On 08 Jan 2015, at 04:48, meekerdb wrote:
On 1/7/2015 7:23 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
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From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]
] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2015 12:12 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Why is there something rather than nothing? From
quantum theory to dialectics?
On 1/7/2015 3:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 06 Jan 2015, at 20:21, meekerdb wrote:
On 1/6/2015 1:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 03 Jan 2015, at 06:05, 'Roger' via Everything List wrote:
Even if the word "exists" has no use because everything exists,
it
seems important to know why everything exists.
But everything does not exist. At the best, you can say everything
consistent or possible exist.
Anyway, as I said, the notion of nothing and everything, which are
conceptually equivalent, needs a notion of thing. That notion of
thing will need some thing to be accepte
It is often ambiguous in this thread if people talk about every
physical things, every mathematical things, every
epistemological things, every theological things, ...
So, we cannot start from nothing.
We light try the empty theory: no axioms at all. But then its
semantics will be all models, and will needs some set theory (not
nothing!) to define the models. The semantics of the empty
theory is a theory of everything, but in a sort of trivial way.
Computationalism makes this clear, I think. We need to assume 0
(we
can't prove its existence from logic alone, we need also to assume
logic, if only to reason about the things we talk about, even
when they do not exist).
What does it mean to "assume 0". Is it to assume a collection of
things
No. If we assume a collection, we would do set theory, or something.
We might assume some intended collection at the metalevel, but if we
build a formal theory (a machine), we will not assume a collection
at the base level.
such that every element has a unique successor (per some ordering
relation) and there is one element that is not the successor of
any other element, which we call zero?
That seems to assume things too.
Assuming zero means here that we add a symbol ("0") in the language
alphabet, and we assume some logical formula. The non logical symbol
that we have introduced are "0, s, + and *", and we assume some
formula like:
~(0 = s(x)), for any x (the x are always supposed to denote the
object of our universe, here the intended standard natural numbers)
also:
0 + x = x
0 * x = 0
We don't assume anything else (about zero).
So 0 is just a mark on paper, a symbol that is not a symbol "of"
anything such as the empty set.
I get the feeling that '0' has a lot more meaning for Bruno than
merely being a vertically oriented oval drawn on a paper (or
computer screen), that it is a symbolic notational reference to a
rather profound concept, which eluded the world for much of its
recorded history. It wasn't until the fifth century A.D. in India
that mathematicians fully conceived of it giving it conceptual
existence, though it was used earlier as a kind of decimal place
holder as far back as 300BC or thereabouts -- in Babylon. It was
the Italian mathematician Fibonacci who introduced the concept back
into the church darkened intellectual deserts of Europe in 1200 AD.
Placeholder type zero's -- to differentiate an empty number column
seems to have been adopted in ancient Sumer. It is only however
much later that the concept of zero was really understood.
As a place holder is meant "no units" or "no tens"; it meant none of
some specific category. You imply that "the concept is really
understood" differently now, but I have my doubts. Bruno reifies
all the natural numbers and all of arithmetic;
Not at all.
Where? On the contrary, see my preceding answer to you.
which is fine as a theory, but it's not a proof of existence.
?
(There is no proof of existence in the whole of science. Proof of
existence are done from theories/hypotheses, always).
Bruno
Brent
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