I understand Prof. Somewhere along the way we've gotten hung up in semantics of Science vs. something else, probably generated from the Copenhagen models. Maybe we need to go back to principles of conceptualization and integration. I'll be thinking about this.

Of course Base-10 is "natural." Everything real is natural. Base-57 would also be "natural." I want to get past the implicit fallacy that Base-10 is intrinsic or intuitive. I know that Ayn Rand would never assert that. That is why she used the word "probable." Her day was only 24 hours long; she could not investigate everything, but she obviously had an insight about the inherent problem of how numbering came about.

All indications are that we did not begin counting on our ten fingers. Base-10, positional arithmetic, and all the rest are the result of a long and arduous journey of discovery and invention.

Right, but what I meant was, how could she abstract the perceptions from the sensations?

Modern Japanese also retains different indicators for counting different objects. Leaves are counted differently than sticks.

I should have known about the Wikipedia entry.

I have Denise Schmandt-Besserat's books.

hear hear

Those who echo Popper do so because they have been told to. They succeed in spite of the bad philosophy, not by thinking according to Popper.

You denied that a base 10 system is "natural" and continue to deny the history of numbers and counting beginning with using our 10 fingers.

The "model" mentality is not science. I did not deny man's "ability to manipulate his environment to solve his life's needs" or that he "has only 5 senses limited" to what they are. Please don't make things up. I did not say anything remotely like that. It is the opposite of what we know and the opposite of Ayn Rand's philosophy.

We think in concepts to expand knowledge beyond the perceptual level. The hierarchy of concepts is based on perception. That has already been discussed in this thread. The thread links to the first chapter of Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which book cannot be ignored for this discussion, but is being replaced here by conventional academic slogans about "models".

Thinking in concepts is not the "model" mentality concocting mental images in parallel with a reality in which you can't ask "what is it", only imagine "models" that are somehow "useful" in "behavior". That is thoroughly Kantian, of the Pragmatist variety. It is not Objectivism. It is not and does not explain knowledge of the world, including science. Concepts are our means of grasping reality, not "modeling" it inside a subjective universe.

This could not be clearer in Objectivist epistemology (or Aristotle's), which shows what concepts are and how they are formed, in particular higher level abstract concepts. Ayn Rand's philosophy does not mean echoing Kant in the name of "reason". Rejecting the conventional bad epistemology does not mean denying man's nature and science, proclaimed in dramatic accusations employing floating abstractions with terminology stolen from Objectivism.

Yes, the Copenhagen Interpretation has problems that are becoming more evident as work proceeds with high energy particle accelerators. Like all theories or models, and the CI is a model, they are or at least should be open to modification. You are correct that at the quantum level, especially within the atom the wave properties of the electron must be the dominant view. There is no way to accommodate the Pauli Exclusion principal if you stick to the particle perspective.

You have to be very careful with the model analogy. Ptolemy's epicycles were a model and very good at predicting the future, but there were not science or physics.

In engineering we created heuristic models all the time for systems that were too complex to analyze from first principles, but we were never confused that we were explaining how the system worked, we were just modeling it.

I would say absolutely.

The Copenhagen Interpretation throws out the law of identity and the law of causality. There was no real justification for this position and many physicists have pointed this out. This has lead to a number of problems and nonsensical projections.

Unraveling the problem is not going to be done overnight especially because of the physics police who are worse that the PC speech police. But a good start would be to take Schrodinger's equation seriously and treat electrons etc as waves and not point particles.

Yes, exactly, that is the point I have been trying to make.

That is a rather remarkable blanket statement. What is your understanding of how scientific experiments are designed and their resulting data interpreted?

You're presenting a denial of a key attribute of man. That being his ability to manipulate his environment to solve his life's needs. Man as he exists, has only 5 senses limited to ranges that results in aspects of reality that effect his life that are not directly perceptible. But man also has the ability to reason from what he can sense directly, that for every effect there must be a cause. Man cannot 'see' the infra-red spectrum of sunlight that sunburns his skin, but he can see the burns. He can know from what he can observe that hot things and heat burns as well as witness that really hot things and fire produce light and can then reason that there is something in sunlight that can burn. From that reasoning, he can then 'invent', using already known components and concepts, instruments that can detect more aspects of sunlight than he's able to directly observe. And from there, invent ways to prevent sunburn.

To get there, he had to 'model' what he couldn't directly perceive with his senses, and from that 'model' invent both the means and the experiments to determine the 'cause' of the effect that he knew happened to him, and must exist by reason. There are countless examples of this throughout the history of mankind.

Einstein utilized 'mental models' exclusively to provide his theories that explained various phenomena that were effects of not directly observable causes. That led to a hundred years of examination, invention, and experiments to prove/disprove the predictions of those 'models', and countless improvements of mankind's understanding of the Universe. It's also pointed to many other things to be identified, conceptualized, 'modeled'/theorized, examined/experimented, invented, and knowledge of gained.

This is science. This is man's uniqueness over all other known life.

You keep repeating the same lecture over and over promoting nonsensical philosophical interpretation as if it were science. It isn't.

It is not the way most scientists think. It is what we are told to believe based on the influence of Kantian philosophy, particularly in the form of Positivism and Pragmatism dogmas falsely promoted in the name of "science".

Agreed

You asked for clarification and insight, and said she seemed to contradict herself.

Yes you perceive the entity but you aren't omniscient and don't know everything about it. It isn't perceiving yourself. Knowing more requires investigating further, starting with the very simple perceptions from different perspectives until you can abstract enough characteristics to make essential distinctions.

Yes and most scientists think that Popper has accurately described science.

And many physicists are pointing this out, not just objectivists.

I don't know what the point of the maps is. Ayn Rand's epistemology is about how to think in concepts, not metaphors. There are a lot of metaphors about going into more detail, like 'peeling the onion', but they aren't epistemology.

We don't perceive measurements, we perceive entities. A measurement is a relation between an entity and a unit regarded as a standard. You have to perceive entities and abstract their characteristics and relationships to be able to do that.