#empircal

[wisdomfish]

The proposition, ‘I only believe in what can be observed empirically, or what can be inferred from what is empirically observed,’ cannot itself be derived from empirical observation!

Greg L. Bahnsen

[allgremlinart]

[aita-alternia]

Oh my fucking god more Alien talk. It’s so strange whenever trolls show up in my inbox like, “Hey stranger I don’t know, want to hear about all these illegal activities and conspiracy theories of mine? Do you support evil activities and conspiracy theories???”

Like Jegus it feels like they’re either trolling me trying to get me culled or they’re Empirical scouts really badly pretending to be normal kids.

I’m considering banning weird alien conspiracy talk from my blog for that reason. I’m not getting a drone strike sent to my hive because people want to send in asks about their fantasy alien erotica.

— Gray @quadrant-query

HI GR^Y QU^DR^NT QUERY. YE^H NO THIS SHIT IS WEIRD ^S FUCK, I CH^LKED IT UP TO GRUBBLE KIN DR^M^ ^T FIRST TBH

OK THE THEORY TH^T ITS EMPIRC^L SCOUTS GOING ^LL "HELLO FELLOW KIDS" ON US IS FUCKING HIL^RIOUS

[satans-trek]

physicist stuck in a Truman Show style experiment where the experiment is to see how many lies they can be convinced of, and the big reveal at the end is that none of the physics is real and it's all actually magic. Like electricity? That's just magic? We lied to you about the electrons. Electromagnetic waves? Photons? No. It's literally just magic. Atoms? We used magic to make it look like there were atoms being scattered in the Rutherford experiment. We used magic to run your "electron"ic devices. Forget all those equations that you spent years using. It's all fake. No, no, stop. You can't ask how it actually works. It's literally just magic. That's the empircal answer. You can't explain it. You can't do any of the physical sciences here. Physics? No. Chemistry? No. Biology. That's on thin ice.

[leohtttbriar]

i sort of think one of the reasons ds9 does fail in the particular (democracy, maybe?) Thematic is because it stopped caring about the other star-trek theme laid out for us in the intro to the original series: "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." ds9 is more about exploring said alien civilizations than about discovery. which is its weak point. when there were episodes about science and discovery and whatnot, they were great and interesting and pushed questions that sci-fi as a genre tends to push. odo discovering his kind, sisko and jake building the star-sailor, julian curing that disease with a vaccine, lenara building a wormhole, jadzia wanting to examine a planet closer and causing everyone to be stuck in a weird colony of pre-determined ancestors, etc. but the war plot overshadowed stuff like this and suddenly it was like watching the conclusion to lord of the rings, where evil defeats itself and the gods knew it all along and now our hero must stay in their realm (with none of the richness of the actual lord of the rings).

but the "discovery" element is important bc it carries themes about choice and questions about self and the essentiality of bodies and so on. to be constantly confronted with something alien, something new, is a process of de-familiarization with one's own world and culture. people don't notice their own accents until they're somewhere else, hearing another accent. but this element is so often linked in fan spaces with things like "colonization" or "imperialism" where the institution of starfleet is an instrument of colonizing and the infrastructure of the federation is that of an empire, much like america is today. my issue with that argument is not so much that i think it's necessarily wrong, or that it's missing "the point" (i mean, how much can a multi-authored, half-century-long story have a single "point")--it's that words like "colonizing" have moral significance and suddenly the things that we see in the shows that the star-explorers do most of the time, i.e., exploring, are colored with this implication: that scientific discovery is inherently a colonial project.

that science has contributed to colonialism, that colonialism has funded scientific exploration, that full knowledge-systems that have aided in establishing some of the most well-established scientific theories have also been rhetorically used to promote violent hate and slavery and dehumanization--there is no question. "exploration" has a history of chugging right along-side actual genocide and violent exploitation. but "exploration" is not colonialism. it's also been a tool for activists, champions of human rights, champions of non-human lives and rights, and, while not a moral tool, an avenue for expanding and encouraging human compassion.

the thing is, the challenge of scientific discovery is not only a challenge of establishing empircal fact but of knowing the boudaries of certainty. and this confrontation with human limits of knowledge, limits of consciousness, limits of Thought and Feeling at their most fundamental, is the sort of stuff a speculative world thrives in. the star-sail-ship that sisko builds is such a prime example because it's quite literally an archaeological and engineering discovery that de-colonizes. "far beyond the stars" is about how the imaginative reality is powerful, as it makes an argument that there will be a future and that future will belong to everyone, even as the world now does not; the imaginative yet exists and can be real if thought is allowed to expand to newness and newness is allowed power to shape what some might call "nature." interrogating "what is" forces out "narratives" and forces in complexity and sincerity and self-definition.

and, like. choice. what it takes to choose.

(and yeah, the colonizing aesthetic is there and i wouldn't blame anyone for being too uncomfortable with what's being presented (in TOS especially). some things have to be earned and words like "final frontier" and the design of some of those "alien" cultures can be hard to see past. at the same time the show is about enfolding new planets into a federation of planets (which, like, from a purely civics/government argument, is not colonialism), it is also enfolding new knowledge into an existing academy. which i think is good. (even if there could stand to be more stories about advanced civilizations that don't actually want to share their knowledge, which is ultimately respected.))

ds9 as whole annoyed me, though, with the thru-line theme being so weak and nonsensical, as it is concluded in the final episode. the institutions and the infrastructure are already there, within the world of the story, to force characters into decisions about power and governing and what it takes for a people to recover from fascist occupation while repelling a second fascist invasion. yet not a single character makes an actual argument against it. or voices a support for said institutions in a way that makes it clear why anyone would repel the invasion to begin with. the changelings are simply morally wrong and must be stopped (and they will definitely be bc the wormhole aliens See All ugh)

julian has one episode in which he learns to let go of his despair because, despite how intensely smart he is, he cannot know the future. and that is the best thing ds9 said about anti-fascism. not everything can be wholly known and wholly controlled. which is why choice has a value. why odo's pithy statement about people choosing "wrong" had to be answered (sucks that it was not). and it's julian, one of the characters most allowed to do scientific work throughout the series, who voices this and voices, in another episode, that some things cannot be simple cures, but only ongoing vaccines, projects that one has to re-invest in time and time again. in spite of uncertainty, in spite of how easy it would be to schedule a death before the pain sets in.

and i just think an established multicultural, liberal, exploration-based institution deserves to be championed in this speculative future. and that sci-fi as a whole could stand to be more focused on infrastructure. because it represents a collective owning of what is to come, so long as the state is owned by the people. i know trekkies on this website as a whole are kind of anti-establishment or anti-state, but my (probably unpopular opinion) is that state-ordained exploration can be a good thing. and someone in ds9 should have said something about why federal democracy is better than the changelings taking over.

[commandtower-solring-go]

I'd like to buy a 44

44: A random fact about anything

Literally my speciality.

There are these ideas in philosophy called Logical Razors. They represent, usually, simple principles that allow you to outright dismiss a bad faith argument. They are called razors for the way they shave off bad faith and nonsense arguments.

One that most people know is Occum's Razor, which is that you shouldn't needlessly complicate an argument. "entities should not be multiplies beyond necessity". Most people understand it as 'the simplest solution is usually the correct one', but this is a slight misunderstanding. It's more accurate to say 'the conclusion which requires the fewest leaps in logic, is most likely the correct one'.

But there are a bunch of these. Another example is Hume's Razor, which states that the only time we should believe in miracles is when the absence of a miracle is more absurd.

However, my favourite is Alder's Razor. Alder's Razor states that "That which cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating". This razor is at the centre of all empircal and scientific inquiry, and is so powerful a tool, that it has been given its own name. Newton's Flaming Lazer Sword, because likening to a razor simply does not do it justice.

[g0blinwitch]

tumblr users be like: umm...I'm very uncomfortable with people talking about the band franz ferdinand withought also talking about the intricate Austro-Hungarian's empircal tensions with the balkan region that led to his assasination ://// Honestly I'm really dissppointed with this site

(If you don't rb this post you'r part of the problem btw people ahve literally died because of this)

[vulpes-nothus]

Curious, as esteemed engineer and science educator Warg Thork, of "Warg Thork the Science Ork" fame, studied over fifty novels proclaimed by humans to be great, and using empircal evidence like word count, rate of speaking, and verb/adverb/noun/adjective ratios, that the human condition can be best summarized as, and I quote, "talking about much your life sucks and you hate people for an average of 23.6 hours without stopping to let anyone else talk."

Would you say that contrasts or compliments Dr. Grumgk's thesis?

You know what, "what is the human condition?" and "what is human nature?" is probably easier to answer when there's inhuman people around.

I'm just saying, maybe we should ask the Orcs to read some of the Great American Novels and see if they have anything to contribute on the topic?

[psychologyclass-blog]

Plato (ca. 428 - 348 B.C.) and his student Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.) have influenced modern thinking in psychology greatly (and other fields). Plato was a rationalist, and believed that knowledge gets acquired through thinking and logical analysis. Aristotle was an empiricist, and believed that knowledge gets acquired through empirical evidence (experience and observation). Both these approaches are used to some extent together in the psychology discipline. Rationalism is important for theory development and empiricism for the empirical evidence.  References: Image: ilimvemedeniyet.com Philosophy: Cognitive Psychology, Sternberg (2012)

[zuttie-deactivated-2022]

When exmuslims say blantantly bigoted things that make them sound no different than a typical Muslim

[drenosa]

Mama Arc: Very well. Penny, can you give birth?

Jaune: Oum, Mom!

Penny: It's okay, Jaune. *Turns to Mama Arc* I can assure you that I have a fully functioning reproductive system.

Penny: In my most recent medical check-up it has been established that my uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries are in excellent shape.

Penny: My pelvis has been, in an informal setting, described as perfect for child bearing.

Penny: And this is on top of the fact that, after some rigourous empircal testing, that the distance from my inner labia to my cervix is the precise distance to fully take in your son's reproductive organ.

The Arc Parents: ...

Jaune: *Blushing an atomic shade of red*

Penny: *Smiling innocently* Any further questions?

Ooh what do you think of this jaune introducing penny to his parents.

Jaune: Mom, dad. This is my girlfriend, Penny Polendina.

Penny: Salutations Mr. and Mrs. Arc!

Mama Arc: Well hello to you Penny, and my does my son know how to pick the cute ones.

Mama Arc: But you can just call me Blanche, dear.

Penny: I will try my best.

Mama Arc: Don't you have anything to say to her, Nick?

Papa Arc: ...Aren't you that girl that who was torn apart during the last Vytal Tournament?

Penny: Yes, but thankfully I was able to have a new body built.

Jaune: ...

M+PA: Jaune, explain now.

[puttingherinhistory]

Jfc, can’t make a post that’s just “anecdotally” talking about the horrible things that have happened to you and women around you from men and have the post pick up a little steam without having eleventy MRA’s hop in the notes and start shrieking “SEE, THIS IS WHY FEMINISM IS FAKE AND CAN’T BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY, IT’S ALL ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE, NO HARD EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE” The thing is, I post a fuck ton of articles and other shit that’s hard empircal data about the oppression of women. I reblog and make posts about studies showing adults treat female infants differently than male infants and this correlates to causing behavior differences in boys and girls. I reblog and make posts about statistics of sexual violence, domestic violence, and femicide. I reblog and make posts that’s hard empirical data about job discrimination against women like bosses admitting to not hiring a woman if she doesn’t perform femininity or if she seems like she might have a baby. I know I’m not the only one. A lot of feminists and womanists collect and share hard data like this.

But the second I share personal stories of ways I’ve been hurt and other women have been hurt by the patriarchy, I get MRA’s swarming me and jumping down my throat for “only posting anecdotes and not hard empirical data.”

Honestly I think they’re just trying to find a intellectual way of saying “shut up you shrill feminazi harpy, you talking about your hurt and oppression is inconvenient to me”

[phonyrams]

my coworker: haha what are you listening to *grabs my earbud* let me hear

my earbud: 🤔miracle how empircal😳 dont kno anything quite hysterical🤣 everything around me transpires🙇‍♀️ this reality 🙄my mentality 🙏everything changes so rapidly🤤

me: haha no

[senzacaponecoda]

Opening thoughts [stopping on p 34, not even through cp 1]

I feel like just arbitrarily preferencing nonconfigurational langs is just setting up a bias against analytic langs and not de-IE-ing things. Like word order really matters to non-IE langs too

I don't think the LAD can be disputed at this point. Kids acquire language instinctually and according to developmental patterns. Yeah there's some variation - VO and OV tend to get verbs in different orders, but frequency is intertwined with syntactic progression in a way that doesn't really feel like a challenge for MinX

"For approaches in the Chomskyan tradition, many syntactic phenomena require multiple, derivationally related representations, for example wh-displacement, free phrase and word order phenomena, and three-place predicates (binary-branching models only)." Why is this a criticism? It's good science if your theory can explain multiple things at once. Sometimes you run into weak and strong confinement, but usually you get quark theory. Or is this not a criticism?

Related to the above the reason phonological nulls are ok with me now is that the little bit of parsimony it sacrifices buys soooo much explanatory power.

I don't really believe that traces have to be physically timeable but I hear often via more cogsci guys that they just empircally exist

So DP predicates, ok. But in languages with DP predicates typically the auxiliary copula appears where a verb should be; when tensed, the tense elements tend to appear where such an auxiliary copula should be. Why do these tense features not simply attach themselves to the predicator? Why does Russian need to get out a byt or whatever they do when they could just attach -ela to the DP? Maria ne koshka, Maria ne byt koshka, Maria ne yest krys, Maria ne yela krys, *Maria ne koshkela

The DetP argument runs into a thing where it seems to me necessary that RRG posits NPs (no overt DP), DPs (no overt NPs), and D-N-Ps (both overt) whereas with null you get one kind of phrase (DP from a functional/constituency perspective, NP from a semantic/dependency perspective) . I don't think this is a problem for RRG, but it feels needlessly enrichening. That is I feel like it will overpredict very surface-level different approaches for the three phrase types whereas it seems to me langs just want their one DP phrase structure.

You don't need to posit bata child N and bata be a child V if you have zero copula I mean

Concerns aside, I do think it's an issue that MinX separates syntax, phonology, and semantics. And I like that RRG tries to marry... some of them, I guess. But I feel like something is wrong, like, mixed aphasia is getting lost again.

wh in situ is associated with SOV, huh. neat

Got my paws on a copy of the Role and Reference Textbook that just came out of cambridge press

I want to go through it and contrast it with Minimalism, so I guess here's a thread. RRG to block it

[perkwunos]

In Shaviro’s account of how Deleuze differs from Kant, in Without Criteria, he actually in significant ways (and, it seems to me, completely contrary to his intentions) details how Deleuze thereby also differs from Whitehead:

Kant’s stance is legislative and juridical: he seeks to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate uses of reason. Deleuze seeks rather (citing Artaud) “to have done with the judgment of God”; his criterion is constructivist rather than juridical, concerned with pushing forces to the limits of what they can do, rather than with evaluating their legitimacy. Also, Kant’s transcendental realm determines the necessary form—but only the form—of all possible experience. Deleuze’s virtual, in contrast, is “genetic and productive” of actual experience (Deleuze 1983, 51–52). ...

To convert Kant from transcendental idealism to transcendental empircism, and from a juridico-legislative project to a constructivist one, is to move from the possible to the virtual, and from merely formal conditions of possibility to concrete conditions of actualization. Deleuze’s transformation of Kant thus leads directly to his famous distinction between the virtual and the possible. For Deleuze, the possible is an empty form, defined only by the principle of noncontradiction. To say that something is possible is to say nothing more than that its concept cannot be excluded a priori, on logical grounds alone. This means that possibility is a purely negative category; it lacks any proper being of its own. Mere possibility is not generative or productive; it is not enough to make anything happen. It does not satisfy the principle of sufficient reason. This is why Deleuze says that “the possible is opposed to the real” (Deleuze 1994, 211). Something that is merely possible has no claim to existence, and no intrinsic mode of being. Its only positive characteristics are those that it borrows from the real that it is not. The possible “refers to the form of identity in the concept”; it “is understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible” (211–212). That is to say, the possible is exactly like the real, except for the contingency that it does not, in fact, exist. And the real is nothing more than the the working-out of what was already prefigured and envisioned as possible. In this mirror play of resemblances, there can be nothing new or unexpected. When a possibility is realized—when it does come into existence—no actual creation has taken place. As Deleuze says, “it is difficult to understand what existence adds to the concept when all it does is double like with like” (212). 

The virtual, on the other hand, is altogether real in its own right; it “possesses a full reality by itself” (ibid. 211). … it is the impelling force, or the principle, that allows each actual entity to appear (to manifest itself) as something new, something without precedence or resemblance, something that has never existed in the universe in quite that way before. That is why the virtual is entirely distinct from the possible. (33-34)

Whitehead’s equivalent to the “virtual,” his eternal objects considered as pure potentialities, exactly are more aligned with logical possibilities: they are definite forms that actual events may be characterized by, they are exactly the “form of identity” that allows for resemblance between actualities, and the eternal objects already in themselves contain logical/mathematical, necessary relations while also beyond such abstract necessities containing indeterminacy as to how, where, why, they ingress into actuality. They are explicitly “not enough to make anything happen” and cannot be a sufficient reason for anything, per Whitehead’s “ontological principle” that maintains that only actual entities can supply such sufficient reasons; eternal objects only exist by virtue of existing within actual entities. (The important qualification being that God’s primordial nature, as the appetitive envisioning of all eternal objects by the primordial actual entity, already guarantees such sufficient reason for their potential efficacy in the ensuing history of the world.)

It is a common argument that due to Whitehead maintaining the pre-existence of all definite form, “the real is nothing more than the the working-out of what was already prefigured and envisioned as possible” and so “there can be nothing new or unexpected.” Of course, Whitehead didn’t think that eternal objects prefigure what is actual by supplying one single plan: they are potentials, indeterminate as to how they may be actualized. It would be impossible to ever be able to truly predict everything that happens in the future, thanks to the indeterminacy of future actual entity’s subjective decisions and intentions, but the definite form of anything that becomes actual could in principle be predicted. I think those who act as if the capacity for rational prediction of such definite forms somehow lessens the novelty of the actual experience are only following the expectations of their own theoretical dictates rather than allowing for the exploration of what they actually experience.

Eternal objects have no “impelling force” on their own--though, by virtue of God’s appetition they necessarily will be experienced already with valuations (though these are necessarily vague initiating suggestions liable to a wide diversity of treatments and rearrangements). It is actual entities, in their construction of themselves through the appetition of their subjective aim, that allow themselves “to appear … as something new”--and each actual entity is radically new, an absolute totality in itself with no more eminent reality (as opposed to Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual)--but it is exactly the role of eternal objects as pure potentials to maintain “precedence or resemblance”.

The strange thing is that Shaviro does, in fact, go on to detail all these aspects of eternal objects I’ve just given, but doesn’t seem to appreciate how much this diverges from Deleuze’s ideas he earlier related. (I suppose Shaviro’s strategy may have been essentially to Whiteheadianize Deleuze, which has some success but I think involves an awkward disjunction of propositions.)

[affirmation--negation]

Nathan Brown, "Rationalist Empircism."