Jammer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Cladking originally wrote
> > Nothing in the real world is even
> quantifiable.
>
> sansahansan answered
> > "Sure it is. Are you alive or dead?"
>
> Cladking answered that with
> > "I would deny this is a quantity."
>
> Quantifiable doesn't mean bean counting! The way
> Sansahansan used it it means to set limits, define
> parameters...
>
> Jammer
>
>


Excellent point Jammer.

Quantifiable doesn't mean bean counting CK. Alive or Dead is a binary question, the answer is either true or false. We know of nothing in between or after or before. Should we ever learn such, then the rules of fuzzy logic may be applicable as the answer wouldn't be binary anymore. In the world of post-technological singularity point arrival, there is an interesting question... if you load your personality and record the interactions of every brain nueron into a machine that can then act, learn, and think just like you... are you still alive? What if your corporeal body should die, is the 'you' in the machine still alive?

Those are non-quantifiable answers, but note we had to journey into a fictional futuristic world to reference them.

Is the sun shedding light? Totally binary question, completely quantifiable... yet unanswerable without setting additional parameters (eclipse, clouds, etc.), -- at least in your perspective yes?

The question 'Is the sun shedding light?' is actually 100% answerable without any qualifications (what those parameters, etc. would be)... It emits photons, photons are light, therefore the sun is shining. That is a quantifiable answer with a binary answer, it is or it isn't.

Now, in the human realm, this world of black and white and quantifiable fails. Human perception renders a 'grey zone' in which black nor white can solely exist without the other. That is qualifiable subjectively, but never quantifiable in that each human's perception of the same event can not be the same by definition... even your angle of view is different, because your positions are different.

Yet science works as witnessed in the pyramids of Giza or the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge or in the HADRON collider experiments... precisely because we reduce the qualifiable to the quantifiable and eliminate that which we cannot measure. Your statement on rulers indicates that you aren't aware of the lengths we goto to for precision without human perception. Just recently they illustrated the time differential in two atomic clacks a startlingly close distance to each other... but one was slightly further from the center of the earth. The experiment was performed based on theoretical values and the results matched the conclusions. If the measuring of the distance between them was as imprecise as you implied, the experiment would yield different results each time, not the same out to the thousandth decimal point (that's 1000 digits, not .001)

"Measure what is measurable and make measurable that which is not"

It's my day for quotes apparently but that statement is what engineering and physics are based upon... and they do work in the modern world.

So be careful how you choose to define quantifiable. You might just find your self thrown at the ground and missing.