gas (plasma) as one of the four states of matter.

Quine, in 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' demonstrated that all statements are 'synthetic', and that analytic really means that we've internalized its factual relationship to the world. Therefore, to say that Quine abolished the distinction is somewhat incorrect, although commonly employed with reference to kant. Yet...the problem here is that Kant, carefully read, used 'analytic' as an ad hoc-ism to describe what philosophy is not. inso far as the real problem is finding the synythetic a priori...

Perhaps your most manifold distinction is between Anglo-Saxon 'analytical' philosophy and 'continental', which is practised in America, as well.

The distinction, as it wwere, is not mine. Scientists refer to 'laws' as a matter of discourse .OTH, philosophers use 'principe', although in a somewhat ambiguous sense.

Per an application of Kahneman and Tversky, morality seems to have a reasoned dimension which might be argued out between consenting adults of good will , but also a heuristic one, as well. This means that much of what we call 'moral' is how we instantly react to unforseen events (See 'trolly-ology for more!). This is also where Aristotle comes back in and says, 'Ethos pathein; moral transgressions give an emotive reaction. So i suppose that part of the issue, in aristotelian terms, is that we expect a 'nomos oud-pathein' investigation--or that morality should stand up to the logical, dispassionate scrutiny of law! We generally, then, react to transgressions with emotion. All we can therfore say is that both first-principle reasoing and reflecttion upon past reactions can offer us some hope of future adjustments...

re 'existants': even a quick google-up of the Stanfiord article on Objectivism will emplasize that the weak point of Rand's philosophy is her failure to expand on the typology of 'existants' For example, do they include all mental constructs, rrgardless of the origin of either mind-dependent or independent? If not, then she's a hopeless idealist! As for 'plasma', there are several accounts of its theoretical state with respect to math. One, by Landau, is 'pheniomenal', ostensibly dealing with observation.

'Existence' to me means 'possessing material properties'. Plasma, oth, is a state in which matter is said not to exist because it's too hot.

My fave is from Nancy Cartwright: The laws of physics lie.

I'm really not sure of the context in which Einstein spoke of a six-year old understanding time-space manifolds, ricci curvatures and Lorentz contractions. Kindly elaborate. I'd also like to distinguish 'principle'--a means of reasoning--from 'law' which is established with proof.

Yes, 'great idea to scare children out of reading!