On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 10:25:18AM -0400, Richard Loosemore wrote: > > One way this group have tried to pursue their agenda is through an idea > due to Montague and others, in which meanings of terms are related to > something called "possible worlds". They imagine infinite numbers of > possible worlds, in which all the possible variations of every > conceivable parameter are allowed to vary, and then they define the > meanings of actual things in our world in terms of functions across > those possible worlds. Such an idea is, of course, not usable in any > computer program, since it requires unthinkably large infinities [sic!],
I don't beleive the last sentence follows from the previous. There are plenty of ways of integrating over infinities to get finite answers. There are an infinite number of points inside a circle, yet we can still define the area of a circle. There are an extremely large number of ways of drawing black and white balls out of urns, and yet we can still define averages and expectations (and these are even analytic, differentiable, smooth functions!) If instead of talking about black and white balls, we talked about "is and is not a chair", and then considered some infinite number of universes where some things were chairs and others were not, and we drew items out of each universe, each labeled as "chair" or "not a chair", one can still, in principle, obtain some usable average idea of chair-ness that a real-world computer program could approximate to some degree, just as real-world programs approximate pi=3.14159... --linas ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=54806224-02bbb2
