Originally posted by SuzianneThat statement of yours reeks of Eastern mysticism, God is not everywhere, infact the Bible states that God is a spirit and therefore resides in a spiritual realm what is often referred to as heaven.
God is everywhere, within and without.
Who said God has limits?
23 Nov 15
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Originally posted by Grampy BobbyThe smell of coffee.
[b]One Simple Question
Based upon your knowledge or opinion are there are things within the universe that we're unable to see which actually exist?[/b]
Gravity. (It's effect I can see, of course, but not it.)
Responsibility.
My genetic heritage. (I know that I must have had ancestors even if I cannot verify who they were.)
My own death and decay. (I know that these things will occur, though I shall not live to see them.)
The list is endless....
23 Nov 15
Originally posted by twhiteheadWhat you are seeing is mold. You need to clean your fridge.
How do you know if you have never seen it? I am sure it is a pale pink.
If I look in my fridge I can see space for one more item.
There are hundreds of different species of molds, but around your house you will commonly see five: blue-green and white, white, pink, gray-brown and fuzzy and black.
https://sites.google.com/site/windintheroses/mold
23 Nov 15
Originally posted by twhiteheadWhen you look in your fridge and see "space" for one more jar of jelly, you are confusing place for space. They are not the same (I refer you to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason if you are unsure of the difference).
How do you know if you have never seen it? I am sure it is a pale pink.
If I look in my fridge I can see space for one more item.
Ultimately what one sees is light, not space, and it is light alone which has color (or properties which we sense as color). The light may be reflected off of some non-luminous surface (such as the wall of your fridge), or it may be defused by a collection of particles of dust or mold or water vapor or whatever, or it may be direct rays from some radiant object or process (such as the incandescent bulb in your fridge or the nuclear fusion of a star). However, I should not have said that space is colorless--that was a careless formulation on my part. Water is colorless. I should have said that space is non-colored.
23 Nov 15
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Originally posted by moonbusWhat if I light bends rather than reflecting? Surely an Einstein ring allows you to see the curvature of space. If you are seeing its curvature are you not seeing it?
Ultimately what one sees is light, not space, and it is light alone which has color (or properties which we sense as color). The light may be reflected off of some non-luminous surface ...
Can black be seen? If you look up at the sky at night, do you not see the blackness of space?
23 Nov 15
Originally posted by twhiteheadBlack is a color; one sees a black cat or a black car because some light is being reflected from the surface of the object which is darker/dimmer, or radiating at a different degree Kelvin, than other light-reflecting objects in the vicinity.
Can black be seen? If you look up at the sky at night, do you not see the blackness of space?
What do you see in a cave with no light at all? In the total absence of light, there is no seeing, so there is no color either.
What you see when you look up at the sky at night is a black expanse spangled with stars. What you see in the night sky are all the places where stars aren't by comparison with the points of light you do see. If there were no stars or other light-reflecting-refracting-bending celestial objects up there, people would not think they were looking at any anything fundamentally different than the inside of a cave. It would be the same, subjectively for humans, if the sky were one single gigantic mono-chromatic luminous expanse from horizon to horizon (we might imagine that the sky on Venus looks like this).
We call the dark expanse in between the stars "(outer) space" (which is to say interstellar void) but one is still liable to confuse "place" with "space." Outer space just happens to be a very big place.
Place is equivalent to location or position, which is always relative to some other place/location/position, or relative to some visible object (such as a star or the walls of a fridge or our Earth when looking at the night sky), or with reference to some system of coordinates (such as latitude and longitude: e.g., a place in the Pacific Ocean). A place can be empty--which is what interstellar space mostly is (empty) and what would contain another jar of jelly in a fridge if no other solid is in that place.
Space is the logical presupposition of there being any place at all. One might think of it as the 'habitat' wherein all places and all objects exist, as time is the 'whenin' all events and processes occur.
A place has dimensions (size), though they may be astronomically vast; space has no dimensions: it is the logical presupposition of dimensionality (at all).
Let me give you a metaphor: what you see when you look at a chess game is a board with 64 squares of alternating colors, two sets of figures (2 kings, 2 queens, 16 pawns, etc.), and the moves (e2-e4, c7-c6 etc.). You do not see that the king cannot be moved into check; no matter how many games you observe in which this move never occurs, you never see that it cannot occur. The reason is that "the king cannot be moved into check" is not a move in the game or a figure in the game or a part of the board. It is a rule of the game, not a move within the game. Space is like that: it's one of the rules of the system, not one of the items within the system. We never see it, but we know it's there.
"What if light bends rather than reflecting? Surely an Einstein ring allows you to see the curvature of space. If you are seeing its curvature are you not seeing it?"
The fact that light can be bent (by gravitational lenses or whatever) shows that there is more than one rule of the game and that the rules form an interactive system, much as there is more than one rule of chess and they too form a system.
If you see an instance of the application of a rule, are you seeing the rule? That is the sort of question Wittgenstein might have racked his brain over. If I say "yes", just make sure you're not confusing the map for the territory!
I would say that one can be said to see space in the sense in which one can also be said to see the friendliness in a friend's smile, or to see that one is falling into a trap in chess. Falling into a trap is not an item on the board in the same way as the kings and queens; we interpret it into the position based on our understanding of the rules of the game. If you were to try to point to "falling into a trap", you could not point to anything other than the kings and queens and the squares they were on.
23 Nov 15
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Originally posted by moonbusEdit: I was writing this when you posted your reply to twhitehead above, I'm not certain we're saying quite the same thing here.
When you look in your fridge and see "space" for one more jar of jelly, you are confusing place for space. They are not the same (I refer you to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason if you are unsure of the difference).
Ultimately what one sees is light, not space, and it is light alone which has color (or properties which we sense as color ...[text shortened]... reless formulation on my part. Water is colorless. I should have said that space is non-colored.
That sounds like playing with words to me. If I say: "There is a place for it in the fridge.", for me the connotation is that there is a vacant spot for that thing which always contains things of that type (the eggs belong in the egg holder). Whereas, if I said: "There is space for it in the fridge.", that doesn't imply anything about proper place, it just means that the fridge is not full. So the distinction between place and space seems to me to do with specific purpose rather than anything fundamental.
Mathematically, a space is just a set containing objects with some rules such as a vector space. Place would refer to a specific vector.
I don't think that this narrow sense of "see" is terribly helpful. Really what we mean when we say we see something is that we detect some sort of predicate (red, big, charged, ...) and categorize the object based on its predicates. So if we can't see it (or hear it or whatever) then we can't assign any predicates to it. So is a predicateless object possible, in other words is ∃x∀P (¬Px) true or false?
23 Nov 15
Originally posted by moonbusNo, actually, it isn't. We may call a very dark colour 'black' but that neither makes black a colour nor give us the ability to see what we know to be truly black (like the darkness of a cave).
Black is a color;
Space is the logical presupposition of there being any place at all.
That is one meaning yes. You were not clear before. So the 'space' you are referring to is actually dimensions, specifically spacial dimensions. One could equally argue that we cannot see time.
But now we must ask what it means to exist. Does time exist? Does a rule of chess exist?