On Friday, February 28, 2020 at 9:08:25 AM UTC+1, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 27 Feb 2020, at 21:01, Philip Thrift <[email protected] <javascript:>> > wrote: > > > > On Thursday, February 27, 2020 at 6:11:49 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >> >> > On 26 Feb 2020, at 21:36, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List < >> [email protected]> wrote: >> > >> > >> > >> > On 2/26/2020 2:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >>> Being sure of that sentence is true, "Dr Watson was a friend of >> Sherlock Holmes." doesn't mean the things named in the sentence exist. >> >> >> >> It certainly means that Watson and Homes exist, in some sense. The >> question is “is that sense interesting with respect to our goal of >> explaining "everything” (matter and consciousness) in a coherent way? >> > >> > They exist in exactly the same way arithmetic and Turing machines >> exist. >> >> >> Really? >> >> The difference is that arithmetic is used by all physicists, >> mathematicians, economists, and that if you are mistaken about their >> relations, your rocket might blow up, or miss the moon. >> >> But if you are wrong about Watson or Holmes, you might just get a bad >> note at your English literature course. >> >> Bruno >> >> >> > What could be a "wrong" thesis about Watson and/or Holmes? > > > Good question. It would be like making a summary of a novel, which would > be wrong. If you say “Tintin never got to the moon” you are wrong, with > respect to the novel, and false, with respect to the mundane reality. But > if you say that the number 18 is prime, you are false, even among the > aliens. >
If your literature professor didn't fail you, he or she should have. I say this without irony or humor intended. Nobody in the world, other than servitor humblebrag here, claims to know or have an authoritative grasp on where "mundane reality" ends and where the land of fiction and wishful thinking begins. Sure, we may know that some abstraction may or may not be locally more effective given some more or less defined domain... but that's far from claiming absolute reality/truth. No credible scientist does this, even when deeply and passionately pursuing their work. And in literary contexts, it is lesson 101: nobody can arbitrate for anybody else what they consider to be real. Any interpretation of platonism worth its salt imho would concur with this. Bruno is therefore not a platonist in my book. Those ancient Greeks did not try to manipulate folks with cheap rhetorical tricks like: "you believe 2 + 2 = 4? you believe in functions that function? So then accept that mechanism the way I preach, my view of reality, and Turing machines are the only valid path in conducting discourse about ensemble theories and everything else for that matter, because this discourse is the primary and only discourse that should exist scientifically because we must be turing machines." This IS the authoritarian tendency of one unfortunate, anxious individual increasingly hijacking the discourse on ensemble theories here. It is colonialist and territorial: if the smallest part of your reasoning assumes one element of my arithmetical system, pay me rent and grant me infinite credibility/authority. In any literature class practiced with care, folks have the decency of understanding the ambiguity between what a finite being may consider real/true and the desperate generalization that would turn that into some absolutist fundamentalism. That's why folks self-destruct on rewards (e.g. gambling) and beliefs of various kinds, and why linguists study discourses of control/power. Nobody is perfect and nobody remains uncompromised. "Realism anything" is a red flag. And I'll maintain that the less serious versions of scientific secularism, christianity/major/minor religions that remain respectful of the inner private lives of people, who may hold different things to be real; including the rather fuzzy humanisms and post-modernisms practiced currently, are perhaps ambiguous for a reason: they are at least life affirming, with efforts to tune them towards benevolence/understanding that may be far from perfect, but clearly more advanced than "metaphysics" that are cynical and authoritative in nature. PGC Democracy and freedom of religion concerns, along with disclaimers towards the usual pitfalls of fundamentalism, should accompany any discourse that assumes itself or claims to be "realist". The Isis guys, Nazis, and any authoritarian regime assume themselves, along with their interpretation of the world, to be more primarily real than some excluded boogyman scapegoat group, which invariably, in logically forcing fashion, leads to the deletion of the less prime elements, to put it mildly. For sake of the real, of course. PGC -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/832bf9c5-90c8-4801-879a-85a8aafc5e56%40googlegroups.com.
