> On 11 Jun 2018, at 01:44, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 12:49:17PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >>> On 8 Jun 2018, at 16:26, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >> >>> and didn't even know where the sun went at night. You've recommended many >>> many books on this list but only a very small number of them were written >>> by authors who have been dead for less than a century, but even those books >>> are unable to calculate 2+2. > > ISTM, the bulk of the books Bruno cites are 20th century, mostly > mid-20th C. This is not surprising: a) because the 20th C was an > explosion of human knowledge, and most of the key concepts Bruno > relies on were elucidated in the early-mid 20th C; b) like most of us, > Bruno did most of his formative reading in his teens and twenties, > which corresponds to the 1960-70s in his case, and c) it is bloody hard > keeping up with 21st century literature, there's so much of it. > > I enjoy Bruno's inclusion of ancient texts, both for the colour, and > for the feeling of hubris you get when you realise someone living 2000 > years ago got surprisingly close to the mark. But his arguments do not > depend on those texts at all.
Right. Except for Lao-Ze, and a bit of Plato and Plotinus, it is only thanks to computer science that I realise those people where close to the mark. If mechanism is true, that is hardly a coincidence. Mechanism, or even just the self-reference theory, explains all what a machine can discover when reasoning about itself without prejudice (except classical logic, which is something discovered by Aristotle). So, it would be astonishing that the humans reasoning about themselves would not have been close to the machine. That would have an indication that mechanism is wrong. But I did not expect at all that Plotinus, and perhaps even more so Moderatus of Gades, would that close. Cheers! Bruno > > > -- > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) > Principal, High Performance Coders > Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected] > Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > -- > 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
