There is no such thing as cause and effect.

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by swarm, Apr 10, 2009.

  1. Cellar_Door Whose Worth's unknown Registered Senior Member

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    This is probably me just being dense, but I don't understand the 'paradox'. Yes you need to traverse half the distance, and then you will traverse the remaining half and reach your goal.
     
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  3. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    Well, any half you traverse there will be a half of the final distance to reach before the goal.

    Assuming infinite precision. Which in quantum physics is wrong.
     
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  5. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    The paradox is that you travel 1/2 way, then 1/2 of the reminder, then 1/2 of that remainder, etc, halving the distance each time: thus it becomes an infinite amount of steps - obviously it is impossible to take an infinite number of steps in a finite time - therefore you'll never reach the wall.
    I believe it was originally phrased thus: to travel any distance completely you must complete at least half of that journey, but to complete that half you need to travel at least half of THAT (effectively reversing the halving in Randwolf's version).
    Each part of the travel must take a finite amount of time, but there is an infinite number of halvings - meaning that you require an infinite amount of time: again, an impossibility.
    (Except for the engineer's solution

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  7. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    For curiosity; what is the engineer's solution?
     
  8. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    It's an old joke:
    A mathematician and an engineer are sat at a bar drinking when a gorgeous blonde walked and winked at them.
    The engineer stood up and started to make his move when the mathematician said "No point, before you reach her you'll have to get half way to her, and then after that you'll need to travel half of the remaining distance, etc. - you can never actually reach her".
    And the engineer said "Maybe so, but I can certainly get close enough for what I want to do".

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  9. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    haha

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  10. three-brane Registered Senior Member

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    I like your line of thought. But from what I have read on quantum physics. The continuom is the illusion. Your brain processes something like 300,000 bytes of information per second, and you are only aware of 1 percent of that.
    The rest is discarded as not congruent with your view on reality.
    A table is solid and seems constant only because it would confuse your sense of reality, if you were able to see all the space in the atoms that make up the table.
    If you take all the spaces out of all the atoms that make up all the humans in the world you would have something about the size of rice.

    So nothing is ever the same. the atoms are constantly shifting and going in and out of existance. the only thing that is real is right now in this moment.
     
  11. three-brane Registered Senior Member

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    I realize this is philosophy. not physics but one more thing. that bullet never acctually touches that person.
    the electrical charges from the electrons that orbit the nucleous of the atoms that make up the bullet and the person, create opposite charges that repel one another.
    now the one with the most energy and tighter woven atoms, will displace the other atoms out of its way. but fundamentaly, nothing substansial of the bullet touches anything substansial on the person.
    although it may be difficult to convince the person in the hospital of this notion.
     
  12. Gustav Banned Banned

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    bone and tissue scooting over to make room for the bullet?
    nice!
     
  13. swarm Registered Senior Member

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    You should reread it. Quantum physics proposes there is even more of a continuum than macro events would have us believe. Things like Bell's theorem connect even things we would ordinarily suppose are not connected.

    You realize that isn't relevant?

    No, a table seems solid because within the ordinary definition of solid, it is. Nor does it confuse my sense of anything because the ordinary level I work at has parity with it. If you go bigger or smaller you must adjust accordingly. If you were to shrink the earth to the size of a cue ball it would be smoother and more perfectly shaped than anything we can currently make. The "solid" earth is a paper thin skin of slag on a molten blob of super giant stellar core ejected some 5 billion years ago.

    Shrink down far enough and the smoothest surface is a jagged waste land. Every surface is covered with life. That "space" isn't empty. It is filled chalk full of probability shells and fields. It is only because you are erroneously pretending its made of discrete particles that you think it is empty.
     
  14. swarm Registered Senior Member

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    You are quite mistaken. Matter is lost from both the bullet to the person and the person to the bullet. Also the bullet is sufficiently energeting that the materials react with each other, bonding the two.

    If the bullet actually could pass through without touching it would actully be nice sine that would result in far less damage from things like shearing.

    Have you ever seen a bullet that has passed through something? There is significant deformation, shearing, even collapse and fragmentation.

    You couldn't be more mistaken.
     
  15. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, but the matter don't actually touch. It's the forces that holds the matter together (and repels matter also).

    That's only because you look at it from a very simplistic perspective compared to what is actually going on. Matter can't touch matter, only the forces repels and bonds. Matter in itself actually goes through matter, weren't it for the forces.

    Due to the forces.



    He couldn't be more correct.
     
  16. sly1 Heartless Registered Senior Member

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    This is why there is no god. This is why everything is infinite or circular. Outside the realm of human labels there is no alpha and there is no omega.

    When you consider the big picture you soon realise a few things. There is no beginning and there is no end. There are only segments inbetween infinity which are infinite much like the infinite "irrational fractions" between 0 and 1.

    Events are tagged or labeled by humans in order to keep a timeline and segment our experiences so we can organize our thoughts. It just how our brain works. Outside of our mind and how it functions there is no event more significant or insignificant than any other which in turn implies that "events" is a man made concoction (sp?) and events themselves don't exist in the universe but only in our minds.
     
  17. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    If I were to consider the big picture and make statements about it, I would be better off knowing what the big picture actually is. Which is what we discuss here. I mean, who says there is no beginning nor end? Each moment is in itself both a beginning and an end.

    And why the notion that all events only happens in the mind? The mind sees what the world shows us.
     
  18. wise acre Registered Senior Member

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    I pretty much agree with this analysis. If one tosses in that time is the fourth dimension - though there is some controversy about this - cause and effect get really silly. We do not say my feet caused my ankles, if you catch my drift.

    Are Big Bang theories also examples of ideas based on this fallacy?
     
  19. swarm Registered Senior Member

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    It does actually touch. Exchanging electrons to form bonds is touching by any reasonable definition of touch.

    Tell that to the colliders. The repelling forces can be over come with sufficient inertia.

    I'm sorry but you happen to be mistaken. Matter can touch other matter up to and including the physical particles interacting.
     
  20. swarm Registered Senior Member

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    The big bang is not the start of anything, it is just a transition from a folded / collapsed universe to an unfolded one. It is not that anything "begins" then. Our space/time goes undefined at its event horizon just like it does at any event horizon.

    There is no "unmoved mover" needed.
     
  21. wise acre Registered Senior Member

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    There does not seem to be consensus out there in the physics community on this one, as far as this layperson can tell. Some talk about time begining with the Big Bang so 'before' makes no sense. Others take about things before - in some cases cycles of collapse and expansion. But there are other versions of this before also.
     
  22. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

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    Please give an esample of that:::

    "In more chaotic environments causes may not even come close to a particular effect."


    An the murderers defence woud be corect but he woud still go to jale.!!!
     
  23. swarm Registered Senior Member

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    Take a canvas, lay it on the floor and drip paint on it. You get a bit of splatter but you can still paint, as jack the dripper proved.

    Now put the canvas under water.

    The higher viscosity of the water cause turbulence (a form of chaos) which scatters and disperses the drops. You can no longer paint as you did before.
     

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