Re: The problem with physics

[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 8:55 AM Bruce Kellett  wrote:

>
> Quantum mechanics itself is not counterfactually definite. Einstein was
> wrong about this. A free electron is described by a wave packet which is a
> superposition of states of definite momentum and position. There is no
> actual "position" for the electron until it interacts with a screen or some
> similar device. This is demonstrated by simple two-slit interference. There
> is no pre-existing position, unless you want to embrace Bohm's pilot wave
> theory, in which the electron does have a definite, though unknown,
> position at all times.
>

I have come across an interesting video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D9HkoHScdY

in which Gerard 't Hooft, Roger Penrose, Tim Maudlin and a couple of others
talk about interpretations of quantum mechanics from their different
perspective. I found the segment by Tim Maudlin particularly interesting,
given his new book on the philosophy of quantum mechanics. His segment
starts at about the 10 minute mark. But the other contributions also have
some interest -- particularly Philip Ball towards the end (about the 20
minute mark).

No definite conclusions are advocated, but it is interesting to hear the
different perspectives.

Bruce

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Re: Frege, Wittgenstein on linguistical truth

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 5:21:25 PM UTC-6, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
>
> On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 3:48:25 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 12/6/2019 4:05 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 5:42:13 AM UTC-6, Lawrence Crowell wrote: 
>>>
>>> On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 12:59:15 AM UTC-6, Philip Thrift wrote: 




 https://philosophynow.org/issues/106/Wittgenstein_Frege_and_The_Context_Principle
  


 Frege was equally concerned to reject one kind of account of 
 mathematical objectivity – the view that mathematical statements are made 
 true by reference to abstract mathematical objects that are in some way 
 real, even though we can’t see, touch or feel them. 

 According to the Context Principle, the basic unit of sense is the 
 proposition, or sentence. The sentence is the smallest unit of language 
 which can be used to say anything at all. The meaningfulness of names and 
 predicates is a matter of the place they occupy in the sentence, and also 
 whether the sentence is true. Whether or not a name refers to an object, 
 then, is a matter of the contribution the name makes to the truth of the 
 whole sentence.

 @philipthrift

>>>
>>> This leads me to appreciate on some level why Feynman called this 
>>> philosofuzzy.
>>>
>>> LC 
>>>
>>
>>
>> Which is why Feyerabend (who I think was together with Feynman when he 
>> came to some conferences in Berkeley) said 
>>
>> The withdrawal of philosophy into a "professional" shell of its own has 
>> had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the 
>> *Feynman*s , the 
>> Schwingers , etc., may 
>> be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than 
>> Bohr , Einstein 
>> , Schrödinger 
>> , Boltzmann 
>> , Mach 
>>  and so on. *But they are 
>> uncivilized savages: they lack in philosophical depth.*
>>
>> So true.
>>
>>
>> Depth is no virtue when you're just muddying the water.
>>
>>
>> @philipthrift
>>
>>
>> Each philosopher knows a lot but, as a whole, philosophers don't know 
>> anything. If they did, they would be scientists.
>>   --- Ludwig Krippahl
>>
>> "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to 
>> seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one 
>> will believe it."
>>--- Bertrand Russell
>>
>> Philosophie ist der systematische Missbrauch einer eigens zu
>> diesem Zweck entwickelten Terminologie."
>>  ---Wolfgang Pauli
>>
>> "The philosophy of science is just about as useful to scientists
>> as ornithology is to birds."
>>   --- Steven Weinberg
>>
>> So is Feyerabend so sure his depth is more profound than theirs?
>>
>> Brent
>>
>>
>>
>>
> What some scientist calls "philosofuzzy" (Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine) 
> perhaps is to hide their own fuzzy philosophy. (I can't find a reference 
> for Feynman ever using that term though).
>
> *Physicists Are Philosophers, Too*
> Victor J. Stenger
> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-are-philosophers-too/
>
> What we are seeing here is not a recent phenomenon. In his 1992 book 
> Dreams of a Final Theory, Nobel laureate *Steven Weinberg* has a whole 
> chapter entitled “Against Philosophy.” Referring to the famous observation 
> of Nobel laureate physicist Eugene Wigner about “the unreasonable 
> effectiveness of mathematics,” Weinberg puzzles about “the unreasonable 
> ineffectiveness of philosophy.”
>
> Weinberg does not dismiss all of philosophy, just the philosophy of 
> science, noting that its arcane discussions interest few scientists. He 
> points out the problems with the philosophy of positivism, although he 
> agrees that it played a role in the early development of both relativity 
> and quantum mechanics. He argues that positivism did more harm than good, 
> however, writing, “The positivist concentration on observables like 
> particle positions and momenta has stood in the way of a ‘realist’ 
> interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which the wave function is the 
> representative of physical reality.”
>
> Weinberg and [others], in fact, are expressing a platonic view of reality 
> commonly held by many theoretical physicists and mathematicians. They are 
> taking their equations and model as existing on one-to-one correspondence 
> with the ultimate nature of reality.
>
> @philipthrift
>

It is not that, and few physicists think their equations are 1 to 1 with 
nature all the way. The point is to calculate things according to scheme 
that gives answers to questions. Spending lots of time concerned wi

Re: Energy conservation in many-worlds

['Brent Meeker' via Everything List]

On 12/6/2019 6:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 6 Dec 2019, at 02:30, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> wrote:




On 12/5/2019 4:28 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 10:45 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> wrote:


On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> wrote:

On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a 
consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a 
response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,

It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to 
what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?

Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.


Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my
dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The
counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding
the counterfact I get another dog.


In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is
not relevant here, but it has to make sense)


So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs". 
You meant responses in some different world, where the input and
the response (and maybe everything else) are different.


The whole question about counterfactuals relates back to 
philosophical questions about what counterfactuals can possible mean 
when the antecedent is manifestly false. I think it was Lewis who 
proposed an analysis of causation in terms of counterfactuals, 
giving them meaning through the concept of "possible worlds". 
Philosophy has moved on past this understanding of counterfactuals, 
but it seems that Bruno is attached to the idea of multiple worlds, 
so he thinks that consciousness depends on a "possible worlds" 
understanding of the response to counterfactual inputs.


Bruno is a logician, so he looks at in terms of Kripke's possible 
worlds modal logic.


I started from biology. I discovered Mechanism in the work of 
Descartes and Darwin. I have just been lucky to discover Gödel’s 
theorem before deciding to study biology, and it makes me realise that 
what Descartes and Darwin described is realised in the number 
relations. I will still remain a bit skeptical on this until I 
eventually understood how solid the Church-Turing thesis is.




But unlike a physicist who takes mathematics and logic to be rules of 
language intended to conserve the validity of inferences in the 
language, he takes them to be proscriptive of reality.


No less than any physicist who use mathematics. Not just the 
mathematical language, but also some mathematical truth.


You probably meant "No more than..."  But what you wrote is correct:

"The direct, platonic, correspondence of physical theories to the nature 
of reality ... is fraught with problems: First, theories are notoriously 
temporary. We can never know if quantum field theory will not someday be 
replaced with another more powerful model that makes no mention of 
fields (or particles, for that matter). Second, as with all physical 
theories, quantum field theory is a model—a human contrivance. We test 
our models to find out if they work; but we can never be sure, even for 
highly predictive models like quantum electrodynamics, to what degree 
they correspond to “reality.” To claim they do is metaphysics. If there 
were an empirical way to determine ultimate reality, it would be 
physics, not metaphysics; but it seems there isn't."

  Victor J Stenger







I'm bothered by his modal logic of "B" which seems to morph betweeen 
"believes" and "proves" (beweisbar) which he justifies by saying he's 
referring to perfect reasoner who therefore proves, and believes, 
everything provable.


That is the lesson of Gödel’s theorem: “provable” does not entail 
“true”, and “true” does not entail provable. And “provable” 
(beweisbar) obey to a logic of belief, not of knowledge. And yes, I 
use “perfect reasoner”, which simplifies a lot the derivation of 
physics. Interrogating machines which lies, or are deluded is not 
necessary for the solution of the metaphysical/theological mind-body 
problem.


But it is highly unrealistic to assume the perfect reasoner not only 
makes no mistakes, but also completes and knows all proofs.








But this not a model of human reasoning.


Right, but using “human reasoning” would make the whole derivation of 
physics far more complex than necessary, especially that we want to 
show that *all* correct universal machine find the same physics.


But that is begging the question.   You may /want/ all correct universal 
machines to find the same physics, but maybe there is no unique physics.



You could critic

Re: The problem with physics

[John Clark]

On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 7:05 AM Bruno Marchal  wrote:

> In the duplicating machine case even after it's all over it's not at all
>> clear who has won because I hear 2 equally loud and equally valid voices
>> demanding that they deserve to receive the title "you”.
>
>
> *> That is right, and it is nice to listen to them both,*
>

I have,

* > as you should (given the definition of first person),*
>

Given the definition and given the circumstances there are now 2 first
persons, and there is nothing indeterminate about that, it's a precise
statement and was correctly predicted to happen yesterday in Helsinki.

> *and when you listen to each of them, you realise that they know
> perfectly who they are.*
>

Yes, one knows they are the Washington  Man and one knows he is the Moscow
Man.

*> The guy in W says “I find myself clearly in W, and could not have
> guessed this in H”,*
>

Nonsense. Yesterday in H anybody could have predicted that the man who saw
W would become the W man, I don't understand  what else somebody should
have said yesterday in H.

*> **and the guy in M says "“I find myself clearly in M, and could not have
> guessed this in H”.*
>

This? In the above "I" is clear, it is the man who saw M, but if "this" in
the above does not mean the man who sees M will become the M Man (which is
easily predictable) then "this" can not be guessed at because nobody knows
what the hell they're suposed to be guessing about. And atop this
ridiculous foundation you have built a huge tower reaching toward the
ethereal heights.

And you wonder why I stopped reading your "proof"!

>
> *both confirms that they got “THE” experience.*
>

Then yesterday in Helsinki it was a ridiculous question to ask "what one
and only one will get THE experience?", it's so ridiculous it wasn't a
question at all, it was just gibberish.

> y*ou can no more invoke a god* [...]
>

And at this point I say goodnight because I know from experience that after
you invoke that particularly ridiculous word (or start babbling about
ancient Greeks) nothing intelligent ever follows.

 John K Clark

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Re: Frege, Wittgenstein on linguistical truth

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 3:48:25 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:
>
>
>
> On 12/6/2019 4:05 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
>
> On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 5:42:13 AM UTC-6, Lawrence Crowell wrote: 
>>
>> On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 12:59:15 AM UTC-6, Philip Thrift wrote: 
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> https://philosophynow.org/issues/106/Wittgenstein_Frege_and_The_Context_Principle
>>>  
>>>
>>>
>>> Frege was equally concerned to reject one kind of account of 
>>> mathematical objectivity – the view that mathematical statements are made 
>>> true by reference to abstract mathematical objects that are in some way 
>>> real, even though we can’t see, touch or feel them. 
>>>
>>> According to the Context Principle, the basic unit of sense is the 
>>> proposition, or sentence. The sentence is the smallest unit of language 
>>> which can be used to say anything at all. The meaningfulness of names and 
>>> predicates is a matter of the place they occupy in the sentence, and also 
>>> whether the sentence is true. Whether or not a name refers to an object, 
>>> then, is a matter of the contribution the name makes to the truth of the 
>>> whole sentence.
>>>
>>> @philipthrift
>>>
>>
>> This leads me to appreciate on some level why Feynman called this 
>> philosofuzzy.
>>
>> LC 
>>
>
>
> Which is why Feyerabend (who I think was together with Feynman when he 
> came to some conferences in Berkeley) said 
>
> The withdrawal of philosophy into a "professional" shell of its own has 
> had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the 
> *Feynman*s , the Schwingers 
> , etc., may be very 
> bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr 
> , Einstein 
> , Schrödinger 
> , Boltzmann 
> , Mach 
>  and so on. *But they are 
> uncivilized savages: they lack in philosophical depth.*
>
> So true.
>
>
> Depth is no virtue when you're just muddying the water.
>
>
> @philipthrift
>
>
> Each philosopher knows a lot but, as a whole, philosophers don't know 
> anything. If they did, they would be scientists.
>   --- Ludwig Krippahl
>
> "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to 
> seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one 
> will believe it."
>--- Bertrand Russell
>
> Philosophie ist der systematische Missbrauch einer eigens zu
> diesem Zweck entwickelten Terminologie."
>  ---Wolfgang Pauli
>
> "The philosophy of science is just about as useful to scientists
> as ornithology is to birds."
>   --- Steven Weinberg
>
> So is Feyerabend so sure his depth is more profound than theirs?
>
> Brent
>
>
>
>
What some scientist calls "philosofuzzy" (Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine) 
perhaps is to hide their own fuzzy philosophy. (I can't find a reference 
for Feynman ever using that term though).

*Physicists Are Philosophers, Too*
Victor J. Stenger
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-are-philosophers-too/

What we are seeing here is not a recent phenomenon. In his 1992 book Dreams 
of a Final Theory, Nobel laureate *Steven Weinberg* has a whole chapter 
entitled “Against Philosophy.” Referring to the famous observation of Nobel 
laureate physicist Eugene Wigner about “the unreasonable effectiveness of 
mathematics,” Weinberg puzzles about “the unreasonable ineffectiveness of 
philosophy.”

Weinberg does not dismiss all of philosophy, just the philosophy of 
science, noting that its arcane discussions interest few scientists. He 
points out the problems with the philosophy of positivism, although he 
agrees that it played a role in the early development of both relativity 
and quantum mechanics. He argues that positivism did more harm than good, 
however, writing, “The positivist concentration on observables like 
particle positions and momenta has stood in the way of a ‘realist’ 
interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which the wave function is the 
representative of physical reality.”

Weinberg and [others], in fact, are expressing a platonic view of reality 
commonly held by many theoretical physicists and mathematicians. They are 
taking their equations and model as existing on one-to-one correspondence 
with the ultimate nature of reality.

@philipthrift

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Re: Energy conservation in many-worlds

['Brent Meeker' via Everything List]

On 12/6/2019 6:34 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 6 Dec 2019, at 00:53, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> wrote:




On 12/5/2019 9:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 5 Dec 2019, at 02:12, Bruce Kellett > wrote:


On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 10:44 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> wrote:


On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a 
consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a 
response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,

It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to 
what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?

Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.


Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my
dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today. The
counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding
the counterfact I get another dog.  The same thing eventuates
tomorrow.  Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and
when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.

Hence Mechanism is false.


I think the point Bruno is making is that consciousness requires 
"counterfactual correctness”,



Not just “consciousness”, also the simpler notion of computation 
requires or even define a notion of counterfactual correctness. It 
is not much more than a semantic for the “if A then B else C”.




by which he appears to mean that consciousness must be such that if 
the inputs are changed (counterfactually), then the output must 
also change.


… must also change (counterfactually). OK.


This hypothesis -- that consciousness requires this 
"counterfactuall correctness" -- was introduced ad hoc in order to 
protect the movie graph argument. If we take the sequence of states 
through which a computation proceeds to give a particular conscious 
experience and reproduce exactly those states on a film or 
something similar, then running through those states will reproduce 
the same conscious experience. They want to avoid this conclusion, 
so they impose the restriction that the sequence of state must be 
"counterfactually correct", i.e., it must respond differently to 
different input -- which the movie graph, being fixed, clearly cannot.


Who they? Not me, and Maudlin makes that move to get a reductio ad 
absurdum of having both mechanism and materialism. Then at the end 
he choses materialism, where I keep Mechanism, but both Maudlin and 
me showed that indeed it is absurd to believe in both mechanism and 
the idea that consciousness is related exclusively to some material 
events.





That this ad hoc manoeuvre does not prove anything about 
consciousness was shown by Maudlin in his "Olympia" argument.


That is weird. Maudlin, and men  did prove something about 
consciousness, mechanism and materialism.


We show that materialism -> non mechanism, or equivalently that 
mechanism -> non materialism. You can’t have them both.


But it assumes that computation exists in the abstract…


Abstract, may be for an Aristotelian who believe in a “concrete” 
physical reality.


Personally, only the natural numbers are concrete object to me, and 
computations are rather very concrete too, as they are as singular as 
the natural number, well defined, etc.


2 is concrete. 2 apples is far more abstract. We are not aware of this 
because we use quasi unconsciously highly sophisticated measuring 
apparatus (eyes, the nose, …) and a very sophisticated computer (the 
nervous system, billions of neurons, etc.) to analyse quickly the 
observation, and to eat the apple, making us feeling that it is 
concrete, when it is actually very abstract, and even more so if we 
accept the current description of what could be an apple (a partial 
trace of a quantum wave in an Hilbert space?).





simply because there's a thing we invented called the existential 
quantifier.


Prime numbers and computations existed in the arithmetical reality in 
a way which does not depend of time, space, or humans for that matter. 
And we don’t need to make existence into a notion of metaphysical 
existence. Computations exists like a solution to the equation x + 1 = 
3 exists.


Only in your topsy-turvy world where my apple is abstract and arithmetic 
is concrete.  Like Alice's caterpillar, your words mean whatever you 
want them to mean.







It's as weak as St Anslem's ontological proof; which tellingly Goedel 
thought he could make sound.



This has nothing to do with the existence of computation, which you 
can prove from Peano arithmetic once you accept the Church-Turing 
definition.


And once you accept that definitions can make things exist...which is 
what St Anselm relied on.


Brent

That is not the case, neither for 

Re: Energy conservation in many-worlds

['Brent Meeker' via Everything List]

On 12/6/2019 6:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 6 Dec 2019, at 00:45, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> wrote:




On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> wrote:




On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a 
consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a 
response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,

It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to 
what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?

Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.


Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog 
died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The 
counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding the 
counterfact I get another dog.


In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not 
relevant here, but it has to make sense)


So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs".  You 
meant responses in some different world, where the input and the 
response (and maybe everything else) are different.


That is modal realism, but I made precise I don’t use this here. That 
is why I said “relatively real or not”. Usually, the counterfactuals 
and their consequences are judged unreal, but in modal realist 
context, like with Everett and with Mechanism, they get real (with 
high or low relative measure).
The counterfactual reality are always as close as possible as the 
factual input. We can say, if Hitler was a nice guy there would not 
have been an holocaust (that is a common reasonable counterfactual). 
But we cannot say (to illustrate counterfactuals) “If Hitler was good, 
pigs would been able to fly”. That is not a counterfactual. It is at 
best a statement that Hitler (perhaps by definition of Hitler) is 
intrinsically bad, or something.


Similarly “if the alarm did not ring, the plane would have crashed” is 
a reasonable counterfactual statement. But “If the alarm did not ring 
chicken would have teeth”, would mean that it is absolutely impossible 
that the alarm could not ring.


You take extreme examples, but where is the line. How do you know that 
in the world where Hitler is a nice guy it is necessarily true that pigs 
fly?  You claim that all that is real is the same as the totality of 
computation.  So from you premise can you prove what you asserted...or 
is it just an assertion?


Brent

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Re: Frege, Wittgenstein on linguistical truth

['Brent Meeker' via Everything List]

On 12/6/2019 4:05 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:



On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 5:42:13 AM UTC-6, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 12:59:15 AM UTC-6, Philip Thrift
wrote:




https://philosophynow.org/issues/106/Wittgenstein_Frege_and_The_Context_Principle





Frege was equally concerned to reject one kind of account of
mathematical objectivity – the view that mathematical
statements are made true by reference to abstract mathematical
objects that are in some way real, even though we can’t see,
touch or feel them.

According to the Context Principle, the basic unit of sense is
the proposition, or sentence. The sentence is the smallest
unit of language which can be used to say anything at all. The
meaningfulness of names and predicates is a matter of the
place they occupy in the sentence, and also whether the
sentence is true. Whether or not a name refers to an object,
then, is a matter of the contribution the name makes to the
truth of the whole sentence.

@philipthrift


This leads me to appreciate on some level why Feynman called this
philosofuzzy.

LC



Which is why Feyerabend (who I think was together with Feynman when he 
came to some conferences in Berkeley) said


The withdrawal of philosophy into a "professional" shell of its own 
has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, 
the***Feynman*s , the 
Schwingers , etc., may 
be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, 
than Bohr , Einstein 
, Schrödinger 
, Boltzmann 
, Mach 
 and so on. *But they are 
uncivilized savages: they lack in philosophical depth.*


So true.


Depth is no virtue when you're just muddying the water.



@philipthrift


Each philosopher knows a lot but, as a whole, philosophers don't know 
anything. If they did, they would be scientists.

  --- Ludwig Krippahl

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to 
seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one 
will believe it."

   --- Bertrand Russell

Philosophie ist der systematische Missbrauch einer eigens zu
diesem Zweck entwickelten Terminologie."
 ---Wolfgang Pauli

"The philosophy of science is just about as useful to scientists
as ornithology is to birds."
  --- Steven Weinberg

So is Feyerabend so sure his depth is more profound than theirs?

Brent



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Re: The largest and smallest Black Holes

[Lawrence Crowell]

Strangelets are a baryon state (d,u,s) where this has a lower energy state than 
a proton state (d,u,u). There is a large potential barrier obstructing a flavor 
changing weak interaction u --> s + e +  nu_ e-bar. However, this is not so 
much for s + u --> s + s + e + nu_ e-bar. So this is self catalysing 
interaction. If there is enough "seed" strangelets this could run away.

If a neutron star has a strange core and it collides with another this stuff 
could slash out and covert more matter to strangelets. However, I suspect this 
is no more a threat than that of a black hole coming through the solar system 
and gravitationally flinging planets and Earth around.

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Re: The largest and smallest Black Holes

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 5 Dec 2019, at 23:59, John Clark  wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 4:44 PM Lawrence Crowell 
> mailto:goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com>> 
> wrote:
> 
> > I don't know what happens in this gap between 2.2 and 3.4 solar masses. It 
> > is possibly a domain for quark stars and related exotic hadronic stars.
> 
> If they exist Quark Stars could be the most dangerous objects in the 
> universe. The stuff they're made of, Strange Matter, would be even denser 
> than neutronium and unlike neutron star stuff it would be stable at earthly 
> pressure; in fact it would be more stable than ordinary matter so one 
> microscopic speck of it would convert the entire planet into a ball of 
> Strange Matter about a foot in diameter. 


I read that some believe that all neutron star could have a core made of quark 
condensation. Not sure if this would necessarily be strange matter, but perhaps 
I am wrong. It is denser than neutronium, to be sure.

I read a paper a long time ago describing some exotic quark condensate 
exploiting a sort of quantum games to assure persistence. 

Bruno



> 
>   John K Clark 
>  
> 
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Re: Energy conservation in many-worlds

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 6 Dec 2019, at 02:30, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 12/5/2019 4:28 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 10:45 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>> mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> 
>> wrote:
>> On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
 On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
 >>> > wrote:
 
 On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, 
>>> it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly 
>>> actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for 
>>> consciousness, 
>> It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" 
>> to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything 
>> but crazy?
> Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
 
 Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd 
 get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that 
 my dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog. 
>>> 
>>> In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant 
>>> here, but it has to make sense)
>> 
>> So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs".  You meant 
>> responses in some different world, where the input and the response (and 
>> maybe everything else) are different.
>> 
>> The whole question about counterfactuals relates back to philosophical 
>> questions about what counterfactuals can possible mean when the antecedent 
>> is manifestly false. I think it was Lewis who proposed an analysis of 
>> causation in terms of counterfactuals, giving them meaning through the 
>> concept of "possible worlds". Philosophy has moved on past this 
>> understanding of counterfactuals, but it seems that Bruno is attached to the 
>> idea of multiple worlds, so he thinks that consciousness depends on a 
>> "possible worlds" understanding of the response to counterfactual inputs.
> 
> Bruno is a logician, so he looks at in terms of Kripke's possible worlds 
> modal logic. 

I started from biology. I discovered Mechanism in the work of Descartes and 
Darwin. I have just been lucky to discover Gödel’s theorem before deciding to 
study biology, and it makes me realise that what Descartes and Darwin described 
is realised in the number relations. I will still remain a bit skeptical on 
this until I eventually understood how solid the Church-Turing thesis is.



> But unlike a physicist who takes mathematics and logic to be rules of 
> language intended to conserve the validity of inferences in the language, he 
> takes them to be proscriptive of reality. 

No less than any physicist who use mathematics. Not just the mathematical 
language, but also some mathematical truth.




> I'm bothered by his modal logic of "B" which seems to morph betweeen 
> "believes" and "proves" (beweisbar) which he justifies by saying he's 
> referring to perfect reasoner who therefore proves, and believes, everything 
> provable. 

That is the lesson of Gödel’s theorem: “provable” does not entail “true”, and 
“true” does not entail provable. And “provable” (beweisbar) obey to a logic of 
belief, not of knowledge. And yes, I use “perfect reasoner”, which simplifies a 
lot the derivation of physics. Interrogating machines which lies, or are 
deluded is not necessary for the solution of the metaphysical/theological 
mind-body problem.




> But this not a model of human reasoning. 

Right, but using “human reasoning” would make the whole derivation of physics 
far more complex than necessary, especially that we want to show that *all* 
correct universal machine find the same physics.
You could criticise newton for simplifying the sun up to a point. That would be 
a poor critics of classical mechanics.


> Factual doesn't enter into it, so how can counterfactual.


?  (If you can elaborate. With mechanism, factual is an indexical)

Bruno




> 
> Brent
> 
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Re: Energy conservation in many-worlds

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 6 Dec 2019, at 00:53, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 12/5/2019 9:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> 
>>> On 5 Dec 2019, at 02:12, Bruce Kellett >> > wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 10:44 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>>> >> > wrote:
>>> On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's 
>> a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions 
>> as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for 
>> consciousness, 
> It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" 
> to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything 
> but crazy?
 Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
>>> 
>>> Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd 
>>> get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my 
>>> dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog.  The 
>>> same thing eventuates tomorrow.  Soon my neighbors report me to the 
>>> authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric 
>>> care.
>>> 
>>> Hence Mechanism is false.
>>> 
>>> I think the point Bruno is making is that consciousness requires 
>>> "counterfactual correctness”,
>> 
>> 
>> Not just “consciousness”, also the simpler notion of computation requires or 
>> even define a notion of counterfactual correctness. It is not much more than 
>> a semantic for the “if A then B else C”. 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> by which he appears to mean that consciousness must be such that if the 
>>> inputs are changed (counterfactually), then the output must also change.
>> 
>> … must also change (counterfactually). OK.
>> 
>> 
>>> This hypothesis -- that consciousness requires this "counterfactuall 
>>> correctness" -- was introduced ad hoc in order to protect the movie graph 
>>> argument. If we take the sequence of states through which a computation 
>>> proceeds to give a particular conscious experience and reproduce exactly 
>>> those states on a film or something similar, then running through those 
>>> states will reproduce the same conscious experience. They want to avoid 
>>> this conclusion, so they impose the restriction that the sequence of state 
>>> must be "counterfactually correct", i.e., it must respond differently to 
>>> different input -- which the movie graph, being fixed, clearly cannot.
>> 
>> Who they? Not me, and Maudlin makes that move to get a reductio ad absurdum 
>> of having both mechanism and materialism. Then at the end he choses 
>> materialism, where I keep Mechanism, but both Maudlin and me showed that 
>> indeed it is absurd to believe in both mechanism and the idea that 
>> consciousness is related exclusively to some material events.
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> That this ad hoc manoeuvre does not prove anything about consciousness was 
>>> shown by Maudlin in his "Olympia" argument.
>> 
>> That is weird. Maudlin, and men  did prove something about consciousness, 
>> mechanism and materialism.
>> 
>> We show that materialism -> non mechanism, or equivalently that mechanism -> 
>> non materialism. You can’t have them both. 
> 
> But it assumes that computation exists in the abstract…

Abstract, may be for an Aristotelian who believe in a “concrete” physical 
reality.

Personally, only the natural numbers are concrete object to me, and 
computations are rather very concrete too, as they are as singular as the 
natural number, well defined, etc. 

2 is concrete. 2 apples is far more abstract. We are not aware of this because 
we use quasi unconsciously highly sophisticated measuring apparatus (eyes, the 
nose, …) and a very sophisticated computer (the nervous system, billions of 
neurons, etc.) to analyse quickly the observation, and to eat the apple, making 
us feeling that it is concrete, when it is actually very abstract, and even 
more so if we accept the current description of what could be an apple (a 
partial trace of a quantum wave in an Hilbert space?).




> simply because there's a thing we invented called the existential quantifier. 

Prime numbers and computations existed in the arithmetical reality in a way 
which does not depend of time, space, or humans for that matter. And we don’t 
need to make existence into a notion of metaphysical existence. Computations 
exists like a solution to the equation x + 1 = 3 exists.




> It's as weak as St Anslem's ontological proof; which tellingly Goedel thought 
> he could make sound.


This has nothing to do with the existence of computation, which you can prove 
from Peano arithmetic once you accept the Church-Turing definition. That is not 
the case, neither for Gödel’s God, nor for any notion of ontological physical 
universe, which requires some faith. The only faith required for mechanism is 
the fai

Re: Are Real Numbers Really Real?

[Lawrence Crowell]

Overcomplete coherent states, such as laser states of light have a symplectic 
and Riemannian structure. This makes these states "classical-like " These are 
states in a huge quantum correlation, or a form of entanglement. This is the 
classical spacetime that has no quantum fluctuations. Quantum states that 
deviate are in a relative mixed or separable configuration.

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Re: Are Real Numbers Really Real?

[Lawrence Crowell]

The sp

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Re: Energy conservation in many-worlds

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 6 Dec 2019, at 00:45, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> 
>>> On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>>> >> > wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's 
>> a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions 
>> as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for 
>> consciousness, 
> It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" 
> to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything 
> but crazy?
 Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
>>> 
>>> Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd 
>>> get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my 
>>> dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog. 
>> 
>> In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant 
>> here, but it has to make sense)
> 
> So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs".  You meant 
> responses in some different world, where the input and the response (and 
> maybe everything else) are different.

That is modal realism, but I made precise I don’t use this here. That is why I 
said “relatively real or not”. Usually, the counterfactuals and their 
consequences are judged unreal, but in modal realist context, like with Everett 
and with Mechanism, they get real (with high or low relative measure).
The counterfactual reality are always as close as possible as the factual 
input. We can say, if Hitler was a nice guy there would not have been an 
holocaust (that is a common reasonable counterfactual). But we cannot say (to 
illustrate counterfactuals) “If Hitler was good, pigs would been able to fly”. 
That is not a counterfactual. It is at best a statement that Hitler (perhaps by 
definition of Hitler) is intrinsically bad, or something.

Similarly “if the alarm did not ring, the plane would have crashed” is a 
reasonable counterfactual statement. But “If the alarm did not ring chicken 
would have teeth”, would mean that it is absolutely impossible that the alarm 
could not ring.

Bruno



> 
> Brent
> 
>> 
>> 
>>> The same thing eventuates tomorrow.  Soon my neighbors report me to the 
>>> authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric 
>>> care.
>> 
>> You will need to elaborate this part. You lost me here.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> Hence Mechanism is false.
>> 
>> ?
>> 
>> Bruno
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> Brent
>>> 
>>> 
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Re: Superdeterminism in comics

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 5 Dec 2019, at 18:30, John Clark  wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 6:31 AM Bruno Marchal  > wrote:
> 
>  >>what did the correct answer to the question asked the day before yesterday 
> in Helsinki turn out to be? What one and only one city did "you" end up 
> seeing yesterday, was it Washington or Moscow? 
> 
> > Almost. 
> 
> Almost my ass, that's all that's going on and it's pretty damn banal. 
> 
> > Mechanism predicts [...]
> 
> Translation from the original Brunospeak: A very silly theory predicts.
>  
> > that you will see only one city,
> 
> And that very silly theory can not say who that shadowy mysterious person 
> called Mr.You is,


The mechanist hypothesis assures that both copy have the right to be qualified 
as you.




> nor can it say what the correct answer to a obvious question turned out to 
> be, "what one and only one city did Mr.You end up seeing??”


Indeed. That is the point. That is the first person indeterminacy, that you are 
using each time you defend Everett. But with Mechanism, you have to derive the 
phenomenological collapse *and* the wave itself. Or you are using a magical 
conception of matter, having the magical ability to make something real or more 
real. Your use of matter is similar to the pseudo-explanation “God did it”.




> . It can't say what the correct answer was EVEN AFTER the "experiment" is 
> long over.

That is where you forget to put yourself in the shoes of the guy making the 
experience. After the experiment, it is easy to understand that both know very 
well the answer, despite having been unable to predict it, for simple logical 
reason.





> And that means it was not an experiment at all,

It is both an experiment, and an experience. Once we distinguish 1p and 3p 
modes, that distinction is of course crucial.






> and it also shows that a question mark does not possess magical powers, it 
> shows that no punctuation mark can turn gibberish into a question, not even 
> if is placed at the very end.  
>  
> > What you cannot predict in Helsinki is the particular city you will feel to 
> > end in.
> 
> It can not be pre-dicted and it can not be post-dicted either because Bruno 
> Marchal does not know what "it" is, or know what exactly the question was, or 
> know who the hell Mr. You is.
> 
> > The clear answer is the prediction I have made in Helsinki: with certainty, 
> > I will [...]  
>  
> By casually throwing in the personal pronoun "I" in a thought experiment that 
> contains a "I" duplicating machine Bruno has already demonstrated that Bruno 
> is unable to clearly ask the question much less answer it.  
> 
> > You have claim this without ever saying what is unclear,
> 
> WHAT THE HELL?! For over 5 years I have been asking the same question, the 
> most recent time was just a few days ago in the very post you're responding 
> to!  I asked and I quote  "what did the correct answer to the question asked 
> the day before yesterday in Helsinki turn out to be? What one and only one 
> city did "you" end up seeing yesterday, was it Washington or Moscow?".  You 
> claim to have derived all sorts of cosmic significant things from the fact 
> that BEFORE the event it can not be predicted what some mysterious person 
> named Mr. You will see, but EVEN AFTER the event nobody knows anything more 
> than what was known BEFORE the event. 


In the 3p description, you are correct, but the question is about your 1p 
experience.

Let us iterate it ten times, starting like always in Helsinki, where the 
question is asked before the experience, of course.

We get the 2^10 first person histories. Imagine that there is no first person 
indeterminacy. That would mean you can predict your future experience in 
Helsinki; Imagine that you predict 

WMMMWM

Now, the question is about the personal experience, so we have to ask all 
copies if they agree, and a good answer is when they all agree. So here, 
clearly (2^10 - 1) copies disagrees.

Yet, if the guy say in Helsinki “I don’t know, except that it will be a 
sequence of “W” and “M”, then every copies get the confirmation. If they work 
together, they can verify that they have been distributed following the normal 
distribution exactly, and can use this to predict P = 1/2 for the next 
experience.




> So the outcome of the "experiment"  has produced precisely ZERO bits of new 
> information because everybody already know the man who saw Moscow would 
> become the Moscow Man and the man who say Washington would become the 
> Washington Man. 

But that is tautological. After the experience, each copy get one bit of 
information. The fact that this is not a verifiable 3p bit of information is 
rather welcome, as it illustrated the non justifiability of the personal 
individuality, which is so well illustrate by this.

You ask for a 3p answer, like if someone was claiming to have found a 3p 
indeterminacy. But that is why I call it 1p-indeterminacy, to avoid this 
mistake.

Re: Are Real Numbers Really Real?

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 5 Dec 2019, at 13:00, Philip Thrift  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Thursday, December 5, 2019 at 5:36:56 AM UTC-6, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
> On Thursday, December 5, 2019 at 3:43:50 AM UTC-6, Philip Thrift wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at 6:11:25 PM UTC-6, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at 4:29:03 PM UTC-6, Philip Thrift wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at 2:31:08 PM UTC-6, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at 1:53:39 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 11:14 AM Lawrence Crowell  <>> wrote:
> 
> >>> The entire notion of quantum states and events as localized in regions of 
> >>> space is not entirely applicable. What symmetries exist with these 
> >>> quantum states or field are then not tied to local geometry.
> 
> >> OK, but if quantum states are to explain local geometry, and that is the 
> >> entire point because that is all that experimenters can see, then the 
> >> reverse can not be true, local geometry must be tied to quantum states. 
> 
> > I guess this is not quite clear to me. Largely the quantum states that form 
> > spacetime are quantum gravitation states.
> 
> It seems to me if quantum gravitational states form spacetime, and if 
> spacetime is smooth and continuous as the Gamma Ray Burst evidence seems to 
> show, then 2 distinct points that are less than a Planck Length apart must 
> correspond to 2 distinct quantum gravitational states.  Am I wrong?
> 
> No it is not possible to know. If you localize a quantum bit to a Planck 
> length it is in a black hole. If you try to localize two qubits arbitrarily 
> closely they caon only be within 2 Planck areas, if on a horizon,or in two 
> Planck volumes if in the bulk. A Planck volume is V_p = (4π/3)ℓ_p^3.So if you 
> try to localize a field is less than two Planck volumes, or within a length 
> 1.26ℓ_p there is a loss of any information about them.
>  
> 
> >> So if the Gamma Ray Burst results hold up and spacetime really is smooth 
> >> and continuous then, would it be correct to say there are a infinite (not 
> >> just astronomically large) number of quantum symmetries and the Planck 
> >> Length and the Planck Time have no physical significance, they are just 
> >> numbers in units of time and space that for no particular reason happen to 
> >> pop out when you mathematically play around with the constants of nature 
> >> in certain ways?
> 
> > The number of quantum states are Virasoro, which is in principle infinite. 
> > However, because the cosmological horizon can only bound a finite number of 
> > such states, as is the case with a black hole with entropy S = A/4ℓ_p^2, 
> > the number of physical states is bounded above. As a result the Virasoro 
> > algebra has high frequency modes that are mathematically possible, but not 
> > physically accessed.
> 
> Then although mathematically infinite as far as physics is concerned there 
> are only a finite number of quantum gravitational states, but if quantum 
> states produces spacetime then why does the Gamma Ray Burst results say 
> spacetime is smooth and continuous? Can 2 points that are arbitrarily close 
> to each other have any physical meaning, does physics need Real Numbers or 
> not?  
> 
> The gamma ray burst data just tells us that different wavelengths of photons 
> have no dispersion. the G(p,p') = 1/(4π(|p - p'|^2 - m^2)) predicts different 
> dispersons for different wavelengths of light. Over distances of billions of 
> light years this would be significant. Nothing of this sort was observed. 
> This means there is no "foaminess" or discreteness to spacetime. This is down 
> to a scale of ℓ_p/50, the last I checked.
>  
>  
> > A Hilbert space H that contains H_a and H_b is not equal to H_a×H_b. Any 
> > unitary transformation between H_a and H_b defines a boundary if we trace 
> > over one of these so S_a = tr_bS = -kTr_b[ρlog(ρ)] and similarly for S_b. 
> > We have removed the off-diagonal terms. We then can define this as a 
> > boundary, aka holographic screen or horizon, between sets of entangled 
> > states. This then defines a form of geometry. The transformation between 
> > H_a and H_b can just as well be time evolution with a boundary that 
> > separates two temporal regions. The Taub-NUT spacetime has this 
> > characteristic as does the region between the spacelike region outside the 
> > inner horizon of a black hole and the mysterious region inside.
> 
> You seem to be saying space may not be fundamental but time is. Would that be 
> a fair representation of your views?
> 
> I tried to indicate that both space and time are emergent.
> 
> LC
>  
> 
> 
> But everything you wrote is in the vocabulary of space+time.
> 
> Even "wavelength".
> 
> @philipthrift 
> 
> This is in reference to the propagation of photons. It illustrates that 
> spacetime is not made of chunks or finite elements. Spacetime is smooth. 
> However, it is an epiphenomenology of quantum entanglement.
> 

Re: Frege, Wittgenstein on linguistical truth

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 5:42:13 AM UTC-6, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
>
> On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 12:59:15 AM UTC-6, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> https://philosophynow.org/issues/106/Wittgenstein_Frege_and_The_Context_Principle
>>
>>
>> Frege was equally concerned to reject one kind of account of mathematical 
>> objectivity – the view that mathematical statements are made true by 
>> reference to abstract mathematical objects that are in some way real, even 
>> though we can’t see, touch or feel them. 
>>
>> According to the Context Principle, the basic unit of sense is the 
>> proposition, or sentence. The sentence is the smallest unit of language 
>> which can be used to say anything at all. The meaningfulness of names and 
>> predicates is a matter of the place they occupy in the sentence, and also 
>> whether the sentence is true. Whether or not a name refers to an object, 
>> then, is a matter of the contribution the name makes to the truth of the 
>> whole sentence.
>>
>> @philipthrift
>>
>
> This leads me to appreciate on some level why Feynman called this 
> philosofuzzy.
>
> LC 
>


Which is why Feyerabend (who I think was together with Feynman when he came 
to some conferences in Berkeley) said 

The withdrawal of philosophy into a "professional" shell of its own has had 
disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the *Feynman*
s , the Schwingers 
, etc., may be very bright; 
they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr 
, Einstein 
, Schrödinger 
, Boltzmann 
, Mach 
 and so on. *But they are 
uncivilized savages: they lack in philosophical depth.*

So true.

@philipthrift

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Re: Frege, Wittgenstein on linguistical truth

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 12:59:15 AM UTC-6, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
>
>
> https://philosophynow.org/issues/106/Wittgenstein_Frege_and_The_Context_Principle
>
>
> Frege was equally concerned to reject one kind of account of mathematical 
> objectivity – the view that mathematical statements are made true by 
> reference to abstract mathematical objects that are in some way real, even 
> though we can’t see, touch or feel them. 
>
> According to the Context Principle, the basic unit of sense is the 
> proposition, or sentence. The sentence is the smallest unit of language 
> which can be used to say anything at all. The meaningfulness of names and 
> predicates is a matter of the place they occupy in the sentence, and also 
> whether the sentence is true. Whether or not a name refers to an object, 
> then, is a matter of the contribution the name makes to the truth of the 
> whole sentence.
>
> @philipthrift
>

This leads me to appreciate on some level why Feynman called this 
philosofuzzy.

LC 

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Re: Frege, Wittgenstein on linguistical truth

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, December 6, 2019 at 1:46:13 AM UTC-6, Brent wrote:
>
>
>
> On 12/5/2019 10:59 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
>
>
> https://philosophynow.org/issues/106/Wittgenstein_Frege_and_The_Context_Principle
>  
>
>
> Frege was equally concerned to reject one kind of account of mathematical 
> objectivity – the view that mathematical statements are made true by 
> reference to abstract mathematical objects that are in some way real, even 
> though we can’t see, touch or feel them. 
>
> According to the Context Principle, the basic unit of sense is the 
> proposition, or sentence. The sentence is the smallest unit of language 
> which can be used to say anything at all. The meaningfulness of names and 
> predicates is a matter of the place they occupy in the sentence, and also 
> whether the sentence is true. Whether or not a name refers to an object, 
> then, is a matter of the contribution the name makes to the truth of the 
> whole sentence.
>
>
> Is that true?  Doesn't the sentence have different truth values depending 
> on what object a name refers to?  not just whether it refers or not?  A 
> name can refer and be meaningful even when the sentence is false.
>
> Brent
>



[ via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_principle ]

In the philosophy of language 
, the *context 
principle* is a form of semantic holism 
 holding that a philosopher 
should "never ... ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in 
the context of a proposition" (Frege).

If semantic holism is interpreted as the thesis that any linguistic 
expression *E* (a word, a phrase or sentence) of some natural language *L* 
cannot 
be understood in isolation and that there are inevitably many ties between 
the expressions of *L*, it follows that to understand *E* one must 
understand a set *K* of expressions to which *E* is related. If, in 
addition, no limits are placed on the size of *K* (as in the cases of 
Davidson, Quine and, perhaps, Wittgenstein), then *K* coincides with the 
"whole" of *L*.


For Quine then (although Fodor and Lepore have maintained the contrary), 
and for many of his followers, confirmation holism 
 and semantic holism are 
inextricably linked.

As Quine states it:


All of our so-called knowledge or convictions, from questions of geography 
and history to the most profound laws of atomic physics or even mathematics 
and logic, are an edifice made by man that touches experience only at the 
margins. Or, to change images, science in its globality is like a force 
field whose limit points are experiences...a particular experience is never 
tied to any proposition inside the field except indirectly, for the needs 
of equilibrium which affect the field in its globality.


@philipthrift 

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