leonardomenderes wrote:
I am trained ... I have been employed ... I actually know ... You are ...
You may ... And that's not an ad-hom
You are addressing the person and not the argument.
As a Scientist, I am offering the
trained opinion that you do not know what you are talking about
when you affiliate yourself, or me I also have scientific background, and have no intention of matching the length of my belt with yours. I'll gain nothing by wiping you out.

The problem is not that at all. The problem is that you are intellectually lazy, and are unwilling to open your mind to ideas you have missed in the past.

I am currently rereading Einstein's popular book Relativity (1916/2005) and Feynman's Six Not-so-easy Pieces (1964/1997) which covers special and general relativity for precisely the strictly philosophical points I am discussing here. They say that you are wrong.

Many people have come and gone who
read favorite pop.sci. treatises.
Philosophic reading too. It's strange
what the lone reading does sometimes.
I'm still stuck on the strange oversimplification
you proffered. Most of the process seems missing.
Sections of thought gone, my dynamic insistance
called static. If there is a cognitive problem,
I'm not going to cure it. I've learned that here.
I'll just take a peek at Pavel's strange diatribes
before I shuffle off.

The relevant division is not between the Platonic (idealists) and Aristotelean realists. It is between those and the relativist.

Realists refer to objects and facts, relativists refer to processes and events. Objects and facts describe things that are talked about as if they were eternal and static. "The Earth is unquestionably round." Aristotelean (and Humean) change is a change to an object. The rock is cold/warm.

On those who enter the same rivers, ever different waters flow.
To a relativist, perspective and time are indispensible in descriptions. It isn't what a thing is, but how a process evolves over time. It cuts reality not across time, but along the time dimension. The river is the name of the waters that flow in a more stable riverbed. Both are in flux, but the rate of change is greater for the waters than for the sands, and the rate of cange for the sands is greater than for the rockbed.

"The Earth is unquestionably either round/flat/oblate/craggy depending on the place&time of perspective including the evolution of its entire history." Heraclitan change is an ongoing process with its own characteristics, including relativity.

If the river is constantly in flux, then so is the perception of that river relative to place and time for those who enter that river.

It seems to me that processes and events are important to idealists and realists too, so are you saying that for relativists processes and events are basic, where these things aren't basic for either idealists or realists?

Erosopher wrote:It seems to me that processes and events are important to idealists and realists too, so are you saying that for relativists processes and events are basic, where these things aren't basic for either idealists or realists?
Realists measure change as the difference between two fixed pictures, one snapped before and one after. Relativists measure the rate and direction of instantaneous change. Newton developed his calculus for this purpose (he said so).

All philosophy that springs from Parmenides, whether Platonic or Aristotelean talks of discrete things, objects, in a matrix of space at different fixed times. These are derived from pictorial slices of reality from an imagined universal perspective. All Aristotelean sciences are like that: observation and classification. Things "are" so-and-so. Facts are the fixed knowable relations between things in a picture. (Also see Wittgenstein's Tractatus for an example.)

This kind of thinking is natural, it is necessary for the survival and reproduction of all animals. Animals inherently see objects as food, enemies, or mates, otherwise they could not possibly survive. However, as Heraclitus points out, this is a naive illusion. I have been "I" all my life, even though I have grown from an infant to an adult. I had to have changed along the way.

Processes and events are the terminology of modern science. The reason for this is that all of modern science is the study of change. Galileo measured change in motion (the second source of relativity) that became the two Galilean laws of mechanics (plus the third added by Newton). Galileo measured gravitational acceleration (the third source of relativity) that became Einstein's theory. This development has not been followed up by philosophy with a philosophy of change. It is a missing link. If you look at the article on change in the SEP, you'll see what I mean -- the meat is missing. That is why physicists can arrogantly dismiss "cocktail-party philosophers" (Feynman) who might approach the subject.

This still seems to suggest that this relativist position is an absurdity, since these relativists still need some unchanging principle that makes change itself possible or even just intelligible. That's why I think really transcendental idealism and empirical realism, or Parmenides and Heraclitus, are the most basic division (and both sides are true).