Natural Science Forum / Physics / General Physics / June 2007

***{Infant.

Note that Trek put quotes around "before." Clearly, he wants to discuss
whether that notion always applies. Your response him took the form of
an unsupported assertion, and, as such, was of no more significance than
the sound of the wind blowing.

My response to him is that real events always arise out of the
rearrangement of material that existed prior to the event, and, thus,
that the notion of "before" is always meaningful, where real events are
concerned. That means deductive logic, of which mathematics is a subset,
always applied in the past, and will always apply in the future.

For example, if a carton contains a dozen eggs and you remove three,
nine remain. Such a statement captures a timeless, eternal truth.

Of course, nine won't remain if an extra egg appears out of nothing for
every egg that you remove. In that case, you could remove limitless
numbers of eggs from a carton containing a dozen, and 12 would still
remain. Similarly, if when you remove an egg, another egg vanishes into
nothing somewhere else in the carton, then when you remove three from a
carton containing a dozen, only 6 will remain.

What this means is that the applicability of deductive reasoning to the
real world does not merely rest on the premises that are "given" within
the specific deductive system, but also on notions of a more fundamental
nature which arise out of philosophy. To be very specific, if the
principle of continuity is true--i.e., if no thing may come into
existence out of nothing or vanish into nothing--then deductive
reasoning captures truths that are timeless and eternal; and if the
principle of continuity isn't true, then we have no basis for believing
in the existence of anything, including "God," the external world, the
self, the "Big Bang," or anything else.

--Mitchell Jones}***

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If I seem to be ignoring you, consider the possibility
that you are in my killfile. --MJ