Dense and and flat at the same time. Well done. I know you meant this for Nick. But I have 1 question that
would help me understand. When you say "finiteness", "finite beings in an infinite
world", and "been infinite forever", do you mean it in the mystico-pop culture sense? Or are
you using it in a technical sense, like the difference between {1,2,3} versus {1,2,3,…}?Because if I swap out your use of "finiteness" with scoped, bounded, separate, disjoint, or such ... that 1 thing can be distinct from another thing, then almost all of what you write snaps into place. But I'm afraid of preemptive registration. On 12/3/25 3:37 AM, Santafe wrote:
[snip]4. It is ultimately the problem of finiteness, and of carrying out inductive behavior, that leads me from the above claims, to the “as if” characterization of the role of an “objective posture” in our discourse and our behavior. I acknowledge that Glen didn’t want to sign off on a notion of the “real world”. But speaking just for myself, I obviously go through the day acting as if there “is” a “real world” “out there” all the time. And I assume that the reason our common language gave me a discourse to refer to such things is that most-everybody else goes through life feeling much like I do about it, and acting much like I do. Indeed, I would argue that we cannot do otherwise, because for practical purposes we are induction-committers: finite beings in an infinite world, who cannot help but coarse-grain endlessly variable circumstances into limited categories, and then use the limited categories as indices for our responses. I settle on that act of performing an inductive continuation as the central feature of us that, if we want to refer to it, will lead to language about the real world, more or less like the language we find ourselves having inherited, and using.4a. On the (still inductive) belief that the moments of my life actually flow in a sequence roughly like I think they do, and that the wakeful moments of my life aren't all a grand hallucination, which only those on LSD recognize in its true nature, and the rest of us are blind to — mea culpa here for my stance on the matter — I take a certain Darwinian (or reinforcement-learning) view that there is only some stability to any of these inductions, enough that we ever have a reason to need to refer to them, because the structure in the events that happen likewise has elements of stability that we can sync onto, metaphorically like a phase-locked loop (from electrical engineering) uses its tendency to synchronize to find the periodicity in a signal that it can lock onto. My reasoning here is clearly circular: in refusing to reject the premise of a “real world”, I am using patterns of structure I form within my discourse about that world, to refer to myself within it, and assign commonalities to me and to the rest of it that warrant my referring to the rest of it. This is what the mystics regard as error on my part: that we have all been infinite forever, and that we therefore never needed to settle for induction. Oh well; I don’t know what to do with them.4b. But at last I at least have a language in which to say how objectivity attached to the earlier discourse about the stability of assertion and activity. This “source of stabilization” for my inductive behaviors is effectively what I tag with the name of “the objectively real”. Then, my own nature as an induction-committer is the thing I tag with this notion of an “objective frame” that I take on w.r.t. all the dimensions of variation I effectively regard as ignorable while I am doing my finite-state induction-committing thing. I suppose that the two different tags have something to do with each other, to the extent that my inductions are stable and present to me as having some structure to refer to, and not just being a structureless random walk. Anyway, sorry to pile more onto the last. Whenever your current project lets go of you, if you aren’t sick of (my version of) all this, it can be added to the silage. Eric
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