relativity and railroads

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu writes:

> I dunno, Andrew, but somehow I suspect old Bertie might have
> anticipated that *obvious* reply and realized it didn't bear too
> much on the question.  *Everything else*?  what could that possibly
> refer to?  Is everything relative to everything else at the same
> time? Sequentially?  Randomly? Doesn't that reply require at the
> least an unbounded universe, something Einstein (and Russell too)
> emphatically rejected in favor of a *bounded but infinite
> nonetheless* model?  Isn't Russell just saying that there's an
> unmoved mover somewhere out there?

Is that bounded and infinite at teh same time? and in the same
dimensions? You have been reading Russell, haven't you. Enough to make
your head spin. But then again that term `unmoved mover' is so
un-Russellian that I suspect you cannot have read (or understood) too
much of his work. One good reason why Russell might have made his
remark can be found (or rather the start of this particular garden
path can be found) in his intro to LudWit's Tractatus - amplification
of which remark I leave as an exercise for the reader.

But if the original remark was crass, so is Russell's dismissal of
it. The original is usually taken as meaning that local effects are
invariably not local in their genesis. The follow-up implies further
that a simple spatial/temporal/conceptual/whatever bound cannot
guarantee to isolate the relation between effect and cause(s) to some
subset of the relevant spatial/temporal/conceptual/ whatever universe.
In other words `There are more things in this world, Horatio, . . .'
Now, much as I find this argument unsatisfactory, I don't think it is
so easily dismissed as Russell claims.

And you clearly missed the point of the aside about Leibniz. Try
reading his Monadology - just a quick scan should make it's relevance
clear. You might also like to relate it to Spinoza's Ethics - Leibniz
certainly did - which you might also usefully relate to LudWit's
Tractatus (to close a circle and show how many more relations there
are between these concepts than you, clearly, are aware of, Horatio).

> Or is it instead a case of *Pierre Dinn, the True Author of the
> PRINCIPIA*? ;-}

I don't think so. I'd rather not be associated with what is arguably
mathematical philosophy's biggest and palest pachyderm.

> respectfully,
> john m

Doubtless . . . doubtless.


Andrew Dinn
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We drank the blood of our enemies.
The blood of our friends, we cherished.