Dear John,
At 16:50 05/07/04 -0400, you wrote:
Bruno, I really cannot work this way. I still prepare to reply to your earlier post (to me) and here I have the repost on the "1st part" with lots to be replied upon. <G>.
Take it easy.
I am in debt with ~30,000 books I did not read. Never will.
This is 29,999 books too much. Just read the Smullyan little bible: "Forever Undecided" IF you want ease the understanding of the reversal ...
How much time may I have left? 30-40 years? (I am pushing 83). Will my mind give up? My hip did already. (My fingers did not, I still perform classical piano-music for a local-public audience - next: October).
Nice. I'm about 50, and serious jaws problems ... You know one of my best Saturday Course student is 87.
So I gave up checking on past millennia wisdom and work on the present - absorbed and developed for myself since retirement. The oldies speculated in a cognitive inventory of the mind which was much poorer than the lately absorbed enrichments. I appreciate their wisdom, as 'function of mind', but the conclusions MAY be old. I am not a judge of that, but can stay out of such argumentations. "Comp", "QM", you ask? Aren't they within the mindset of the minds within THIS universe, which I deemed "human ways" of thinking?
To be frank I do think Comp and QM are more universal than human, and
perhaps what *is* human is to considere comp and QM as human thinking.
Got argument that those belongs to all possible universes, or better all possible
dreams.
Same good old math-conceptualization. I am talking about something not-matching. Cohen and Stewart played such tunes in their enjoyable books (Collapse of Chaos and Figments of Reality) - their "aliens", the Zarathustrans, with their octimalization (8?). Of course that was still sort of "human" switch, a bit of Tao etc.
I read many of your web text. You did defend sort of naturalism isn't it?
I tend to consider that the opposition natural/artificial is ... artificial (and thus natural).
>> "truth" is an object of study by logicians.<< My best wishes for them. I went through many 'thruths' - different religious ones, reincarnational, pragmatic natural science, astrology, Indian,
We are not talking of the same "truth". I talk about many different ways to just talk about the concept. Just tools for being able to go through many "truth" is a non confusing way.
Marxist, Leninist, atheist (who require a god to deny),
In the first page of the introduction to "Conscience et Mecanisme" I explain that atheist are believers indeed.
every one had something attractive, but... and settled with my scientific agnosticism: not even the contrary is true of what people believe. (That really came from politics).
I am a scientific agnostic too. (Agnostic to nature, universe, matter, ...).
But I cannot doubt 1+1 is 2, except for some minutes before the first (or the second
I never know) cup of coffee ...
If you go into "variables": my wholistic views allow no fixed conditions and unlimited variabilities upon which a mathematician friend remarked: "well, this is a bit steep". Only models can have boundaries, quantities, fixed qualia etc. That goes also for QM (Comp I don't know, never let it clarify in my mind).
?
Even "topics" are cut out from the extratopical wholeness. Limited Models. A map is a model, a territory a wider one. Most minds (on this and other lists) work within a certain modeling (we cannot do better, that's the way we can manage with the material tool we apply for thinking: the neuronal brain, restricting the mind into "human" logic (oops!). Is my wholistic thinking inept for achieveing practical conclusions? you bet it is. We just started to tackle with such ideas, have to find suitable concepts and (formulate?) words to express them.
This is what I try to propose right now.
>...(UDA) *forces* us to do: if comp is true we have to explain > the physical appearances by a sort of mean on all consistent belief > systems. < (if!)
Yes. IF! I cannot provide more.
- now the 'physical appearances' are the mind's interpretations upon impact inknown, lately observed by instruments WITHIN this system of ours. And I did not ask for "CONSISTENT" belief systems, before I even know what kinds may exist at all.
Arithmetical consistency is very large (by Godel). Indeed even inconsistency
is consistent !!!!! (Godel' second theorem). Just let your mind accept classical
logic for a while, if only for the sake of the argument. Why not?
We know SOME, here and now, pertinent to our cultural basis (human mindset of the present local(?!) societal conditions). I am consistent in my agnosticism. All argumentative support from within is useless for without.
OK.
Now I can return to thinking about math (for the 2nd part reply), although I don't know much about it. It was my elective in my Ph.D. work (1948), never used it later, beyond arithmetics, mostly by my slide ruler, while inventing and implementing a pioneering-worldlevel industrial branch, 38 patents, consulting (and solving technical production-problems) on 3 continents over 4 decades. All in the simplest reductionist technical common sense creativity.
You are hard with yourself, no?
Look, John, you are quite lucky (with respect to my work) given that you know the french!
You can read my Changeux/Conne/comp recent paper here:
http://lutecium.org/stp/marchal.html
The others can download it for its 8 + 1 pictures which talks by themselves ...
I am ready for a coffee, myself.
Enjoy it,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
