Dear Bruno,
my thanks for taking the time in your busy schedule to reflect to my
babbling to Stephen.
If you don't mind, I reflect to some of them just in plain text above your
post copied hereunder.
*
So "numbers' ARE markers for quantity? what are "quantities"? (they may not
be so abstract!) And: of WHAT?
*
In the mind? an abacus is pretty real <G> in material construct.
*
Later on you question 'my' WORLD, which is(?) the infinite complexity of
everything in a fashion that is beyond us.
As I imagine (in my faith???) it's both a-temporal and a-spatial so I do not
consider a "LOCAL" reality (to describe quantities or anything else).
*
I cannot understand 'logic' or 'logics' without knowing what could be
"THINKING" (the WAY of which logic should be). I have a pretty ignorant
image of 'mentality' all in those parts of the "WORLD"?? which is still not
explainable in our informational basis - with a (material) -tool- we apply
for it, called the neural brain,
I don't go for a mechanistic neuronal interaction-firing scheme becuase it
does not answer several of my questions (no repeat here).
*
*Br:* *If you agree that there is something unknown, you believe that
there is something to be known or believed OK?*
I dislike to be though with MY mind by someone else (ha ha). No, I don't
'believe' there is something we know. We think we know.
I accept some of it to have something to go on/by, call it "MY belief
system" because such is the human way we think (?).
After Robert Rosen I hold a view of a 'model-world' made of known
ingredients (topical/functional) as the sole domain we can THINK within. In
addition to that is the rest of the infinite complexity (unknown to us)
influencing our model-content (I think) . This is why we cannot pinpoint THE
cause of a change chosen from the known model-content only. We speak in
processes: it may be a change in relations (between much more than what we
can imagine and totally different from even 'aspects' we can think of.
I take my agnostic ignorence for real.
*
A machine? Feel free to identify it as MORE than what WE are. Would you
restrict (your) machine to structural components within our inventory of
today? HER functions to restricted into OUR present sortiment of activities?
I like to call it an ORGANIZATION and no such restriction emerge. It is only
a name. "WE" are orgqnizations as well, with unlimited (into our models that
is) connections into the WORLD (infinite complexity of everything). Your
Universal Computer may be even more compact and outreaching. (I am not
talking about our present binary embryonic digital Kraxlwerks - we call our
computers).
Thanks for your thoughts
John M
On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>
> On 21 Oct 2011, at 22:09, John Mikes wrote:
>
> *Hi Stephen,*
> *it seems you are closing to 'my alley'. *
> *First: if you don't think of T R U T H (in any absolute sense, meaning
> it's acceptable 'meaning') how can you abide by a version of it? - What are
> the "REALS"? *
> *I do not consider 'Arithmetic' the one and only ontological primitive: I
> cannot 'see' ontology at all in a world that changes ceaselessly and the
> 'being' (ontology) turns into 'becoming' (sort of epistemology?) with
> changing away at the instant you would realize it "became".
>
> Idem per idem is not a workable position. You can explain a 'system' only
> in terms looking at it from a different (outside?) view. **Platonism is
> such a system. I try a "common sense" platform.*
> *I asked Bruno several times how he explains as the abstract 'numbers'
> (not the markers of quantity, mind you) which makes the fundamentals of the
> world. He explained: arithmetically 2 lines (II) and 3 lines (III) making 5
> (IIIII) that is indeed viewable **exactly as quantity-markers (of lines
> or whatever). *
>
>
> That's the idea.
>
>
>
> *Of course a zero (no lines) would introduce the SPACE between lines -
> yet another quantity, so with the 'abstract' of numbers we got bugged down
> in measurement techniques (physics?). *
>
>
> Here you might be too much literal already. The numbers are more of the
> type of mind ability to distinguish quantities of similar things. It is more
> in the mind, than in the way we might use a local reality to describe them.
>
>
> *Logic? a human way of thinking (cf the Zarathustrans in the
> Cohen-Stewart books Collapse of Chaos and The Figment of Reality) with other
> (undefinable and unlimited) ways available (maybe) in the 'infinite
> complexity' of the world *
> *- IF our term of a 'logic' is realizable in it at all. *
>
>
> If logic is a human way of thinking, is not logics ways of thinking (note
> the plural). There are infinities of logic. Classical logic is the way of
> the greek human thinking, and of the he ideally arithmetically correct
> machine, which can be studied to learn about us, like the bacteria
> Escherichia coli can studied for learning something about us.
>
>
>
> **
> *You know a lot more in math-related terms than I do, so I gave only the
> tips of my icebergs in my thinking. *
> **
> *Then there is my agnosticism: the belief in the unknown part of the world
> that yet influences whatever we think of. *
>
>
> But here is the problem: what do you mean by "world"? Is there a world? Why
> not a dream. If you agree that there is something unknown, you believe that
> there is something to be known or believed OK?
>
>
>
>
> *We continually learn further parts of it, but only to the extent of the
> capabilities of our (restricted) mental capacity. So whatever we 'know' is
> partial and inadequate (adjuste, incomplete) into our 'mini-solipsism' of
> Colin Hales. *
>
>
> What is the difference with the first person's beliefs? And with the first
> person knowledge. Are you OK with the idea that a machine can also have her
> mini-solipsism? (this would not imply that "we" are machine, just that a
> machine could think). I just try to have a more precise idea of your
> thinking.
>
> Best,
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
> **
> *Regards*
> **
> *John M*
> **
> **
> * *
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 7:07 AM, Stephen P. King <stephe...@charter.net>wrote:
>
>> Hi John,
>>
>> I was not thinking of truth in any absolute sense. I'm not even sure
>> what that concept means... I was just considering the definiteness of the
>> so-called truth value that one associates with Boolean logic, as in it has a
>> range {0,1). There are logics where this can vary over the Reals!
>> My question is about "where" does arithmetical truth get coded given
>> that it cannot be defined in arithmetic itself? If we consider Arithmetic to
>> be the one and only ontological primitive, it seems to me that we lose the
>> ability to define the very meaningfulness of arithmetic! This is a very
>> different thing than coding one arithmetic statement in another, as we have
>> with Goedel numbering. What I am pointing out is that if we are beign
>> consisstent we have to drop the presumption of an entity to whom a problem
>> is defined, i.e. valuated. This is the problem that I have with all forms of
>> Platonism, they assume something that they disallow: an entity to whom
>> meaning is definite. What distinguishes the Forms from each other at the
>> level of the Forms?
>>
>> Onward!
>>
>> Stephen
>>
>>
>> On 10/20/2011 10:18 PM, John Mikes wrote:
>>
>> Dear Stephen,
>>
>> as long as we are not omniscient (good condition for impossibillity) there
>> is no TRUTH. As Bruno formulates his reply:
>> there is something like "mathematical truth" - but did you ask for such
>> specififc definition?
>> Now - about mathematical truth? new funamental inventions in math (even
>> maybe in arithmetics Bruno?) may alter the ideas that were considered as
>> mathematical truth before those inventions. Example: the zero etc.
>> It always depends on the context one looks at the problem FROM and draws
>> conclusion INTO.
>>
>> John M
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 12:48 AM, Stephen P. King
>> <stephe...@charter.net>wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I ran across the following:
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_indefinability_theorem
>>>
>>> *"Tarski's undefinability theorem*, stated and proved by Alfred
>>> Tarski<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Tarski>in 1936, is an important
>>> limitative result in mathematical
>>> logic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic>, the foundations
>>> of mathematics <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics>,
>>> and in formal semantics <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics>.
>>> Informally, the theorem states that *arithmetical truth cannot be
>>> defined in arithmetic*."
>>>
>>> Where then is it defined?
>>>
>>> Onward!
>>>
>>> Stephen
>>> --
>>>
>>
>>
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