On 10/30/2012 7:36 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 11:39 PM, Stephen P. King
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 10/30/2012 5:39 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/30/2012 2:27 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 10/30/2012 5:15 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/30/2012 1:53 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
Dear Brent,
What is it that distinguishes between tokens and
propositions?
Tokens are the physical elements (e.g. letters, words, sounds)
that are used to represent a proposition in a particular language.
What determines the map between the letters, words, sounds
and the content of propositions?
The proposition is the abstracted meaning which is independent
of particular language.
Does this independence do so far as to disallow for an
arbitrary physical entity to know of it? Independence of
abstractions from particular individuals is not independence
from all.
So "Zwei est ein und ein." are tokens expressing the same
proposition as "Two equals one plus one." which is that 2=1+1.
That
Which 'that' do you refer to, the tokens or the proposition.
is true only because multiple persons came to believe that it is
true
You previously agreed that one person alone could come to know
that 2=1+1 or 17 is prime and express it symbolically, i.e. in
tokens. So multiple persons are only necessary in order for the
tokens to be used for communicating from one to another; which is
the case whether the thing communicated is true or false.
Reread this:
In 10/30/2012 5:03 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 10/30/2012 3:05 PM, meekerdb wrote:
[SPK] Unless multiple entities can agree that the sequence of
symbols "17 is prime" is an indicator of some particular
mathematical object and one of its particular properties, then
how does "17 is prime" come to mean anything at all?
I agree with that. But you're talking about the tokens "17 is
prime" not the concept that 17 is prime. Could not a person who
grew up alone on an island realize that 17 has no divisors, and
he could even invent a private language in which he could write
down Peano's axioms.
/* Why are you using such trivial and parochial framing for
abstract questions? Why the reference to single individuals? Did
you not understand that I am claiming that meaningfulness
requires at least the possibility of interaction between many
entities such that each can evaluate the truth value of a
proposition and thus can truthfully claim to have knowledge of
true statements? *//*
*/
/* A person that grew and died on a desert island may have
discovered for itself that 17 objects cannot be divided into
equal subsets, but our statements about that are mere figemnts of
our imagination as we could know nothing objective and
non-imaginative at all about that person. We are imagining
ourselves to have powers that we simply do not have. We are not
omniscient voyeurs of Reality and there is not anything that is. */
How is an imaginary entity come to aquire a real 1p or actual
real properties? It might if that imaginary entity is deemed to
have 1p content within some narrative. But outside of that
narrative, it does not even exist! Languaging more about this is
getting us nowhere.
Brent
and acted to cause it to be true. Remove one person from the
multiplicity and the meaning still is there. Remove all of them
and the meaning vanishes.
This needs a cowboy's few cents:
Every bet on ontological primitive is, despite the infinite models and
conjectures we can weave from them, just that: a bet.
If this is stated clearly and honestly then it's cool, no matter if it
turns out an error, as we've eliminated something at least.
But this is unfortunately rarer than to pound people with "real,
reality, authentic" vs "imaginary, artificial" in discourse where
axioms are not shared: if somebody can demarcate this boundary clearly
for all discourse, then I fail to see/understand how anybody could do
this outside of being high with a smile on their face and comic
implication. My intelligence is limited insofar as I cannot
understand, how this is not some form of needless force, in face of
our vast ignorance.
Meaning is not some magical quality bestowed upon the discoverer of a
set of relations. That's everybody's flavor of semantics working there.
As for "human"; if this is close to philosophical humanism
semantically, then it's safe to say that, paired with standard model
of physics, it's nice epistemologies with a lot of bs for its close
association to ideological atheism; particularly the assertion "no
supernatural miracle shit" when asserting singularity as big bang is
just that: another miracle; when the rules of the humanist bet said
"no miracles".
m
Dear Cowboy,
One question. Was the general outline that I was trying to explain
make any sense to you? Without being obvious about it, I am trying to
finely parse the difference between the logic of temporal systems and
the logic of atemporal systems - such as the Platonic Realm - such that
I might show that reasonings that are correct in one are not necessarily
correct in the other. One problem that I have discovered (I thank Brent
for bringing this up!) is that in our reasoning we set up constructions
- such as the person on the desert island - that blur the very
distinction that I am trying to frame. We should never assume temporal
situations to argue for relations that are atemporal unless we are
prepared to show the morphisms between the two situations.
Bruno would have us, in step 8 of UDA, to "not assume a concrete
robust physical universe". He goes on to argue that Occam's razor would
demand that we reject the very idea of the existence of physical worlds
given that he can 'show' how they can be reconstructed or derived from
irreducible - and thus ontologically primitive - Arithmetic 'objects'
{0, 1, +, *} that are "operating" somehow in an atemporal way. We should
be able to make the argument run without ever appealing to a Platonic
realm or any kind of 'realism'. In my thinking, if arithmetic is
powerful enough to be a TOE and run the TOE to generate our world, then
that power should be obvious. My problem is that it looks tooo much like
the 'explanation' of creation that we find in mythology, whether it is
the Ptah <http://ancientegyptonline.co.uk/ptah.html> of ancient Egypt
or the egg of Pangu <http://www.livingmyths.com/Chinese.htm> or
whatever other myth one might like. What makes an explanation framed in
the sophisticated and formal language of modal logic any different?
I agree 1000000000% with your point about 'miracles'. I am very
suspicions of "special explanations' or 'natural conspiracies'. (This
comes from my upbringing as a "Bible-believing Fundamentalist" and
eventual rejection of that literalist mental straight-jacket.) As I see
things, any condition or situation that can be used to 'explain' some
other conceptually difficult condition or situation should be either
universal in that they apply anywhere and anytime or are such that there
must be a particular configuration of events for them to occur. This
principle (?) applies to everything, be it the Big Bang initial
state/singularity or consciousness.
One point about the Big Bang. It seems to me that if we are
considering conditions in our current physical universe that involve
sufficiently small scales and/or high enough energies that there should
be the equivalent to the Big Bang initial conditions, thus the Big Bang
should be considered as an ongoing process even now and not some
epochally special event.
--
Onward!
Stephen
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