| | Ed T. wrote:
You are just jealous that I and everyone around me -- and everyone I know (and everyone they know) -- perform "measurements" on a daily basis without any man-made devices such as rulers, thermometers, and clocks. It gets your goat. It burns you. You rail against it. You try to denigrate it. You try to associate it with complete and total subjectivity -- with "feelings."
Why the first scare quotes? Are you admitting to metaphor? Do they all fabricate numbers for their feelings like you? By the way, how do you plead to the allegation of hijacking? LOL, anyway.
My body constantly registers temperature changes, and you hate that. So does mine, but you are wrong about my hating it. I simply face up to the cold (no pun intended), hard facts that you don't want to admit in this discussion. You even fabricate numbers to justify calling your sensing/feelings "measurements." And it gets your goat that I don't do the same.
My body can also sense/feel different temperatures of different objects, for example, X is warmer than Y, which is ranking. But there is no measuring go on, since there is no standard like a degree F or C. No real numbers, either. My sensing/feeling can't compete with a thermometer.
Suppose you are given are 4 containers of water. Unknown to you the temperatures are 40 degrees F for #1, 150 F for #2, 90 F for #3, and 90 F for #4, all measured by the same good thermometer. You put your right hand in #1 and left hand in #2 for a while. Then you put your right hand in #3 and your left hand in #4. You say #3 feels warm and #4 feels cool. What a concept -- the same temperature water is both warm and cool! No thermometer will give such conflicting information. Nor could you accurately tell the temperature differences in degrees F. Next do the experiment again, except this time #4's temperature is 95 F. Of course, neither you nor I would sense the difference from the first experiment, but the thermometer can. Such are the cold, hard facts, and many more experiments could be done to show how subjective your feelings are. I readily admit how subjective my sensing/feeling is and it doesn't stack up compared to measuring with a thermometer. But you find it more convenient to evade such facts for the sake of arguing.
Other species of animals can sense different temperatures, too, some probably better than humans. Do you say they "measure", too? If yes, do they fabricate numbers like you do?
You want me to go back to Plato's cave (or was it Socrates' cave?). ... though your line of reasoning precludes that possibility (or isolates that kind of thing as something that only occurs in a laboratory with specialized measuring devices). LOL. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A Fable
There was once a guy named Eddie who lived in Lake Wobegon. He thought everything could be measured. He would fabricate numbers as "proof." He was very persistent, so the folks of Lake Wobegon made a new concept to honor Eddie and they labeled it "mezshur". After a while the word even appeared in dictionaries. The folks of Lake Wobegon recognized that on rare occasions Eddie's use of "mezshur" fit their concept MEASURE. However, his meaning of MEZSHUR was very vague and far wider than MEASURE. MEASURE was a small subset of MEZSHUR.
The folks of Lake Wobegon even followed Eddie in adopting a new scale for mezshuring temperature. They abbreviated it E after Eddie, similar to Fahrenheit abbreviated F and centigrade C. There was no common standard that different people used. So whenever one person said, "the ambient air temperature is 12 degrees E", nobody else had much of a grasp of what that person meant. Each person had his/her own personal scale. E was used very subjectively. There was no objective meaning or standard, akin to using a thermometer, that almost anyone could use, and by which people could understand one another.
Some folks came up with various formulas to convert F or C and even K to E. Some were quite creative, using exponents, trig functions, and wind velocity. An entrepreneur re-engineered mood rings to give E readings. There were several versions. They began using E on television weather forecasts, along with F. They even had a lottery to pick who could say what the high E would be the next day. It was a lot of fun.
For a few years this kind of talk and behavior was viewed lightheartedly. However, eventually the humor wore off. People began to say "What is E?" to express frustration or futility or despair, similar to people saying "Who is John Galt?" in the famous novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Nobody knows what happened to Eddie. Legend has it that Eddie made some miscalculations when flying his airplane in stormy weather conditions and crashed into Lake Superior. Some dictionaries still include "mezshur", always designated as archaic. A typical definiens is "to devise numbers in a vague way by subjective methods."
(Edited by Merlin Jetton on 7/22, 5:58am)
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