Are there any absolutes?
 

Is there anything which is an absolute - no matter the observer.

For instance, we known that time is relative to the observer.

Is evil an absolute?
Is good?

What is the same for everyone?

I think this is an interesting topic as it helps us understand what is just our perception and what is everyones perception.

So far I cannot think of an absolute.

Well, of course the problem with this question is that you can't answer no, because that would then be an absolute, right? But let me ask you a question -- what do you mean by 'absolute' in the question? Because there might be a really easy answer to that question if things like absolute zero or the speed of light counted.

Only the sith deal in absolutes.

Absolutes are for the realm of theory. In reality I can't think of any absolutes in the real world. As far as philosophy, absolute is a matter of perspective.

Yes, I absolutely cannot watch Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole or Dr. Phil and his show.

existence and experience

absolutely not. If you believe in absolutes, you are the most vulnerable.

I would think the opposite. If you believe in absolutes, its everyone else who appears the most vulnerable. If you believe in absolutes I think you're the most grounded, the most sure. And I think, the most logical.

Is this sarcasm? :hmm:

I don't believe there to be anything absolute, anything can be disputed or challenged, even in the realm of science.. not even the most accurate or precise measurements--after all correctness is contingent on the tool being used and the user. At that, if the "absolute" is expected, then the tool itself should be measured

Time is relative to the observer. The nature of time's relationship with an observer is absolute.

I am sorry but I don't understand what you mean.

Are you talking about relative absolutes?
That seesms like an oxymoron.

The observer may perceive (relative) an event as taking place for one hour, but the actual (absolute) time was 45 minutes.

That I believe is the point of being relative.
The 'actual' time does not exist. There is no 'actual' 45 minutes except for the 45 minutes you, the observer, experience.

In my life, there are only three absolutes ....

1) death
2) taxes
3) every Greek song will eventually speed up.

It is irrelevant to the existence of the "absolute" whether we believe in it or not.

I believe there is an "absolute" because if there wasn't there would be no order and there is observable order.



....of course...that could be a hallucination of mine....if I really do exist at all.... :crazy:

I am absolutely here...the rest of you I can't speak for :D

Does that mean I'm your hallucination? :hmm:

As far as I'm concerned, the only absolutes are the physical, i.e. gravity sucks and time only moves in one direction.

There is Truth in the world. Either something does or does not happen, regardless of how anyone or thing perceived it. E.g. if a tree falls... well, I have no idea if it makes a sound or whether that's related to anyone being around to hear it... BUT, the point is that IT FELL.

Of course, that's pretty simplistic... but even with more complex situations, any kind of hypothesis testing is meant to find out the Truth (at least in the physical world), with as little bias from flawed tools/humans as possible. Science has its limits... it can only approximate the Truth that it seeks, but as long as its methodology is on track, then it can only continue approaching the Truth.

I see it a bit like an asymptote constantly approaches the axes of a graph... always getting closer, but never touching. The asymptote cannot exist without bounds to constrain it... hence the absolute. Science cannot do what it does without a reality, an absolute, to constrain it... even if it never reaches it fully.

(Where the hell is Pigglet, I am finally getting around to his question!!)

Yeah....isn't that what I said? ....only you said it with much more panache! I guess it's what I wish I'd said.... :thumbsup:

Hey thanks! Yeah, I guess I didn't read the other posts carefully enough.

Actually though, I don't quite agree that the existence of order leads to a belief in an absolute. At least, it doesn't for me. You can have chaos and still have absolutes, too. Although, perhaps you mean that the laws of physics can only operate in an ordered manner, and therefore there are absolutes because even chaos is ordered by natural laws? I could jive with that.

Uh....yeah....that's what I meant...yeah.... :cool:


(actually that IS what I meant (I think)...but again...you said it much better...! :icare: )

... are you sure???
:hmm:

:)

P.S. Welcome, Felicity!! You are absolutely welcome here. :D

Note: I don't have any "Training" in philosophy, but I have always thought of Pain as being proof (in my mind) of the existence of absolutes. Anything that you can do to inflict pain on others is “Evil”. Knowingly inflicting pain on another is an act of evil. Yes, you can condition your mind to accept, and to a certain extent, enjoy pain, however this is only after external stimulus has shifted the natural defense mechanisms of the body. If you slap a newborn baby on the bottom, they don’t laugh, they cry.

I think that there are principles of behavior or morality that are absolute -- but that there is no single good way to apply any of those principles, and many gray areas. For example, suppose you believe that is it is absolutely wrong to kill, and are in a situation where you could kill a man before he killed three other people? Priests face this dilemma when someone confesses a hideous crime, one for which they've not been caught and which they may repeat.

Life is full of situations in which sticking to certain principles would seem to do more harm than compromising them -- usually, much less dire situations than the hypotheticals I gave above. The great responsibility of human beings is to apply good will and whatever wisdom we can develop to apply perfect principles in an imperfect world, as best we can. To compromise when it seems best, and to be unyielding when that is required.

Well I didn't want to say anything, but you might not be real :D

And if we need pain to feel pleasure, is it still evil? Does one act, an evil man make? Or is it just the act that is evil? Is it arrogant to think you have any idea why pain is here? Does everything I say have to end in a question? ;)

Pain is pain. Blue is blue. Pretty much every perception is what it is, absolutely.

How do you know blue is blue? It's blue cause you see it being blue? What if you see diffently to someone else? Maybe you've been told it's blue, but actually it's red, and it's all a life-long joke on you?

There are absolutes, the only one I can think of at the moment is existence. I exist. You exist. Well, maybe you don't, but you can't deny your own existence. It is the absolute. There are others, but you can't really know them unless you exist.

I plan to make a thread based on my own thoughts on this, but it's not ready yet.

Me is here....uppitty woman! :)

Now I see your asymptoticalitude...I would tend to agree. I would say that I believe there is an absolute reality, which is beyond my perception. All of my measurements and comparisons and so forth approximate this absolute reality, but never measure up. Ergo, yon asymptote, I believe. However, I can't prove this absolute reality exists, nor can I prove it does not. It is, however, as convenient as any other theory and I tend to think it makes the most sense. If I'm wrong, and absolute reality doesn't exist, what have I lost. It seems to me that if the opposite is true, and it doesn't exist, then none of this "life" crap means anything, and I might as well go ahead and end it. Skip all that getting old crap and broken hearts and watching people suffer and so forth.

I think that the presence of order might strongly imply an absolute reality. Chaos is ordered...I don't know enough chaos theory to say if we have any observations of randomness that extend so far up and so far down in our measurement scales that they can't be averaged out...but it seems that we contain randomness within some bounds, no?

The question I would return to then, is are there absolutes in morality? It seems like most of the discussion in here has centered around physics, with the exception of rodney's mention. I know this has been discussed before, such as linky link link . I tend to believe that there are certain moral principles that tend to be absolute, in the sense that they appear over and over again, due to the fact that in most situations these principles are the most likely to maximize individual freedom within the constraints of social stability, so to speak. Does an absolute moral code exist, in the same sense that an absolute reality exists (if you believe such does exist)? I tend to think of morals as an expression of the order of said reality, so I would argue that they do exist within our perceived relationships of the workings of reality.

I experience blue therefore there is a thing, blue, that can be experienced, absolutely.

the notion of absolutes is an illusion: it rests on one of the grammatical features of a sentence like this one: the words at once refer to themselves (as parts of an utterance) and to a more transcendent sphere simply because they formalize the world as they purport to describe it---because written words operate through generalized meanings---because of the nature of grammatical relations--the proposition "i think x...." is both particular and transcendent.

example: in descartes's proof in the "meditations on first philosophy" and "discourse on method" the argument goes like this: i can doubt that there is a world, doubt everything, but cannot doubt that i am doubting.
cogito blah blah, and i see that this is clear and distinct.
i have within me a notion of perfection
i know that i am an imperfect being
so the notion of perfection must have come from somewhere else.
therefore god.

that perfection can be arrived at by inverting the meaning of imperfection does nto cross his mind.
same kind of problem with the notion of absolutes.

hmmm...I've always tended to think that our perceptions are illusions which hang on an absolute. I don't mean in the sense of playing word games to arrive at a solution on paper, but simply by virtue of the fact that despite what nature you ascribe to your/our existence and your perception of it, something is going on. That something, I've always thought, was absolute reality.

absolutes exist in mathematics.

I don't think that absolutes exist naturally. It's only when we as people define a system that an absolute can exist. Most belief systems are based around the idea of right and wrong but in order for such a system to work something must be defined as being wrong.

But in the act itself of "defining" anything (and every thought defines perception)...you demonstrate the "reality" (as others have said: the "approximation") of the existence of an absolute by imagining a point of reference. Even if the point of reference is a relationship between two perceptions--the cognition of each perception itself references a commonality that is universal.

That makes sense to me in my little mind...although--as I read it over--I'm not sure it will to others. It sure is tough explaining these types of things when I got a "D" in Algebra and a "D-" in Geometry in high school...

mathematics is a particular type of conceptual space.
its features arez not models for the rest of the world.
and mathematically systems are not self-enclosed/self-enclosing---godel's theorem---so they do not operate as a model for complete logical systems in any event.

I think that is what I was trying to express. It's not until we try and define something that an absolute can exsist. For instance everything is stuff. Then we decide what is stuff and what is not. The very act of making that decision creates an artifical absolute.

I'm happy it made sense! Only I don't agree that the absolute--at it's most basic level is "artificial." It is absolutely so that act--the dawn of awareness--exists--it is "real."

I think this is an interesting point - I'd argue though that the real world shares this property of not being self-enclosed/ing. I'd like to think that Godel's theorem can be applied to the universe in the same way it can be applied to mathematics.

At the same time, it either elevates (or delevates(?)) mathematics to the same level as the universe as percieved. I err on the side that believes that perception is underrated, and that a lot of how we describe the universe, its constituents and relationships is incomplete, because our perception is incomplete. Plato's cave springs to mind.

The upshot of all this is that while there may well be some absolutes, we are incapable of seeing, and extremely unlikely to ever find them - if we ever do - we'll have achieved something incredible in the process.

nezmot: spoken like a true nominalist....i would probably have made more or less the same argument as you did to extend the last post--my only divergence would have been a less optimistic end (i do not think that the absolutes would be found, are findable--i think they are semantic effects.) but yes.

If you have ever been in love with someone so much it hurts, then you should already know.

seer:
i'm sorry, but....what?
i don't understand what you are saying.

Well stated. I concur

1+1 always equals 2

In boolean algebra, if A is true and B is false, then (A OR B) is true.

Hydrogen always has one proton, exactly

A benzene molecule always contains six carbon atoms

Pi is the same for everyone.

This will sound odd comeing from a bitter bastard like me, but love is the absolute. Be it absolute joy or absolute pain. When you are head over heels hopelessly can't live without you in love, the world is a better place. The effects it has on every aspect of you life is, well, absolute. The same goes when it crashes down on you. The missery of bottoming out from such an overwhelming emotional high. If you have ever been head over heels in love like that, then you know there IS an absolute. And if you have had it go wrong, then you wish like hell there wasn't.

huh...i wonder if we are talking about the same thing under the rubric of absolute, then.
at a crass structural level, love leans on an investment of affect in an object--that is in the image of another (investment here in the psychoanalytic sense.)
there is often a kind of transfer of power that follows on this investment: you might link your sense of yourself to the actions of another, whom you do not and cannot control....once this is in place, then all kinds of results can take shape that feel as though they originate from without--which in a sense they do, but only as a function of your own investment and the types of relation to that investment that you bundle together with the emotion you call love (i put it this way because love can mean alot of things)...so because you lay yourself open in this way--you allow the image of another to function as judge. because love is, particularly in its more crush-like phases, caught up with fantasy at many many particular (that is individual) levels, it follows that a structuring feature of this kind of relation is that there may be an assymetry between the image you construct for yourself of the other, as object of your desire, and the person who floats about in that image. being in love would tend to prompt you to downplay such assymetries--but if things (the actual relationship) do not go as you would prefer, those assymetries (gaps) can reveal themselves in very painful ways.

because you put another in a position to effectively make judgements about you--deep emotional judgements--the outcomes of the relationship do in fact come from a space beyond your control--which would make them seem transcendent (not absolute)--but the origin of that transcendence is your own affective investment and the ways in which affect gets knit into an emotional state you call love--a state that brings with it all kinds of specific rules/comportments.

this whole thing is a kind of structural explanation for a type of relation, not an account of love itself. i dont think i could give an account of love. i say this because i feel a bit odd about what i wrote above, which responds to your post, seer, in the context of this thread, but at the same time seems to make a very complex emotional space into something that relies on a kind of hydraulic relation between component parts. thinking in this way about emotions is sometimes strange business.

anyway, i dont see how love could be understood as anything like an absolute.
but like i said, maybe we are talking about different understandings of the term absolute.

There seems to be a number of competing definitions of absolute in this thread. I think the main question here is whether there are moral absolutes which exist regardless of the situation. I argue that there are not. Absolutism is a feature of many religions and some philosophies. Its contrast is moral relativity which judges values by societal and situational characteristics.

There are simple examples that negate either position however. You might say that its absolutely immoral for a mother to kill her child (post birth) but there are situations that call for this, such as to preserve the health of others in the family (starvation/sacrifice). Interestingly the bible, which is the source text for many absolutist religions, includes a number of instances where the sacrifice of one's child is deemed necessary by God (who is "absolutely moral").

Moral relativism on the other hand puts us in the position of excusing cultural practices like cannibalism, childhood female circumcision, and slavery as immoral to us but moral to others. The only way around the acceptance of truly abhorent behavior that I can conceive of is to argue for a global moral community. Not an absolute global moral, but an interconnected web of cultures. There are no humans living today that do not at least know that there are others who do not live as they do. Therefore no culture is completely insulated from external moral influence and consequently judgement.

The math (an outgrowth of philosophy) examples above are interesting, but as has already been pointed out, they exist only when predicated on a great number of abstractions. Not that concepts like zero or inifinity don't have applicability in real life, but they don't actually exist as anything other than abstractions. Interestingly the ancient Greeks, who saw no difference between math and philosophy, had neither a concept of zero nor infinity. Although the pre-Socratic Zeno had a number of philosphical problems based around concepts of the infinite, he didn't extend those concepts mathematically. Aristotle had a number of proofs for why there was no infinity.

In physics there is a concept of absolute zero temperature at which all molecular activity ceases. To my knowledge though that state has never been reproduced in a laboratory (they've gotten within a degree) so it remains theoretical.

Outside of the realm of religion, I don't believe there are any absolutes. If people are debating the definition of absolutes in this thread -- that rules out absolutes altogether, doesn't it?

I believe in religious absolutes, but I think that's out of the range of this post. I don't think humans experience absolutes. Love is closest thing to religion that most people will admit to. I believe that religious belief is an extension of love.

Death. That is an absolute.

I think the only absolute truth is death.

-Will

That is, unless you bring in the possiblity of reincarnation, in which case, death, like life, is just a temperary state. Also, once there is no more life, death has no meaning, so sooner or later, when all this comes to a finnal stop, death is pretty much meaningless, and no longer relivent.

Raochboy, I'll get back to your point once my brain stops hurting enough to think. Long day at work.

Reincarnated or not....the body never returns....Dig up a 100 year old casket, and I'm pretty sure there will be some nasty remains in it...

So yeah, death is pretty much absolute :)

-Will

Well the philosopher's quest itself, is originally a search for an absolute: Truth. But because through history, man has become increasingly aware of his own limitations (can we trust our own senses? aren't they flawed?how accurate is our capacity to reason? Can we trust ourselves, isn't our unconscious hiding something from ourselves?) becase of all of these issues and also scientific paradoxes(physical laws of gravity vs. subatomic physics), they had to replace absolute universal truths with validities, limited by time and space.
So are there any absolutes? Often what we do is go towards that absolute and try to get closer and closer, never attaining it, IMO.

Tell that to Buffy. :P

Do you know that? And when does it become an absolute?

In a hundred years, the body decomposes to the point where it's skeletal. The remains bear some resemblance to the individual they once were. How about a thousand years? Or a million? At which point do those remains cease being remains and simply become matter, so much more 'stuff', as it's been aptly put?

And further, if the body dies but the soul lives on, is that truly death? Could it not also be a transition, a sort of chrysalis?

Or, let's go extreme and see if it holds up. it's pretty widely accepted these days that perception is fallible. What you see is not necessarily what you get. So if somebody dies, how do you know they've actually died? How do you know those remains are, in fact, remains?

I do believe in the one Descartian absolute. Outside of that, I can't help but think there aren't any.

Here's a question; if anything were absolute, if anything were beyond reproach or debate, how could we be debating this? The answer, I would think, would be self-evident.

In terms of morals, that question ties closely to my belief that nobody embarks on a course of action while believing it to be wrong. Nobody does anything with the intent of being evil; there are no supervillains. It's simply that that individual's idea of what's moral doesn't line up with mine.

I had a discussion with a friend of mine recently on the subject. I took an extreme stance. It's something I do often, because it's only at the very far end of the spectrum that we can truly see if a theory holds up or not. Anyway, I created a hypothetical situation for him wherein he had to choose between humanity or some other form of being that outnumbered us, was sentient and was peaceful. I asked him which he'd choose. He told me that he'd choose to die and take the world with him rather than inflict harm on an undeserving people - if it were us or them, he'd essentially pick them. Me, I went the opposite route. I believe that an individual has to make any given choice based on his own values and wisdom - we can only work with what we've got, in other words. And I assign a higher value to my life and those that I care about than I do to some faceless race out there.

Is either stance wrong? It depends on how you look at it, I reckon.

I'd enjoy telling alotta things to Buffy ;)....

Martian,

I see your points....Even if I were to look at it from a spiritual POV, as opposed to a physical POV, things would be different...

-Will

Why has this been overlooked? *shrugs*

And what about the cosmic level of the collective consciousness?

Cosmic or universal laws such as "To thyne own self be true" and "All is one"? Are they not meant to be absolute?

If you say no, then that creates the absolute belief of not believing in absolutes :-) a paradox

Okay come up with a way to make this absolute, I dare ya.

If you don't have oxygen in your blood your body DIES. There an absolute that cannot be wrong or changed.

There are no absolutes. Absolutely none! :)

change is an absolute.

Interesting thread.

I really do wonder about the whole concept of absolutes, they become difficult when you consider the concept of infinity. Even absolute zero really isn't the coldest it can really get... of course... how would we measure anything colder?

No? I thought that absolute zero was reached when there was a total absence of heat...which would explain the particles not moving (no friction)..
I always assumed that. :confused:

Absolutes only exist in a singularity. I wouldn't get to close if I were you...

For those of you who don't believe there are any absolutes: How do you question your own existence?

And for those of you who believe that their existence is absolute: You must be experiencing things in order to experience so mustn't there absolutely be things that can be experienced. For instance I experience green so I know that there is green to be expereinced, if only this one time for only me. I'm NOT saying there is a green things somewhere outside of me, but I'm saying there must be green in order for me to experience green, and since I do not doubt that I am experiencing then I cannot doubt that there is green.

I was gonna post a bunch of crap, but this is what it basically boils down to.

well if we talk about moral absolutes, I don't really believe they exist, everything depends on the circumstance, time, and other factors.

I believe that if talking broadly, death is absolute, everyone and everythign will eventually die. you, me, this country, this world, this universe.