Jon-
Your relating of Cantor's predicament/circumstance really reminds me of
how much I sometimes wish I could live my life over again and encounter
these ideas in a more coherent order than I did. The way I organized my
understanding of reality (life, the universe, and everything) sometimes
feels hopelessly tangled in the early structures I was offered.
It may seem a leap, but this is what I was referencing when I challenged
Nick (really using Nick as a proxy for one of my own homunculii in the
GEPR (I think) sense) on his implied Cold War
interpretation/apprehension of the current activities/stances of the
Chinese people/government/CCParty). It sometimes feels as if my
brain/mind/consciousness is nothing more (nor less) than a sorting
machine attempting to organize the myriad factoids/perceptionlets that
impinge upon it through my embodied body-mind.
In principle, I suppose, there might *be* one final lowest-entropy
organization of the totality of my perceptions (as if that is ever a
done deal, perceiving new things) but it seems that if 42 (in the
Douglas Adams sense) IS the lowest entropy organization, the
superposition (ensemble) of all possible intermediate organizations is
somehow more real than 42 (which must be nothing more than an index into
that ultimate sorted state of perceptions?).
- Stir
On 11/21/21 2:19 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
That water is H20 gets at my confusion. While this is a classic example
of an a posteriori truth, the stability of truths like these form
categories that couldn't have been any other way. I feel that your
follow up questions get at this nicely:
"""
Would we say something like: Sure, but then it wouldn't be "water"
Or would we say something like: Yes, that could definitely be a possible
world, but their "water" wouldn't be exactly the same as our water.
"""
That Thompson's (and I suspect your) flavor of Peircean logic derives
from an interest in how we get robust generals from sampling messy
particulars, I interpret his (and possibly your) program (from within
the framework of Kripke semantics) as an attempt to understand when a
posteriori truths "lift" to reveal what are effectively a priori truths.
"""
There might be a conversation something like it that would have a bit of
depth, but instead it is almost entirely linguistic trickery masquerading
as deep thoughts.
"""
I understand that your post was intended to ridicule an argument, that
in all likelihood is faux deep[围棋], but elements of the "linguistic
trickery" reminds me (and may be modeled upon) of Cantor's famous
argument[א]. Cantor begins his argument by attempting to put the Real
numbers in correspondence with the Natural numbers (effectively naming
each real number with some integer) only to show that there is always
one more real that could not be named. In the p-zombie argument, one is
*supposed to conclude* that there must always be one more quality of
consciousness that is not accounted for by naming with the material
world, and thus more than physicalism is needed to account for the world.
Whatever the p-zombie argument's final status be, my post was an attempt
to assess the risk while responding thoughtfully to your entertaining
and generous offering.
[围棋] To take the argument seriously is to see it as a kind of hanami ko,
but it may, in fact, be something more akin to throwing away stones in
what is clearly another's territory. On the other hand, as the proverb
goes, "Stones are never truly dead until they're removed from the board".
[א] Cantor, probably the greatest of all metaphysician mathematicians ;)
His Wikipedia article documents the hostility and ridicule that he and
his transfinite numbers received:
"""
Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers was originally regarded as so
counter-intuitive – even shocking – that it encountered resistance from
mathematical contemporaries (...) Cantor, a devout Lutheran Christian,
believed the theory had been communicated to him by God. Some Christian
theologians (particularly neo-Scholastics) saw Cantor's work as a
challenge to the uniqueness of the absolute infinity in the nature
of God – on one occasion equating the theory of transfinite numbers
with pantheism – a proposition that Cantor vigorously rejected.
The objections to Cantor's work were occasionally fierce: Leopold
Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing
Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of
youth". Kronecker objected to Cantor's proofs that the algebraic numbers
are countable, and that the transcendental numbers are uncountable,
results now included in a standard mathematics curriculum. Writing
decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is
"ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory",
which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong".
"""
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