On 06 Mar 2012, at 12:22, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
Stephen,
The life is full of paradoxes. My point was that while philosophers
cannot solve apparently simple problems (well, these problems happen
not to be simple), engineers continue doing their business
successfully. How they do it? I believe, exactly this way, they try
to understand what they do not know. Then they make trials, run
tests, etc. and finally with some luck we get a new technology.
Whether the theory of everything exists or not, happens not be
essential for the success in engineering. I do not know why.
Right now I am at the end of Beweistheorien (Proof Theories) by Prof
Hoenen
http://www.podcasts.uni-freiburg.de/podcast_content?id_content=24
At the end of his course, he considers the ontological arguments
where the goal was to proof existence from pure logic.
This is weird. Since the failure of Whitehead and Russell, it is
admitted that we cannot prove existence, even of the number zero, from
logic alone.
A pretty interesting attempt. Still there is a huge gap between
logic and existence and it seems that engineers successfully fills
it. Ask them, how they do it.
This is weirder. Engineers prove that things exist, in theory which
assume that some things exist. That is not different than proving the
existence of prime or universal number or relation, from the
assumption of the existence of the numbers. It is always relative
proof of existence.
Bruno
On 05.03.2012 14:34 Stephen P. King said the following:
On 3/5/2012 7:01 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
John,
It is not that bad to say that we do not know something. Yet, it
might
be even better to specify more accurately what exactly we do not
know.
Think of your younger colleagues that do chemistry research right
now.
Chemists have been quite successful and the story continues. The
concepts of atom, molecule, macromolecule, electron density, etc.
have
helped a lot along this way. We may take this concepts ontologically
or just pragmatically, this is after all not that important.
Materials
science seems not to be affected.
Evgenii
...
Hi Evgenii,
This is a very fascinating statement to me and I find John's
comments to
be very wise! "...it might be even better to specify more accurately
what exactly we do not know. " Does it not lead to a paradox? For
if we
could state exactly what we do not know then it would be the case
that
we do in fact know it and thus "we would known what we do not know",
which appears to be a contradiction.
Is this a sample of a more general kind of situation that is
inevitable
given the idea of self-reference? It seems to me that we need to
consider that Bivalency
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_bivalence> can be a
source of
error sometimes, or claim that knowledge is impossible. (note the
bivalence here! LOL!) I am focusing on this because it it part of my
overall critique of the idea of a Theory of Everything. For example,
what exactly does it mean for a sentence to have a definite truth
value
absent the ability to evaluate that truth value? This is what I see
your
hypothetical situation as discussing....
Onward!
Stephen
--
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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
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
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
