Hi Bruno,
Thank you for your kind considerations and comments. I will interleave my replies below. From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 10:44 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What's wrong with this? Hi Stephen, The 1004 fallacy is when people argue, generally on vocabulary, by demanding precision which is actually not relevant with the concerned issue. It come from a passage of "Sylvie and Bruno" by Lewis Carroll. Bruno was looking at a flock of sheep. Sylvie asked how many sheep there are, and Bruno answered "about 1004". Sylvie said that "about" contradicts the four in 1004, and that he should have said "about 1000". To say about "1004" is what I like to call the 1004 fallacy. It is very common in some kind of pseudo human science, and is akin to "jargon". (Of course Bruno likes to have the last word, and justified his "1004" by saying he was sure about the "4", given that he distinctly see four sheep here and there, and that the "about" applied to the "1000" which could have been "100" or "10000" (something like that). [SPK] Ah! I understand and I beg your indulgence on that point. I am trying to communicate an idea for which I do not yet have a precise and well-formed symbolic representation and thus am throwing a lot of notions your way hoping that you might intuit a rough version of the idea and ignore the extraneous noise. I am using several ideas that are similar, within my understanding, to several ideas that are present in mathematics and logics and so I beg your indulgence. [BM] Now I do have that feeling a bit with your last posts, where you refer to hard technical works when at the same time I have some difficulties to understand your position (just to make sense of it). [SPK] Yes, we are coming from differing backgrounds and learning and thinking styles. My position is to look at interactions and the implications of such as a possible source and origin for notions that have been usually assumed and even postulated to be primitive and fundamental, but I am also aware that my ideas are a bit divergent of the kinds of things that you are focused upon. As I understand your work so far, you are building a model of the internal and grundladen structure that is an alternative to the diffuse and sometimes naïve metamathematical and metaphysical underpinnings of current physics and that model seems to focus on a single and static entity. I am focused on the external and interactive aspects that highlight many entities in an ongoing and even eternal dialogue with each other. [BM] I think that you try to defend the idea that "time" is fundamental. Now do you mean some physical notion of time, or do you mean the first person feeling of duration? [SPK] No, time is not fundamental as I understand it. I am advancing and defending the idea that Change is fundamental; time is merely a particular measure of such within finite perception and interactions. I try to go further and advance the idea that we can recover the usual notions of "substance" and "being" in terms of isomorphisms within this underlying and fundamental Change. This is done from a Hereclitian perspective informed by the ideas of Plato and others, the latter of which focused upon Being and changelessness as fundamental. I see in most logics and mathematics a tacit axiom of changelessness and I understand the reasoning for such. Truth must be an invariant, but such invariance, I argue, does not necessitate that changelessness be fundamental and primitive. Thus I bet on Arithmetic Realism as True but point out that there is more involved that cannot be captured only within the framework of AR + digital substitution. I argue that we need to have a place within our models for interaction and time, even if that notion of time is emergent and not fundamental. I take duration to be a 1st person aspect that is part of what generates an emergent notion of 3rd person duration for many, such that an appearance of an evolving "Common universe" obtains. My argument on this are based on my study of computational complexity, concurrency and intractability issues that I found in many philosophical systems. I found that Leibniz' Monadology offered the best framework to explain my reasoning and possible solution. I see your work on modal logics as part of the structure of a Monad, aspects that even Leibniz did not consider and thus am very eager to understand the subtle points of your model. [BM] Are you aware that in both case you have to abandon the mechanist hypothesis, because the digital mechanist hypothesis makes the ultimate reality undistinguishable with arithmetical truth (which is something atemporal/aspatial). In the first case you introduce some physicalism, and in the second case you make consciousness primitive, like Rex. Both are emerging from arithmetical truth once we assume mechanism. [SPK] Yes, but I have tried to explain that Change and Time are not the same thing. Yes, time and consciousness are taken as derivative and secondary notions in my model, but I am also arguing that at the level of ultimate "reality" – that I denote as "existence itself" – there does not exist a notion of distinguishing for the same reason that an infinity cannot distinguish itself as a whole from a proper subset of itself. It is only within the finite subsets or "filters" of Existence that we can advance the idea that there exist notions of measures and other means to relate contrast and compare parts to each other and to wholes. Physicality, within my thinking, is co-emergent with consciousness. In your SIENA.pdf paper you wrote: "This makes Matter prone to acquire or to represent distinctive and possibly alternative incidental (contingent) qualities, but in such a way that matter itself remains invariant and separated from any of those qualities. This makes Matter literally the opposite or the negation of the intelligible." It is this "opposite or negation" that, I believe is the same as what I see in the duality that Pratt is using. If we can coherently model most of the "classical" aspect of "the intelligible" as a Boolean algebra then its "opposite" or Dual (via the Stone/Pontryagin duality) is a featureless dust, technically a completely disconnected Hausdorff space. Thus my model is dualistic in this sense. This is consistent with Plotinus' idea and thus should not be problematic for you, if you are following Plotinus' framework. I move, following Pratt's reasoning, from a static and changeless thought to one were we have relative measures of change for considerations of interactions and communications between many "persons" (considered non-anthropomorphically as Leibnizian Monads) and am trying to sketch out a model that recovers the classical picture of physics and is consistent with quantum mechanics and try to look forward from that model toward questions about quantum gravity. [BM] Also, in your last paragraph (see below) you seem to confuse the set of natural numbers + its ordering, with the set of true propositions (or true sentences) about those numbers. The first set is recursive, the second is not. Arithmetical truth is not even recursively enumerable, and in a sense is the most complex thing a *computationalist* machine can believe in (analytical sets becomes "useful fiction" in some sense). [SPK] OK, this is something that I need to discuss with you in depth. Is the set of true propositions about natural numbers + its orderings isomorphic to some proper subset of Natural numbers? In other words, is Natural Numbers *all that Exists* in your thinking? [BM]If you identify arithmetical truth with the set of Gödel numbers of true arithmetical sentences, you can consider that arithmetical truth is a subset of the set of natural numbers, and indeed a very complex subset. It is the union of all sigma_i sets, of all the Pi_i sets, of all the Delta_i sets. It is the union of all the arithmetical hierarchy. [SPK] Ok, this goes partly to my question above but let me be more pointed. Is that subset a "proper subset"? As per this definition: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ProperSubset.html "A proper subset S^'of a set S, denoted S^' subset S, is a subset <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Subset.html> that is strictly contained in Sand so necessarily excludes at least one member of S. The empty set <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/EmptySet.html> is therefore a proper subset of any nonempty set <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NonemptySet.html> ." Note that this notion of Set seems to be the usual well-founded one. I have discovered that my model uses the non-well founded sets and thus there is some further work that I need to do to recover a good and well-formed definition. So far it is the idea that "at least one member of S is excluded" that needs to be weakened so that one can have something like "asymptotic exclusion" or "almost always exclusion". [BM] May I suggest you try to write a text on your conception of reality which should be understandable by a 15 years old person. Then you could try to explain informally Pratt's work, and why you think it might be used to develop your conception. I can make sense of Pratt's work with mechanism, but more at a phenomenological level, than ontological (and thus it relates to some relations between the first person hypostases, without making one more fundamental than another). [SPK] I am in the process of doing that using Leibniz' Monadology, but I still need to work out some of the language that I can use for part of the idea is non-intuitive for many people. This notion of a vanishing duality and the notion of concurrent bisimulations that I use have caused me a great deal of pain. It is as if I am trying to explain the color Red to a blind person L and so I have been working to improve my understanding of how logical, metaphysical and fundamental notions are explained to the general public. [BM]It is hard for me to see if the math you allude too should be taken as (interesting) analogies, or literally. The advantage of the comp hypothesis, is that the math (computer science) can be taken literally, so we can do science instead of continental like philosophy. (Not that I have anything against *all* continental philosophies, but it is not really my expertise, except by modeling them through the 1-hypostases). Bruno [SPK] Thank you. What I am working on is a task that is far greater than my single ability to express and so I must lean on the work of others that is similar to make progress. I greatly appreciate your kindness and patience. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
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