On 02 Mar 2013, at 21:58, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/2/2013 1:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 01 Mar 2013, at 20:37, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/1/2013 8:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 01 Mar 2013, at 16:28, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/1/2013 7:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 28 Feb 2013, at 20:29, meekerdb wrote:
On 2/28/2013 10:59 AM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com
> wrote:
>> It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is
not not Y then X is gibberish,
> X = alcohol Y = poison.
becomes "alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison"
Exactly, and 2 negatives, like "isn't not" cancel each other
out so you get "alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a
poison" which is gibberish just like I said.
Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the
quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to
notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are
not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian
syllogisms.
> If there were no free will then nobody could choose to
assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other
than gibberish.
Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols "free will"
mean.
And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted
from the email johnkcl...@gmail.com is only accidentally
meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where
not chosen by a conscious act.
I think we're safe in assuming that they are emitted by a
process that is either random or deterministic.
It could also be partially random and partially deterministic.
Sure. It's hard to even define what might be meant by
"completely" random.
Algorithmic incompressability (Chaitin, Martin Loef, Solovay ...)
make good attempts. This makes sense with Church's thesis. I
guess you know that. Sequences algorithmically incompressible
contains maximal information, but no way at all to decode it.
But those always implicitly assume infinite sequences.
Not at all. The interest of algorithmic information theory is that
it defines a notion of finite random sequence (any sequence whose
length is as long as the shortest program to generate it). The
notion is not constructive and is defined only up to a constant,
but it has its purpose). Infinite random sequence are defined by
having all their finite initial segment non compressible.
But isn't any finite sequence tivial compressible - just not all by
the same compression algorithm? When you say a random sequence is
defined by having all its finite initial segments non-compressible,
don't you mean not compressible by the same algorithm.
Not at all. Up to a constant, if a string is not compressible it is
not compressible by any algorithm. A constant appears, related to the
fact that all universal machine can emulate all other universal
machine, and the constant will be related to the length of the
interpreter translation. This makes the notion a bit useless for
"little string" (compared to that constant), but makes sense for
almost all finite strings (all, except a finite number of them). Then
it makes sense for the infinite strings. (Of course this makes sense
only through Church thesis).
Bruno
Brent
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