On 31 Oct 2012, at 19:59, Stephen P. King wrote:
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]
> 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".
?
Reread step 8. Step 7 and step 8 are the only steps where I explicitly
do assume a primitive physical reality.
In step 8, it is done for the reductio ad absurdum.
He goes on to argue that Occam's razor would demand that we reject
the very idea of the existence of physical worlds
Only of primitive physical worlds. And you did agree with this. I just
prove this from comp. That's the originality. A bit of metaphysics is
made into a theorem in a theory (comp).
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 of
ancient Egypt or the egg of Pangu or whatever other myth one might
like. What makes an explanation framed in the sophisticated and
formal language of modal logic any different?
I use the self-reference logic, for obvious reason. Again, this
entails the sue of some modal logics, due to a *theorem* by Solovay.
All correct machine whose beliefs extend RA obeys to G and G*. There
is no choice in the matter.
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
But even in your theory anywhere and anytime must be defined by
something more primitive, given that you agree that physics cannot be
the fundamental theory, given that the physical reality is not
primitive.
Bruno
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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