Hi,
For reason of sharp time scheduling (I am in a teaching period), I
will be shorter than usual.
Craig, I still agree with most of your point below, but it contradicts
the 19th century conception of mechanism, not the 20th century (post
Turing Church ...) Mechanism.
Bruno
On 26 Feb 2013, at 17:29, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Tuesday, February 26, 2013 6:30:59 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Feb 2013, at 20:59, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Monday, February 25, 2013 1:26:49 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Feb 2013, at 01:30, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Sunday, February 24, 2013 3:07:12 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 22 Feb 2013, at 17:45, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, February 21, 2013 12:11:36 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal
wrote:
On 21 Feb 2013, at 15:06, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, February 21, 2013 5:58:20 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal
wrote:
On 20 Feb 2013, at 21:15, meekerdb wrote:
On 2/20/2013 8:02 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Hi John,
On 19 Feb 2013, at 23:28, John Mikes wrote:
Craig, it seems we engaged in a fruitful discussion- thank you.
I want to reflect to a few concepts only from it to clarify
MY stance.
First my use of a 'model'. There are different models, from
the sexy young females over the math-etc. descriptions of
theoretical concepts (some not so sexy). - What I (after
Robert Rosen?) use by this word is an extract of something,
we may not know in toto. Close to an 'Occamized' version, but
"cut" mostly by ignorance of the 'rest of it', not for added
clarity. Applied to whatever we know TODAY about the world.
Or: we THINK WE KNOW.
A scientist know nothing. Just nothing, not even his own
consciousness.
In science we have only beliefs,
But then, according to you, if they happen to be true they are
knowledge.
Yes, but "we" can't know that.
Can "we" know that we can't know that?
Yes. That something that the machine can prove and know.
How can we know what a machine can prove or know if our own
knowledge is only belief?
Because some time our beliefs are true.
What does 'true' mean if we can only believe?
We can't define that, but we have a lot of example.
Suppose we meet and that I give you a slap. Then "Bruno gave a slap
to Craig" would be true. It would not be true, if we meet, or not,
and don't give you a slap.
How do you know that we met or didn't meet? Maybe it was just a
dream?
Then it is true, or false, with respect to the dream. I was only
illustrating a concept, known to de not definable, although
approximable.
There isn't necessarily a particular condition which is true or
false in a dream. More often it just 'seems like' someone is your
old college roommate in one sense, but maybe your brother also. Both
truth and belief here are a posteriori to the sense experience of
the dream itself, which is a gestalt and not meaningfully described
by either-or expectations with respect to either belief or truth. In
a dream, we don't know what we experience and we don't not-know what
we experience. This is a truer representation of sense than public
realism, which is disambiguated by thermodynamic irreversibility
among the total collection of experiences.
When we believe something, it means that we believe that it is
true, even when keeping in mind that it is a belief, and that we
might be wrong, that is not true.
Not necessarily. There may be no objective truth quality.
?
Sense pre-figures truth. Truth is a proportion or qualitative ratio
of sense agreements against disagreements.
We may be creating belief synthetically by our expectation.
That is called wishful thinking.
No, I'm talking about the idea that we have no beliefs at all until
we question them. It may be an analytical abstraction that is a
posteriori. We don't literally 'have a belief' that the sky is blue
- we participate in a universe in which it seems that the sky is
blue. It's a bit of sleight of hand to insert this presumption of
belief where in fact the experience of the sky's color is not
derived from any proposition or logical relation.
If your criteria is wishful thinking, that might explain your
question begging type of 'argument'.
If you ask someone whether they believe that eating meat is
immoral, they may not have had an opinion one way or another about
it before you asked. There may not be an expectation that their
spontaneously projected 'belief' reflects something that is 'true',
but just an expression of what makes sense to them - what feels
best in their mind or seems appropriate for their idea of their own
character.
I think it is better to try to see on what we agree, and build from
that. Statements like "eating meat is immoral" are very complex high
level statements not well suited for reasoning.
If what I'm saying is true, "eating meat is immoral" is a very
simple statement on the personal level, and ideal for pointing out
the bad assumptions of reasoning as an assembled low level
mechanism. Children can become vegetarian (I have known one in my
family) because they grasp the simple reality of how animals become
meat, not because they have deliberated anything with any particular
complexity. It would be very complex if we tried to create these
feelings from an impersonal level, I would say impossible, but
within the personal range of sense, these considerations are very
simple and direct, while calculus is very complex. Your view is that
complexity just increases from the bottom up, while mine is that
simplicity is conserved at every level by sense.
Craig
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