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Great Ideas Discussion Group

Take part in friendly, informal conversations that explore some of the significant ideas that have influenced human life. This month we’ll focus on Relativity - Scientific, Philosophic. We'll be considering such questions as: What can we know? Are there any absolute truths? Is certainty possible? How far are traditional commonsense notions adequate for understanding the natural and human worlds? Is nature deterministic, as Einstein’s theory holds? How best can we deal with irreconcilable systems of thought and customs that each claim to be true and binding? Can reality ever be captured in human language and thought?  We hope to see you there!

  • When: Tuesday, September 7, 7:30 to 8:45 pm
  • Where: Bellevue Regional Library, 1111 - 110th Avenue NE, Bellevue
Upcoming Topics

     October 5: Utilitarianism
     November: The Oneness of Life
     December: God / Gods


A few quotes reflecting different views, to get the conversation started:

The theory of relativity worked out by Mr. Einstein, which is in the domain of natural science, I believe can also be applied to the political field. Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts – and not absolute and general. – Jiang Zemin
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Relativity applies to physics, not ethics. – Albert Einstein
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MAGNITUDE, n. Size. Magnitude being purely relative, nothing is large and nothing small. If everything in the universe were increased in bulk one thousand diameters nothing would be any larger than it was before, but if one thing remain unchanged all the others would be larger than they had been. To an understanding familiar with the relativity of magnitude and distance, the spaces and masses of the astronomer would be no more impressive than those of the microscopist. For anything we know to the contrary, the visible universe may be a small part of an atom, with its component ions, floating in the life-fluid of some animal. Possibly the wee creatures peopling the corpuscles of our own blood are overcome with the proper emotion when contemplating the unthinkable distance from one of these to another. – Ambrose Bierce
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The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration. – Heinz Pagels
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This principle [of cultural relativism], or more correctly, this axiom, states that because there is no universally valid standard by which the beliefs or practices of other cultures can be evaluated, they can only be judged relative to the cultural context in which they occur…. For W. G. Sumner, who had never done research in a non-Western society, practices such as religious prostitution, cannibalism, human sacrifice, infanticide, and slavery were perfectly reasonable human adaptations to particular circumstance. Like all practices, they had to be understood in context; there could be no absolute standard for evaluating them.  

… in the 1970s a far more radical version of the concept came into vogue. … Cultures, this new relativism insists, are incommensurable; each one can only be understood, or more correctly, interpreted, in its own terms as a unique system of meanings. What is more, only someone enculturated in that system can comprehend it fully. As Renato Rosaldo put it, “My own group aside, everything human is alien to me.” As these relativists have said, it necessarily follows that if peoples’ minds vary so much from one culture to another, Western science is only a culturally specific form of ethnoscience, not a universally valid way of verification or falsification…. Physicist Charles Nissam-Sabat has chided epistemological relativists for adopting this extreme position because “they make the people they study falsely incomprehensible and thus dehumanized.”

… most anthropologists believe that it is possible to understand many aspects of another culture. As Gellner and Spiro have observed, no ethnographer know to them (or to me) has returned from a stay in another culture to report that the people they encountered were so alien that their beliefs and practices were completely incomprehensible. – Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies
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I should emphasize this, to keep well-meaning but misguided multiculturalists at bay: the theoretical entities in which these tribal people frankly believe – the gods and other spirits – don't exist. These people are mistaken, and you know it as well as I do. It is possible for highly intelligent people to have a very useful but mistaken theory, and we don't have to pretend otherwise in order to show respect for these people and their ways. – Daniel C. Dennett
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The following two statements are assumed to be evidence and true: (1) Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external. (2) Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. – Isaac Newton
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With almost breathtaking sweep, Einstein began his paper [on special relativity] by proclaiming that his theories worked not just for light, but were truths about the universe itself. Remarkably, he derived all his work from two simple postulates applying to inertial frame (i.e., objects that move with constant velocity with respect to each other):
    1. The laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames.
     2. The speed of light is a constant in all inertial frames.
These two deceptively simple principles mark the most profound insights into the nature of the universe since Newton’s work. From them, one can derive an entirely new picture of space and time. – Michio Kaku
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In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined. – David Bohm
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But what if the members of an entire community are agreed that some statement is true: must it then not be true for them? For example, it was at one time universally agreed that the sun moves around the earth: was it not therefore true for the people living at that time that the sun moved around the earth? If so, where does that leave us who are living now? It seems to follow that anything on which we are unanimously agreed can be true only for us. There can then be no absolute truth.

… Someone who knows the meaning of a statement must be able to recognize evidence for its truth when he is presented with it. He must also be able to distinguish conclusive from defeasible evidence. If the people of former times took themselves to have conclusive evidence that the sun goes around the earth, then … they could not admit anything as counterevidence against the truth of this proposition…. But if the people of former times took themselves merely to have very strong evidence that fell short of being conclusive, there is no ground for saying that the proposition was true for them; they merely wrongly thought that it was true. It was simply a proposition for which they believed that they had strong evidence, but the meaning … allowed the possibility of counterevidence, which Galileo later brought to light. Indeed, they might have been brought to see that their evidence was weak; when someone said to Wittgenstein that it was natural to think that the sun goes around the earth because it looks as though it does, he retorted with the question, “And how would it look if it looked as if the earth rotated on its axis?” – Michael Dummett, The Nature and Future of Philosophy



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