Thanks. The video is more along the lines of "science communication". So
there's no real need to watch it unless you care about how such can be well or badly done.
I like the pivot to commitment. A fact might be a good nickname for commitments one isn't willing or able to
question/challenge. That's definitely distinct from assumption, which seems to imply "always
challengable". I guess there might be a further nit to pick w.r.t. the inaccessible past. ... like
"yeah, we use this formal system because we have no choice" -- something like "science
progresses one funeral at a time". Incapable of re-configuring the system is different from unwilling to
reconfigure it.
And even though I was joking about metalogical gaslighting, there is something
to say about schematic proto-configurations. E.g. ZF without C or ZFC. C and ¬C
is variable, but ZF are fixed. So while C might be an assumption, ZF are
commitments.
On 6/29/26 2:23 PM, Santafe wrote:
Of course I need to watch the video to make a responsible reply, and don’t have
time to do that right now…
But Frank’s common-languaging of axiom as assumption seems good to me, in the
sense that it makes a much better point than one generally _can_ make with
loose common-language terms such as “fact” or “truth”. It calls out axioms as
the foundation-blocks for building up artificial model-worlds. So it would be
like declaring the environment variables for running some collection of
programs. That seems like a good operational characterization to me, of what
one does with axioms.
The words “fact” and “truth” are ones I would avoid, myself, unless I had time
for a very long conversation, and an interlocutor whom I didn’t know with
certainty would make me regret entering it. But there are less troublesome
words such as “empirically valid” (which still requires a long conversation,
but maybe not as long because it acknowledges a certain rough-and-ready and
habit-accepting regime of behavior), or “logically entailed”, which
acknowledges that one has moved over into the operations of some specific
artificial world (kind of gone into some container).
If I had to give a common-language-ethnography on connotations associated with
“fact” as a term, I would probably appeal to latin roots having to do with
“something done” (like e fatto in Italian today), but I would look for cognates
with terms such as “faith” — which are probably wrong; someday I will look up
all these etymologies — having to do with what one is willing to put weight on,
hoping that the “fact” will carry such weight. On the grounds that _anything_
one does is a choice, whether to accept something or not to accept it, then
life is full of these little irreversible commitments, just by the fact that
ongoing moments of existence get buried into the inaccessible past, and by dint
of that, one _has_ chosen something, and something, and something. Like Seth
Lloyd’s Computing the Universe (though I could have left Lloyd out of it and
this paragraph would have had exactly the same content). So the notion of what
one has “de facto” chosen is a kind of notion that begs for some term if we are
to reflect on practical life, and it doesn’t surprise me that the term that
accretes around it is polysemous and something of a placeholder.
But of course, I should watch the video before replying….
Eric
On Jun 30, 2026, at 6:07, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
That's not a very useful contribution. Are you *begging* me to ask: Then what,
in your opinion, are better regarded as facts? If that's what you're begging me
to ask, then why not go ahead and put that in your response? Why make me ask it?
Like "level", the word "fact" should be stricken from any sane vocabulary. But
we are not sane, are we?
On 6/29/26 2:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
Axiom are better regarded as assumptions in my opinion.
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Research: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2>
On Mon, Jun 29, 2026, 2:47 PM glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Never mind that Folley's linearity, here, disallows the exceptions where fallacious
arguments are *good* arguments ... maybe even [gasp] made good *because* they're
fallacious. But because some of my AI slop has recently been labeled "factually
incorrect" 8^D, his use of the phrase starting just after the 2:36 mark triggered me.
The 7 Levels of Logical Thinking
https://youtu.be/yrimaWOQtfM?si=QL8-wj68gqj67ltu&t=156
<https://youtu.be/yrimaWOQtfM?si=QL8-wj68gqj67ltu&t=156>
"There are awful people throughout history who have still been factually correct
about some things. And there are incredibly moral people who have been factually
incorrect about some things."
Grrr. In addition to the assumption of linearity, let's put aside the violation of Hume's guillotine.
What I'd like to focus on is nickname "fact". What is fact in such argumentation? I suppose we
could allow that axioms are "brute" facts and, if the inference is truth-preserving, subsequent
sentences may be facts but not brute. But these punctuation marks, the well-formed sentences are distinct
from the transformations that operate on them. Are the transformations properly called "facts",
just like the sentences they operate on? My guess is that they're more akin to axioms than derived outcomes.
So the transformations are also brute, if they're facts at all.
And if we promote primitive transformations to "facts", then do we also promote
compositions of transformations to "facts"? Would the compositions be analogous to the
derived sentences? So composite tranforms are mere facts but primitive transformations are brute
facts?
Worse yet, although the rest of what he says in the rest of the video is fine, just fine, w.r.t. to what can be called or
understood as "fact", are metalogical classificiations of logics somehow *more* factual? I mean, if some property holds
for a class of logics, then there's a bit of wiggle room in which logic you choose for some task addressable by any in the class.
So that metalogical fact is a more robust fact than a persnickety fact upheld by a smaller set of logics. By this progressive
promotion, we might say that "brute facts" of axioms or primitive transforms in a particular logic are not even facts,
whereas metalogical true sentences are facts, flipping the whole "factuality calculus" on its head. Could "it is
blue" be less factual than "there exist things that are blue"?
Or even more radical, is it possible that AI hallucinations, having been
derived from more data than God, are more factual than any particular validated
output?
Is gaslighting more entheogenic than psilocybin? Where are the
representative Scientologists when you need one?
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