On 3/1/2022 2:40 AM, Tomas Pales wrote:
On Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at 1:47:04 AM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote: On 2/28/2022 4:08 PM, Tomas Pales wrote:On Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at 12:15:39 AM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote: On 2/28/2022 1:29 PM, Tomas Pales wrote:On Monday, February 28, 2022 at 9:47:21 PM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote: On 2/28/2022 2:47 AM, Tomas Pales wrote: > The structure of every object should be reducible to a pure set, which > is a set of sets of sets etc., down to empty sets. So in principle we > could check the consistency of the structure by defining it as a pure > set. But due to Godel's second incompleteness theorem we can't do even > that because it is impossible to prove that set theory is consistent. > But our inability to prove the consistency of an object has no impact > on whether the object is consistent and thus whether it exists. We > just know that if an object is not consistent it cannot exist because > it is nonsense. To say an object is consistent is nonsense. It just means the object is not self-contradictory. But objects aren't propositions. So alreadythere's a category error.I said what it means that an object is consistent. It means that it is identical to itself, or in other words, it has the properties it has. No square circle.Which, if I understand correctly, means every object is tautologically consistent. Every existent object is what it is. A square circle is not what it is, so it can't exist.You refer to the properties of the object. But those are mostly relational and we invent them, like my car that is insurable. They are no "of the object" per se. What else do we invent? The whole world around us?If you limit "the world" to it's description, yes. But only consistent descriptions correspond to the world, so in this sense the world is consistent.I didn't say it wasn't. I was just pointing out that this is based on the premise that the world exists. So it is invalid to infer from "this world has a consistent description" that "all world's with consistent description exist".I was not making such an inference. I was just clarifying what it means for a world to be "consistent": it means that it has only a consistent description. As for "all worlds with consistent description exist", my reason for believing this is still the same: I see no difference between a world being consistent and existing.And having a consistent description is not really that helpful. Before quantum mechanics everyone was sure that it was true of the world that nothing could be in two different places at the same time. It was/just/ logic.But before we can assess whether something has a consistent description we need to specify the description precisely. With a vague description we may be missing an inconsistency lurking somewhere in it or there may appear to be an inconsistency that is not really there. For example, if we try to describe a quantum object in terms of classical physics the description will not be precise enough and the assumptions inherent in those terms will be contradictory. The ideal description would reveal the complete structure of the object down to empty sets but we can't physically probe objects around us to that level.
I think that's a cheat. It's not that classical physics was imprecise. It was just wrong. QM and Newtonian mechanics even have different ontologies. If you're wrong about the subject matter no amount of logic will correct that. Logic only explicates what is implicit in the premises. It's a cheat to appeal to an ideal description when you have no way of producing such a description or knowing if you have achieved it or even knowing whether one exists .
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