Those are all interesting veiwpoints, but I feel today that any philosophical treatise on the laws of nature must come from a complete as possible understanding of what we know of those laws so far, whcih you can only discover through observing it...ie: science. One CAN NOT discover the laws of nature through thought (philosophy and logic) alone, one must be guided by nature herself. Philosophy becomes much, much more powerful when persued from this vantage. You simply can not place the mind of man at such...well an almost divine stature in nature that he can almost prescribe to nature how she ought to behave, for it is in fact quite the opposite case. Now your questions are very insightful from a purely logical perspective, but they are not necessarily relevant in the sense as how they pertain to the real physical world. Logic itself does not by any means garauntee congruency to the physical world, not at all. There are many logical arguments which are interesting to stretch your mind around, but they simply do not have anything to do woth reality...remember Xeno`s paradox? The rabbit will surely win, even though there exists a completey logical argument which says that it can not. The problem is that the logic, even though it is consistent, is incomplete. And incomplete logic may as well be no logic at all. How do you complete it?..by letting nature show you the path to the truth...at least a truth which will be more complete than what you had before. And this is the endeavour we all call science. With this understanding, we see that all scientists are in fact philosophers. As a scientist myself I`ve tried do dispute that discovery (for I am a scientist, not a philosopher) but I can not. I suppose then that I am a philosopher of a certain `kind`.
In any case, your questions are very well defined and all have answers. I implore you, you having an obviously good grasp of logic and philosophy, to complete it with an indepth and advanced study of mathematics and physics. It will take some time but if you are serious, if you really want to know something about the physcial world and how it works, then that is your only option.
I can not answer your questions simply or quickly, because most of what I would have to tell you would only give rise to more questions, and it could go on ad infinitum. And in any case most of the answers could only be best explained through the logic of mathematics, that logos which seems to be at the very heart of nature herself.

• RE: RE: RE: RE: experiment - Phil.O.Sofir - April 10, 2000 - 02:35 UTC