Has anyone seen my neutral pointer?

[bennyboy]

So, if I understand this correctly, why can't we just say, "we don't know" instead of saying it's neutral?

I still don't get the whole apple analogy.

Anyone care to help me understand?

To me, a "neutral pointer" means you are referring to something, whatever it "really" happens to be.  In other words, you don't make assumptions about the framework behind it.

[Excited Penguin]

Anyone care to help me understand?

To me, a "neutral pointer" means you are referring to something, whatever it "really" happens to be.  In other words, you don't make assumptions about the framework behind it.

That's simply impossible to do.

[Whateverist]

 So maybe you see an apple and say it's material stuff.  I see an apple and say it's a collection of ideas 

-stuff describing stuff.

Or .. that describing the other that?  (So hard to care.)

[Whateverist]

Anyone care to help me understand?

To me, a "neutral pointer" means you are referring to something, whatever it "really" happens to be.  In other words, you don't make assumptions about the framework behind it.

And yet no neutral pointer is used in reference to the manner in which we distinguish "stuff" from "ideas", or the "material" from the "something else".  In that we are said to be dead wrong, as seen from his high horse.

[bennyboy]

To me, a "neutral pointer" means you are referring to something, whatever it "really" happens to be.  In other words, you don't make assumptions about the framework behind it.

And yet no neutral pointer is used in reference to the manner in which we distinguish "stuff" from "ideas", or the "material" from the "something else".  In that we are said to be dead wrong, as seen from his high horse.

Eh?

I think you'll find the OP a lot more neutral than I am.  I'm just saying what I think the OP is talking about.

[Joods]

I'm just completely lost on this. Using the apple analogy, why can't people just say, an apple is an apple. Nothing more, nothing less. Why complicate that?

[Alex K]

I'm with benny, I think I understand perfectly what the OP wants in principle.I was faced with a similar problem writing popular science stuff: When recounting "what happens in nature", can one avoid talking through the lens of a theory, can one say theory-independent things about how nature works?


My problem responding to the OP is that I don't know what the word material thing means as opposed to immaterial thing. Anyonce care to offer a working definition that fits?

To me, a "neutral pointer" means you are referring to something, whatever it "really" happens to be.  In other words, you don't make assumptions about the framework behind it.

That's simply impossible to do.

I think you can do it in a subjective fashion by talking only about your experience, with the assumption that one can talk about ones experience.

[Excited Penguin]

I'm with benny, I think I understand perfectly what the OP wants in principle.I was faced with a similar problem writing popular science stuff:  When recounting "what happens in nature", can one avoid talking through the lens of a theory, can one say theory-independent things about how nature works?


My problem responding to the OP is that I don't know what the word material thing means as opposed to immaterial thing. Anyonce care to offer a working definition that fits?

That's simply impossible to do.

I think you can do it in a subjective fashion by talking only about your experience, with the assumption that one can talk about ones experience.

The way you interpret what's been said it makes sense. The way I did, it didn't.

[bennyboy]

I think you can do it in a subjective fashion by talking only about your experience, with the assumption that one can talk about ones experience.

^
This.

Isn't that the essence of science, really? Make the rawest observations you can, and then formulate theory on what they mean? It seems to me that filtering that raw information through one's philosophical world view (whatever that might be) is going to pointlessly limit the directions science might go in.

The particle controversy seems like the example to end all examples-- it was by letting go of older, more concrete, views of the workings of particles that science was finally able to move forward to where it is today, right?

[The Grand Nudger]

In context, do you think that science is pointlessly limited to the material.....? Science doesn't "let go" of useful or predictive models until it has a reason to. QM, for example...is the study of fundamental -particles-. We haven;t let go of older views on particles anymore than we've let go of newtonian mechanics, the question being asked so generally. Both work to describe relationships at some level of granularity. We -have- abandoned phlogiston theory but people sometimes don't realize how fruitful the theory was (had it not been so fruitful they would not have known enough about what it is they were studying to, eventually, realize that the phlogiston bit itself...was wrong). There may come a point where we abandon particles like we abandoned phlogiston, or even as we put the asterisk by newtonian mechanics. We're not there yet. I have no idea what you think that status of science in the here and now is. What was abandoned in favor of what and when?