On 03 Mar 2017, at 19:25, John Clark wrote:
On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 4:43 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
> Science is not politics, you can't invoke numbers of
believers,
But Science is not vocabulary either, and you CAN invoke the
number of speakers of the English language to determine what a word
in the English language means, in fact that is the only valid way of
doing so.
There is a better way, which is the axiomatic method. We abandon the
idea of trying to see if we talk on the same thing(s), and trying only
to agree on the main defining (albeit abstractly) what we talk about.
Mathematicians used this way, but it can be used on any domain of
inquiry.
I cannot really define what I mean by "natural numbers", but we can
agree on the main defining relations, like the Robinson or the Peano
Axioms.
Like we can agree that consciousness, or the belief in some reality,
is undoubtable, yet in an absolutely non justifiable reason.
Like we can agree to use "god" in the sense of the philosopher: the
(unknown) ultimate/absolute reality.
The axioms express only the relations on which we agree to focus on
when we explore some domain(s).
The meanings and interpretations are 100% vocabulary independent if we
limit ourselves to first-order theories and languages.
Then, the computationalist hypothesis, makes possible to assume not
much at the start, like any Church-Turing Universal system, and that
is cheap, you get it already with very elementary arithmetic. All
those systems determine a "web of dreams", with the dreams
corresponding to those computations emulating brains, say, and that
makes computationalism testable, and already confirmed "intuitively"
by the many-worlds apparent in quantum mechanics, but also formally
with Theaetetus-Plotinus theory of observable translated in
arithmetic, which gives a precise quantum logic (to compare with the
"labyrinth of quantum logics" (van Frassen) of the physicists).
Bruno
John K Clark
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