esoteric = "intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest." According to this definition, I'm not making self-reference esoteric. On the contrary, since I devote a whole book to it, the intention is to make self-reference to be understood by everyone. Probably you want to mean something else by esoteric, something like "out-of-this-world". But this again is not the case, because self-reference is the source of the entire existence, so it is pretty much part of the world.
Also, your example with the Mars Rover is faulty, because the rover doesn't know anything. Knowledge is something that exists in consciousness. Only consciousnesses know things. And things indeed are formal entities, but the process of knowing itself is not. Actually, knowledge can be formal precisely because the processes of knowing is unformalizable. On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 04:44:22 UTC+3, Brent wrote: > > You seem to make self-reference into something esoteric. Every Mars > Rover knows where it is, the state of its batteries, its instruments, its > communications link, what time it is, what its mission plan is. Whether > it is "formalizable" or not would seem to depend on choosing the right > formalization to describe what engineers already create. > > Brent > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
