On 03/03/2016 11:16 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
I find myself confused about what you mean when you say
they are "signs that stand in a rigorous, systematic, and extensively
confirmed way to ... mathematical relationships". A sign is not (in your
view) a thing (other than itself) is it? I would have thought that a sign
it's a reference to a thing. The thing itself is only brought to mind (in
the mind) when looking at and thinking about the sign.
A sign is one of 3 objects in a 3-tuple. The set of 3 is the subject of this
conversation, not any single member of the set. Any one of the 3 things can be
handled as itself, separate from that particular 3-tuple. I.e. any given
referent object (the thing the sign signifies) can have multiple signs; the
sign can signify other objects (be part of a different 3-tuple); and the thing
interpreting the sign can interpret other signs. E.g.
multiple signs: √ versus x^.5
multiple referents:
• any x such that x*x=2
• ½[x_n + 2/x_n]|n→∞
multiple interpreters: ZFA versus ZFC
The important point is that if you remove any of the 3 objects, you no longer
have a sign.
So let's say we take a paint
color strip and ask people to select from a list of five color words (along
with non-of-these as an option) the best match to the color experience they
have when looking at the strip. Let's say there is essentially universal
agreement. Is that good enough to confirm that they all have the same color
experience? That sounds more empirical than mathematics and should satisfy
your requirement for an experimental experience -- although I'm not sure
what you mean by "experimental experience".
You keep isolating the machine from its I/O. If they all get "the same" input and give "the
same" output, then they are all "the same", up to the strength of whatever equivalence is
considered. Any variation that is undetectable is just that... undetectable. Sure, you can _speculate_ on
those undetectable differences... the differences that don't make a difference. But why? To what purpose?
We've already talked about hypothesis formulation. So, perhaps the purpose is
to formulate a new equivalence relation that will detect the differences
undetectable under the old one. But you're not talking that way. You seem to
want to promote speculated constructs up to a significance that's unwarranted
... to talk about thoughts and feelings as if they exist, without any
similarity measure with which to falsify them.
--
⇔ glen
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