Entities and attributes in science

[Baldeee]

Now, as to the notion of whether attributes such as mass existed prior to there being someone to coneptualise such an attribute:
James R seems to have one view, that mass didn't exist prior to human conceptualisation of mass, and this is indeed held to be the case by some philosophers: Spinoza, for example, said "By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence”.
So absent the intellect, the attribute ceases to exist.
He would also espouse there being a single property for each object, that property being the object's essence (its extension).
He would also espouse there being an actual underlying substance (so not "bundle theory", then).

David Armstrong, in his Instantiation Principle, said that attributes only exist if it is instantiated by an object.
If there is no object in the universe that has the attribute, then that attribute does not exist, although this considers the universe as a whole, both spatially and temporally, such that if the attribute was, is, or will be instantiated then it is said to exist.
So under this Principle, even if one agrees that mass is only an attribute once conceptualised by humans, it does exist as an attribute now, and thus has always existed, even if not exmplified previously.

Taking it back to what arfa brane said: "How do you know there's still a rose left if you discount all the "attributes"? (#post 41), which is the basic question that Hume's theory tries to resolve as "nothing".
And James R's response: "This is the old "if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is watching..." debate. Another one for the philosophers." (#post 52)...

While I see this as an unfortunate sweeping aside of an interesting issue with an apparent non sequitur (in that it seems to miss the point arfa brane was making) it does at least highlight a consistency in thought, but one that is difficult to ignore further: why does a property of a thing no longer exist just because those who conceptualise it are not there to do so?
If the universe had no mass prior to humans conceptualising "mass", how could the universe have formed as we see it now?
What we conceptualise as "mass" may be a concept that only has meaning to those that conceptualise it, but it does represent something about the thing in question.
That something doesn't just disappear because one can't formulate the thoughts or words to express it, surely, at least not within the realm of science, does it?
Sure, Spinoza et al might define their understanding of an attribute as only being relevant to human conceptualisation, but does science do that?
Our expression, our concept of that something may not be a precise description of what is actually going on, but nonetheless that something is still there, I'd suggest.
I'm interested to hear why you think otherwise?

 

[Baldeee]

I don't really do this line by line stuff.

Then feel free to respond as you see fit, addressing what you want to.
I have no issue with that.
Personally I find that if I don't go line by line I might miss things that are worth responding to, and if someone has taken the time to respond to me then I'll take the time to respond to everything I consider worth responding to.
As it is, I'm not going to change the way I post to accommodate you, I'm afraid.
Sorry.
So either respond or don't, and however you want.
It's entirely up to you.

 

[davewhite04]

An entity is something that has distinct and independent existence, whether tangible or intangible, whether actually or potentially, physically or not.

Just a quick question.

Can you give me an example of an entity as you describe. existing but being intangible?

 

[Baldeee]

Just a quick question.

Can you give me an example of an entity as you describe. existing but being intangible?

A football league
Numbers
Sets
Angels and demons (at least for the atheist among us )

Basically any object you can think of and talk about that can't be put in a bottle due to not being tangible.
There is some obvious debate about such things as to whether they can be said to exist, but not all philosophy is physicalism.

 

[davewhite04]

Angels and demons (at least for the atheist among us )

I also thought of ghosts

... but not all philosophy is physicalism.

I agree.

 

[arfa brane]

I think it's transparent what James R and his acolytes are doing here.

The idea is that an entity, a real physical object, is something you can put in a bottle. Now, I think since we're being so picky about what words mean in physics, the word "bottle" should be picked on. James doesn't do that.

Next up, we march straight to the "thus it is written" part, where entities are separate from a list of attributes or properties they exhibit.
So an electron isn't its charge (although the electron's charge exists because of a more complex field, weak hypercharge and a symmetry-breaking process, so it isn't actually a simple static "attribute", like a red color). Take away all the things your entity of choice has, because they aren't the entity "itelf". Then claim its all conceptual

Yeh. I still got nothin' over here.

 

[arfa brane]

Now, as to the notion of whether attributes such as mass existed prior to there being someone to coneptualise such an attribute:
James R seems to have one view, that mass didn't exist prior to human conceptualisation of mass, and this is indeed held to be the case by some philosophers: Spinoza, for example, said "By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence”.

But mass is a quantity; it's the quantity in a "quantity of matter". James I think disagrees that "mass density" and "matter density" are interchangeable.

But if mass is another word for quantity of matter, which is three words, how do electrons gain a rest mass via the Higgs interaction? Or any of the fermions? Further, I do not see how you can agree that a particle is real but its attributes are concepts that explain behaviour. The mass of an electron, its rest mass, is an ongoing interaction with a field, the Higgs field (there is strong evidence that at least one Higgs-type field exists).

"Exists" in the sense it has existed since the universe of matter has.
Woops, I forgot, James thinks fields in physics are conceptual.

 

[arfa brane]

One more quibble:

I watched a lecture yesterday by Leonard Susskind. He discusses storing some energy in a bottle; the bottle has a perfectly reflecting inner surface, so the energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation is conserved. Clearly this bottle is an ideal physical object, it would be a hard problem to solve, manufacturing a perfect reflector.
But such a bottle or container would be able to store the red color of a rose . . . note the IS reference there.

What Susskind said in that lecture clearly contradicts what James R has been telling us. And yes, I prefer to believe Susskind in this case. After all, the man has published scientific papers, has a PhD and is a tenured professor at Stanford. I noticed he did not say he knows what energy is! He most certainly never says it's a concept in a human mind.

 

[exchemist]

One more quibble:

I watched a lecture yesterday by Leonard Susskind. He discusses storing some energy in a bottle; the bottle has a perfectly reflecting inner surface, so the energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation is conserved. Clearly this bottle is an ideal physical object, it would be a hard problem to solve, manufacturing a perfect reflector.
But such a bottle or container would be able to store the red color of a rose . . . note the IS reference there.

What Susskind said in that lecture clearly contradicts what James R has been telling us. And yes, I prefer to believe Susskind in this case. After all, the man has published scientific papers, has a PhD and is a tenured professor at Stanford. I noticed he did not say he knows what energy is! He most certainly never says it's a concept in a human mind.

You said it yourself. What he is storing is radiation, which has, repeat, has energy. Energy is one of the many attributes of radiation.

 

[arfa brane]

You said it yourself. What he is storing is radiation, which has, repeat, has energy. Energy is one of the many attributes of radiation.

No. Energy has different forms: work, heat, electromagnetic radiation, sound . . .

EM radiation is a form of energy. Energy is an "attribute of" electromagnetic energy, and of itself. Sure. Whatever.

The logic is thus: if heat is a form of energy, then what is infrared radiation?
The answer is, infrared is a form of energy too; adding infrared is equivalent to adding heat. Infrared radiation makes molecules and atoms vibrate, it increases their energy.

You made a mistake there. If you discount the energy of infrared (or any other) EM radiation, then what's left? If you want to believe that a form of energy is an attribute you need to specify what the entity is.

So if EM radiation isn't really a form of energy because "energy is an attribute", what is EM radiation "apart from" the energy specified by the frequency and Planck's constant? Is there any "apart from"? Where is it if it's the "real, physical stuff"? What does it do to "other stuff"?

 

[arfa brane]

All this useless crap about entities and attributes, and here we still are.

What is it about human perception that allows us to classify physical stuff that way?
The color of a flower, such as a red, or a white, rose is something we perceive. So is the process of perception a physical thing?
Is a process an entity? Are ideas attributes of a mind/brain?

Why is it so important to see everything as either an entity or an attribute? I just can't see that it is.
Which is why I prefer to not try to qualify the word physical beyond "having physical units".
One thing it allows me is that probabilities are not physical because they don't have physical units. However, it seems that probabilities really do exist--I have done a bit of gambling in my day.

I cannot for the life of me see why I need to classify probability as either an entity or an attribute.

 

[exchemist]

No. Energy has different forms: work, heat, electromagnetic radiation, sound . . .

EM radiation is a form of energy. Energy is an "attribute of" electromagnetic energy, and of itself. Sure. Whatever.

The logic is thus: if heat is a form of energy, then what is infrared radiation?
The answer is, infrared is a form of energy too; adding infrared is equivalent to adding heat. Infrared radiation makes molecules and atoms vibrate, it increases their energy.

You made a mistake there. If you discount the energy of infrared (or any other) EM radiation, then what's left? If you want to believe that a form of energy is an attribute you need to specify what the entity is.

So if EM radiation isn't really a form of energy because "energy is an attribute", what is EM radiation "apart from" the energy specified by the frequency and Planck's constant? Is there any "apart from"? Where is it if it's the "real, physical stuff"? What does it do to "other stuff"?

Balls.

 

[arfa brane]

Electromagnetic radiation is a form of energy that propagates as both electrical and magnetic waves traveling in packets of energy called photons.

--https://www.britannica.com/science/electromagnetic-radiation

Electromagnetic energy travels in waves and spans a broad spectrum from very long radio waves to very short gamma rays.

--https://science.nasa.gov/ems/01_intro

Electromagnetic waves are invisible forms of energy that travel though the universe.

--https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/electro

Electromagnetic radiation is a form of energy.

--https://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/projects/vss/docs/thermal/3-what-makes-em-radiation.html

. . .

 

[arfa brane]

I detect a distinct lack of interest from the still-confused camp.
James R and exchemist don't seem to have a lot to say anymore. What the hell happened?

I mean, pages and pages from James R, supporting arguments for every word he posts, from exchemist.
And now, nothing.

They've got nothing.

 

[Beer w/Straw]

I detect a distinct lack of interest from the still-confused camp.

Could you clarify the meaning behind that statement?

 

[Tiassa]

Your dishonest behavior—

Try to be specific, if you're going to make accusations.

By why waste time like this, with a hide-and-seek game with post references? Why not just state how you think I misrepresented you?

—is unacceptable, James.

Let's take a look at what you quoted:

As you were just caught↑ misrepresenting↑ me...

As you see, I included two links: One is your post↑, misrepresenting me, and one is my post↑, in which I describe the misrepresentation. That is, the post in which I make the specific point and state how you misrepresented me.

So, for you to turn around and demand what is already on the record is explicitly dishonest. Especially when you're quoting the link to the explanation on record.

‡​

Thus, just for you:

… if you're going to wag like that, then do not misrepresent what other people say; it's almost impossible that you missed the next sentence↑ of what I said, but, sure, I'll remind you:

You want energy in a bottle, fine, I'll wind a watch spring and leave it locked. And while we all know that's not what you mean, to what degree is any form of energy contained in such a manner as you ask? To what degree can that energy exist under the circumstances you suggest?

(boldface accent added)​

See what you missed, there? See what you skipped out on?

Because, what was it you had said?

Here's the crux - the part of my argument that you completely failed to grasp: energy is not a "thing", in the relevant sense, because you can't isolate it in that bottle, in the absence of the watch spring. The energy is an attribute of the watch spring, in this example, whereas the spring itself is an entity. Moreover, if you think about it, the "energy of the coiled spring" is just a number in your head or - if you're not a physicist - some kind of very vague concept in your imagination.

Do you understand the distinction I have been making, yet? Surely, you must, if you've read this far.

See, you skipped over the proverbial (and literal) very next sentence in order to wag and huff about its absence. That was very dishonest behavior, James:

• What you quoted: "You want energy in a bottle, fine, I'll wind a watch spring and leave it locked."

• What I said: "You want energy in a bottle, fine, I'll wind a watch spring and leave it locked. And while we all know that's not what you mean, to what degree is any form of energy contained in such a manner as you ask?"​

Do you see how you skipped out on the part that explicitly says, "we all know that's not what you mean" in order to complain that the watch spring wasn't what you mean? But maybe it feels good to huff and wag self-righteously, "Do you understand the distinction I have been making, yet? Surely, you must, if you've read this far," because, yes, James, it was already established, and you know that because you're not stupid. Or, perhaps consider the alternative: That your excuse would be having gotten so wound up that you huffed self-righteous without reading the next sentence. Good one, James. Brilliant.

It was the next damn sentence. But at least you got to skip out on a question.

Or was that all too confusing?

It may be that nobody flags your dishonesty, but that doesn't mean anyone is obliged to overlook your behavior.

 

[James R]

Baldeee:

You are asserting that the description of a thing is the thing. My stance in this thread has been the opposite: that the description of a thing is a not the thing itself.

In fact, you go further, saying that a thing is nothing but its description. Take the description away and presumably the thing itself vanishes, for some reason.

That view doesn't appeal to me.

The reason I asked you whether you had read through the previous discussion was to save myself some time and effort in repeating the points I have made yet again, for yet another new participant in the thread who was apparently too lazy and too entitled to get himself up to speed with the discussion that went before, prior to jumping in with claims that things weren't explained satisfactorily, or were wrong.

You ask whether I clearly defined the difference between my usage of the words "entity" and "attribute". As it happens, I proposed a very simple empirical test you could use to tell the difference.

Rather than repeating myself for the third (or is it the fourth) time, for the latest person who is new to the thread, I suggest you do some homework at this point and get yourself up to speed. Once you've done that, you and I can talk some more, if you like.

Good luck.

 

[arfa brane]

Baldeee:

You are asserting that the description of a thing is the thing. My stance in this thread has been the opposite: that the description of a thing is a not the thing itself.

In fact, you go further, saying that a thing is nothing but its description. Take the description away and presumably the thing itself vanishes, for some reason.

I see nowhere in any of Baldeee's posts in this thread where he asserts any such thing.

You are a dishonest man. You are pretty much full of shit, bro.
I have no reason left, that I can find in my head to respond to you again. You have nothing to contribute except confusing crap, and it looks intentional.

I refuse to waste any more time with idiots, like you.

 

[James R]

Tiassa:

I'm at a loss as to what your continuing claim about my supposedly misrepresentating you is about. I'll grant you that you seem sincere and are trying to explain what you perceive the issue to be, but I'm not understanding your point.

Let's take a look at what you quoted:
....
As you see, I included two links: One is your post↑, misrepresenting me, and one is my post↑, in which I describe the misrepresentation. That is, the post in which I make the specific point and state how you misrepresented me.

I am under the impression that I replied in detail to your complaint, addressing your post more or less line by line.

You seem to be alleging that I misrepresented you not directly, but by omission in some form or other. That's about as far as I can get with this.

....
See, you skipped over the proverbial (and literal) very next sentence in order to wag and huff about its absence.

My perception is that I didn't skip over anything. You asked "And while we all know that's not what you mean, to what degree is any form of energy contained in such a manner as you ask?"

My answer was/is that energy cannot be contained in the way you described, and I explained why in that paragraph you quoted from me that starts with the words "Here's the crux - ..."

Do you see how you skipped out on the part that explicitly says, "we all know that's not what you mean" in order to complain that the watch spring wasn't what you mean?

I can't read your mind, Tiassa. I have no way to tell what you're thinking when you say "we all know that's not what you mean", unless you also explain what you think I mean - and you didn't do that, there. How, then, do you expect me to reply to that? You asserted you knww what I meant about something, while doing nothing to demonstrate you knew what I meant. On the contrary, my reading was that you missed the point and therefore explicitly did not know what I meant. So, I explained it again to you.

But maybe it feels good to huff and wag self-righteously, "Do you understand the distinction I have been making, yet? Surely, you must, if you've read this far," because, yes, James, it was already established, and you know that because you're not stupid. Or, perhaps consider the alternative: That your excuse would be having gotten so wound up that you huffed self-righteous without reading the next sentence. Good one, James. Brilliant.

The thing is, though, as far as I can tell, you still haven't actually demonstrated that you understand the point of dispute, despite my taking considerable time and effort to respond directly to you and to explain things again, this time around entirely for your benefit.

Instead, you've decided to just assume the worst and complain that I've gone out of my way to dishonestly misrepresent what I understand your understanding to be. Which, I might add, is all very meta and divorced from any actual discussion of any on-topic point of dispute you and I might have.

Maybe if you tried spending a little less time trying to find reasons to take personal offence, you might have time to engage with the topic of the thread. Just a thought.

 

[James R]

arfa brane:

I detect a distinct lack of interest from the still-confused camp.

The still-confused camp in this is your side, not mine.

Please be aware that some of us have lives outside of sciforums that we need to get on with from time to time. Try having a little patience.

Besides, your cries for attention aren't very consistent with your repeated claims that all of this is a waste of your time. Make up your mind. Do you want this sorted, or not? If you're over it, you can always just walk away. But it makes no sense to claim you're uninterested and simultaneously complain that you're not getting attended to rapidly enough to calm your flustered nerves.

I think it's transparent what James R and his acolytes are doing here.

I don't know about you, but I'm not colluding with anybody behind the scenes on this one, arfa. This is simple enough not to require outside help or moral support. Having said that, exchemist's posts have been very useful and on the ball, as usual.

I know you're a rude, uncivil sort of man, so it doesn't particularly surprise me that you want to reduce independent participants who happen to agree with me to the insulting status of "acolytes". This, too, does not reflect well on your character.

The idea is that an entity, a real physical object, is something you can put in a bottle. Now, I think since we're being so picky about what words mean in physics, the word "bottle" should be picked on. James doesn't do that.

Neither have you, yet. By your own admission, you haven't even grasped what the argument is.

But mass is a quantity; it's the quantity in a "quantity of matter". James I think disagrees that "mass density" and "matter density" are interchangeable.

"100 kg" is not an entity. It's a label we use to quantify something. A concept.

I won't be at all surprised if you proceed to conflate the two meanings of "mass" yet again. I actually expect you will do that again, despite careful attempts to tutor you.

But if mass is another word for quantity of matter...

See what I mean?

Can you explain the two meanings of the "mass" that I previously took some time to carefully distinguishing for you (at least twice)? I don't think you can. As you said, you've got nothing.

... how do electrons gain a rest mass via the Higgs interaction?

The Higgs interaction is a theory - a concept in your mind.

Further, I do not see how you can agree that a particle is real but its attributes are concepts that explain behaviour.

I have not claimed that concepts are "not real". Concepts describe things. Attributes are concepts that describe entities.

Woops, I forgot, James thinks fields in physics are conceptual.

What do you think they are?

Can you show me a field in a bottle? How will you go about detecting the field? How will you be sure you have detected a field, as opposed to merely observing some behaviour of entities?

I watched a lecture yesterday by Leonard Susskind. He discusses storing some energy in a bottle; the bottle has a perfectly reflecting inner surface, so the energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation is conserved.

"Energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation" is a nonsense phrase.

We've come full circle. Energy is not electromagnetic radiation. Electromagnetic radiation is not energy. Electromagnetic radiation is not a "form of energy". All of that is nonsense.

If Susskind stored some light in a reflective bottle, so be it. If he calculated a number and called it the "energy of the radiation", so be it. But I'm almost sure he would be able to tell the difference between the energy and the light - something that seems to be quite beyond your capacities.

But such a bottle or container would be able to store the red color of a rose . . .

It couldn't store the red colour of a rose without the rose.

You can't show me a bottle full of red.

What Susskind said in that lecture clearly contradicts what James R has been telling us.

Either Susskind is as dense as you on this, or you've misunderstood him. I'm guessing the latter.

And yes, I prefer to believe Susskind in this case. After all, the man has published scientific papers, has a PhD and is a tenured professor at Stanford.

I'll be very happy to correct him on this matter, if he actually sides with you. That seems very unlikely. I think he's probably smarter than that. He'd probably grasp the gist of this argument from reading just the first few posts of this thread, then agree with me.

I noticed he did not say he knows what energy is! He most certainly never says it's a concept in a human mind.

i.e. he didn't address the topic of dispute in this thread. Which makes this whole digression of yours irrelevant.

No. Energy has different forms: work, heat, electromagnetic radiation, sound . . .

Those are just labels used to partition concepts from one another.

If "electromagnetic energy" was really different from "heat energy" or "mass energy", we couldn't add them together to calculate "total energy".

EM radiation is a form of energy.

Error Will Robinson! Error! Does not compute.

Energy is an "attribute of" electromagnetic energy, and of itself. Sure. Whatever.

Contradicting yourself in consecutive sentences? Sure. Why not?

This just proves you (still) don't understand what you're trying to talk about. Clearly, this is beyond you.

The logic is thus: if heat is a form of energy, then what is infrared radiation?

Radiation.

The answer is, infrared is a form of energy too...

Wrong.

Infrared radiation makes molecules and atoms vibrate, it increases their energy.

Yes, and yes. Irrelevant.

You made a mistake there. If you discount the energy of infrared (or any other) EM radiation, then what's left?

The EM radiation.

If you want to believe that a form of energy is an attribute you need to specify what the entity is.

EM radiation, in this case.

So if EM radiation isn't really a form of energy because "energy is an attribute", what is EM radiation "apart from" the energy specified by the frequency and Planck's constant?

Contradicting yourself in the same sentence now?

All this useless crap about entities and attributes, and here we still are.

You can check out any time you like.

What is it about human perception that allows us to classify physical stuff that way?

Strange question. It isn't perception that allows us to classify things. We need to think, to do that.

The color of a flower, such as a red, or a white, rose is something we perceive. So is the process of perception a physical thing?

Define "physical thing".

Does the process of perception have physical units? No. So, using your definition, it seems this isn't a physical thing.

Is a process an entity?

Can you put the process of perception in a bottle? If not, then just maybe it's not an entity. It might just be a ... process?

Are ideas attributes of a mind/brain?

I'd say: not in the simple way I have previously defined entities and attributes. Ideas are, however, concepts, so are in the same ontological ballpark as attributes.

Why is it so important to see everything as either an entity or an attribute? I just can't see that it is.

If it's not important to you, you can check out of this discussion any time you like. But you're still here.

Besides that, who said it's important to see everything as either an attribute or an entity? Not me.

Which is why I prefer to not try to qualify the word physical beyond "having physical units".

Ergo, the process of perception is not physical, using your definition. Turns out that quite a lot of things aren't physical, using your definition, despite what common sense might suggest to other people.

One thing it allows me is that probabilities are not physical because they don't have physical units. However, it seems that probabilities really do exist--I have done a bit of gambling in my day.

It seems to me that ideas, and love, and unicorns really do exist. They really exist ... as concepts.

You still don't know what this discussion is about, do you?

I cannot for the life of me see why I need to classify probability as either an entity or an attribute.

Who told you that you need to do that?

You're a free man. Free to walk away from things that don't matter to you. Why don't you walk away from this?