On 02/10/2018 14:03, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Tue, 2 Oct 2018 09:34:30 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote:

On 30/09/2018 17:50, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 18:32:16 +0200, Paul Schlyter
wrote:

So deities which lack this power to hide, their existence is knowable?

It seems likely. I've seen nothing to suggest that anything in nature
is unknowable, so I'd only reserve certainty of unknowability for the
supernatural.

Conjugate variables in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is the most
obvious counter example. You cannot simultaneously know the momentum and
position of a particle in phase space to arbitrary precision.

Yes, but that's a triviality.

No. It isn't. It is a fundamental part of how our universe operates.
Quantum mechanics would be entirely different if you could know both
conjugate variables precisely and at the same time.

Like saying you can't know what's on the
side of sphere that you can't observe. We're really talking about the
knowability of natural law and structure, not "things". It is
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that informs us. That allows us to
know.

It also allows us to know what we do not know.

That Rumsfeld speech about known knowns, known unknowns and unknown
unknowns that got him ridiculed in the press was actually right on the mark:

"As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are
some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones
we don’t know we don’t know."

It is a 2x2 contingency table so he missed out unknown knowns. Facts we
don't yet know (one of which was that Iraq did not have any WMD).

--
Regards,
Martin Brown