Dear Bruno and Friends,
After having read Smullyan's wonderful little book and reading these
posts I would like to point out a problem that I see.
The notion of Knights and Knaves, as Truth and Falsehood-tellers (or
"reporters") respectively, tacitly assumes that these entities are
Omniscient, e.q., that they have access to a list of all Possible
Truths/Falsehoods or what ever is equivalent. No effort seems to be made to
explain exactly how it is that this assumption can be related to the actual
world of experience, a world where information is finite, oracles are often
wrong, perpetual motion is impossible and distributions are almost never
Gaussian nor linear.
This, I believe, is related to the main problem that I have with the
Platonic approach to Logic, Mathematics and COMP (among others), it grants
"God-like" powers to entities - infinite computational resources, infinite
heat sinks/sources, etc. - and in so doing allows for us to fool ourselves
that very difficult problems, such as found in cosmology, can easily be
solved.
Kindest regards,
Stephen
