Dear Stephen,


>  We can go on and on about relations between states, numbers, UDs, or
> whatever, but unless we have a consistent way to deal with the source 
> of
> individuation and thus distinguishability, we are going nowhere...


The source of individuation could be personal memory I think. Like a 
sequence of W and M appears in the diary of someone subjected to an 
iterated WM-self-multiplication experiment. Memory is rather easy to 
define once we assume comp. The main difficulty here is to get an idea 
of what "personal" means, and for this we need a theory of 
self-reference, ... and that is what the diagonalization posts are all 
about.


***


Concerning Pratt's dualism, it seems to me it is a purely mathematical 
dualism a priori coherent with number platonism, although further 
studies could refute this. Open problem. I don't see Pratt reifying 
either primary matter or primary time, it seems to me.

I think a similar dualism appears in Plotinus cosmogony where 
(simplifying a lot!) *from outside* the Good transforms itself 
degenerating eventually into Evil (also called Matter by the 
(neo)platonist!) and by doing so makes the soul falling inexorably in 
that matter) and *from inside* all souls extract themselves from that 
matter and are inexorably attracted by the Good and converge toward it. 
Arrows are reversed. And with comp it can be argued that the choice of 
the Categories of sets and its dual (which funnily enough gives the 
category of boolean algebras) is a genuine one, although some 
quasi-constructive alpha-categories could fit in a still more better 
way (I think). But I have neither the time nor the competence to really 
develop such approaches. Also, finding good notion of coherence here 
seems to me to be a little bit ad hoc so that I refer to you the the 
comp derivation path of those coherence conditions.


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to