Silly Is As Silly Philosophizes

This article irritated me on several levels, so I responded. My responses won't make much sense unless you read the article so I suggest you look at the link  first.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-married-bachelor-proves-that-unicorns-exist/

 Things can't be mutually contradictory? Then light is a wave and not particle. Unless it's a particle and not wave. Or at least it's kind of both sometimes, and also one or the other at other times and...

And Einstein's famous train thought experiment simply can't be true. Except it is. Under certain circumstances mutually exclusive concepts are both correct. To Susan on the train, both doors open at the same moment in time and that is an absolute fact. But it is also an absolute fact that to Bob standing outside the train as it passes by, the rear door opens first. Sorry, all of you who believe in classic Greek logic as an absolute  truth, but Greek logic is very limited and is not adequate for our modern level of knowledge.

The article makes a great deal of 'suppose you know one of these things is true, but how do you know they're true?'  The article makes much ado about this simple point, but why?  It's better to sum it up quickly.

 What if you're wrong? What if you're absolutely certain you're correct, but in objective reality you are not? That's all that needs to be said about it. Going on and on about it may sound erudite, but verbally beating a dead horse is a waste of words. This article is very pretentious, but it takes simple points and makes them lengthy and abstruse.  

This is a great weakness of philosophers.

To put it even more simply,  the liar paradox which has so often been presented, that is still being presented with awesome respect for the brilliance of its creator is nothing but the silly nonsense of misusing and even abusing human language. 

As for me, insofar as I find it profound, I find this article profoundly silly.

We don't need a lengthy philosophizing to demonstrate that it's silly. It is simply silly. All the philosophizing simply gives a nonsensical foolish statement the image of being profound and serious when fact it's nothing but a silly statement. Frankly, philosophers take themselves far too seriously.

Why say in a simple direct self evident statement that which is obviously true, when you can write an entire article endlessly dodging about and describing in exotic terms that which even a fool could see at first glance?

The answer is quite obvious and simple. Philosophers are paid by the word. Furthermore, lengthy words receive bonuses!

Hear Me Roar

 Copying a Facebook post. I didn’t include the article which was about quantum reality versus observable reality because I didn’t think it was covering any new ground.

I simply must respond to this article. It irritates me so much. Actually, not the article. Just a single comment beginning it:  > If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Perhaps not, some say.<

Like all supposed paradoxes this is just a bad misuse of language and simple human confusion regarding the the nature of reality.

The answer to this supposed conundrum is what exactly do you mean by “sound”?

If no human is there to hear the sound a squirrel heard it. That’s a sound. No squirrels? Then a frog heard it. No frogs? Then a snail heard it. No snails… you get the picture.

But what is something extremely weird and improbable happened and no animals are within any range which could possibly have heard the sound? As it happens, sound is a series of compression waves in the air. Even if there were no ears to hear the sound there would still be compression waves and thus there would still be sound.

"The Planck length is derived from Newton’s gravitational constant, the speed of light and Planck’s own constant from quantum theory. It is unfathomably small: Comparing its size to a bacterium is like comparing the size of a bacterium to the visible universe."

The above quote brings us to Zeno's Paradox. Zeno pointed out that you get from point A to point B you first had to go halfway from point A to point B. Then, of course, you had to go half of the remaining distance and so on, ad infinitum.  His conclusion? That no one ever could actually get anywhere. To actually obtain any goal in terms of covering the distance is simply impossible!

Nevertheless, it is very clear that things do manage to reach their goals. That's why it was considered a paradox. If the universe is atomic, that is to say composed of units which cannot be reduced any further than their smallest limit, the supposed paradox disappears. In other words, yes, you must cover half the distance, then half of the remaining distance, and half of the remaining distance, but at a certain point there is no we remaining distance.  There is only this tiny little leap from one frame to the next.

Of course, this means that the world down at the tiny quantum level, is incredibly strange. It means that at that vanishingly small level we move forward like frames of a motion picture. At a certain point, things have gotten a small as they can get. This includes distance itself! Down at that level there is no smaller distance. There is no halfway to anything. There is only here and there with nothing in between. And that nothing includes no distance.  It's not a vacuum.  It's an absence of anything. It's a space that simply does not exist!

What's my point? I'm not sure I really have one. I suppose I just feel like saying that paradoxes, if I may repeat myself, are things that exist only in the mind of man. Reality does not allow for them. Paradoxes are language misused, sloppy thinking, or just human misunderstanding.

And that's all to say for today.