On 18 Sep 2013, at 04:12, chris peck wrote:
Hi John
>> Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to
tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no
change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's
book was published. None whatsoever.
Newton and Darwin would have had problems if they had of needed
Popper given they worked before he was even born. Sometimes I read
your posts and just think your belching wind.
Popper was not trying to explain to people like Einstein how to 'get
knowledge out of nature'. You're basing your entire argument on a
straw man. In fact, he used Einstein as a paradigm example of how to
conduct science properly. But what of Adler, Freud or Marx? All
these people claimed their theories to be scientific too and earnt a
whole lot of credit for that, but where they scientific? Their
theories could be contrasted with Einstein's in so far as where
Einstein derived 'bold and risky' observational predictions which
could be falsified; neither Freud, Adler nor Marx did.
You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in
science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse,
Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of
history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore.
Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions.
There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which
has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable
foundations.
In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string
"theory" if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the
funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it
matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Should other
theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope
for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available
resources.
Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of
that, so has Popper and the movement he spearheaded had an effect?
Of course it has. Its pompous boneheaded bullshit to suggest
otherwise.
If we agree, with Popper, that a theory needs to be falsifiable to be
interesting, then Popper's theory is interesting, because, strictly
speaking, it has been refuted, by John Case and Ngo-Manguelle:
CASE J. & NGO-MANGUELLE S., 1979, Refinements of inductive inference
by Popperian
machines. Tech. Rep., Dept. of Computer Science, State Univ. of New-
York, Buffalo.
By accepting that an inductive inference machine proposes, from time
to time, unfalsifiable theories, you enlarge non trivially the class
of phenomena that the machine can recognize, and build correct
theories about.
Note the (slight) paradox here.
Bruno
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 13:39:10 -0400
Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
From: johnkcl...@gmail.com
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>> So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of
numbers
> ???? I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A
broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What
happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers
emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass.
OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of
numbers?
>> don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more
gibberish.
> It is a matter of tedious, and not so simple, exercise to see that
the computations exist in some definite sense when we postulate
arithmetic. (This is done in good textbook, and very well done in
Epstein & Carnielli, but also in Boolos & Jeffrey). Physical things
then appears as stable percept
And concerning broken glass I said in my September 11 post "It must
have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to
identify it as a thing".
> by persons living those dreams.
OK. Therefore the physical universe and the physical things in it
exist.
>> Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of
"natural numbers" in "relative computations" and then you say
"digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations"
are an exception to this because what they do "is not a process".
The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes
any sense to me.
> Some number relation defines some machines, or some programs,
which are static entities.
*Other number relations, involving the preceding one, defines
computations, or processes,
Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some
other process!
> A machine, in that setting is basically one number, relative to
some universal number.
Relative? A relation needs at least 2 things, and some sort of
computation with them.
John K Clark
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