On 8/17/2014 3:16 PM, LizR wrote:
On 18 August 2014 06:41, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 8/16/2014 11:02 PM, LizR wrote:Indeed. This is generally my objection to theories that /require/ conscious observers (and also my objection to people who say 1+1=2 is a human invention, by the way, since the laws of physics, which appear to be based on arithmetic, still worked fine without any conscious beings to "invent" them).But that's because we invented them to work that way. We invented language to describe things as we seen them and then we make inferences from it.Yes, note the "As we see them" in the above sentence. If we are describing things as we see them, we aren't inventing them.
Yes we are, because there are many inequivalent ways of describing what we see, compare Copernican astronomy with Ptolemaic. What we see does not force a single model or explanation on us. So it takes invention or creativity to see that Kepler's data is described by an inverse square law bilinear in the masses of orbiting bodies.
We already had an argument about your weird use of "invent" to mean "discover" - we don't invent the world that is being described, we only invent the particular form of the description, like using the symbol "1". If you're going to use invent and discover interchangeably like this, fine, just remind me not to bother discussing it with you in future.
Don't bother discussing it with me again. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
