Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/20/2013 8:49 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: The way to completely avoid Landauer's limit is to make all operations reversible, never lose any information so that the whole calculation could be reversed. Then there's no entropy dumped to the environment and Landauer's limit doesn't apply. Intriguing thought, but hard to see how it could be done. Not sure I understand what you mean by a reversible operation and how would a fully reversible universe square with causality It squares just fine. Newtonian physics modeled the universe as a perfect clockwork that could run either way. Which was cause and which was effect was just a convention: effect is later than cause. Feynman already wrote about making quantum computers reversible 30yrs ago: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall05/frs119/papers/feynman85_optics_letters.pdf Brent ... unless of course causality is a side effect of some other deeper process that we experience as the irreversible vector of time. But at least within the universe we experience, some processes are not reversible. In order to unwind a transaction a log is required and a log requires the recording of information, which requires space. When the log runs out of room then what happens? Without erasure memory will run out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 20 Sep 2013, at 19:08, meekerdb wrote: On 9/20/2013 7:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Sep 2013, at 19:31, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: A computation is a process. I can agree with this, unless you meant a physical process, OK. As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, Yes, Landauer is a major proponents of that idea. If that is true, then computationalism is false. I don't see that. I think it just requires a broader meaning of physical (which isn't well defined anyway). You have to broaden physical so that 0 and his successors are physical object. But then the term physical has no more meaning at all, imo. Bruno 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 20 Sep 2013, at 21:00, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, Yes, Landauer is a major proponents of that idea. If that is true, then computationalism is false. Bullshit. I gave you the reference, and you convince no one of any rational reason to stop at step 3 of the main reasoning, nor did you consider the mathematical theory. So your bulshit seems be a bit premature. And the, what is the meaning of computation is physical? It looks to me that this consists in single out some universal system and declare that only running it makes things real. This implies ontologial commitment, reification of a level of description, etc. All those things which gives philosophy a bad reputation. That some scientists do that too does not makes such type of reasoning more correct or productive. What does mean physical?. I don't take that notion for granted. With comp, a physical process is the result of the first person (plural) indeterminacy beaing on all computations. So your great discovery is that you don't know what the end of a computation will be until you come to the end of the computation. Some have said exactly this to Feynman for his sum over histories formulation of QM. It is the same problem, with similar conclusions, and both are testable and comparable. Just that with comp we have more relative states, a priori. But the arithmetical quantization (I give the equations) shows that the problem is not trivial, and that comp is not yet refuted by physics. You have study only 2/8 of part UDA, and 0/8 of AUDA, so you might try to be cautious in your judgment. Bruno John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: And the, what is the meaning of computation is physical? Which word didn't you understand? It looks to me that this consists in single out some universal system and declare that only running it makes things real.[...] What does mean physical?. I don't take that notion for granted. I'll explain what physical means just as soon as you explain what real means, and what means means. So your great discovery is that you don't know what the end of a computation will be until you come to the end of the computation. Some have said exactly this to Feynman for his sum over histories formulation of QM. It is the same problem, with similar conclusions, and both are testable and comparable. Feynman's theory said the magnetic moment for the electron should not be exactly 1 as had been thought but 1.00115965246, what number does your theory say it should be? You have study only 2/8 of part UDA, True, I have only read the first 2 steps (or maybe it was 3, I forget) of your Ulster Defense Association proof, but proofs are built on the foundation of what comes before, so when one comes upon a ridiculous blunder in step 2 (or maybe 3) it would be equally ridiculous to keep reading. And in none of your writings do you factor in the IHA principle. and 0/8 of AUDA, so you might try to be cautious in your judgment. I don't see how friend of Lawrence of Arabia, Auda ibu Tayi, is relevant to our conversation. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
RE: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Brent I believe you are correct; cellphones regularly broadcast in order to participate in the network. A steerable antenna could cut power usage by a large factor - maybe even by an order of magnitude - but it would need to be able to constantly reorient itself as it gets shifted around the x,y z axis' while for example being in a pocket while someone is walking. I think in this case software could help on a couple levels. Obviously a lower powered antenna would be a huge win - and would make the patent owner very wealthy, but absent that. It could be possible, by using algorithmic means to improve and sharpen the quality of an unusably poor signal thereby enabling the use of a much lower powered antenna. Another possibility is in how the mobile unit and the network synch. The network could buffer attempts to contact the mobile unit for a short duration (from the human perspective, but an eon of time from the machine perspective) without it being excessively noticeable to the users. The mobile device would thus limit its communication back to the cell network to a shared configuration ping schedule. The network would know when to expect a ping and if there was anything in the mobile devices in buffer it would at that time make the connection. The second option of course relies on a controlled degradation of the service that is kept below the level where users begin to notice the delays; by sharing a configured schedule both the cell network and the mobile device would have advance knowledge of when the next synch point would be (something on the order of every seven seconds) enabling both sides of the networked handshake to optimize for that synchronization sequence point. A third option is to ramp up the number of base stations by several orders of magnitude and go to a much lower powered signal - the antenna would still be the main power draw perhaps, but overall energy would be saved because the transmission signal strength could be much lower (because cell base stations would be much more numerous). -Chris From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 11:47 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it worse than that. Doesn't the smartphone (or cel phone) radiate even when you're not talking, so that the system knows where you are if someone calls you? The only improvement in efficiency I could suggest is electronically steerable antennae to reduce the required radiated power. Brent On 9/20/2013 8:08 PM, L.W. Sterritt wrote: Chris, Brent and meekerdb, While we have been considering optimizing the efficiency of circuitry and software, we neglected that while talking on the smartphone, 1/2 of the total power budget goes to radiation from the smartphone antenna - about 2 Watts as I remember. That will drain a typical smartphone battery in less than 3 hours, and there is not a lot we can do about it, except use the phone for all of it's other functions and don't talk too much! LWSterritt On Sep 20, 2013, at 5:24 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/20/2013 4:40 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: Current software is very energy efficient -- and on so many levels. I worked developing code used in the Windows Smartphone and it was during that time that I had to first think hard about the energy efficiency dimension in computing -- as measured by useful work done per unit of energy. The engineering management in that group was constantly harping on the need to produce energy efficient code. Programmers are deeply engrained with a lot of bad habits -- and not only in terms of producing energy efficient software. For example most developers will instinctively grab large chunks of resources -- in order to ensure that their processes are not starved of resources in some kind of peak scenario. While this may be good for the application -- when measured by itself -- it is bad for the overall footprint of the application on the device (bloat) and for the energy requirements that that software will impose on the hardware. Another example of a common bad practice poorly written synchronization code (or synchronized containers). These bad practices (anti-patterns in the jargon) can not only have a huge impact on performance in peak usage scenarios, but also act to increase the energy requirements for that software to run. I think that -- with a lot of programming effort of course (which is why it will never happen) that the current code base, and not only in the mobile small device space, where it is clearly important, but in datacenter scale applications and service (exposed) applications as well -- that the energy efficiency of software has a huge headroom for improvement. But in order for this to happen there has to first be a profound cultural change amongst software developers who
RE: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Reversible computing seems like a fascinating possibility, but it is pretty far off. even if economically feasible and mass producible reversible physical logic gates and chip architectures were to be discovered today, the inertia of the existing code base would take many decades to work its way through the life cycle. Attempts to promote the parallelization of algorithms also face this legacy problem as well. But by the time (if ever) a reversible set of the basic logic gates AND, NAND, OR, XOR are discovered - perhaps algorithms will have become so sophisticated that an existing legacy code base could be run through the various analyzers etc. and the intent of the code could be discovered by an automatic self-tending process that could then use this map as a template in order to perform code generation of equivalent user facing functionality - and so is an essentially seamless experience for the user - but that has been radically re-architected, re-factored recompiled into code that works with a reversible architecture. A similar strategy could be used for achieving the maximum feasible parallelization of algorithms/code - by automatically re-writing the code base.. For quantum computing algorithms (i.e. code) as well. All still some ways off into the future though. just somewhat pie in the sky musings. From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 8:50 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. How does that square with the increased (well measured) energy efficiency per fundamental unit of logic (single machine operation) -- it takes far less energy to perform an elementary logic operation on a modern CPU than it did on say a CPU from ten years ago I'm talking about the theoretical limit dictated by the laws of physics, right now we are nowhere near that and technological factors are astronomically more important. According to Landauer's principle the minimum energy to change one bit of information is, in joules, kT*ln2 where k is Boltzmann's constant and T is the temperature in degrees kelvin of the object doing the computation. A joule is a very small amount of energy, one watt hour is equal to 3600 joules, and Boltzmann's constant is a very very small number, about 10^-23, so it will be some time before we have to start thinking seriously about ways to overcome this theoretical limit with something like reversible computing. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Hi Bruno Im not all that wrapped by Popper's method possibly because I have a background in the soft sciences where I think it is much harder to devise falsifiable statements. Other minds being unobservable and all that... I like Popper's critiques of other thinkers. His destruction of Hegel in 'Open Society' is brutal and convincing and his analysis of Marx tempered, fair and exhaustive. I like that he favours doubt over certainty and argues for that as a socially organising principle. I dont like that he puts science (as he defines it) on a pedestal. Funny that he is known for his take on science. His politics is more important I think. I read that you didn't like Feyerabend which I found odd given how your system challenges modern dogma so heavily. I dont think any other method would leap so readily to defend its right to be brought into the scientific fold and I often read you complaining of current dogmas. I would have thought him to be a choice thinker for this list generally. All the best --- Original Message --- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be Sent: 20 September 2013 12:15 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? Hi Chris, OK. Thanks for the precisions. I like Popper, for its epistemology (modulo the chosen vocabulary)., Yet, he disappointed me on QM, and even more on the mind-body problem, where he defended the Eccles dualist, and non mechanist, theory. But at least he tried, and he didn't put the mystery under the rug. Bruno On 18 Sep 2013, at 18:25, chris peck wrote: Hi Bruno We don't have to accept Popper's demarcation principle in order to understand that it has genuinely been influential or that Popper's arguments are used within scientific circles. I haven't read the paper you mention but many people have taken falsificationism to task. Kuhn; Lakatos; Feyerabend to name just a few. Hilary Putnam's 'On the corroboration of Theories' is also I think a good refutation which argues that strictly speaking no hypotheses are falsifiable. But then the point is that they take Popper's ideas as a starting point from which to build more sophisticated descriptions of science. I think Popper is often misconstrued though. I don't think he meant to argue that unfalsifiable theories had no place. His admiration for Darwinism and to a lesser extent Marxist Economics is informative here. He thought both to be valuable whilst also thinking both contained unfalsifiable elements. But it is a matter of degree. Theories that currently make falsifiable predictions are more interesting from an experimental perspective. All else being equal they have a greater claim for time in the lab and a greater claim on resources generally I would have thought...thus the current criticism of String Theory. All the best --- Original Message --- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be Sent: 19 September 2013 12:08 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On 18 Sep 2013, at 04:12, chris peck wrote: Hi John Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. Newton and Darwin would have had problems if they had of needed Popper given they worked before he was even born. Sometimes I read your posts and just think your belching wind. Popper was not trying to explain to people like Einstein how to 'get knowledge out of nature'. You're basing your entire argument on a straw man. In fact, he used Einstein as a paradigm example of how to conduct science properly. But what of Adler, Freud or Marx? All these people claimed their theories to be scientific too and earnt a whole lot of credit for that, but where they scientific? Their theories could be contrasted with Einstein's in so far as where Einstein derived 'bold and risky' observational predictions which could be falsified; neither Freud, Adler nor Marx did. You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundations. In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 19 Sep 2013, at 19:31, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: A computation is a process. I can agree with this, unless you meant a physical process, OK. As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, Yes, Landauer is a major proponents of that idea. If that is true, then computationalism is false. all computations must use energy and generate heat. And what's the difference between a physical process and a non-physical process anyway? With comp, a physical process is the result of the first person (plural) indeterminacy beaing on all computations. It involves Qubit, and can exploit Fourier transform on infinities of result in alternate computations. A non physical process would be defined by number relations involving only finite and local informations. Bruno John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 20 Sep 2013, at 00:10, LizR wrote: On 20 September 2013 05:31, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: A computation is a process. I can agree with this, unless you meant a physical process, OK. As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, all computations must use energy and generate heat. And what's the difference between a physical process and a non-physical process anyway? I thought it was only erasing the results of computations that had to use energy and increase entropy? Right. And, as found by Hao Wang a long time ago, you can build universal system which never erase. (universal = Turing universal). A good thing, as a universal quantum computer is such a system. You still need the initial kick in, for macroscopic reversible universal system, but for microscopic system the energy time uncertainty can provide it. With comp, the point is that we have still to explain why the winner seems to be time symmetrical below the substitution level. - if so - quibbling, I know, but sometimes quibbles have important consequences. Sure. Bruno -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 6:10 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, all computations must use energy and generate heat. And what's the difference between a physical process and a non-physical process anyway? I thought it was only erasing the results of computations that had to use energy and increase entropy? - if so - quibbling, I know, but sometimes quibbles have important consequences. A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/20/2013 7:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 19 Sep 2013, at 19:31, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: A computation is a process. I can agree with this, unless you meant a physical process, OK. As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, Yes, Landauer is a major proponents of that idea. If that is true, then computationalism is false. I don't see that. I think it just requires a broader meaning of physical (which isn't well defined anyway). 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/20/2013 10:38 AM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 6:10 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com mailto:lizj...@gmail.com wrote: As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, all computations must use energy and generate heat. And what's the difference between a physical process and a non-physical process anyway? I thought it was only erasing the results of computations that had to use energy and increase entropy? - if so - quibbling, I know, but sometimes quibbles have important consequences. A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. That's in the limit of erasing registers isentropically. But if you don't erase at all, you keep the calculation reversible, there's no necessary loss. 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com wrote: its at the core of Popper's view that theories should aim to be productive Wow, theories should be productive, only a super genius could figure that out! in making falsifiable predictions and you are only regurgitating that view because rightly or wrongly, via Popper, it has seeped into our culture's conception of what good science is. 150 years ago, you wouldn't have really cared. That is asinine. 250 years ago the young Jean-Paul Marat tried to get into the French Academy of Science on the basis of his thesis on animal magnetism. The greatest chemist of the 18'th century, Antoine Lavoisier recommended against this and called Marat's paper worthless because it led to nothing that could be tested. Marat never forgot or forgave and 20 years later when he became a leader of the French Revolution he ordered that poor Lavoisier, probably the greatest mind in France, be beheaded. You would have been happy had scientists worked purely inductively. Are you seriously trying to tell me that popper invented deductive reasoning?! Euclid, who lived 2500 years before Popper was born would have been very surprised to hear that, and so would Imhotep who lived 2000 years before Euclid. all of them agree that it matters that string theory has not made any testable prediction. No, there are testable predictions. They make predictions like we might see xyz happen when we smash particles together at abc energies. What the hell? First you say, correctly, that string theory has not made any testable predictions, and now you're saying it has. You can't make up your mind what you're disagreeing with. And we spend lots of cash seeing if that is true. By that I assume you mean the standard model, and up to now all the results from our huge billion dollar particle accelerators conform with it precisely, and that's the problem, it's not leading us to new physics. Not finding the Higgs Boson would have been a huge surprise but we found it, in fact a particle accelerator hasn't found anything surprising in about 40 years. But eventually, the community begins to get hacked off and goes: wouldn't it be better to stop testing until we have some prediction that is falsifiable? Stop testing what? String theory has given us nothing to test. The standard model has given us lots to test and so far it is always right, damn it. Until accelerators find something surprising they can't help us go beyond the standard model. It wasn't Popper's concern to help particular theories develop falsifiable predictions it was his concern to argue that they should. Any idiot knows they should, but it takes a genius to figure out how, and unfortunately popper was no genius. The fact you employ words like pseudoscience shows that he has. You think about science in Popper's terms. One doesn't need to read Popper to know that pseudoscience exists, just reading this list can do that. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Chris, An article in Nature last year presents a calculation of the theoretical minimum energy required to erase a bit - independent of the computer: Antoine Bérut, Artak Arakelyan, Artyom Petrosyan, Sergio Ciliberto, Raoul Dillenschneider + et al. Nature 483, 187-189 doi:10.1038/nature10872 L.W.Sterritt On Sep 20, 2013, at 1:22 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. How does that square with the increased (well measured) energy efficiency per fundamental unit of logic (single machine operation) -- it takes far less energy to perform an elementary logic operation on a modern CPU than it did on say a CPU from ten years ago (even if the modern CPU may suck down more total power -- it is performing far more work) Modern CPUs clearly are also operating at much higher speeds. I think you are not factoring in the dimension of scale or the physical size of the logic container/state-machine. As the size of a logic gate is scaled down it takes less energy and can operate at a higher clock speed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt For example, the early UNIVAC I computer performed approximately 0.015 operations per watt-second (performing 1,905 operations per second (OPS), while consuming 125 kW). The Fujitsu FR-V VLIW/vector processor system on a chip in the 4 FR550 core variant released 2005 performs 51 Giga-OPS with 3 watts of power consumption resulting in 17 billion operations per watt-second.[1][2] This is an improvement by over a trillion times in 54 years. Size (or rather the lack of it) matters in this equation. -Chris From: John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 10:38 AM Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 6:10 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, all computations must use energy and generate heat. And what's the difference between a physical process and a non-physical process anyway? I thought it was only erasing the results of computations that had to use energy and increase entropy? - if so - quibbling, I know, but sometimes quibbles have important consequences. A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. John K Clark -- 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 mailto:everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 20 Sep 2013, at 11:46, chris peck wrote: Hi Bruno Im not all that wrapped by Popper's method possibly because I have a background in the soft sciences where I think it is much harder to devise falsifiable statements. Other minds being unobservable and all that... I like Popper's critiques of other thinkers. His destruction of Hegel in 'Open Society' is brutal and convincing and his analysis of Marx tempered, fair and exhaustive. Hmm... OK. I agree even on his critics on Plato, but Plato remains correct on the main things, and this he failed to see (for reason I get when reading his philosophy of mind and of matter). I like that he favours doubt over certainty and argues for that as a socially organising principle. I dont like that he puts science (as he defines it) on a pedestal. Funny that he is known for his take on science. His politics is more important I think. I read that you didn't like Feyerabend which I found odd given how your system challenges modern dogma so heavily. Hmm I feel myself as being more like conservative. A platonist conservative, even a Pythagorean one, thanks to Church thesis. I dont think any other method would leap so readily to defend its right to be brought into the scientific fold and I often read you complaining of current dogmas. I truly complain on *all* dogma. I complain that some scientist have dogma when they pretend they not. I am really only an (applied) logician, and all what I give is a reasoning showing that IF we are digitalizable machine, THEN physicalism is wrong. I have heard about some flaws in the argument, but when I ask them I get silence or non valid argument using assumptions that I do not use. Many scientists, who have never really thought on the mind-body problem, seems to believe that science has decided between Aristotle and Plato, on the nature of reality, but this is pure non sense. We are much more ignorant than what they imagine. I would have thought him to be a choice thinker for this list generally. It seems leading to some relativism, and he is not enough Popperian for me. Best, Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Interesting. Do you know what assumptions went into their analysis? I would think that this is a medium dependent value; i.e. what underlying medium is the relying on to hold its logical state. Did the researchers attempt to figure out the minimum scale system (say an electron spin for example in a spintronics device -- which have not yet been built, but which is very much one of the future paths to the ever more small scale and which is sucking down big RD money to try to find an economic means of building the single electron type gates that would rely on the electron's spin. What if some hypothetical future technology is able to access more fundamental sub-atomic systems and a logic state is able to be contained in something far smaller than an electron. I am speculating here of course because such technology does not exist (as far as I know), but what if a state could reliably be inferred -- even if not directly measured -- in something that begins to approach the Planck scale -- say some property of a vibrating string. Wouldn't the minimum energy to flip a bit, in this new hypothetical and vastly smaller scale circuit be considerably less (by many orders of magnitude) than the energy required to flip a macro gate (which by comparison even the most miniaturized transistor would be)? My point in replying is that the medium and the scale in which the logic is etched (or some equivalent process for non-lithography based production) are other drivers that need to be considered, and that lower energy does not necessarily equate to slower performance. The twenty watt human computer can solve (especially subtle pattern recognition) problems that bring a super-computer to its knees; admittedly this is changing as computer hardware/software improves and better pattern recognition algorithms are developed, but our energy frugal computing machines cannot be said to be slow -- yes I know nerve impulses travel at a vastly reduced speed as compared to electrons flipping logic circuits, but the brain is a massively parallel architecture and is performing thousands maybe millions of tasks each and every second. -Chris From: L.W. Sterritt lannysterr...@comcast.net To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Cc: L.W. Sterritt lannysterr...@comcast.net Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 1:50 PM Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? Chris, An article in Nature last year presents a calculation of the theoretical minimum energy required to erase a bit - independent of the computer: * Antoine Bérut, * Artak Arakelyan, * Artyom Petrosyan, * Sergio Ciliberto, * Raoul Dillenschneider * + et al. Nature 483, 187-189 doi:10.1038/nature10872 L.W.Sterritt On Sep 20, 2013, at 1:22 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. How does that square with the increased (well measured) energy efficiency per fundamental unit of logic (single machine operation) -- it takes far less energy to perform an elementary logic operation on a modern CPU than it did on say a CPU from ten years ago (even if the modern CPU may suck down more total power -- it is performing far more work) Modern CPUs clearly are also operating at much higher speeds. I think you are not factoring in the dimension of scale or the physical size of the logic container/state-machine. As the size of a logic gate is scaled down it takes less energy and can operate at a higher clock speed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt For example, the early UNIVAC I computer performed approximately 0.015 operations per watt-second (performing 1,905 operations per second (OPS), while consuming 125 kW). The Fujitsu FR-V VLIW/vector processor system on a chip in the 4 FR550 core variant released 2005 performs 51 Giga-OPS with 3 watts of power consumption resulting in 17 billion operations per watt-second.[1][2] This is an improvement byover a trillion times in 54 years. Size (or rather the lack of it) matters in this equation. -Chris From: John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 10:38 AM Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 6:10 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, all computations must use energy and generate heat. And what's the difference between a physical process and a non-physical process anyway? I thought it was only erasing the results of computations that had to use energy and increase entropy? - if so - quibbling, I know, but sometimes quibbles have important consequences. A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, Yes, Landauer is a major proponents of that idea. If that is true, then computationalism is false. Bullshit. With comp, a physical process is the result of the first person (plural) indeterminacy beaing on all computations. So your great discovery is that you don't know what the end of a computation will be until you come to the end of the computation. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. How does that square with the increased (well measured) energy efficiency per fundamental unit of logic (single machine operation) -- it takes far less energy to perform an elementary logic operation on a modern CPU than it did on say a CPU from ten years ago (even if the modern CPU may suck down more total power -- it is performing far more work) Modern CPUs clearly are also operating at much higher speeds. I think you are not factoring in the dimension of scale or the physical size of the logic container/state-machine. As the size of a logic gate is scaled down it takes less energy and can operate at a higher clock speed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt For example, the early UNIVAC I computer performed approximately 0.015 operations per watt-second (performing 1,905 operations per second (OPS), while consuming 125 kW). The Fujitsu FR-V VLIW/vector processor system on a chip in the 4 FR550 core variant released 2005 performs 51 Giga-OPS with 3 watts of power consumption resulting in 17 billion operations per watt-second.[1][2] This is an improvement byover a trillion times in 54 years. Size (or rather the lack of it) matters in this equation. -Chris From: John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 10:38 AM Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 6:10 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, all computations must use energy and generate heat. And what's the difference between a physical process and a non-physical process anyway? I thought it was only erasing the results of computations that had to use energy and increase entropy? - if so - quibbling, I know, but sometimes quibbles have important consequences. A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. John K Clark -- 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 mailto:everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Chris, It's the Landauer argument relating energy to information, as Frank wrote. There is a summary article in the same issue of Nature: Philip Ball, The unavoidable cost of computation revealed, Nature (March 07, 2012). Ball references the analysis mentioned in my last post; It's the ultimate thermodynamic limit, and how close we approach that limit will depend upon technology as you discuss. Intel, Apple and others are making significant improvements in the efficiency of their chip sets, but there is never enough battery life in a smart phone. LW On Sep 20, 2013, at 2:40 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: , Interesting. Do you know what assumptions went into their analysis? I would think that this is a medium dependent value; i.e. what underlying medium is the relying on to hold its logical state. Did the researchers attempt to figure out the minimum scale system (say an electron spin for example in a spintronics device -- which have not yet been built, but which is very much one of the future paths to the ever more small scale and which is sucking down big RD money to try to find an economic means of building the single electron type gates that would rely on the electron's spin. What if some hypothetical future technology is able to access more fundamental sub-atomic systems and a logic state is able to be contained in something far smaller than an electron. I am speculating here of course because such technology does not exist (as far as I know), but what if a state could reliably be inferred -- even if not directly measured -- in something that begins to approach the Planck scale -- say some property of a vibrating string. Wouldn't the minimum energy to flip a bit, in this new hypothetical and vastly smaller scale circuit be considerably less (by many orders of magnitude) than the energy required to flip a macro gate (which by comparison even the most miniaturized transistor would be)? My point in replying is that the medium and the scale in which the logic is etched (or some equivalent process for non-lithography based production) are other drivers that need to be considered, and that lower energy does not necessarily equate to slower performance. The twenty watt human computer can solve (especially subtle pattern recognition) problems that bring a super-computer to its knees; admittedly this is changing as computer hardware/software improves and better pattern recognition algorithms are developed, but our energy frugal computing machines cannot be said to be slow -- yes I know nerve impulses travel at a vastly reduced speed as compared to electrons flipping logic circuits, but the brain is a massively parallel architecture and is performing thousands maybe millions of tasks each and every second. -Chris From: L.W. Sterritt lannysterr...@comcast.net To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Cc: L.W. Sterritt lannysterr...@comcast.net Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 1:50 PM Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? Chris, An article in Nature last year presents a calculation of the theoretical minimum energy required to erase a bit - independent of the computer: Antoine Bérut, Artak Arakelyan, Artyom Petrosyan, Sergio Ciliberto, Raoul Dillenschneider + et al. Nature 483, 187-189 doi:10.1038/nature10872 L.W.Sterritt On Sep 20, 2013, at 1:22 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. How does that square with the increased (well measured) energy efficiency per fundamental unit of logic (single machine operation) -- it takes far less energy to perform an elementary logic operation on a modern CPU than it did on say a CPU from ten years ago (even if the modern CPU may suck down more total power -- it is performing far more work) Modern CPUs clearly are also operating at much higher speeds. I think you are not factoring in the dimension of scale or the physical size of the logic container/state-machine. As the size of a logic gate is scaled down it takes less energy and can operate at a higher clock speed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt For example, the early UNIVAC I computer performed approximately 0.015 operations per watt-second (performing 1,905 operations per second (OPS), while consuming 125 kW). The Fujitsu FR-V VLIW/vector processor system on a chip in the 4 FR550 core variant released 2005 performs 51 Giga-OPS with 3 watts of power consumption resulting in 17 billion operations per watt-second.[1][2] This is an improvement by over a trillion times in 54 years. Size (or rather the lack of it) matters in this equation. -Chris From: John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/20/2013 1:22 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. How does that square with the increased (well measured) energy efficiency per fundamental unit of logic (single machine operation) -- it takes far less energy to perform an elementary logic operation on a modern CPU than it did on say a CPU from ten years ago (even if the modern CPU may suck down more total power -- it is performing far more work) Modern CPUs clearly are also operating at much higher speeds. I think you are not factoring in the dimension of scale or the physical size of the logic container/state-machine. As the size of a logic gate is scaled down it takes less energy and can operate at a higher clock speed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt For example, the early UNIVAC I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_I computer performed approximately 0.015 operations per watt-second (performing 1,905 operations per second (OPS), while consuming 125 kW). The Fujitsu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu FR-V http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FR-V VLIW http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLIW/vector processor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_processor system on a chip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip in the 4 FR550 core variant released 2005 performs 51 Giga-OPS with 3 watts of power consumption resulting in 17 billion operations per watt-second.^[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt#cite_note-1 ^[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt#cite_note-2 This is an improvement by*over a trillion times in 54 years*. Size (or rather the lack of it) matters in this equation. But there still a limit because entropy has to be dumped into the environment, which is not at 0deg, if a register is to be erased. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle But we are many orders of magnitude from the Landauer limit now - lots of room for improvement. 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Current software is very energy efficient -- and on so many levels. I worked developing code used in the Windows Smartphone and it was during that time that I had to first think hard about the energy efficiency dimension in computing -- as measured by useful work done per unit of energy. The engineering management in that group was constantly harping on the need to produce energy efficient code. Programmers are deeply engrained with a lot of bad habits -- and not only in terms of producing energy efficient software. For example most developers will instinctively grab large chunks of resources -- in order to ensure that their processes are not starved of resources in some kind of peak scenario. While this may be good for the application -- when measured by itself -- it is bad for the overall footprint of the application on the device (bloat) and for the energy requirements that that software will impose on the hardware. Another example of a common bad practice poorly written synchronization code (or synchronized containers). These bad practices (anti-patterns in the jargon) can not only have a huge impact on performance in peak usage scenarios, but also act to increase the energy requirements for that software to run. I think that -- with a lot of programming effort of course (which is why it will never happen) that the current code base, and not only in the mobile small device space, where it is clearly important, but in datacenter scale applications and service (exposed) applications as well -- that the energy efficiency of software has a huge headroom for improvement. But in order for this to happen there has to first be a profound cultural change amongst software developers who are being driven by speed to market, and other draconian economic and marketing imperatives and are producing code under these types od deadlines and constraints. If there is a theoretical minimum that derives from the second law of thermodynamics it must be exceedingly far below what the current practical minimums are for actual real world computing systems. And I do not see how a minimum can be determined without reference to the physical medium in which the computing system being measured is implemented. In fact how could a switch be implemented without it being implemented in some medium that contains the switch? -Chris From: L.W. Sterritt lannysterr...@comcast.net To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Cc: L.W. Sterritt lannysterr...@comcast.net Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 3:27 PM Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? Chris, It's the Landauer argument relating energy to information, as Frank wrote. There is a summary article in the same issue of Nature: Philip Ball, The unavoidable cost of computation revealed, Nature (March 07, 2012). Ball references the analysis mentioned in my last post; It's the ultimate thermodynamic limit, and how close we approach that limit will depend upon technology as you discuss. Intel, Apple and others are making significant improvements in the efficiency of their chip sets, but there is never enough battery life in a smart phone. LW On Sep 20, 2013, at 2:40 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote:, Interesting. Do you know what assumptions went into their analysis? I would think that this is a medium dependent value; i.e. what underlying medium is the relying on to hold its logical state. Did the researchers attempt to figure out the minimum scale system (say an electron spin for example in a spintronics device -- which have not yet been built, but which is very much one of the future paths to the ever more small scale and which is sucking down big RD money to try to find an economic means of building the single electron type gates that would rely on the electron's spin. What if some hypothetical future technology is able to access more fundamental sub-atomic systems and a logic state is able to be contained in something far smaller than an electron. I am speculating here of course because such technology does not exist (as far as I know), but what if a state could reliably be inferred -- even if not directly measured -- in something that begins to approach the Planck scale -- say some property of a vibrating string. Wouldn't the minimum energy to flip a bit, in this new hypothetical and vastly smaller scale circuit be considerably less (by many orders of magnitude) than the energy required to flip a macro gate (which by comparison even the most miniaturized transistor would be)? My point in replying is that the medium and the scale in which the logic is etched (or some equivalent process for non-lithography based production) are other drivers that need to be considered, and that lower energy does not necessarily equate to slower performance. The twenty watt human computer can solve (especially subtle pattern recognition) problems that bring
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Thanks, just read the article An interesting experiment and reaffirmation of the second law of thermodynamics in the realm of information processing (or erasure). Will need a little time to digest it. I can certainly see how it would show up - when measured within the constraints of an underlying medium -- they used a silica bead in two state light trap as the system. The theoretical minimums are millions of times less than actual values achieved; so lots of headroom still. From: L.W. Sterritt lannysterr...@comcast.net To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Cc: L.W. Sterritt lannysterr...@comcast.net Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 3:27 PM Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? Chris, It's the Landauer argument relating energy to information, as Frank wrote. There is a summary article in the same issue of Nature: Philip Ball, The unavoidable cost of computation revealed, Nature (March 07, 2012). Ball references the analysis mentioned in my last post; It's the ultimate thermodynamic limit, and how close we approach that limit will depend upon technology as you discuss. Intel, Apple and others are making significant improvements in the efficiency of their chip sets, but there is never enough battery life in a smart phone. LW On Sep 20, 2013, at 2:40 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote:, Interesting. Do you know what assumptions went into their analysis? I would think that this is a medium dependent value; i.e. what underlying medium is the relying on to hold its logical state. Did the researchers attempt to figure out the minimum scale system (say an electron spin for example in a spintronics device -- which have not yet been built, but which is very much one of the future paths to the ever more small scale and which is sucking down big RD money to try to find an economic means of building the single electron type gates that would rely on the electron's spin. What if some hypothetical future technology is able to access more fundamental sub-atomic systems and a logic state is able to be contained in something far smaller than an electron. I am speculating here of course because such technology does not exist (as far as I know), but what if a state could reliably be inferred -- even if not directly measured -- in something that begins to approach the Planck scale -- say some property of a vibrating string. Wouldn't the minimum energy to flip a bit, in this new hypothetical and vastly smaller scale circuit be considerably less (by many orders of magnitude) than the energy required to flip a macro gate (which by comparison even the most miniaturized transistor would be)? My point in replying is that the medium and the scale in which the logic is etched (or some equivalent process for non-lithography based production) are other drivers that need to be considered, and that lower energy does not necessarily equate to slower performance. The twenty watt human computer can solve (especially subtle pattern recognition) problems that bring a super-computer to its knees; admittedly this is changing as computer hardware/software improves and better pattern recognition algorithms are developed, but our energy frugal computing machines cannot be said to be slow -- yes I know nerve impulses travel at a vastly reduced speed as compared to electrons flipping logic circuits, but the brain is a massively parallel architecture and is performing thousands maybe millions of tasks each and every second. -Chris From: L.W. Sterritt lannysterr...@comcast.net To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Cc: L.W. Sterritt lannysterr...@comcast.net Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 1:50 PM Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? Chris, An article in Nature last year presents a calculation of the theoretical minimum energy required to erase a bit - independent of the computer: * Antoine Bérut, * Artak Arakelyan, * Artyom Petrosyan, * Sergio Ciliberto, * Raoul Dillenschneider * + et al. Nature 483, 187-189 doi:10.1038/nature10872 L.W.Sterritt On Sep 20, 2013, at 1:22 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. How does that square with the increased (well measured) energy efficiency per fundamental unit of logic (single machine operation) -- it takes far less energy to perform an elementary logic operation on a modern CPU than it did on say a CPU from ten years ago (even if the modern CPU may suck down more total power -- it is performing far more work) Modern CPUs clearly are also operating at much higher speeds. I think you are not factoring in the dimension of scale or the physical size of the logic container/state
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Okay I am beginning to get the reasoning... some heat must be lost, inevitably dispersed, increasing entropy when the bit of information contained by the system is erased. Am still not clear how Landauer computed the formula kT ln 2 -Chris From: meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 4:37 PM Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On 9/20/2013 1:22 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. How does that square with the increased (well measured) energy efficiency per fundamental unit of logic (single machine operation) -- it takes far less energy to perform an elementary logic operation on a modern CPU than it did on say a CPU from ten years ago (even if the modern CPU may suck down more total power -- it is performing far more work) Modern CPUs clearly are also operating at much higher speeds. I think you are not factoring in the dimension of scale or the physical size of the logic container/state-machine. As the size of a logic gate is scaled down it takes less energy and can operate at a higher clock speed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt For example, the early UNIVAC I computer performed approximately 0.015 operations per watt-second (performing 1,905 operations per second (OPS), while consuming 125 kW). The Fujitsu FR-V VLIW/vector processor system on a chip in the 4 FR550 core variant released 2005 performs 51 Giga-OPS with 3 watts of power consumption resulting in 17 billion operations per watt-second.[1][2] This is an improvement byover a trillion times in 54 years. Size (or rather the lack of it) matters in this equation. But there still a limit because entropy has to be dumped into the environment, which is not at 0deg, if a register is to be erased. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle But we are many orders of magnitude from the Landauer limit now - lots of room for improvement. 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/20/2013 4:40 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: Current software is very energy efficient -- and on so many levels. I worked developing code used in the Windows Smartphone and it was during that time that I had to first think hard about the energy efficiency dimension in computing -- as measured by useful work done per unit of energy. The engineering management in that group was constantly harping on the need to produce energy efficient code. Programmers are deeply engrained with a lot of bad habits -- and not only in terms of producing energy efficient software. For example most developers will instinctively grab large chunks of resources -- in order to ensure that their processes are not starved of resources in some kind of peak scenario. While this may be good for the application -- when measured by itself -- it is bad for the overall footprint of the application on the device (bloat) and for the energy requirements that that software will impose on the hardware. Another example of a common bad practice poorly written synchronization code (or synchronized containers). These bad practices (anti-patterns in the jargon) can not only have a huge impact on performance in peak usage scenarios, but also act to increase the energy requirements for that software to run. I think that -- with a lot of programming effort of course (which is why it will never happen) that the current code base, and not only in the mobile small device space, where it is clearly important, but in datacenter scale applications and service (exposed) applications as well -- that the energy efficiency of software has a huge headroom for improvement. But in order for this to happen there has to first be a profound cultural change amongst software developers who are being driven by speed to market, and other draconian economic and marketing imperatives and are producing code under these types od deadlines and constraints. There's a lot of bad design in consumer electronics, particularly in user interfaces, because the pressure is to get more and newer features and apps. Eventually (maybe already) this will slow down and designers will start to pay more attention to refining the stuff already there. If there is a theoretical minimum that derives from the second law of thermodynamics it must be exceedingly far below what the current practical minimums are for actual real world computing systems. And I do not see how a minimum can be determined without reference to the physical medium in which the computing system being measured is implemented. It is determined by the temperature of the environment in which entropy must be dumped in order to execute irreversible operations (like erasing a bit). But you're right that current practicle minimums are very far above the Landauer limit and so it has not effect on current design practice. The current practice is limited by heat dissipation and battery capacity. In fact how could a switch be implemented without it being implemented in some medium that contains the switch? The way to completely avoid Landauer's limit is to make all operations reversible, never lose any information so that the whole calculation could be reversed. Then there's no entropy dumped to the environment and Landauer's limit doesn't apply. 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Chris, Brent and meekerdb, While we have been considering optimizing the efficiency of circuitry and software, we neglected that while talking on the smartphone, 1/2 of the total power budget goes to radiation from the smartphone antenna - about 2 Watts as I remember. That will drain a typical smartphone battery in less than 3 hours, and there is not a lot we can do about it, except use the phone for all of it's other functions and don't talk too much! LWSterritt On Sep 20, 2013, at 5:24 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/20/2013 4:40 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: Current software is very energy efficient -- and on so many levels. I worked developing code used in the Windows Smartphone and it was during that time that I had to first think hard about the energy efficiency dimension in computing -- as measured by useful work done per unit of energy. The engineering management in that group was constantly harping on the need to produce energy efficient code. Programmers are deeply engrained with a lot of bad habits -- and not only in terms of producing energy efficient software. For example most developers will instinctively grab large chunks of resources -- in order to ensure that their processes are not starved of resources in some kind of peak scenario. While this may be good for the application -- when measured by itself -- it is bad for the overall footprint of the application on the device (bloat) and for the energy requirements that that software will impose on the hardware. Another example of a common bad practice poorly written synchronization code (or synchronized containers). These bad practices (anti-patterns in the jargon) can not only have a huge impact on performance in peak usage scenarios, but also act to increase the energy requirements for that software to run. I think that -- with a lot of programming effort of course (which is why it will never happen) that the current code base, and not only in the mobile small device space, where it is clearly important, but in datacenter scale applications and service (exposed) applications as well -- that the energy efficiency of software has a huge headroom for improvement. But in order for this to happen there has to first be a profound cultural change amongst software developers who are being driven by speed to market, and other draconian economic and marketing imperatives and are producing code under these types od deadlines and constraints. There's a lot of bad design in consumer electronics, particularly in user interfaces, because the pressure is to get more and newer features and apps. Eventually (maybe already) this will slow down and designers will start to pay more attention to refining the stuff already there. If there is a theoretical minimum that derives from the second law of thermodynamics it must be exceedingly far below what the current practical minimums are for actual real world computing systems. And I do not see how a minimum can be determined without reference to the physical medium in which the computing system being measured is implemented. It is determined by the temperature of the environment in which entropy must be dumped in order to execute irreversible operations (like erasing a bit). But you're right that current practicle minimums are very far above the Landauer limit and so it has not effect on current design practice. The current practice is limited by heat dissipation and battery capacity. In fact how could a switch be implemented without it being implemented in some medium that contains the switch? The way to completely avoid Landauer's limit is to make all operations reversible, never lose any information so that the whole calculation could be reversed. Then there's no entropy dumped to the environment and Landauer's limit doesn't apply. 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.comwrote: A computation always takes a nonzero amount of energy to perform, theoretically you can make the energy used be as close to zero as you like, but the less energy you use the slower the calculation. How does that square with the increased (well measured) energy efficiency per fundamental unit of logic (single machine operation) -- it takes far less energy to perform an elementary logic operation on a modern CPU than it did on say a CPU from ten years ago I'm talking about the theoretical limit dictated by the laws of physics, right now we are nowhere near that and technological factors are astronomically more important. According to Landauer's principle the minimum energy to change one bit of information is, in joules, kT*ln2 where k is Boltzmann's constant and T is the temperature in degrees kelvin of the object doing the computation. A joule is a very small amount of energy, one watt hour is equal to 3600 joules, and Boltzmann's constant is a very very small number, about 10^-23, so it will be some time before we have to start thinking seriously about ways to overcome this theoretical limit with something like reversible computing. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
RE: What gives philosophers a bad name?
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 5:25 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/20/2013 4:40 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote:
Current software is very energy efficient -- and on so many levels. I worked
developing code used in the Windows Smartphone and it was during that time
that I had to first think hard about the energy efficiency dimension in
computing -- as measured by useful work done per unit of energy. The
engineering management in that group was constantly harping on the need to
produce energy efficient code.
Programmers are deeply engrained with a lot of bad habits -- and not only in
terms of producing energy efficient software. For example most developers
will instinctively grab large chunks of resources -- in order to ensure that
their processes are not starved of resources in some kind of peak scenario.
While this may be good for the application -- when measured by itself -- it
is bad for the overall footprint of the application on the device (bloat)
and for the energy requirements that that software will impose on the
hardware. Another example of a common bad practice poorly written
synchronization code (or synchronized containers).
These bad practices (anti-patterns in the jargon) can not only have a huge
impact on performance in peak usage scenarios, but also act to increase the
energy requirements for that software to run.
I think that -- with a lot of programming effort of course (which is why it
will never happen) that the current code base, and not only in the mobile
small device space, where it is clearly important, but in datacenter scale
applications and service (exposed) applications as well -- that the energy
efficiency of software has a huge headroom for improvement. But in order for
this to happen there has to first be a profound cultural change amongst
software developers who are being driven by speed to market, and other
draconian economic and marketing imperatives and are producing code under
these types od deadlines and constraints.
There's a lot of bad design in consumer electronics, particularly in user
interfaces, because the pressure is to get more and newer features and apps.
Eventually (maybe already) this will slow down and designers will start to
pay more attention to refining the stuff already there.
If there is a theoretical minimum that derives from the second law of
thermodynamics it must be exceedingly far below what the current practical
minimums are for actual real world computing systems. And I do not see how a
minimum can be determined without reference to the physical medium in which
the computing system being measured is implemented.
It is determined by the temperature of the environment in which entropy must
be dumped in order to execute irreversible operations (like erasing a bit).
But you're right that current practicle minimums are very far above the
Landauer limit and so it has not effect on current design practice. The
current practice is limited by heat dissipation and battery capacity.
Okay.. and interesting as well, but wouldn't the dissipated low grade heat -
i.e. the entropy - depend not just on the ambient temperature (the sink),
but also on how much energy was required, in the first place, in order to
flip the bit in this simple single bit state machine {1,0}
In fact how could a switch be implemented without it being implemented in
some medium that contains the switch?
The way to completely avoid Landauer's limit is to make all operations
reversible, never lose any information so that the whole calculation could
be reversed. Then there's no entropy dumped to the environment and
Landauer's limit doesn't apply.
Intriguing thought, but hard to see how it could be done. Not sure I
understand what you mean by a reversible operation and how would a fully
reversible universe square with causality. unless of course causality is a
side effect of some other deeper process that we experience as the
irreversible vector of time. But at least within the universe we experience,
some processes are not reversible. In order to unwind a transaction a log is
required and a log requires the recording of information, which requires
space. When the log runs out of room then what happens? Without erasure
memory will run out.
Brent
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RE: What gives philosophers a bad name?
T From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of L.W. Sterritt Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 8:09 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Cc: L.W. Sterritt Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? Chris, Brent and meekerdb, While we have been considering optimizing the efficiency of circuitry and software, we neglected that while talking on the smartphone, 1/2 of the total power budget goes to radiation from the smartphone antenna - about 2 Watts as I remember. That will drain a typical smartphone battery in less than 3 hours, and there is not a lot we can do about it, except use the phone for all of it's other functions and don't talk too much! LWSterritt Good point. where is the energy usage going. A lot goes into the displays as well and into Blue Tooth and GPS. Wouldn't vastly increasing the number of base stations (very small scale base stations) and concurrently lowering the network signal strengths needed lower the total system wide energy requirements of a cellular system; including of course transmission strengths. Also I am not certain that nothing can be done to improve antenna performance itself. One way would be to accept the hit and use a lower powered lower fidelity antenna and then improve the signal by algorithmic means achieving a similar level of quality of service. In this instance I am suggesting that software could be used to process a low energy, weak noisy signal and that the overall energy required would still be less than that required by the better signal produced by a higher powered antenna that requires no dsp layer. On Sep 20, 2013, at 5:24 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/20/2013 4:40 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: Current software is very energy efficient -- and on so many levels. I worked developing code used in the Windows Smartphone and it was during that time that I had to first think hard about the energy efficiency dimension in computing -- as measured by useful work done per unit of energy. The engineering management in that group was constantly harping on the need to produce energy efficient code. Programmers are deeply engrained with a lot of bad habits -- and not only in terms of producing energy efficient software. For example most developers will instinctively grab large chunks of resources -- in order to ensure that their processes are not starved of resources in some kind of peak scenario. While this may be good for the application -- when measured by itself -- it is bad for the overall footprint of the application on the device (bloat) and for the energy requirements that that software will impose on the hardware. Another example of a common bad practice poorly written synchronization code (or synchronized containers). These bad practices (anti-patterns in the jargon) can not only have a huge impact on performance in peak usage scenarios, but also act to increase the energy requirements for that software to run. I think that -- with a lot of programming effort of course (which is why it will never happen) that the current code base, and not only in the mobile small device space, where it is clearly important, but in datacenter scale applications and service (exposed) applications as well -- that the energy efficiency of software has a huge headroom for improvement. But in order for this to happen there has to first be a profound cultural change amongst software developers who are being driven by speed to market, and other draconian economic and marketing imperatives and are producing code under these types od deadlines and constraints. There's a lot of bad design in consumer electronics, particularly in user interfaces, because the pressure is to get more and newer features and apps. Eventually (maybe already) this will slow down and designers will start to pay more attention to refining the stuff already there. If there is a theoretical minimum that derives from the second law of thermodynamics it must be exceedingly far below what the current practical minimums are for actual real world computing systems. And I do not see how a minimum can be determined without reference to the physical medium in which the computing system being measured is implemented. It is determined by the temperature of the environment in which entropy must be dumped in order to execute irreversible operations (like erasing a bit). But you're right that current practicle minimums are very far above the Landauer limit and so it has not effect on current design practice. The current practice is limited by heat dissipation and battery capacity. In fact how could a switch be implemented without it being implemented in some medium that contains the switch? The way to completely avoid Landauer's limit is to make all operations reversible, never lose any information so that the whole calculation could be reversed. Then there's no entropy dumped
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Also, we have a requirement for the antenna to be low-gain, omnidirectional because we don't know where the towers are. So most of what we transmit is lost. LW On Sep 20, 2013, at 9:09 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: T From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of L.W. Sterritt Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 8:09 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Cc: L.W. Sterritt Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? Chris, Brent and meekerdb, While we have been considering optimizing the efficiency of circuitry and software, we neglected that while talking on the smartphone, 1/2 of the total power budget goes to radiation from the smartphone antenna - about 2 Watts as I remember. That will drain a typical smartphone battery in less than 3 hours, and there is not a lot we can do about it, except use the phone for all of it's other functions and don't talk too much! LWSterritt Good point… where is the energy usage going. A lot goes into the displays as well and into Blue Tooth and GPS. Wouldn’t vastly increasing the number of base stations (very small scale base stations) and concurrently lowering the network signal strengths needed lower the total system wide energy requirements of a cellular system; including of course transmission strengths. Also I am not certain that nothing can be done to improve antenna performance itself. One way would be to accept the hit and use a lower powered lower fidelity antenna and then improve the signal by algorithmic means achieving a similar level of quality of service. In this instance I am suggesting that software could be used to process a low energy, weak noisy signal and that the overall energy required would still be less than that required by the better signal produced by a higher powered antenna that requires no dsp layer. On Sep 20, 2013, at 5:24 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/20/2013 4:40 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: Current software is very energy efficient -- and on so many levels. I worked developing code used in the Windows Smartphone and it was during that time that I had to first think hard about the energy efficiency dimension in computing -- as measured by useful work done per unit of energy. The engineering management in that group was constantly harping on the need to produce energy efficient code. Programmers are deeply engrained with a lot of bad habits -- and not only in terms of producing energy efficient software. For example most developers will instinctively grab large chunks of resources -- in order to ensure that their processes are not starved of resources in some kind of peak scenario. While this may be good for the application -- when measured by itself -- it is bad for the overall footprint of the application on the device (bloat) and for the energy requirements that that software will impose on the hardware. Another example of a common bad practice poorly written synchronization code (or synchronized containers). These bad practices (anti-patterns in the jargon) can not only have a huge impact on performance in peak usage scenarios, but also act to increase the energy requirements for that software to run. I think that -- with a lot of programming effort of course (which is why it will never happen) that the current code base, and not only in the mobile small device space, where it is clearly important, but in datacenter scale applications and service (exposed) applications as well -- that the energy efficiency of software has a huge headroom for improvement. But in order for this to happen there has to first be a profound cultural change amongst software developers who are being driven by speed to market, and other draconian economic and marketing imperatives and are producing code under these types od deadlines and constraints. There's a lot of bad design in consumer electronics, particularly in user interfaces, because the pressure is to get more and newer features and apps. Eventually (maybe already) this will slow down and designers will start to pay more attention to refining the stuff already there. If there is a theoretical minimum that derives from the second law of thermodynamics it must be exceedingly far below what the current practical minimums are for actual real world computing systems. And I do not see how a minimum can be determined without reference to the physical medium in which the computing system being measured is implemented. It is determined by the temperature of the environment in which entropy must be dumped in order to execute irreversible operations (like erasing a bit). But you're right that current practicle minimums are very far above the Landauer limit and so it has not effect on current design practice. The current practice is limited by heat
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Chris, I get an empty message here. Bruno On 18 Sep 2013, at 17:57, chris peck wrote: --- Original Message --- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be Sent: 19 September 2013 12:08 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On 18 Sep 2013, at 04:12, chris peck wrote: Hi John Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. Newton and Darwin would have had problems if they had of needed Popper given they worked before he was even born. Sometimes I read your posts and just think your belching wind. Popper was not trying to explain to people like Einstein how to 'get knowledge out of nature'. You're basing your entire argument on a straw man. In fact, he used Einstein as a paradigm example of how to conduct science properly. But what of Adler, Freud or Marx? All these people claimed their theories to be scientific too and earnt a whole lot of credit for that, but where they scientific? Their theories could be contrasted with Einstein's in so far as where Einstein derived 'bold and risky' observational predictions which could be falsified; neither Freud, Adler nor Marx did. You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundations. In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of that, so has Popper and the movement he spearheaded had an effect? Of course it has. Its pompous boneheaded bullshit to suggest otherwise. If we agree, with Popper, that a theory needs to be falsifiable to be interesting, then Popper's theory is interesting, because, strictly speaking, it has been refuted, by John Case and Ngo- Manguelle: CASE J. NGO-MANGUELLE S., 1979, Refinements of inductive inference by Popperian machines. Tech. Rep., Dept. of Computer Science, State Univ. of New- York, Buffalo. By accepting that an inductive inference machine proposes, from time to time, unfalsifiable theories, you enlarge non trivially the class of phenomena that the machine can recognize, and build correct theories about. Note the (slight) paradox here. Bruno Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 13:39:10 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of numbers? don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so simple, exercise to see that the computations exist in some definite sense when we postulate arithmetic. (This is done in good textbook, and very well done in Epstein Carnielli, but also in Boolos Jeffrey). Physical things then appears as stable percept And concerning broken glass I said in my September 11 post It must have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a thing. by persons living those dreams. OK. Therefore the physical universe and the physical things in it exist. Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of natural numbers in relative computations and then you say digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations are an exception to this because what they do is not a process. The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes any sense to me. Some number relation defines some machines, or some programs, which are static entities. *Other number relations, involving the preceding one, defines computations, or processes, Name a number relation that does not involve
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 18 Sep 2013, at 19:32, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some other process! It is difference between a number j used as a name for a program, like in the arithmetical relation phi_j(k) = r, A arithmetical relation is a process. A sigma_1 arithmetical relation can be seen as a digital process. OK. But a sigma_i (or pi_i) arithmetical relation cannot be seen in that way, unless you generalize a lot the notion of process. and a number coding a computation A computation is a process. I can agree with this, unless you meant a physical process, OK. Bruno John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: A computation is a process. I can agree with this, unless you meant a physical process, OK. As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, all computations must use energy and generate heat. And what's the difference between a physical process and a non-physical process anyway? John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Hi Chris, OK. Thanks for the precisions. I like Popper, for its epistemology (modulo the chosen vocabulary)., Yet, he disappointed me on QM, and even more on the mind-body problem, where he defended the Eccles dualist, and non mechanist, theory. But at least he tried, and he didn't put the mystery under the rug. Bruno On 18 Sep 2013, at 18:25, chris peck wrote: Hi Bruno We don't have to accept Popper's demarcation principle in order to understand that it has genuinely been influential or that Popper's arguments are used within scientific circles. I haven't read the paper you mention but many people have taken falsificationism to task. Kuhn; Lakatos; Feyerabend to name just a few. Hilary Putnam's 'On the corroboration of Theories' is also I think a good refutation which argues that strictly speaking no hypotheses are falsifiable. But then the point is that they take Popper's ideas as a starting point from which to build more sophisticated descriptions of science. I think Popper is often misconstrued though. I don't think he meant to argue that unfalsifiable theories had no place. His admiration for Darwinism and to a lesser extent Marxist Economics is informative here. He thought both to be valuable whilst also thinking both contained unfalsifiable elements. But it is a matter of degree. Theories that currently make falsifiable predictions are more interesting from an experimental perspective. All else being equal they have a greater claim for time in the lab and a greater claim on resources generally I would have thought...thus the current criticism of String Theory. All the best --- Original Message --- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be Sent: 19 September 2013 12:08 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On 18 Sep 2013, at 04:12, chris peck wrote: Hi John Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. Newton and Darwin would have had problems if they had of needed Popper given they worked before he was even born. Sometimes I read your posts and just think your belching wind. Popper was not trying to explain to people like Einstein how to 'get knowledge out of nature'. You're basing your entire argument on a straw man. In fact, he used Einstein as a paradigm example of how to conduct science properly. But what of Adler, Freud or Marx? All these people claimed their theories to be scientific too and earnt a whole lot of credit for that, but where they scientific? Their theories could be contrasted with Einstein's in so far as where Einstein derived 'bold and risky' observational predictions which could be falsified; neither Freud, Adler nor Marx did. You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundations. In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of that, so has Popper and the movement he spearheaded had an effect? Of course it has. Its pompous boneheaded bullshit to suggest otherwise. If we agree, with Popper, that a theory needs to be falsifiable to be interesting, then Popper's theory is interesting, because, strictly speaking, it has been refuted, by John Case and Ngo- Manguelle: CASE J. NGO-MANGUELLE S., 1979, Refinements of inductive inference by Popperian machines. Tech. Rep., Dept. of Computer Science, State Univ. of New- York, Buffalo. By accepting that an inductive inference machine proposes, from time to time, unfalsifiable theories, you enlarge non trivially the class of phenomena that the machine can recognize, and build correct theories about. Note the (slight) paradox here. Bruno Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 13:39:10 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 20 September 2013 05:31, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: A computation is a process. I can agree with this, unless you meant a physical process, OK. As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, all computations must use energy and generate heat. And what's the difference between a physical process and a non-physical process anyway? I thought it was only erasing the results of computations that had to use energy and increase entropy? - if so - quibbling, I know, but sometimes quibbles have important consequences. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
RE: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Hi John It doesn't take a genius to realize that if a idea isn't getting anywhere, that is to say if it doesn't produce new interesting ideas, your time would be better spent doing something else. Whats with this idea that the only good ideas are ones it would take a genius to realize? The best ideas are ones kids can understand. Your idol Feynmann would have put you over his lap and spanked you for saying that. Few people had greater contempt for 'ideas' only 'geniuses' could understand. Anyway, its at the core of Popper's view that theories should aim to be productive in making falsifiable predictions and you are only regurgitating that view because rightly or wrongly, via Popper, it has seeped into our culture's conception of what good science is. 150 years ago, you wouldn't have really cared. You would have been happy had scientists worked purely inductively. Most likely you'ld have swallowed psychoanalysis hook line and sinker without even considering whether it could be falsified. Are you trying to tell me with a straight face that without Popper people in 2013 wouldn't have been able to figure out that the study of penis envy wasn't a good use of your time? John, are you honestly telling me I should keep a straight face when corresponding with you? Obviously it matters! Does it? The point is that there is a debate about that. all of them agree that it matters that string theory has not made any testable predictions No, there are testable predictions. They make predictions like we might see xyz happen when we smash particles together at abc energies. And we spend lots of cash seeing if that is true. Then, when its not, we go, ah well maybe xyz happens at abc+1. In other words, a lot of science operates within a verificationist framework. But eventually, the community begins to get hacked off and goes: wouldn't it be better to stop testing until we have some prediction that is falsifiable? In other words a debate emerges using arguments derived from Popper. You do appreciate the difference between 'testability' and falsifiability, right? The big question is whether string theory will ever be able to make testable predictions, and Popper is of absolutely no help whatsoever in answering that question. None zero zilch goose egg. Its comments like this that make me think its a bit mean to insist I keep a straight face. It wasn't Popper's concern to help particular theories develop falsifiable predictions it was his concern to argue that they should. Bullshit. Titwank? There was both good science and pseudoscience a hundred years ago and there is both good science and pseudoscience today. Popper changed nothing. The fact you employ words like pseudoscience shows that he has. You think about science in Popper's terms. Like it or not, you are a fan-boy of Popper demarcating between 'good science' and 'pseudoscience'. It seems to me you are more Popper than anyone else on this list. All the best. Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 10:10:17 +1200 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On 20 September 2013 05:31, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: A computation is a process. I can agree with this, unless you meant a physical process, OK. As Rolf Landauer said Computation is physical, all computations must use energy and generate heat. And what's the difference between a physical process and a non-physical process anyway? I thought it was only erasing the results of computations that had to use energy and increase entropy? - if so - quibbling, I know, but sometimes quibbles have important consequences. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 17 Sep 2013, at 19:39, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of numbers? It would be like saying that the relation between matter and energy (E = mc^2) is made of ink or of pixels. don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so simple, exercise to see that the computations exist in some definite sense when we postulate arithmetic. (This is done in good textbook, and very well done in Epstein Carnielli, but also in Boolos Jeffrey). Physical things then appears as stable percept And concerning broken glass I said in my September 11 post It must have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a thing. I agree. But a computation can provide stable things for another computations or subcomputations. Then arithmetical truth is rather stable itself. by persons living those dreams. OK. Therefore the physical universe and the physical things in it exist. That makes sense. Just that such an existence is a first person plural construction. This exists for all universal system which can run different computations in parallel, and makes them interact. Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of natural numbers in relative computations and then you say digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations are an exception to this because what they do is not a process. The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes any sense to me. Some number relation defines some machines, or some programs, which are static entities. *Other number relations, involving the preceding one, defines computations, or processes, Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some other process! It is difference between a number j used as a name for a program, like in the arithmetical relation phi_j(k) = r, and a number coding a computation, that is some sequence like phi_j(k)^1, phi_j(k)^2, phi_j(k)^3, phi_j(k)^4, phi_j(k)^5, phi_j(k)^6, phi_j(k)^7, ... Here phi_i is an enumeration of the partial computable functions, k is a natural number input, and ^s means the sth step of the computation. A machine, in that setting is basically one number, relative to some universal number. Relative? A relation needs at least 2 things, Yes. The two things are 1) the number playing the role of the machine (the j in phi_j(k)), and 2) the universal system (seen as a number, unless we start in the basic system assumed, like arithmetic, or the combinators) which computes phi_j(k). You can look at the Matiyasevitch book for a nice implementation of arbitrary Turing machine *and* their computations (seen as something very dynamic) in the terms of Diophantine equations (since as very static). That can help. Providing examples is very long and technical, alas, but we will come back on this most probably. and some sort of computation with them. Absolutely, Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 18 Sep 2013, at 04:12, chris peck wrote: Hi John Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. Newton and Darwin would have had problems if they had of needed Popper given they worked before he was even born. Sometimes I read your posts and just think your belching wind. Popper was not trying to explain to people like Einstein how to 'get knowledge out of nature'. You're basing your entire argument on a straw man. In fact, he used Einstein as a paradigm example of how to conduct science properly. But what of Adler, Freud or Marx? All these people claimed their theories to be scientific too and earnt a whole lot of credit for that, but where they scientific? Their theories could be contrasted with Einstein's in so far as where Einstein derived 'bold and risky' observational predictions which could be falsified; neither Freud, Adler nor Marx did. You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundations. In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of that, so has Popper and the movement he spearheaded had an effect? Of course it has. Its pompous boneheaded bullshit to suggest otherwise. If we agree, with Popper, that a theory needs to be falsifiable to be interesting, then Popper's theory is interesting, because, strictly speaking, it has been refuted, by John Case and Ngo-Manguelle: CASE J. NGO-MANGUELLE S., 1979, Refinements of inductive inference by Popperian machines. Tech. Rep., Dept. of Computer Science, State Univ. of New- York, Buffalo. By accepting that an inductive inference machine proposes, from time to time, unfalsifiable theories, you enlarge non trivially the class of phenomena that the machine can recognize, and build correct theories about. Note the (slight) paradox here. Bruno Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 13:39:10 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of numbers? don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so simple, exercise to see that the computations exist in some definite sense when we postulate arithmetic. (This is done in good textbook, and very well done in Epstein Carnielli, but also in Boolos Jeffrey). Physical things then appears as stable percept And concerning broken glass I said in my September 11 post It must have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a thing. by persons living those dreams. OK. Therefore the physical universe and the physical things in it exist. Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of natural numbers in relative computations and then you say digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations are an exception to this because what they do is not a process. The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes any sense to me. Some number relation defines some machines, or some programs, which are static entities. *Other number relations, involving the preceding one, defines computations, or processes, Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some other process! A machine, in that setting is basically one number, relative to some universal number. Relative? A relation needs at least 2 things, and some sort of computation with them. John K Clark -- You received this message because you
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
--- Original Message --- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be Sent: 19 September 2013 12:08 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On 18 Sep 2013, at 04:12, chris peck wrote: Hi John Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. Newton and Darwin would have had problems if they had of needed Popper given they worked before he was even born. Sometimes I read your posts and just think your belching wind. Popper was not trying to explain to people like Einstein how to 'get knowledge out of nature'. You're basing your entire argument on a straw man. In fact, he used Einstein as a paradigm example of how to conduct science properly. But what of Adler, Freud or Marx? All these people claimed their theories to be scientific too and earnt a whole lot of credit for that, but where they scientific? Their theories could be contrasted with Einstein's in so far as where Einstein derived 'bold and risky' observational predictions which could be falsified; neither Freud, Adler nor Marx did. You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundations. In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of that, so has Popper and the movement he spearheaded had an effect? Of course it has. Its pompous boneheaded bullshit to suggest otherwise. If we agree, with Popper, that a theory needs to be falsifiable to be interesting, then Popper's theory is interesting, because, strictly speaking, it has been refuted, by John Case and Ngo-Manguelle: CASE J. NGO-MANGUELLE S., 1979, Refinements of inductive inference by Popperian machines. Tech. Rep., Dept. of Computer Science, State Univ. of New- York, Buffalo. By accepting that an inductive inference machine proposes, from time to time, unfalsifiable theories, you enlarge non trivially the class of phenomena that the machine can recognize, and build correct theories about. Note the (slight) paradox here. Bruno Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 13:39:10 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of numbers? don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so simple, exercise to see that the computations exist in some definite sense when we postulate arithmetic. (This is done in good textbook, and very well done in Epstein Carnielli, but also in Boolos Jeffrey). Physical things then appears as stable percept And concerning broken glass I said in my September 11 post It must have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a thing. by persons living those dreams. OK. Therefore the physical universe and the physical things in it exist. Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of natural numbers in relative computations and then you say digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations are an exception to this because what they do is not a process. The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes any sense to me. Some number relation defines some machines, or some programs, which are static entities. *Other number relations, involving the preceding one, defines computations, or processes, Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some other process! A machine, in that setting is basically one number, relative to some universal number. Relative? A relation needs
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Hi Bruno We don't have to accept Popper's demarcation principle in order to understand that it has genuinely been influential or that Popper's arguments are used within scientific circles. I haven't read the paper you mention but many people have taken falsificationism to task. Kuhn; Lakatos; Feyerabend to name just a few. Hilary Putnam's 'On the corroboration of Theories' is also I think a good refutation which argues that strictly speaking no hypotheses are falsifiable. But then the point is that they take Popper's ideas as a starting point from which to build more sophisticated descriptions of science. I think Popper is often misconstrued though. I don't think he meant to argue that unfalsifiable theories had no place. His admiration for Darwinism and to a lesser extent Marxist Economics is informative here. He thought both to be valuable whilst also thinking both contained unfalsifiable elements. But it is a matter of degree. Theories that currently make falsifiable predictions are more interesting from an experimental perspective. All else being equal they have a greater claim for time in the lab and a greater claim on resources generally I would have thought...thus the current criticism of String Theory. All the best --- Original Message --- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be Sent: 19 September 2013 12:08 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On 18 Sep 2013, at 04:12, chris peck wrote: Hi John Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. Newton and Darwin would have had problems if they had of needed Popper given they worked before he was even born. Sometimes I read your posts and just think your belching wind. Popper was not trying to explain to people like Einstein how to 'get knowledge out of nature'. You're basing your entire argument on a straw man. In fact, he used Einstein as a paradigm example of how to conduct science properly. But what of Adler, Freud or Marx? All these people claimed their theories to be scientific too and earnt a whole lot of credit for that, but where they scientific? Their theories could be contrasted with Einstein's in so far as where Einstein derived 'bold and risky' observational predictions which could be falsified; neither Freud, Adler nor Marx did. You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundations. In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of that, so has Popper and the movement he spearheaded had an effect? Of course it has. Its pompous boneheaded bullshit to suggest otherwise. If we agree, with Popper, that a theory needs to be falsifiable to be interesting, then Popper's theory is interesting, because, strictly speaking, it has been refuted, by John Case and Ngo-Manguelle: CASE J. NGO-MANGUELLE S., 1979, Refinements of inductive inference by Popperian machines. Tech. Rep., Dept. of Computer Science, State Univ. of New- York, Buffalo. By accepting that an inductive inference machine proposes, from time to time, unfalsifiable theories, you enlarge non trivially the class of phenomena that the machine can recognize, and build correct theories about. Note the (slight) paradox here. Bruno Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 13:39:10 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of numbers? don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 10:12 PM, chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.comwrote: You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundation It doesn't take a genius to realize that if a idea isn't getting anywhere, that is to say if it doesn't produce new interesting ideas, your time would be better spent doing something else. Are you trying to tell me with a straight face that without Popper people in 2013 wouldn't have been able to figure out that the study of penis envy wasn't a good use of your time? In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Obviously it matters! Although most physicists have not read Popper and may not even have heard of him, all of them agree that it matters that string theory has not made any testable predictions, but everybody also agrees that it is a work in progress; after all, Einstein's theory of gravitation didn't make testable predictions either when it was only half finished and he was still struggling with it. The big question is whether string theory will ever be able to make testable predictions, and Popper is of absolutely no help whatsoever in answering that question. None zero zilch goose egg. Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. So far quantum loop gravity is no better at making testable predictions than string theory is. Which theory will history say was more productive? Perhaps strings will lead to something, perhaps loops will, perhaps both will, perhaps neither will. I don't know, you don't know, and Popper most certainly does not know. Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of that Bullshit. There was both good science and pseudoscience a hundred years ago and there is both good science and pseudoscience today. Popper changed nothing. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some other process! It is difference between a number j used as a name for a program, like in the arithmetical relation phi_j(k) = r, A arithmetical relation is a process. and a number coding a computation A computation is a process. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/18/2013 10:24 AM, John Clark wrote: Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. So far quantum loop gravity is no better at making testable predictions than string theory is. Actually I think LQG predicts that there should be some dispersion for very energetic photons. A prediction that seems to have be falsified by the simultaneous arrival of different energy gamma rays from very distant supernova. The result indicates spacetime is smooth down to 0.002 of the Planck length. http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.5191v2 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of numbers? don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so simple, exercise to see that the computations exist in some definite sense when we postulate arithmetic. (This is done in good textbook, and very well done in Epstein Carnielli, but also in Boolos Jeffrey). Physical things then appears as stable percept And concerning broken glass I said in my September 11 post It must have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a thing. by persons living those dreams. OK. Therefore the physical universe and the physical things in it exist. Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of natural numbers in relative computations and then you say digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations are an exception to this because what they do is not a process. The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes any sense to me. Some number relation defines some machines, or some programs, which are static entities. *Other number relations, involving the preceding one, defines computations, or processes, Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some other process! A machine, in that setting is basically one number, relative to some universal number. Relative? A relation needs at least 2 things, and some sort of computation with them. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
RE: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Hi John Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. Newton and Darwin would have had problems if they had of needed Popper given they worked before he was even born. Sometimes I read your posts and just think your belching wind. Popper was not trying to explain to people like Einstein how to 'get knowledge out of nature'. You're basing your entire argument on a straw man. In fact, he used Einstein as a paradigm example of how to conduct science properly. But what of Adler, Freud or Marx? All these people claimed their theories to be scientific too and earnt a whole lot of credit for that, but where they scientific? Their theories could be contrasted with Einstein's in so far as where Einstein derived 'bold and risky' observational predictions which could be falsified; neither Freud, Adler nor Marx did. You say that this demarcation principle has had no influence in science. Within Psychology however, for better or worse, Psychoanalysis is now perceived as a faintly absurd artifact of history. No one gets hot under the collar about penis envy anymore. Why? Because psychoanalysis doesn't make falsifiable predictions. There has been a cognitive and neuro-scientific 'revolution' which has striven hard to base psychology on more empirically falsifiable foundations. In physics there is a debate about whether string theory (or string theory if you must shake your rattle, John) deserves all the funding it receives. What is at the core of the debate?: Does it matter that it fails to make falsifiable predictions? Should other theories (quantum loop gravity) which potentially offer more scope for falsifiability receive a greater proportion of the available resources. Go back a hundred years or so and no-one gave a toss about any of that, so has Popper and the movement he spearheaded had an effect? Of course it has. Its pompous boneheaded bullshit to suggest otherwise. All the best. Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 13:39:10 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. OK. How is that any different from saying broken glass is made of numbers? don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so simple, exercise to see that the computations exist in some definite sense when we postulate arithmetic. (This is done in good textbook, and very well done in Epstein Carnielli, but also in Boolos Jeffrey). Physical things then appears as stable percept And concerning broken glass I said in my September 11 post It must have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a thing. by persons living those dreams. OK. Therefore the physical universe and the physical things in it exist. Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of natural numbers in relative computations and then you say digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations are an exception to this because what they do is not a process. The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes any sense to me. Some number relation defines some machines, or some programs, which are static entities.*Other number relations, involving the preceding one, defines computations, or processes, Name a number relation that does not involve a computation or some other process! A machine, in that setting is basically one number, relative to some universal number. Relative? A relation needs at least 2 things, and some sort of computation with them. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 15 Sep 2013, at 18:02, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 10:15 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Me: Feynman predicted in 1948 that the magnetic moment of an electron can't be exactly 1 in Dirac units as had been thought because it is effected by an infinite (and I do mean infinite and not just astronomical) number of virtual particles. He brilliantly figured out a way to calculate this effect and do so in a finite amount of time, he calculated it must be 1.00115965246, while the best experimental value found much later is 1.00115965221. That's like measuring the distance between Los Angeles and New York to the thickness of a human hair, and Feynman got it right just by using his mind. That's too good to be a coincidence, Feynman must have been onto something good. Feynman was a giant in physics. No doubt. I just said that he was bad in philosophy. Feynman showed that virtual particles must exist, particles that can violate the law of conservation of mass-energy, at least for a short time. Feynman showed that when a particle moves from point X to point Y it can do so by any path with various degrees of probability, and when you add up all the infinite (and not just very large) number of paths you get the path we observe the particle to be moving at, and he showed us how to add up these infinite number of things in a finite amount of time and get numbers out of them. These profound philosophical discoveries dwarf anything Popper found, assuming he found anything at all. And Feynman wasn't the only one, Darwin showed how multicellular life such as ourselves came to be, Godel found that some things are true but can't be proved, Turing showed that some things are deterministic but not predictable, Cantor proved that there are degrees of infinity, Hubble found that the universe was expanding, and Watson and Crick showed how heredity works at the most fundamental level. None of these huge philosophical discoveries were made by somebody who called himself a philosopher, and that's why I say that philosophers no longer do philosophy. That's natural philosophy, but today we call that physics, biology, biochemistry. Popper made clear what science is all about, which was already clear for good scientists, but which is still ignored by most professional philosopher, and most applied scientists. But I do agree with you that philosophy today is a bit sick, like theology (the science) has virtually disappear since the Roman Empire. In many universities, when I was young, philosophy was just Marxism and anti-americanism. Academical philosophy is used today as a tool to ignore scientific results when they are politically unpleasant (like the fact that cannabis cure cancers, or that primary matter does not exist, to name a few). Personally, I am problem driven, and don't believe in clear separation of field, which is just a practical tool to make experts. I don't really believe in academical philosophy. In many places, they have prevents philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, debate on QM, if not forbidden the use of terms like consciousness, etc. The pity is that some scientist give them the full academical authority. Today, we use philosophy, like theology has been used before enlightenment. Just unfounded authoritative (violent) arguments. How many philosophers told me you have not the right to reason like that ..., when of course a scientist would show precisely that a rule, or method of reasoning, is invalid, by providing a counter- example. Bruno John K Clark it would be hard to find ANY calculation in modern particle physics that doesn't involve some form of virtual particles. virtual particles I am not a pal of Feyerabend, nor of many philosophers since 1500 years. Feyerabend is too much relativist to be taken seriously when you study machine's (logical) theology. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 15 Sep 2013, at 18:29, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: As long as you suggest that there are things made of things, you are staying in the Aristotelian frame. Other can suggest that there are no such things at all, just natural numbers relative computations, So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers, I was just saying that things are not made up of things. A broken glass is NOT made of number. That has no meaning at all. What happens is that addition and multiplication of natural numbers emulate dreams, which might be dream of a broken glass. fine, and who knows it might even be true, but don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. It is a matter of tedious, and not so simple, exercise to see that the computations exist in some definite sense when we postulate arithmetic. (This is done in good textbook, and very well done in Epstein Carnielli, but also in Boolos Jeffrey). Physical things then appears as stable percept by persons living those dreams. By machine I assume you mean a deterministic process. A machine is not a process, Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of natural numbers in relative computations and then you say digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations are an exception to this because what they do is not a process. The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes any sense to me. Some number relation defines some machines, or some programs, which are static entities. *Other number relations, involving the preceding one, defines computations, or processes, ... A machine, in that setting is basically one number, relative to some universal number. A computation might be codes by one number, but is better seen as a sequence of numbers, coding the states corresponding to that computation. Bruno John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Feynman showed that virtual particles must exist, particles that can violate the law of conservation of mass-energy, at least for a short time. Feynman showed that when a particle moves from point X to point Y it can do so by any path with various degrees of probability, and when you add up all the infinite (and not just very large) number of paths you get the path we observe the particle to be moving at, and he showed us how to add up these infinite number of things in a finite amount of time and get numbers out of them. These profound philosophical discoveries dwarf anything Popper found, assuming he found anything at all. And Feynman wasn't the only one, Darwin showed how multicellular life such as ourselves came to be, Godel found that some things are true but can't be proved, Turing showed that some things are deterministic but not predictable, Cantor proved that there are degrees of infinity, Hubble found that the universe was expanding, and Watson and Crick showed how heredity works at the most fundamental level. None of these huge philosophical discoveries were made by somebody who called himself a philosopher, and that's why I say that philosophers no longer do philosophy. That's natural philosophy, Natural philosopher is the old term for scientist and I wish it was still used, the word scientist was only invented in 1834 and it was decades after that before it became popular. Just one year later in 1835 philosopher Auguste Comte determined from his pure philosophical studies that human beings would never find out what the stars are made of. In 1850 natural philosopher (scientist) Gustav Kirchhoff found out what the stars are made of. I am certain that Comte read Plato and Aristotle, and I am even more certain that Kirchhoff never read Popper. but today we call that physics, biology, biochemistry. That's why some people say philosophy has accomplished nothing. Today philosophy is for areas of thought where ignorance is king where everybody is certain but nobody is correct. Forget finding the answers, philosophy is for where you don't even know what the correct questions to ask are. Philosophy has everything to do with taste and opinion and nothing to do with facts. At one time physics and astronomy and biology and even meteorology were philosophical subjects, but they graduated. Popper made clear what science is all about, which was already clear for good scientists, Exactly, Newton and Darwin and Einstein didn't need Popper to tell them how to get knowledge out of nature, and absolutely no change in how science was done happened in 1934, the year Popper's book was published. None whatsoever. but which is still ignored by most professional philosopher I would say that professional philosophers are the ONLY ones who don't ignore Popper, the general public certainly does and most working scientists probably couldn't even tell you who the hell Popper was, they have better things to do with their time than read him. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 13 Sep 2013, at 19:49, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Science, or at least theoretical physics, is all about explaining physical laws in terms of other more general laws. Either this process goes on forever like a infinitely nested Russian doll, or it does not go on forever and come to a end and some things are just fundamental and it is pointless when you reach that level to ask what is it made of?. Indeed. But some stop at elementary particles, or strings, One step at a time! At this point it would be pretty silly to worry about what strings are made of when we have almost no evidence that they even exist. Right now it can explain almost nothing we see so there is no such thing as string theory, there is only the striving for a string theory; when and if theorists succeed in building something useful out of it then we can talk about what if anything strings are made of. As long as you suggest that there are things made of things, you are staying in the Aristotelian frame. Other can suggest that there are no such things at all, just natural numbers relative computations, lived as dream of things made of things. This makes sense as all those (mathematical, arithmetical) computations exists in a sense similar to the existence of, say, even or prime numbers. With comp (the idea that we are machine), By machine I assume you mean a deterministic process. A machine is not a process, and I was refereing to digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations. Well you're a logician so you know we either are or we are not, and if we are not then we are by definition random. Like it or not its a question of cuckoo clocks or roulette wheels. There are many other options, like a machine + a random oracle, or even options with spiritual substances (I don't believe in them, but logically we cannot exclude them). Bruno John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 10:15 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Me: Feynman predicted in 1948 that the magnetic moment of an electron can't be exactly 1 in Dirac units as had been thought because it is effected by an infinite (and I do mean infinite and not just astronomical) number of virtual particles. He brilliantly figured out a way to calculate this effect and do so in a finite amount of time, he calculated it must be 1.00115965246, while the best experimental value found much later is 1.00115965221. That's like measuring the distance between Los Angeles and New York to the thickness of a human hair, and Feynman got it right just by using his mind. That's too good to be a coincidence, Feynman must have been onto something good. Feynman was a giant in physics. No doubt. I just said that he was bad in philosophy. Feynman showed that virtual particles must exist, particles that can violate the law of conservation of mass-energy, at least for a short time. Feynman showed that when a particle moves from point X to point Y it can do so by any path with various degrees of probability, and when you add up all the infinite (and not just very large) number of paths you get the path we observe the particle to be moving at, and he showed us how to add up these infinite number of things in a finite amount of time and get numbers out of them. These profound philosophical discoveries dwarf anything Popper found, assuming he found anything at all. And Feynman wasn't the only one, Darwin showed how multicellular life such as ourselves came to be, Godel found that some things are true but can't be proved, Turing showed that some things are deterministic but not predictable, Cantor proved that there are degrees of infinity, Hubble found that the universe was expanding, and Watson and Crick showed how heredity works at the most fundamental level. None of these huge philosophical discoveries were made by somebody who called himself a philosopher, and that's why I say that philosophers no longer do philosophy. John K Clark it would be hard to find ANY calculation in modern particle physics that doesn't involve some form of virtual particles. virtual particles I am not a pal of Feyerabend, nor of many philosophers since 1500 years. Feyerabend is too much relativist to be taken seriously when you study machine's (logical) theology. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: As long as you suggest that there are things made of things, you are staying in the Aristotelian frame. Other can suggest that there are no such things at all, just natural numbers relative computations, So you are suggesting that a thing like broken glass is made of numbers, fine, and who knows it might even be true, but don't tell me there is no such thing as a thing, that's just more gibberish. By machine I assume you mean a deterministic process. A machine is not a process, Make up your mind! First you say everything is the process of natural numbers in relative computations and then you say digital machines, which are defined in term of number relations are an exception to this because what they do is not a process. The sum of number relations is not a process?? None of this makes any sense to me. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 12 Sep 2013, at 22:02, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 11:15 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Feynman was very bad in philosophy. Even in the philosophy of QM, he has avoided all questions, and only put in footnote some remarks showing that he did not believe in the wave collapse. He added often: don't try to understand what happens, Nature just acts like that ... That is bad philosophy Maybe, but he wasn't a professional philosopher, thank goodness. While others were contemplating their navels and doing nothing but saying the same thing over and over quantum mechanics is weird Feynman was trying to figure it out. and bad science. BULLSHIT! Feynman predicted in 1948 that the magnetic moment of an electron can't be exactly 1 in Dirac units as had been thought because it is effected by an infinite (and I do mean infinite and not just astronomical) number of virtual particles. He brilliantly figured out a way to calculate this effect and do so in a finite amount of time, he calculated it must be 1.00115965246, while the best experimental value found much later is 1.00115965221. That's like measuring the distance between Los Angeles and New York to the thickness of a human hair, and Feynman got it right just by using his mind. That's too good to be a coincidence, Feynman must have been onto something good. Let's see a good philosopher like your pal Feyerabend beat that! Feynman was a giant in physics. No doubt. I just said that he was bad in philosophy. I am not a pal of Feyerabend, nor of many philosophers since 1500 years. Feyerabend is too much relativist to be taken seriously when you study machine's (logical) theology. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 12 Sep 2013, at 21:25, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Feyerabend was correct on this (at least). I ask myself why in the 21'th century would any educated man agree with a certified jackass like Feyerabend who said the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself and Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just? I can only think of 2 explanations for this very odd behavior: 1) The person does not really agree that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself or that Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just. Thus he was only trying to be provocative. I do not believe the Church being more faithful to reason than Galileo, except, perhaps serendipitously on the fact that Galileo was proposing a theory. Of course even this was not due to faith in reason, and as most probably a trick. That is why I add serendipitously. 2) The person sincerely believes that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself ... only on that precise point. You are overgeneralzing abusively. and Its verdict against Galileo was rational. Thus he is just not very bright. Only on that precise point. It is not important; just fun. I am not so appreciative on Feyerabend too, so perhaps he was also just serendipitously correct on this. I hope #1 is the explanation because as I have said, sincerity is a vastly overrated virtue but intelligence is not. None of Aristotle's ideas about physics were even close to being correct and could have been easily refuted even in his own day, but instead it was held as the gospel truth for almost 2000 years. And probably Aristotle might have some responsibility for this. But being refuted is a glory, in science. It means that you have succeeded to be read People read what pornographers have to say too. Good for them. But for natural reason that's more easy. and have been enough precise to be wrong. OK good point, I'll give you that. in theology, To hell with theology! Which one? you are the one still under the influence of Aristotle, which I think was due to a lack of understanding of Plato. To hell with Aristotle and Plato! They are at the origin of science. Plato is coherent with mechanism, Aristotle is not. Science has not yet decided. Clues accumulate for Plato, though. Plato was more correct with respect to comp To hell with comp! Then you can say to hell with the mind-body problem, and this means only you are not interested in fundamental question. Then you mock those who are interested. You would have mock Gödel, Einstein, basically all those who made genuine contribution in science. If the physical universe did not exist there would be no Moon, no Earth, no Sun, no atoms, no John Clark, and well things would be rather different. Well, things are not different so logically we can only conclude that the physical universe does exist. Excellent. Now that we've got that settled let's move on to other more interesting things. That is what some materialist, and all physicalist are doing for the notion of physical universe. They say that we cannot find an explanation of the origin of the physical laws, Straw man, I don't know anybody who is saying that. All those who criticize my own work without reading it, or taking a bit of time to understand. basically the numerous physicalist, or even more numerous believer in Aristotle theological dogma (like the existence of a primary matter). Science, or at least theoretical physics, is all about explaining physical laws in terms of other more general laws. Either this process goes on forever like a infinitely nested Russian doll, or it does not go on forever and come to a end and some things are just fundamental and it is pointless when you reach that level to ask what is it made of?. Indeed. But some stop at elementary particles, or strings, or any token that they assume to have an independent physical existence. The platonist explains it through a mathematical relation, without any material substances One of those things must be true, I don't know which one and nobody else does either. With comp (the idea that we are machine), we can, and actually have to, stop at the universal Turing machine, or equivalent. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 13 Sep 2013, at 03:18, meekerdb wrote: On 9/12/2013 8:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: The difference is the following. Some say there is a broken glass, but forbid you to ask why there is a broken glass?. That is what some materialist, and all physicalist are doing for the notion of physical universe. They say that we cannot find an explanation of the origin of the physical laws, and insult as irremediably idiot anyone trying to search on that problem. There seems to be a lot of attributing of opinions to others. My friend Vic Stenger, who's about as reductionist and physicalist as one can be, has written a book, The Comprehensible Cosmos about the origin of physical laws, which he says are just models we create. I don't know of any physicist who insists that we cannot find an explanation for physical laws - although very few of them think the probability of success makes the study a wise choice. But in his book God the failed hypothesis it seems clear to me that he assume some primitive physical reality, everywhere from the first to the last page. If he says that physical laws are just models we create, what does he mean by we, if we are not physical object or model ourself? I think you refer to the physicists who believe in a physical explanation of the physical laws, like Deutsch (but unlike Wheeler who is a notable exception, with Tegmark too). They don't go out of the Aristotelian frame, I think. I like very much Stenger, especially a comprehensible cosmos, but he is still rather naive when approaching theology, even if he insist that his critics bear only on the Abramanic theologies. Bruno 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Science, or at least theoretical physics, is all about explaining physical laws in terms of other more general laws. Either this process goes on forever like a infinitely nested Russian doll, or it does not go on forever and come to a end and some things are just fundamental and it is pointless when you reach that level to ask what is it made of?. Indeed. But some stop at elementary particles, or strings, One step at a time! At this point it would be pretty silly to worry about what strings are made of when we have almost no evidence that they even exist. Right now it can explain almost nothing we see so there is no such thing as string theory, there is only the striving for a string theory; when and if theorists succeed in building something useful out of it then we can talk about what if anything strings are made of. With comp (the idea that we are machine), By machine I assume you mean a deterministic process. Well you're a logician so you know we either are or we are not, and if we are not then we are by definition random. Like it or not its a question of cuckoo clocks or roulette wheels. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Hi John, Roulette wheels are technically deterministic. I know with your cuckoo clocks or roulette wheels aphorism you're trying to make things as simple as possible, but that is potentially confusing. Terren On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 1:49 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Science, or at least theoretical physics, is all about explaining physical laws in terms of other more general laws. Either this process goes on forever like a infinitely nested Russian doll, or it does not go on forever and come to a end and some things are just fundamental and it is pointless when you reach that level to ask what is it made of?. Indeed. But some stop at elementary particles, or strings, One step at a time! At this point it would be pretty silly to worry about what strings are made of when we have almost no evidence that they even exist. Right now it can explain almost nothing we see so there is no such thing as string theory, there is only the striving for a string theory; when and if theorists succeed in building something useful out of it then we can talk about what if anything strings are made of. With comp (the idea that we are machine), By machine I assume you mean a deterministic process. Well you're a logician so you know we either are or we are not, and if we are not then we are by definition random. Like it or not its a question of cuckoo clocks or roulette wheels. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Every AI scientist, category theorist or semioticist, and cognitive psychologist just tries to redo the work of Aristotle or Spinoza with different names and in a donwgraded way, to fit the fashion prejudices and the needs of this time, that includes extreme reductionist scientifists like you. 2013/9/11 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Einstein read Kant, and loved Spinoza, and admit his influence in his own research. He may have read and loved detective stories too. Einstein was interested in things other than science, like politics, and those thinkers may have helped him there, but not in his serious work. As for Spinoza, this is what Richard Feynman had to say: My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these attributes, and Substances, and all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there's no excuse for it! In the same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world and you can't tell which is right. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
In a conference Dennet said that a country with religious soldiers would be defeated by a country ruled by engineers and economists . the audience were well trained and educated atheists, but they couldn´t avoid to laugh loudly at the end of the phrase. The problem with Dennet and in general with the analytical philosophers that are after to the discoveries of experimental science, is the renounce to hypothesize and even to despise whatever the experiemental science still don´t know. They have Cartesian Blindness. But scientists, at least the bright ones are not blind. They ask themselves new questions and assume hypothesis that others may discuss. THe scientist did not studied religion. Therefore Dennet despise religion. David Sloan Wilson is a evolutionary scientist that study religion from an evolutionary point of view.. What DSW discovered was against the prejudices of Dennet, However Dennet accepted the arguments of DSW (there are some videos out there), but that did not changed his prejudices. It is too old and has invested too much on that. Instead of extracting the consequences and going further, creating new hypothesis for the advance of knowledge. The classical philosopher is different. He confront the questions that arrive to his mind directly. And what the classical philosopher as itself is how to live, and this means to know himself and the other like him. That means to discover the human mind and the highest level. And because in order to live he act and think, he tries to know consciously what he do unconsciously when he do and feel things. That introspection method is valid and good because he find that what he discover has a lot of common things with what others say about their own introspections. The concepts , entities o and their relation are the same. there are differences in the rank of them and their names. This means that these concepts are universal. For all humans. For sure, the modern reductionst scientists will advance and study higher level phenomena, and one day will aknowledge the work of the classical philosophers. That is just happening now with the evolutionary scientists. 2013/9/12 Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com Every AI scientist, category theorist or semioticist, and cognitive psychologist just tries to redo the work of Aristotle or Spinoza with different names and in a donwgraded way, to fit the fashion prejudices and the needs of this time, that includes extreme reductionist scientifists like you. 2013/9/11 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Einstein read Kant, and loved Spinoza, and admit his influence in his own research. He may have read and loved detective stories too. Einstein was interested in things other than science, like politics, and those thinkers may have helped him there, but not in his serious work. As for Spinoza, this is what Richard Feynman had to say: My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these attributes, and Substances, and all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there's no excuse for it! In the same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world and you can't tell which is right. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- Alberto. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 11 Sep 2013, at 20:37, meekerdb wrote: On 9/11/2013 4:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Sep 2013, at 19:45, meekerdb wrote: On 9/10/2013 1:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Today we know that science proves nothing about reality, but it can refute theories, and it can provides evidences for theories, but not automatically the truth. Scientific theories are certainly not automatically the truth. But to say science proves *nothing* about reality is ridiculous. It might depend what we mean by reality. If reality is defined by a model of arithmetic, then we can agree that science can prove statements having the shape: if there is a reality, then there is an infinity of prime numbers, and that might be an example. But usually we prove propositions inside theories, That's your Platonist dogma. Not at all. It is a common definition of proving. It is always in a theory. Observation can only lead to conceiving, choosing or abandoning a theory. I know many people use proof in larger sense, but this very fact explains the mess here, around epistemology. You can only prove propositions inside theories by assuming some axioms from which to prove them. The scientific method is prove theories (in the original sense of test) by observation. That's how Galileo proved the moon was not a perfect celestial sphere: he observed craters on it. He just refuted the theory that the moon was a perfect sphere. and it is always a sort of bet that such theories really apply to reality. Sure, because the axioms and the rules of inference are never certain. But when you make an empirical observation you are interacting with reality if there's any reality at all. OK. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:30 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.comwrote: In a conference Dennet said that a country with religious soldiers would be defeated by a country ruled by engineers and economists. There is certainly some truth in that. Religion can make otherwise sane people suicidal and suicidal people make for excellent cannon fodder. You are unlikely to deliberately crash an airliner into a skyscraper unless you think you're going to get 77 virgins in the afterlife. David Sloan Wilson is a evolutionary scientist that study religion from an evolutionary point of view. It sounds to me that Dennet has also studied religion from an evolutionary point of view, the mindless suicidal soldier may be a reason that religion evolved. Dennet despise religion. Proving that not all philosophers are fools, just most of them. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 11 Sep 2013, at 21:25, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 5:41 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: My point was just that the verdict against Galileo was rational, or Popperian. I don't believe that Karl Popper was as deep a thinker as many on this list do, but I don't think he was as big a fool as THAT! It is question of historical facts. The Church asks Galileo to mention that his proposal was a theory. It is not important, because the motivation of the Church was not based on a respect of Reason. Just that Feyerabend was correct on this (at least). Aristotle was refuted, but this is usual in science. It does not make him bad, on the contrary. None of Aristotle's ideas about physics were even close to being correct and could have been easily refuted even in his own day, but instead it was held as the gospel truth for almost 2000 years. And probably Aristotle might have some responsibility for this. But being refuted is a glory, in science. It means that you have succeeded to be read (not always obvious), and have been enough precise to be wrong. As Bertrand Russell said: Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths. Great genius makes big mistakes. You can't judge people by singling out their stupidities. Physics would have been better off if Aristotle had never been born. You don't know that. Perhaps, as Plato was more correct with respect to comp, but science might need to do detours. Also, in theology, you are the one still under the influence of Aristotle, which I think was due to a lack of understanding of Plato. By Aristotelian I just mean the theories which assume an ontological physical universe. I asked you this before but got no answer, if the physical universe does not exist how would things be different if it did? If the physical universe did not exist there would be no Moon, no Earth, no Sun, no atoms, no John Clark, and well things would be rather different. But I was talking about the Aristotelian Physical Universe. This one needs, by definition, to be assumed as a *primitive* entity. That one imposes physicalism. If that one would exist, and if there is no flaw in my proposal, then we cannot be digital machine, and most probably could not evolve through evolution, and things would also be different. I don't know, but my point here is that it is indirectly testable. By Platonist theories I mean the theories which do not assume a physical universe and which try to explain the appearance of it from something else. Then I am a Platonist and so is everybody who has half a brain because clearly the appearance of something is not the same as the thing itself. The sound of broken glass is not broken glass, the look of broken glass is not broken glass, the feel of broken glass is not broken glass. What IS broken glass? I don't have a complete answer but It must have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a thing. I don't understand why physical universe isn't a good name for that collection of properties. The difference is the following. Some say there is a broken glass, but forbid you to ask why there is a broken glass?. That is what some materialist, and all physicalist are doing for the notion of physical universe. They say that we cannot find an explanation of the origin of the physical laws, and insult as irremediably idiot anyone trying to search on that problem. Bruno John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Feyerabend was correct on this (at least). I ask myself why in the 21'th century would any educated man agree with a certified jackass like Feyerabend who said the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself and Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just? I can only think of 2 explanations for this very odd behavior: 1) The person does not really agree that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself or that Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just. Thus he was only trying to be provocative. 2) The person sincerely believes that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself and Its verdict against Galileo was rational. Thus he is just not very bright. I hope #1 is the explanation because as I have said, sincerity is a vastly overrated virtue but intelligence is not. None of Aristotle's ideas about physics were even close to being correct and could have been easily refuted even in his own day, but instead it was held as the gospel truth for almost 2000 years. And probably Aristotle might have some responsibility for this. But being refuted is a glory, in science. It means that you have succeeded to be read People read what pornographers have to say too. and have been enough precise to be wrong. OK good point, I'll give you that. in theology, To hell with theology! you are the one still under the influence of Aristotle, which I think was due to a lack of understanding of Plato. To hell with Aristotle and Plato! Plato was more correct with respect to comp To hell with comp! If the physical universe did not exist there would be no Moon, no Earth, no Sun, no atoms, no John Clark, and well things would be rather different. Well, things are not different so logically we can only conclude that the physical universe does exist. Now that we've got that settled let's move on to other more interesting things. That is what some materialist, and all physicalist are doing for the notion of physical universe. They say that we cannot find an explanation of the origin of the physical laws, Straw man, I don't know anybody who is saying that. Science, or at least theoretical physics, is all about explaining physical laws in terms of other more general laws. Either this process goes on forever like a infinitely nested Russian doll, or it does not go on forever and come to a end and some things are just fundamental and it is pointless when you reach that level to ask what is it made of?. One of those things must be true, I don't know which one and nobody else does either. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 11:15 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Feynman was very bad in philosophy. Even in the philosophy of QM, he has avoided all questions, and only put in footnote some remarks showing that he did not believe in the wave collapse. He added often: don't try to understand what happens, Nature just acts like that ... That is bad philosophy Maybe, but he wasn't a professional philosopher, thank goodness. While others were contemplating their navels and doing nothing but saying the same thing over and over quantum mechanics is weird Feynman was trying to figure it out. and bad science. BULLSHIT! Feynman predicted in 1948 that the magnetic moment of an electron can't be exactly 1 in Dirac units as had been thought because it is effected by an infinite (and I do mean infinite and not just astronomical) number of virtual particles. He brilliantly figured out a way to calculate this effect and do so in a finite amount of time, he calculated it must be 1.00115965246, while the best experimental value found much later is 1.00115965221. That's like measuring the distance between Los Angeles and New York to the thickness of a human hair, and Feynman got it right just by using his mind. That's too good to be a coincidence, Feynman must have been onto something good. Let's see a good philosopher like your pal Feyerabend beat that! John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
2013/9/12 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:30 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.comwrote: In a conference Dennet said that a country with religious soldiers would be defeated by a country ruled by engineers and economists. There is certainly some truth in that. Religion can make otherwise sane people suicidal and suicidal people make for excellent cannon fodder. You are unlikely to deliberately crash an airliner into a skyscraper unless you think you're going to get 77 virgins in the afterlife. I don't understand what you argue here, because it seems you argue the contrary of the quote... ie a country with religious soldiers would defeat a country ruled by engineers and economists instead of a country with religious soldiers would be defeated by a country ruled by engineers and economists... which truth are you referring to ? There is certainly some truth in that ? Quentin David Sloan Wilson is a evolutionary scientist that study religion from an evolutionary point of view. It sounds to me that Dennet has also studied religion from an evolutionary point of view, the mindless suicidal soldier may be a reason that religion evolved. Dennet despise religion. Proving that not all philosophers are fools, just most of them. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/12/2013 3:30 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: In a conference Dennet said that a country with religious soldiers would be defeated by a country ruled by engineers and economists . the audience were well trained and educated atheists, but they couldn´t avoid to laugh loudly at the end of the phrase. He said that by way of making a provocative introduction. If you watch the rest of his talk it's clear he doesn't believe it's necessarily so. The problem with Dennet and in general with the analytical philosophers that are after to the discoveries of experimental science, is the renounce to hypothesize and even to despise whatever the experiemental science still don´t know. They have Cartesian Blindness. But scientists, at least the bright ones are not blind. They ask themselves new questions and assume hypothesis that others may discuss. THe scientist did not studied religion. Therefore Dennet despise religion. David Sloan Wilson is a evolutionary scientist that study religion from an evolutionary point of view.. What DSW discovered was against the prejudices of Dennet, I've read both of them, and Scott Atran and Loyal Rue, and I don't see that Wilson or the others found anything contradicting Dennett. However Dennet accepted the arguments of DSW (there are some videos out there), but that did not changed his prejudices. It is too old and has invested too much on that. Instead of extracting the consequences and going further, creating new hypothesis for the advance of knowledge. Dennett also studies religion and even wrote a book recommending more study of religion,Breaking the Spell. He's currently conducting The Clergy Project. The classical philosopher is different. He confront the questions that arrive to his mind directly. And what the classical philosopher as itself is how to live, and this means to know himself and the other like him. That means to discover the human mind and the highest level. And because in order to live he act and think, he tries to know consciously what he do unconsciously when he do and feel things. That introspection method is valid and good because he find that what he discover has a lot of common things with what others say about their own introspections. The concepts , entities o and their relation are the same. there are differences in the rank of them and their names. This means that these concepts are universal. For all humans. That was certainly the method of philosophers like Hume and Nietzche - both of whom despised religion and specifically the Abrahamic religions. For sure, the modern reductionst scientists will advance and study higher level phenomena, and one day will aknowledge the work of the classical philosophers. That is just happening now with the evolutionary scientists. Holistic science has always been the refuge of charlatans and snake oil salesmen. If it were going to be useful anywhere you would expect it to be in the humanities, but you're a fool if you hire a holistic lawyer to defend you. Brent I have often thought that people who believe in alternative medicine should fly in airplanes designed by people who believe in alternative physics. --- Terence Geogahegan -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/12/2013 8:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: The difference is the following. Some say there is a broken glass, but forbid you to ask why there is a broken glass?. That is what some materialist, and all physicalist are doing for the notion of physical universe. They say that we cannot find an explanation of the origin of the physical laws, and insult as irremediably idiot anyone trying to search on that problem. There seems to be a lot of attributing of opinions to others. My friend Vic Stenger, who's about as reductionist and physicalist as one can be, has written a book, The Comprehensible Cosmos about the origin of physical laws, which he says are just models we create. I don't know of any physicist who insists that we cannot find an explanation for physical laws - although very few of them think the probability of success makes the study a wise choice. 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 3:18 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/12/2013 8:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: The difference is the following. Some say there is a broken glass, but forbid you to ask why there is a broken glass?. That is what some materialist, and all physicalist are doing for the notion of physical universe. They say that we cannot find an explanation of the origin of the physical laws, and insult as irremediably idiot anyone trying to search on that problem. There seems to be a lot of attributing of opinions to others. My friend Vic Stenger, who's about as reductionist and physicalist as one can be, has written a book, The Comprehensible Cosmos about the origin of physical laws, which he says are just models we create. I don't know of any physicist who insists that we cannot find an explanation for physical laws - Ok but... although very few of them think the probability of success makes the study a wise choice. Doesn't this make the point? Their positions influence research/funding and low probability means practically stupid... also, how should anyone about probabilities with such a question? Not hubris? PGC 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/12/2013 6:42 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 3:18 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/12/2013 8:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: The difference is the following. Some say there is a broken glass, but forbid you to ask why there is a broken glass?. That is what some materialist, and all physicalist are doing for the notion of physical universe. They say that we cannot find an explanation of the origin of the physical laws, and insult as irremediably idiot anyone trying to search on that problem. There seems to be a lot of attributing of opinions to others. My friend Vic Stenger, who's about as reductionist and physicalist as one can be, has written a book, The Comprehensible Cosmos about the origin of physical laws, which he says are just models we create. I don't know of any physicist who insists that we cannot find an explanation for physical laws - Ok but... although very few of them think the probability of success makes the study a wise choice. Doesn't this make the point? Their positions influence research/funding and low probability means practically stupid... also, how should anyone about probabilities with such a question? Not hubris? PGC You're perfectly free to pursue the subject. Everybody has to decide for themselves how to spend their life. I don't think they owe you an explanation for their decision. 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 10 Sep 2013, at 17:35, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 4:55 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I do not like very much Feyerabend, and disgaree with its overal philosophy of science, I do agree with him on Galileo. OK so let me get this straight, you agree that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, I did not say that. Nor did Feyerabend. Bruno you are incorrect, Feyerabend did say the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and he also said Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just: hemultidisciplinarian.com/2012/08/07/the-worst-enemy-of-science/ Bruno, is this really the sort of toothless hillbilly you want to be associated with? John, I can't access to that page. My point was just that the verdict against Galileo was rational, or Popperian. Blinded? BLINDED!? Were talking about Galileo and the church but it's Galileo who was blinded!? Yes, he was blinded by its Aristotelian faith Aristotelian faith!? Galileo was the guy who proved that Aristotle was the worst physicist who ever lived! Aristotle was refuted, but this is usual in science. It does not make him bad, on the contrary. And I thought this list was supposed to be about cutting edge developments in human knowledge, so why the hell do we keep talking about ancient Greeks who (with the important exception of Greek mathematicians) didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground? As long as we don't progress in the mind body problem, we cannot decide between plato and Aristotle's conception of reality. By Aristotelian I just mean the theories which assume an ontological physical universe. By Platonist theories I mean the theories which do not assume a physical universe and which try to explain the appearance of it from something else. We have progressed, we know that IF we are machine, then there is no primitive physical universe such that we can use it to explain the physical laws. We have to explain the physical laws from internal arithmetical modalities. It seems to work up to now. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 10 Sep 2013, at 19:45, meekerdb wrote: On 9/10/2013 1:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Today we know that science proves nothing about reality, but it can refute theories, and it can provides evidences for theories, but not automatically the truth. Scientific theories are certainly not automatically the truth. But to say science proves *nothing* about reality is ridiculous. It might depend what we mean by reality. If reality is defined by a model of arithmetic, then we can agree that science can prove statements having the shape: if there is a reality, then there is an infinity of prime numbers, and that might be an example. But usually we prove propositions inside theories, and it is always a sort of bet that such theories really apply to reality. Science is born from doubt and never leave it. Bruno 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
I don't see how reporting on something that people have known for thousands of years is new or unexpected. It's new because most white, educated reading audiences at that time didn't hang out with Huichol shamans. It's like saying 'why would anyone listen to Elvis Presley sing 'Hound Dog' when it had already been sung four years earlier by Big Mama Thornton. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 8:22 PM, chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.comwrote: Given the way John has framed the task any contribution made by xyz will end up not being a contribution in philosophy. Take Charles Pierce who pretty much founded semiotics and made contributions in fields as diverse as psychology and chemistry; or Frege who invented predicate logic; or Descartes work in mathematics, or Leibniz's invention of calculus; As I said on Jan 6, 2012: I love philosophy but hate philosophers because very little philosophy comes from professional philosophers, it comes from scientists and mathematicians. Every time I think I'm being too hard on philosophers somebody mentions a person like Feyerabend and I remember why I dislike them so much. I have also said that Godel and Turing made some of the most important philosophical discoveries of the 20'th century, and Charles Peirce (I don't know who Charles Pierce is) was a mathematical logician too, and so was Gottlob Frege. Descartes and Leibniz made huge contributions to human knowledge but that was before 2 centuries ago. I specified the cutoff because in their day people who did what they did were called Natural Philosophers. Firstly, there hasn't ever been a method scientists have always employed. Secondly, there is always an argument between scientists over how to proceed correctly. Exactly! If Popper had found an algorithm to do good science I would call him the greatest human being who ever lived, but he did no such thing. Students are preached to about Popper and falsificationism in one lecture and in the next Philosophy majors sure, they write PHD dissertations about falsification, but once science students get out of the 5th grade their teachers don't preach about it much and for the same reason they don't preach about the multiplication table much. The idea that scientists have radically altered the way they work after 1963 because of a book Karl Popper wrote is absolutely nuts; most working scientists probably couldn't even tell you who the hell Popper was, they have more important things to occupy their mind. Even in physics, the 'hardest' of hard sciences, there is trouble afoot with string theory, and a debate rages as to whether it is falsifiable There is no debate about that whatsoever, string theory as it exists right now is NOT falsifiable. Some think that someday it may be falsifiable and others think it probably never will be, but nobody really knows if it just needs more work or if it's on the wrong track entirely. Time will tell, but right now it's misnamed, String Theory is not a theory at all, it's just a hope for a theory. Even John, right now, is doing the very same thing. He is engaging in philosophy. He is expending all this effort on what he has argued is worthless. Philosophy is NOT worthless, it's philosophers that are worthless because, despite the similar sounding words, philosophers haven't done any philosophy in 200 years. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/11/2013 4:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Sep 2013, at 19:45, meekerdb wrote: On 9/10/2013 1:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Today we know that science proves nothing about reality, but it can refute theories, and it can provides evidences for theories, but not automatically the truth. Scientific theories are certainly not automatically the truth. But to say science proves *nothing* about reality is ridiculous. It might depend what we mean by reality. If reality is defined by a model of arithmetic, then we can agree that science can prove statements having the shape: if there is a reality, then there is an infinity of prime numbers, and that might be an example. But usually we prove propositions inside theories, That's your Platonist dogma. You can only prove propositions inside theories by assuming some axioms from which to prove them. The scientific method is prove theories (in the original sense of test) by observation. That's how Galileo proved the moon was not a perfect celestial sphere: he observed craters on it. and it is always a sort of bet that such theories really apply to reality. Sure, because the axioms and the rules of inference are never certain. But when you make an empirical observation you are interacting with reality if there's any reality at all. Brent Science is born from doubt and never leave it. Bruno -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Einstein read Kant, and loved Spinoza, and admit his influence in his own research. He may have read and loved detective stories too. Einstein was interested in things other than science, like politics, and those thinkers may have helped him there, but not in his serious work. As for Spinoza, this is what Richard Feynman had to say: My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these attributes, and Substances, and all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there's no excuse for it! In the same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world and you can't tell which is right. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 5:41 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: My point was just that the verdict against Galileo was rational, or Popperian. I don't believe that Karl Popper was as deep a thinker as many on this list do, but I don't think he was as big a fool as THAT! Aristotle was refuted, but this is usual in science. It does not make him bad, on the contrary. None of Aristotle's ideas about physics were even close to being correct and could have been easily refuted even in his own day, but instead it was held as the gospel truth for almost 2000 years. As Bertrand Russell said: Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths. Physics would have been better off if Aristotle had never been born. By Aristotelian I just mean the theories which assume an ontological physical universe. I asked you this before but got no answer, if the physical universe does not exist how would things be different if it did? By Platonist theories I mean the theories which do not assume a physical universe and which try to explain the appearance of it from something else. Then I am a Platonist and so is everybody who has half a brain because clearly the appearance of something is not the same as the thing itself. The sound of broken glass is not broken glass, the look of broken glass is not broken glass, the feel of broken glass is not broken glass. What IS broken glass? I don't have a complete answer but It must have stable properties of some sort or I wouldn't be able to identify it as a thing. I don't understand why physical universe isn't a good name for that collection of properties. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/11/2013 11:54 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: But when you make an empirical observation you are interacting with reality if there's any reality at all There may be an underlyng reality behind. Matter and their phenomena can be a derived reality Math - compution - time - mind - geometry - space - matter and phenomena Sure, in fact 'matter' is ontologically vague in physics - an electron 'matter' or is it just an excitation in the electron field. Is a wave function 'matter' or just a mathematical abstraction. Explanations always have to be in terms of something else, ideally something you understand better than the thing explained. So I like NUMBERS - MACHINE DREAMS - PHYSICAL - HUMANS - PHYSICS - NUMBERS. --- Bruno Marchal 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/11/2013 11:26 AM, John Clark wrote: Philosophy is NOT worthless, it's philosophers that are worthless because, despite the similar sounding words, philosophers haven't done any philosophy in 200 years. Since philosophy can be useful it's reasonable that some people try to specialize in doing it instead of leaving it just to experts in some field who are mostly too busy or narrowly focused to do it. I think Dan Dennett does some useful philosophy and mainly because he actually involves himself in AI, animal cognition, and robotic research projects. There's an essay by Dennett on the Wieseltier v. Pinker dispute which outlines Dennett's view of the role of philosophers: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-dennett/post_5592_b_3901577.html Brent He's like a philosopher who says, I know it's possible in practice. Now I'd like to know whether it's possible in principle. --- Daniel Dennett, on Michael Behe -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
But when you make an empirical observation you are interacting with reality if there's any reality at all There may be an underlyng reality behind. Matter and their phenomena can be a derived reality Math - compution - time - mind - geometry - space - matter and phenomena 2013/9/11 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net On 9/11/2013 4:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Sep 2013, at 19:45, meekerdb wrote: On 9/10/2013 1:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Today we know that science proves nothing about reality, but it can refute theories, and it can provides evidences for theories, but not automatically the truth. Scientific theories are certainly not automatically the truth. But to say science proves *nothing* about reality is ridiculous. It might depend what we mean by reality. If reality is defined by a model of arithmetic, then we can agree that science can prove statements having the shape: if there is a reality, then there is an infinity of prime numbers, and that might be an example. But usually we prove propositions inside theories, That's your Platonist dogma. You can only prove propositions inside theories by assuming some axioms from which to prove them. The scientific method is prove theories (in the original sense of test) by observation. That's how Galileo proved the moon was not a perfect celestial sphere: he observed craters on it. and it is always a sort of bet that such theories really apply to reality. Sure, because the axioms and the rules of inference are never certain. But when you make an empirical observation you are interacting with reality if there's any reality at all. Brent Science is born from doubt and never leave it. Bruno -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
RE: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Hi John And I am STILL waiting for somebody to tell me one thing that bozos like Popper and Feyerabend who call themselves philosophers have discovered in the last 2 centuries that is deep, clear, precise, unexpected and true that scientists had not discovered long before.It seems like a simple request and I have asked 3 times but nobody can think of a damn thing; and yet people continue to tell me how wonderful Feyerabend and Popper were. Yeah, Ive noticed that too. You've asked at least twice before, I can completely vouch for you on that one. On this very thread you set the challenge earlier and then again later but before this current instance. And now you've set it again. By my calculations that makes it at least 3 times you've asked people this. There might be other times that I haven't noticed, I can't say for sure about that. Perhaps you could help out on this detail? It might be more than three but it definitely isn't less. And you can trust in me completely to back you up on that to anyone who says different. All the best. Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 01:28:16 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com wrote: it seems to me that John has just misunderstood Feyerabend. It seems to me that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself leaves little room for misunderstanding and is as clear as it is imbecilic. And I might add that anyone who feels compelled to defend such a moronic statement is also a moron. Unsuprising given his misunderstanding of Popper Even Popper misunderstood Popper because he admitted (in 1978!) that he was wrong about Darwin. That's almost as good as the church admitting (in the year 2000!) that they may have gone just a bit too far in their treatment of Galileo and maybe just maybe he had a point after all. There have been calls for the church to reopen the case against the astronomer Giordano Bruno and give hin a posthumous apology for burning him alive for saying that the stars were other suns, but so far the church has not done so, but give them time, it's only been 413 years. not to mention Darwin. Please show me that your understanding of Darwin is greater than my own. Dazzle me with your brilliance. From a Popperian point of view Galileo ought to be regarded as unscrupulous and the church should be regarded as the more reasonable party in the affair. Galileo discovered new knowledge for humanity, Popper and Feyerabend discovered nothing, zip zero zilch goose egg. And they were both philosophers and if it really was their point of view that Galileo was unscrupulous and the church reasonable then these ignorant jackasses are yet another reason philosophers have a bad name. And I am STILL waiting for somebody to tell me one thing that bozos like Popper and Feyerabend who call themselves philosophers have discovered in the last 2 centuries that is deep, clear, precise, unexpected and true that scientists had not discovered long before. It seems like a simple request and I have asked 3 times but nobody can think of a damn thing; and yet people continue to tell me how wonderful Feyerabend and Popper were. I think they were like bad movie critics, full of condemnation about how other people made their movie but couldn't make one themselves if you put a gun to their head. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 09 Sep 2013, at 20:42, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 10:00 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I do not like very much Feyerabend, and disgaree with its overal philosophy of science, I do agree with him on Galileo. OK so let me get this straight, you agree that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, I did not say that. Nor did Feyerabend. We were just saying that concerning the precise point that galielo should have accepted that it was theory, not the truth per se. In this orecise case, perhaps by chance, the Church was asking to Galileo to be ... Popperian. Of course the Church itself was not Popperian nor rational, as I mentioned. you think somebody wanting to burn somebody else alive for saying the earth goes around the sun is much more faithful to reason than the scientist who said it. Bruno, at this point I really don't want to hear any more crap about comp, right now I just want to know if that is what you're really trying to say. Being provocative is all well and good, but not to the point of stupidity. Galileo was blinded Blinded? BLINDED!? Were talking about Galileo and the church but it's Galileo who was blinded!? Yes, he was blinded by its Aristotelian faith that what we see is automatically the truth. Today we know that science proves nothing about reality, but it can refute theories, and it can provides evidences for theories, but not automatically the truth. In that precise case, by a sort of chance, the Church was correct against Galileo, from a logical perspective. Of course, Galileo was very plausibly less wrong than the Church on the content of the theory, but that is not what Feyerabend was discussing. Bruno This is yet another thing that gives philosophy a bad name, I may have heard stupider remarks in my life but I can't think of one right now. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
John Popper and specially Feyerabend discovered how the scientists work, not how scientist should work or or how they think that they work, since the subtle details of the process of scientific discovery are unconscious unless a lot of time is devoted to think how we think. They gave it light and showed their flaws and strengths. Read again the tread for the details. 2013/9/10 chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com Hi John * And I am STILL waiting for somebody to tell me one thing that bozos like Popper and Feyerabend who call themselves philosophers have discovered in the last 2 centuries that is deep, clear, precise, unexpected and true that scientists had not discovered long before.It seems like a simple request and I have asked 3 times but nobody can think of a damn thing; and yet people continue to tell me how wonderful Feyerabend and Popper were.* Yeah, Ive noticed that too. You've asked at least twice before, I can completely vouch for you on that one. On this very thread you set the challenge earlier and then again later but before this current instance. And now you've set it again. By my calculations that makes it at least 3 times you've asked people this. There might be other times that I haven't noticed, I can't say for sure about that. Perhaps you could help out on this detail? It might be more than three but it definitely isn't less. And you can trust in me completely to back you up on that to anyone who says different. All the best. -- Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 01:28:16 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com wrote: it seems to me that John has just misunderstood Feyerabend. It seems to me that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself leaves little room for misunderstanding and is as clear as it is imbecilic. And I might add that anyone who feels compelled to defend such a moronic statement is also a moron. Unsuprising given his misunderstanding of Popper Even Popper misunderstood Popper because he admitted (in 1978!) that he was wrong about Darwin. That's almost as good as the church admitting (in the year 2000!) that they may have gone just a bit too far in their treatment of Galileo and maybe just maybe he had a point after all. There have been calls for the church to reopen the case against the astronomer Giordano Bruno and give hin a posthumous apology for burning him alive for saying that the stars were other suns, but so far the church has not done so, but give them time, it's only been 413 years. not to mention Darwin. Please show me that your understanding of Darwin is greater than my own. Dazzle me with your brilliance. From a Popperian point of view Galileo ought to be regarded as unscrupulous and the church should be regarded as the more reasonable party in the affair. Galileo discovered new knowledge for humanity, Popper and Feyerabend discovered nothing, zip zero zilch goose egg. And they were both philosophers and if it really was their point of view that Galileo was unscrupulous and the church reasonable then these ignorant jackasses are yet another reason philosophers have a bad name. And I am STILL waiting for somebody to tell me one thing that bozos like Popper and Feyerabend who call themselves philosophers have discovered in the last 2 centuries that is deep, clear, precise, unexpected and true that scientists had not discovered long before. It seems like a simple request and I have asked 3 times but nobody can think of a damn thing; and yet people continue to tell me how wonderful Feyerabend and Popper were. I think they were like bad movie critics, full of condemnation about how other people made their movie but couldn't make one themselves if you put a gun to their head. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:52 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 11:58:37AM +0200, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi Alberto,
On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com
wrote:
I think that there are real progress that can be even measured in terms of
entropic order. That a man embodies more structure and organization than a
bacteria is objective and measurable, and it is a product of more emergent
levels of evolution. In concrete the human being includes the eucariotic
level, the multicelularity level and human society level, that are
aggregations of coordinated individuals to achieve an individuality of an
higher level. These levels are absent in bacteria .
Ok, there's an arrow of complexification, that's undeniable. I'm not
convinced that Darwinism alone explains that. One of the reasons for
my scepticism is the failure of ALife models to replicate unbounded
complexification. My favourite attempt in this domain is the Echo
model by John Holland -- which is beautiful but didn't work in this
sense. There's also Tierra/Avida, where you get a lot of interesting
stuff but no unbounded complexification.
One idea I heard but don't know whom to attribute to is this:
evolutionary complexification is just an artefact of the simplicity of
the initial state. The idea being that the laws of physics inherently
contain a pressure towards a certain level of complexity and that
evolution is just following the path of least resitance, in a way. It
is then conceivable that there is a state of equilibrium that we
haven't reached yet and that complexification will halt at some point.
This is wild speculation, of course, but I like to ponder on this
hypothesis.
I think this idea goes by the name of modal bacter. It was, perhaps, most
forcefully argued in Stephen Gould's 1996 book Full House.
Thanks Russell!
I suspect the idea is wrong, because it fails to explain the
exponential growth of diversity, seemingly observed by
Palaeontologists such as Michael Benton:
@Article{Benton01,
author = {Michael J. Benton},
title ={Biodiversity on Land and in the Sea},
journal = {Geological Journal},
year = 2001,
volume = 36,
pages ={211--230}
}
Ok, but I guess that depends on how we measure diversity, which is not
a trivial matter. From a quick look at this paper, it seems to focus
on the number of biological orders/families/genus. Suppose we were
able to estimate the Kolmogorov complexity of the entire ecosystem, do
you figure it would also grow exponentially?
What is not true is that human beings are more adapted than bacteria.
That
is not true. Because there is no objective and absolute measure of
adaptation. It ever depends on the concrete environment, and varies a lot.
Humm... I think ecologists are able to estimate the likelihood of a
species going extinct. I'd argue that this could be taken as a measure
of adaption.
That measure is called persistence, and no, it is not really related to
adaption. For an adaption measure, one good possibility is Mark
Bedau's cumulative evolutionary activity
@InProceedings{Bedau-etal98,
author = {Mark A. Bedau and Emile Snyder and Norman H. Packard},
title ={A Classification of Long-Term Evolutionary Dynamics},
crossref = {ALifeVI},
pages={228--237}
}
I read this paper some years ago, it's a very nice one.
I would say that cumulative evolutionary activity is a metric that
applies to the entire evolutionary system as a whole. The article
makes it depressingly clear the Holland's Echo does not match the
unbounded evolution dynamics found in the fossil record. But maybe I'm
missing something.
In the previous discussion I was arguing that persistence could be
intuitively taken as a fitness measure of some specific population or
species, and I still feel that's the case. If you want to estimate the
biological fitness of an individual, you could determine an analogous
probability of the individual producing x viable offsprings before
dying.
I think.
Telmo.
--
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Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
chris Lol. A good mockig of the reductionist obsession with the details and despising the big picture. For sure you have work hard to certify that John has asked that three times and not more nor less. That is accurate. I would say that is scientifically accurate. No. wait we need more confirmations of the experimental fact. Lets get busy investigating that. 2013/9/10 chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com Hi John * And I am STILL waiting for somebody to tell me one thing that bozos like Popper and Feyerabend who call themselves philosophers have discovered in the last 2 centuries that is deep, clear, precise, unexpected and true that scientists had not discovered long before.It seems like a simple request and I have asked 3 times but nobody can think of a damn thing; and yet people continue to tell me how wonderful Feyerabend and Popper were.* Yeah, Ive noticed that too. You've asked at least twice before, I can completely vouch for you on that one. On this very thread you set the challenge earlier and then again later but before this current instance. And now you've set it again. By my calculations that makes it at least 3 times you've asked people this. There might be other times that I haven't noticed, I can't say for sure about that. Perhaps you could help out on this detail? It might be more than three but it definitely isn't less. And you can trust in me completely to back you up on that to anyone who says different. All the best. -- Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 01:28:16 -0400 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com wrote: it seems to me that John has just misunderstood Feyerabend. It seems to me that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself leaves little room for misunderstanding and is as clear as it is imbecilic. And I might add that anyone who feels compelled to defend such a moronic statement is also a moron. Unsuprising given his misunderstanding of Popper Even Popper misunderstood Popper because he admitted (in 1978!) that he was wrong about Darwin. That's almost as good as the church admitting (in the year 2000!) that they may have gone just a bit too far in their treatment of Galileo and maybe just maybe he had a point after all. There have been calls for the church to reopen the case against the astronomer Giordano Bruno and give hin a posthumous apology for burning him alive for saying that the stars were other suns, but so far the church has not done so, but give them time, it's only been 413 years. not to mention Darwin. Please show me that your understanding of Darwin is greater than my own. Dazzle me with your brilliance. From a Popperian point of view Galileo ought to be regarded as unscrupulous and the church should be regarded as the more reasonable party in the affair. Galileo discovered new knowledge for humanity, Popper and Feyerabend discovered nothing, zip zero zilch goose egg. And they were both philosophers and if it really was their point of view that Galileo was unscrupulous and the church reasonable then these ignorant jackasses are yet another reason philosophers have a bad name. And I am STILL waiting for somebody to tell me one thing that bozos like Popper and Feyerabend who call themselves philosophers have discovered in the last 2 centuries that is deep, clear, precise, unexpected and true that scientists had not discovered long before. It seems like a simple request and I have asked 3 times but nobody can think of a damn thing; and yet people continue to tell me how wonderful Feyerabend and Popper were. I think they were like bad movie critics, full of condemnation about how other people made their movie but couldn't make one themselves if you put a gun to their head. John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:56 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 05:26:02PM +0200, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com wrote: However a darwinian process is a natural process. In a block universe, there is no such darwinian process (because there is no process of any kind at all). Not sure I understand why there is no process of any kind in a block universe. In a trivial way, there is no change in a block universe. But in a somewhat less trivial way, there are no irreversible processes in a block universe Ok, but I don't think that darwinism is necessarily a process. It could be seen as a type of structure in a block universe, no? This is why I argued with John Clark some time ago that darwinism might be an incomplete theory, and that there might be something more fundamental going on, which explains the illusion of evolution. Sorry if I'm rambling a bit, still having my first coffee. What I'm suggesting is darwinism + anthropocentrism. I believe this is inline with the ideas you describe in your book. Simply some paths in the block universe maintain the entropy constant against the surroundings. These paths are living beings along their lines of time. I'm not sure I can agree that, for example, a program in the Tierra environment maintains a constant entropy against the environment. Could you describe more precisely what you mean? Its more of an entropy pump. Chris Adami has written some stuff on that, using a related system called Avida. Ok, I'm familiar with Tierra and Avida but I don't recall coming across those ideas. If you find a reference, I'd be interested. Best, Telmo. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
I think that the whole business of putting numbers to fitness and so on
either is flawed or alternatively if the parameter is accurate, it is
useless.
In the long term anything could happen. I can have 10 children in a flawed
society that enter in decadence and war. And maybe I support the ideas that
push this society to the limits. Then most of these sons die a few decades
later by war, hunger etc. What was my fitness?.
2013/9/10 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:52 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au
wrote:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 11:58:37AM +0200, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi Alberto,
On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com
wrote:
I think that there are real progress that can be even measured in
terms of
entropic order. That a man embodies more structure and organization
than a
bacteria is objective and measurable, and it is a product of more
emergent
levels of evolution. In concrete the human being includes the
eucariotic
level, the multicelularity level and human society level, that are
aggregations of coordinated individuals to achieve an individuality
of an
higher level. These levels are absent in bacteria .
Ok, there's an arrow of complexification, that's undeniable. I'm not
convinced that Darwinism alone explains that. One of the reasons for
my scepticism is the failure of ALife models to replicate unbounded
complexification. My favourite attempt in this domain is the Echo
model by John Holland -- which is beautiful but didn't work in this
sense. There's also Tierra/Avida, where you get a lot of interesting
stuff but no unbounded complexification.
One idea I heard but don't know whom to attribute to is this:
evolutionary complexification is just an artefact of the simplicity of
the initial state. The idea being that the laws of physics inherently
contain a pressure towards a certain level of complexity and that
evolution is just following the path of least resitance, in a way. It
is then conceivable that there is a state of equilibrium that we
haven't reached yet and that complexification will halt at some point.
This is wild speculation, of course, but I like to ponder on this
hypothesis.
I think this idea goes by the name of modal bacter. It was, perhaps,
most
forcefully argued in Stephen Gould's 1996 book Full House.
Thanks Russell!
I suspect the idea is wrong, because it fails to explain the
exponential growth of diversity, seemingly observed by
Palaeontologists such as Michael Benton:
@Article{Benton01,
author = {Michael J. Benton},
title ={Biodiversity on Land and in the Sea},
journal = {Geological Journal},
year = 2001,
volume = 36,
pages ={211--230}
}
Ok, but I guess that depends on how we measure diversity, which is not
a trivial matter. From a quick look at this paper, it seems to focus
on the number of biological orders/families/genus. Suppose we were
able to estimate the Kolmogorov complexity of the entire ecosystem, do
you figure it would also grow exponentially?
What is not true is that human beings are more adapted than
bacteria. That
is not true. Because there is no objective and absolute measure of
adaptation. It ever depends on the concrete environment, and varies a
lot.
Humm... I think ecologists are able to estimate the likelihood of a
species going extinct. I'd argue that this could be taken as a measure
of adaption.
That measure is called persistence, and no, it is not really related to
adaption. For an adaption measure, one good possibility is Mark
Bedau's cumulative evolutionary activity
@InProceedings{Bedau-etal98,
author = {Mark A. Bedau and Emile Snyder and Norman H. Packard},
title ={A Classification of Long-Term Evolutionary Dynamics},
crossref = {ALifeVI},
pages={228--237}
}
I read this paper some years ago, it's a very nice one.
I would say that cumulative evolutionary activity is a metric that
applies to the entire evolutionary system as a whole. The article
makes it depressingly clear the Holland's Echo does not match the
unbounded evolution dynamics found in the fossil record. But maybe I'm
missing something.
In the previous discussion I was arguing that persistence could be
intuitively taken as a fitness measure of some specific population or
species, and I still feel that's the case. If you want to estimate the
biological fitness of an individual, you could determine an analogous
probability of the individual producing x viable offsprings before
dying.
I think.
Telmo.
--
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com wrote:
I think that the whole business of putting numbers to fitness and so on
either is flawed or alternatively if the parameter is accurate, it is
useless.
Snow leopards are much more likely to go extinct than E. Coli
bacteria. The latter are much less complex, so evolved complexity
doesn't always help. I think this is an interesting fact.
In the long term anything could happen. I can have 10 children in a flawed
society that enter in decadence and war. And maybe I support the ideas that
push this society to the limits. Then most of these sons die a few decades
later by war, hunger etc. What was my fitness?.
It was zero, but for most of the people that had 10 children it turned
out to be high, so a high estimation was a reasonable one. Couldn't
this criticism be applied to statistics in general? Pill X cures 99.9%
of people with pneumonia, but it killed Mr. Y because he had a weird
genetic mutation. Was it reasonable to give Mr. Y the pill?
Telmo.
2013/9/10 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:52 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au
wrote:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 11:58:37AM +0200, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi Alberto,
On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Alberto G. Corona
agocor...@gmail.com wrote:
I think that there are real progress that can be even measured in
terms of
entropic order. That a man embodies more structure and organization
than a
bacteria is objective and measurable, and it is a product of more
emergent
levels of evolution. In concrete the human being includes the
eucariotic
level, the multicelularity level and human society level, that are
aggregations of coordinated individuals to achieve an individuality
of an
higher level. These levels are absent in bacteria .
Ok, there's an arrow of complexification, that's undeniable. I'm not
convinced that Darwinism alone explains that. One of the reasons for
my scepticism is the failure of ALife models to replicate unbounded
complexification. My favourite attempt in this domain is the Echo
model by John Holland -- which is beautiful but didn't work in this
sense. There's also Tierra/Avida, where you get a lot of interesting
stuff but no unbounded complexification.
One idea I heard but don't know whom to attribute to is this:
evolutionary complexification is just an artefact of the simplicity of
the initial state. The idea being that the laws of physics inherently
contain a pressure towards a certain level of complexity and that
evolution is just following the path of least resitance, in a way. It
is then conceivable that there is a state of equilibrium that we
haven't reached yet and that complexification will halt at some point.
This is wild speculation, of course, but I like to ponder on this
hypothesis.
I think this idea goes by the name of modal bacter. It was, perhaps,
most
forcefully argued in Stephen Gould's 1996 book Full House.
Thanks Russell!
I suspect the idea is wrong, because it fails to explain the
exponential growth of diversity, seemingly observed by
Palaeontologists such as Michael Benton:
@Article{Benton01,
author = {Michael J. Benton},
title ={Biodiversity on Land and in the Sea},
journal = {Geological Journal},
year = 2001,
volume = 36,
pages ={211--230}
}
Ok, but I guess that depends on how we measure diversity, which is not
a trivial matter. From a quick look at this paper, it seems to focus
on the number of biological orders/families/genus. Suppose we were
able to estimate the Kolmogorov complexity of the entire ecosystem, do
you figure it would also grow exponentially?
What is not true is that human beings are more adapted than
bacteria. That
is not true. Because there is no objective and absolute measure of
adaptation. It ever depends on the concrete environment, and varies a
lot.
Humm... I think ecologists are able to estimate the likelihood of a
species going extinct. I'd argue that this could be taken as a measure
of adaption.
That measure is called persistence, and no, it is not really related to
adaption. For an adaption measure, one good possibility is Mark
Bedau's cumulative evolutionary activity
@InProceedings{Bedau-etal98,
author = {Mark A. Bedau and Emile Snyder and Norman H. Packard},
title ={A Classification of Long-Term Evolutionary Dynamics},
crossref = {ALifeVI},
pages={228--237}
}
I read this paper some years ago, it's a very nice one.
I would say that cumulative evolutionary activity is a metric that
applies to the entire evolutionary system as a whole. The article
makes it depressingly clear the Holland's Echo does not match the
unbounded evolution dynamics found in the fossil record. But maybe I'm
missing something.
In the previous
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
It was zero. but the evolutiometrist said me a few decades ago that my
fitness was certainly 10.
That is why I said that either this measure is flawed or alternatively, if
it is accurate (like this), it is useless (as a durable parameter to
predict something)
2013/9/10 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com
wrote:
I think that the whole business of putting numbers to fitness and so on
either is flawed or alternatively if the parameter is accurate, it is
useless.
Snow leopards are much more likely to go extinct than E. Coli
bacteria. The latter are much less complex, so evolved complexity
doesn't always help. I think this is an interesting fact.
In the long term anything could happen. I can have 10 children in a
flawed
society that enter in decadence and war. And maybe I support the ideas
that
push this society to the limits. Then most of these sons die a few
decades
later by war, hunger etc. What was my fitness?.
It was zero, but for most of the people that had 10 children it turned
out to be high, so a high estimation was a reasonable one. Couldn't
this criticism be applied to statistics in general? Pill X cures 99.9%
of people with pneumonia, but it killed Mr. Y because he had a weird
genetic mutation. Was it reasonable to give Mr. Y the pill?
Telmo.
2013/9/10 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:52 AM, Russell Standish
li...@hpcoders.com.au
wrote:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 11:58:37AM +0200, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi Alberto,
On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Alberto G. Corona
agocor...@gmail.com wrote:
I think that there are real progress that can be even measured in
terms of
entropic order. That a man embodies more structure and organization
than a
bacteria is objective and measurable, and it is a product of more
emergent
levels of evolution. In concrete the human being includes the
eucariotic
level, the multicelularity level and human society level, that are
aggregations of coordinated individuals to achieve an individuality
of an
higher level. These levels are absent in bacteria .
Ok, there's an arrow of complexification, that's undeniable. I'm not
convinced that Darwinism alone explains that. One of the reasons for
my scepticism is the failure of ALife models to replicate unbounded
complexification. My favourite attempt in this domain is the Echo
model by John Holland -- which is beautiful but didn't work in this
sense. There's also Tierra/Avida, where you get a lot of interesting
stuff but no unbounded complexification.
One idea I heard but don't know whom to attribute to is this:
evolutionary complexification is just an artefact of the simplicity
of
the initial state. The idea being that the laws of physics inherently
contain a pressure towards a certain level of complexity and that
evolution is just following the path of least resitance, in a way. It
is then conceivable that there is a state of equilibrium that we
haven't reached yet and that complexification will halt at some
point.
This is wild speculation, of course, but I like to ponder on this
hypothesis.
I think this idea goes by the name of modal bacter. It was, perhaps,
most
forcefully argued in Stephen Gould's 1996 book Full House.
Thanks Russell!
I suspect the idea is wrong, because it fails to explain the
exponential growth of diversity, seemingly observed by
Palaeontologists such as Michael Benton:
@Article{Benton01,
author = {Michael J. Benton},
title ={Biodiversity on Land and in the Sea},
journal = {Geological Journal},
year = 2001,
volume = 36,
pages ={211--230}
}
Ok, but I guess that depends on how we measure diversity, which is not
a trivial matter. From a quick look at this paper, it seems to focus
on the number of biological orders/families/genus. Suppose we were
able to estimate the Kolmogorov complexity of the entire ecosystem, do
you figure it would also grow exponentially?
What is not true is that human beings are more adapted than
bacteria. That
is not true. Because there is no objective and absolute measure of
adaptation. It ever depends on the concrete environment, and
varies a
lot.
Humm... I think ecologists are able to estimate the likelihood of a
species going extinct. I'd argue that this could be taken as a
measure
of adaption.
That measure is called persistence, and no, it is not really related
to
adaption. For an adaption measure, one good possibility is Mark
Bedau's cumulative evolutionary activity
@InProceedings{Bedau-etal98,
author = {Mark A. Bedau and Emile Snyder and Norman H.
Packard},
title ={A Classification of Long-Term Evolutionary
Dynamics},
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
In this case in that flawed society the fitness of the 99% of the people
with 10 children was 0.
THat is because the environment may change a lot. Men have been on the
verge of extinction. The last time was about 70.000 years ago, where a few
thounsands survived. What a extraterrestrial evolutiometrist would say
about the fitness of these people 70.000 years ago?
2013/9/10 Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com
It was zero. but the evolutiometrist said me a few decades ago that my
fitness was certainly 10.
That is why I said that either this measure is flawed or alternatively, if
it is accurate (like this), it is useless (as a durable parameter to
predict something)
2013/9/10 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com
wrote:
I think that the whole business of putting numbers to fitness and so on
either is flawed or alternatively if the parameter is accurate, it is
useless.
Snow leopards are much more likely to go extinct than E. Coli
bacteria. The latter are much less complex, so evolved complexity
doesn't always help. I think this is an interesting fact.
In the long term anything could happen. I can have 10 children in a
flawed
society that enter in decadence and war. And maybe I support the ideas
that
push this society to the limits. Then most of these sons die a few
decades
later by war, hunger etc. What was my fitness?.
It was zero, but for most of the people that had 10 children it turned
out to be high, so a high estimation was a reasonable one. Couldn't
this criticism be applied to statistics in general? Pill X cures 99.9%
of people with pneumonia, but it killed Mr. Y because he had a weird
genetic mutation. Was it reasonable to give Mr. Y the pill?
Telmo.
2013/9/10 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:52 AM, Russell Standish
li...@hpcoders.com.au
wrote:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 11:58:37AM +0200, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi Alberto,
On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Alberto G. Corona
agocor...@gmail.com wrote:
I think that there are real progress that can be even measured in
terms of
entropic order. That a man embodies more structure and
organization
than a
bacteria is objective and measurable, and it is a product of more
emergent
levels of evolution. In concrete the human being includes the
eucariotic
level, the multicelularity level and human society level, that are
aggregations of coordinated individuals to achieve an
individuality
of an
higher level. These levels are absent in bacteria .
Ok, there's an arrow of complexification, that's undeniable. I'm not
convinced that Darwinism alone explains that. One of the reasons for
my scepticism is the failure of ALife models to replicate unbounded
complexification. My favourite attempt in this domain is the Echo
model by John Holland -- which is beautiful but didn't work in this
sense. There's also Tierra/Avida, where you get a lot of interesting
stuff but no unbounded complexification.
One idea I heard but don't know whom to attribute to is this:
evolutionary complexification is just an artefact of the simplicity
of
the initial state. The idea being that the laws of physics
inherently
contain a pressure towards a certain level of complexity and that
evolution is just following the path of least resitance, in a way.
It
is then conceivable that there is a state of equilibrium that we
haven't reached yet and that complexification will halt at some
point.
This is wild speculation, of course, but I like to ponder on this
hypothesis.
I think this idea goes by the name of modal bacter. It was,
perhaps,
most
forcefully argued in Stephen Gould's 1996 book Full House.
Thanks Russell!
I suspect the idea is wrong, because it fails to explain the
exponential growth of diversity, seemingly observed by
Palaeontologists such as Michael Benton:
@Article{Benton01,
author = {Michael J. Benton},
title ={Biodiversity on Land and in the Sea},
journal = {Geological Journal},
year = 2001,
volume = 36,
pages ={211--230}
}
Ok, but I guess that depends on how we measure diversity, which is not
a trivial matter. From a quick look at this paper, it seems to focus
on the number of biological orders/families/genus. Suppose we were
able to estimate the Kolmogorov complexity of the entire ecosystem, do
you figure it would also grow exponentially?
What is not true is that human beings are more adapted than
bacteria. That
is not true. Because there is no objective and absolute measure of
adaptation. It ever depends on the concrete environment, and
varies a
lot.
Humm... I think ecologists are able to estimate the likelihood of a
species going extinct. I'd argue that
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:44 PM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com wrote:
In this case in that flawed society the fitness of the 99% of the people
with 10 children was 0.
THat is because the environment may change a lot. Men have been on the
verge of extinction. The last time was about 70.000 years ago, where a few
thounsands survived. What a extraterrestrial evolutiometrist would say about
the fitness of these people 70.000 years ago?
Ok, sure, this fitness value has no reality statues. We agree. I'm
just not convinced that it is totally useless to try and estimate it.
But we are nitpicking, I don't think we have any fundamental
disagreement here.
2013/9/10 Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com
It was zero. but the evolutiometrist said me a few decades ago that my
fitness was certainly 10.
That is why I said that either this measure is flawed or alternatively, if
it is accurate (like this), it is useless (as a durable parameter to predict
something)
2013/9/10 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com
wrote:
I think that the whole business of putting numbers to fitness and so on
either is flawed or alternatively if the parameter is accurate, it is
useless.
Snow leopards are much more likely to go extinct than E. Coli
bacteria. The latter are much less complex, so evolved complexity
doesn't always help. I think this is an interesting fact.
In the long term anything could happen. I can have 10 children in a
flawed
society that enter in decadence and war. And maybe I support the ideas
that
push this society to the limits. Then most of these sons die a few
decades
later by war, hunger etc. What was my fitness?.
It was zero, but for most of the people that had 10 children it turned
out to be high, so a high estimation was a reasonable one. Couldn't
this criticism be applied to statistics in general? Pill X cures 99.9%
of people with pneumonia, but it killed Mr. Y because he had a weird
genetic mutation. Was it reasonable to give Mr. Y the pill?
Telmo.
2013/9/10 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:52 AM, Russell Standish
li...@hpcoders.com.au
wrote:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 11:58:37AM +0200, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi Alberto,
On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Alberto G. Corona
agocor...@gmail.com wrote:
I think that there are real progress that can be even measured in
terms of
entropic order. That a man embodies more structure and
organization
than a
bacteria is objective and measurable, and it is a product of
more
emergent
levels of evolution. In concrete the human being includes the
eucariotic
level, the multicelularity level and human society level, that
are
aggregations of coordinated individuals to achieve an
individuality
of an
higher level. These levels are absent in bacteria .
Ok, there's an arrow of complexification, that's undeniable. I'm
not
convinced that Darwinism alone explains that. One of the reasons
for
my scepticism is the failure of ALife models to replicate unbounded
complexification. My favourite attempt in this domain is the Echo
model by John Holland -- which is beautiful but didn't work in this
sense. There's also Tierra/Avida, where you get a lot of
interesting
stuff but no unbounded complexification.
One idea I heard but don't know whom to attribute to is this:
evolutionary complexification is just an artefact of the simplicity
of
the initial state. The idea being that the laws of physics
inherently
contain a pressure towards a certain level of complexity and that
evolution is just following the path of least resitance, in a way.
It
is then conceivable that there is a state of equilibrium that we
haven't reached yet and that complexification will halt at some
point.
This is wild speculation, of course, but I like to ponder on this
hypothesis.
I think this idea goes by the name of modal bacter. It was,
perhaps,
most
forcefully argued in Stephen Gould's 1996 book Full House.
Thanks Russell!
I suspect the idea is wrong, because it fails to explain the
exponential growth of diversity, seemingly observed by
Palaeontologists such as Michael Benton:
@Article{Benton01,
author = {Michael J. Benton},
title ={Biodiversity on Land and in the Sea},
journal = {Geological Journal},
year = 2001,
volume = 36,
pages ={211--230}
}
Ok, but I guess that depends on how we measure diversity, which is not
a trivial matter. From a quick look at this paper, it seems to focus
on the number of biological orders/families/genus. Suppose we were
able to estimate the Kolmogorov complexity of the entire ecosystem, do
you figure it would also grow exponentially?
What is not
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 5:47 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 5:50 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.comwrote: chris Lol. A good mockig of the reductionist obsession with the details and despising the big picture. For sure you have work hard to certify that John has asked that three times and not more nor less. And now, because it is so important, I am going to ask for a FOURTH time for somebody to tell me one thing that no nothing bozos like Popper and Feyerabend who like to call themselves philosophers have discovered in the last 2 centuries that is deep, clear, precise, unexpected and true that scientists had not discovered long before. Come on, these guys are your heroes, you should be able to think of SOMETHING! John K Clark You pretend this, but don't want to hear an answer. The way you frame the question, it is impossible that John K Clark will find whatever somebody might think to qualify, to not be bogus! Your competitive tone indicates this. A bogosity trap where some fly is given a seductive but poisonous trap to answer a seemingly harmless question...hmm. I'll go for the trap, but instead of answering with some personal hero or purely philosophical insight, I'll literally bring poison for the poisoned trap: deep, clear, precise, unexpected, and true + discovered in the last 2 centuries by philosopher who is not scientist by John Clark's arbitrary standards? Ok. Aldous Huxley, writer and philosophical mystic, not scientist in your book, discovers and articulates to the broad public that mescaline is effective at eliciting a subjective experiences that harmonize with the following kinds of philosophies, observations, and mysticisms: *By 12:30 pm, a vase of flowers becomes the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. The experience, he asserts, is neither agreeable nor disagreeable, but simply is. He likens it to Meister Eckharthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister_Eckhart's istigheit or is-ness, and Plato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's Being but not separated from Becoming. He feels he understands the Hinduhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduconcept of Satchitananda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satchitananda, as well as the Zen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen koanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koanthat the dharma body of the Buddha is in the hedge and Buddhist suchness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tath%C4%81t%C4%81/Dharmat%C4%81. In this state, Huxley explains he didn't have an I, but instead a not-I. Meaning and existence, pattern and colour become more significant than spatial relationships and time. Duration is replaced by a perpetual present. * Mescaline had been discovered and isolated by Hefter, or your understanding of science in 1898, but without the above link. This, thousands of years later (at least 5600 to be precise) than Huichol and other Native American tribes had intuitively and via bioassay verified the assignment of 1person pov mystical experience through cactus. Huxley verified that this class of subjective state is real, not merely tribal superstition as science has held up to that point (and because of prohibition/corruption/cowardice still does to large extent), gave a clear dosage, and described the unexpected link between ingestion of some molecule or plant and a set of mystic positions and experiences of various cultures on the globe throughout the ages. Aldous Huxley is not a personal hero of mine. But I do admire the step: YO wait just a second! This isn't just some provincial superstitious nonsense. 400 milligrams and funky 1st person effect is real. Your version of Science did not uncover the 1 person reality of such states in any shape or form for the last few hundred years. It didn't even do so in the last hundred years. It took at philosophical mystic to state this connection. PGC -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 5:50 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.comwrote: chris Lol. A good mockig of the reductionist obsession with the details and despising the big picture. For sure you have work hard to certify that John has asked that three times and not more nor less. And now, because it is so important, I am going to ask for a FOURTH time for somebody to tell me one thing that no nothing bozos like Popper and Feyerabend who like to call themselves philosophers have discovered in the last 2 centuries that is deep, clear, precise, unexpected and true that scientists had not discovered long before. Come on, these guys are your heroes, you should be able to think of SOMETHING! John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 4:55 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I do not like very much Feyerabend, and disgaree with its overal philosophy of science, I do agree with him on Galileo. OK so let me get this straight, you agree that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, I did not say that. Nor did Feyerabend. Bruno you are incorrect, Feyerabend did say the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and he also said Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just: hemultidisciplinarian.com/2012/08/07/the-worst-enemy-of-science/ Bruno, is this really the sort of toothless hillbilly you want to be associated with? Blinded? BLINDED!? Were talking about Galileo and the church but it's Galileo who was blinded!? Yes, he was blinded by its Aristotelian faith Aristotelian faith!? Galileo was the guy who proved that Aristotle was the worst physicist who ever lived! And I thought this list was supposed to be about cutting edge developments in human knowledge, so why the hell do we keep talking about ancient Greeks who (with the important exception of Greek mathematicians) didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground? John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/10/2013 1:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Today we know that science proves nothing about reality, but it can refute theories, and it can provides evidences for theories, but not automatically the truth. Scientific theories are certainly not automatically the truth. But to say science proves *nothing* about reality is ridiculous. 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:10 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: deep, clear, precise, unexpected, and true + discovered in the last 2 centuries by philosopher who is not scientist by John Clark's arbitrary standards? Ok. Aldous Huxley, writer and philosophical mystic, not scientist in your book, But I loved his book Brave New World, I first read it when I was about 10 and reread it just a few months ago. discovers and articulates to the broad public that mescaline is effective at eliciting a subjective experiences that harmonize with the following kinds of philosophies, observations, and mysticisms: People have been drinking alcohol for at least 7000 years because it alters their perception of the world, and they have been eating Peyote, who's active ingredient is mescaline, for almost as long. I like Aldous Huxley, and like his grandfather and brother even more, but I don't see how reporting on something that people have known for thousands of years is new or unexpected. John K Clark *By 12:30 pm, a vase of flowers becomes the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. The experience, he asserts, is neither agreeable nor disagreeable, but simply is. He likens it to Meister Eckharthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister_Eckhart's istigheit or is-ness, and Plato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's Being but not separated from Becoming. He feels he understands the Hindu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu concept of Satchitanandahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satchitananda, as well as the Zen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen koanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koanthat the dharma body of the Buddha is in the hedge and Buddhist suchness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tath%C4%81t%C4%81/Dharmat%C4%81. In this state, Huxley explains he didn't have an I, but instead a not-I. Meaning and existence, pattern and colour become more significant than spatial relationships and time. Duration is replaced by a perpetual present. * Mescaline had been discovered and isolated by Hefter, or your understanding of science in 1898, but without the above link. This, thousands of years later (at least 5600 to be precise) than Huichol and other Native American tribes had intuitively and via bioassay verified the assignment of 1person pov mystical experience through cactus. Huxley verified that this class of subjective state is real, not merely tribal superstition as science has held up to that point (and because of prohibition/corruption/cowardice still does to large extent), gave a clear dosage, and described the unexpected link between ingestion of some molecule or plant and a set of mystic positions and experiences of various cultures on the globe throughout the ages. Aldous Huxley is not a personal hero of mine. But I do admire the step: YO wait just a second! This isn't just some provincial superstitious nonsense. 400 milligrams and funky 1st person effect is real. Your version of Science did not uncover the 1 person reality of such states in any shape or form for the last few hundred years. It didn't even do so in the last hundred years. It took at philosophical mystic to state this connection. PGC -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
As usual, I see a microcosm of science in this thread. From Bruno's perspective, the power of reason is in its ability to see through its own bias to find questions, problems, and shades of grey. From John Clark's perspective, reason is about black and white evidence which provides answers and closes the door on what is wrong as it opens the door to a future which leads to what it true and right. To me, these are both exaggerations - idealizations of how we would like to seem to ourselves and how we would like science to be. I think that the truth of science is that there is no formula, no method other than a general faith in precision and methodology and a hope for discovery. Thanks, Craig On Tuesday, September 10, 2013 11:35:16 AM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 4:55 AM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.bejavascript: wrote: I do not like very much Feyerabend, and disgaree with its overal philosophy of science, I do agree with him on Galileo. OK so let me get this straight, you agree that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, I did not say that. Nor did Feyerabend. Bruno you are incorrect, Feyerabend did say the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and he also said Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just: hemultidisciplinarian.com/2012/08/07/the-worst-enemy-of-science/ Bruno, is this really the sort of toothless hillbilly you want to be associated with? Blinded? BLINDED!? Were talking about Galileo and the church but it's Galileo who was blinded!? Yes, he was blinded by its Aristotelian faith Aristotelian faith!? Galileo was the guy who proved that Aristotle was the worst physicist who ever lived! And I thought this list was supposed to be about cutting edge developments in human knowledge, so why the hell do we keep talking about ancient Greeks who (with the important exception of Greek mathematicians) didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground? John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 9/10/2013 3:38 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: It was zero. but the evolutiometrist said me a few decades ago that my fitness was certainly 10. That is why I said that either this measure is flawed or alternatively, if it is accurate (like this), it is useless (as a durable parameter to predict something) That's like saying statistics are useless because it's not always right. Brent The race is not always to the swift nor battle to the strong...but that's the way to bet. --- Ring Lardner -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Also, forgetting Karl Popper, inventor of the hot popper, Craig is in a sense, reminding us all of Kurt Godel's mathematical proof, on mathematical proofs. This, I suppose, also applies to bench science and bench scientists? -Original Message- From: Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tue, Sep 10, 2013 1:50 pm Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? As usual, I see a microcosm of science in this thread. From Bruno's perspective, the power of reason is in its ability to see through its own bias to find questions, problems, and shades of grey. From John Clark's perspective, reason is about black and white evidence which provides answers and closes the door on what is wrong as it opens the door to a future which leads to what it true and right. To me, these are both exaggerations - idealizations of how we would like to seem to ourselves and how we would like science to be. I think that the truth of science is that there is no formula, no method other than a general faith in precision and methodology and a hope for discovery. Thanks, Craig On Tuesday, September 10, 2013 11:35:16 AM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 4:55 AM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I do not like very much Feyerabend, and disgaree with its overal philosophy of science, I do agree with him on Galileo. OK so let me get this straight, you agree that the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, I did not say that. Nor did Feyerabend. Bruno you are incorrect, Feyerabend did say the church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and he also said Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just: hemultidisciplinarian.com/2012/08/07/the-worst-enemy-of-science/ Bruno, is this really the sort of toothless hillbilly you want to be associated with? Blinded? BLINDED!? Were talking about Galileo and the church but it's Galileo who was blinded!? Yes, he was blinded by its Aristotelian faith Aristotelian faith!? Galileo was the guy who proved that Aristotle was the worst physicist who ever lived! And I thought this list was supposed to be about cutting edge developments in human knowledge, so why the hell do we keep talking about ancient Greeks who (with the important exception of Greek mathematicians) didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground? John K Clark -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
True. Statistics are useful for a short period of time. But evolutionary biology has nothing to do with short periods of time 2013/9/10 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net On 9/10/2013 3:38 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: It was zero. but the evolutiometrist said me a few decades ago that my fitness was certainly 10. That is why I said that either this measure is flawed or alternatively, if it is accurate (like this), it is useless (as a durable parameter to predict something) That's like saying statistics are useless because it's not always right. Brent The race is not always to the swift nor battle to the strong...but that's the way to bet. --- Ring Lardner -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
A log pos is someone who snaps their fingers and says, prove it now in front of me! Or, all that exists is all we can detect! Most scientists do hold the opening for new things discovered, but a fair amount cling to old ideas, like the standard model, anyway. Prove it~ Prove it now Dr,. Marchal--other universes..now! Its that sort of attitude. They have a practical point, but should practical be the first pass when doing theoretical-hypothetical work? Nada. -Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sun, Sep 8, 2013 2:16 pm Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On 08 Sep 2013, at 00:52, spudboy...@aol.com wrote: Yet, there's lots of scientists in public forums like this, who embrace logical positivism. I am not saying this is a good thing, but something I have experienced. Who is logical positivist? I only see people believing in some realities, and explaining or trying to explain the appearances and measure with what is. Postivism is dead. The first positivist condemn the microscope and deny microbes. Positivism tries to evacuate metaphysics by using a very strong metaphysical assumption. It is self-defeating. Bruno -Original Message- From: meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sat, Sep 7, 2013 4:16 pm Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On 9/7/2013 12:40 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: That's right. I´m not joking if i say that the thing that discredited philosophers definitively was relativity, quantum mechanics and their realization: the atomic bomb. That is the event that raised physicalism, a branch of logical positivism and analytical philosophy, and discredited any other way of thinking. If by physicalism you mean the meta- of physics, then it's not positivism. Positivism hasn't been considered a good meta-physics since Mach. Too many unobservable things: atoms, photons, quarks, virtual particles,... turned out to make good empirical models. 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 9:18 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:10 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: deep, clear, precise, unexpected, and true + discovered in the last 2 centuries by philosopher who is not scientist by John Clark's arbitrary standards? Ok. Aldous Huxley, writer and philosophical mystic, not scientist in your book, But I loved his book Brave New World, I first read it when I was about 10 and reread it just a few months ago. discovers and articulates to the broad public that mescaline is effective at eliciting a subjective experiences that harmonize with the following kinds of philosophies, observations, and mysticisms: People have been drinking alcohol for at least 7000 years because it alters their perception of the world, and they have been eating Peyote, who's active ingredient is mescaline, for almost as long. I like Aldous Huxley, and like his grandfather and brother even more, but I don't see how reporting on something that people have known for thousands of years is new or unexpected. I am corrupt at times, but not this cheap John! Articulating philosophically the overlap between a first person experience and mystic traditions in Doors of Perception with altered states of perception throughout the ages generally, is pure John Clark philosophy; a philosophy in which 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine and ethanol are just altering user's perception of the world. This implies a logic wherein a person getting shot, going to a store, shooting heroin, enjoying a piece of cake and a cup of coffee, doing nothing, pursuing a career, taking mescaline or having a beer are all just simply altering their perception. This is so vague and general it is philosophical by your own standards: not deep, not clear, not precise, and not true by any measure I can affirm. Children eating ice cream and consuming mescaline are just doing the same thing, just altering their perception? I await your explanation, even just on the level between alcohol and mescaline, as they seem to a) be different chemically and b) elicit different effect profiles both on metabolic levels and on subjective levels of experience. Your equivalency statement is disputed by the Huxley in Doors, who outlines the difference many times, like so: *Ours is the age, among other things, of the automobile and of rocketing population. Alcohol is incompatible with safety on the roads, and its production, like that of tobacco, condemns to virtual sterility many millions of acres of the most fertile soil. The problems raised by alcohol and tobacco cannot, it goes without saying, be solved by prohibition. The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones. Some of these other, better doors will be social and technological in nature, others religious or psychological, others dietetic, educational, athletic. But the need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short. Such a drug must be potent in minute doses and synthesizable. If it does not possess these qualities, its production, like that of wine, beer, spirits and tobacco will interfere with the raising of indispensable food and fibers. It must be less toxic than opium or cocaine, less likely to produce undesirable social consequences than alcohol or the barbiturates, less inimical to heart and lungs than the tars and nicotine of cigarettes. And, on the positive side, it should produce changes in consciousness more interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, delusions of omnipotence or release from inhibition.* No chemist would buy this equivalency. No biologist either. Liberals would disagree with you, even drug warrior fanatics disagree with you as well as the philosopher/writer you love(d), who thinks this reductionism itself is harmful and your equivalency false. I have trouble seeing anybody, even fanatics of all kinds taking seriously such an equivalency proposition. Scientific proof certainly fails to equate the two. What is left is faith in John Clark. PGC John K Clark *By 12:30 pm, a vase of flowers becomes the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. The experience, he asserts, is neither agreeable nor disagreeable, but simply is. He likens it to Meister Eckharthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister_Eckhart's istigheit or is-ness, and Plato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's Being but not separated from Becoming. He feels he understands the Hindu
RE: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Hi PGC With respect, you've embarked on a fools errand there, PGC. Given the way John has framed the task any contribution made by xyz will end up not being a contribution in philosophy. Take Charles Pierce who pretty much founded semiotics and made contributions in fields as diverse as psychology and chemistry; or Frege who invented predicate logic; or Descartes work in mathematics, or Leibniz's invention of calculus; the big punch line has to be that either these people were not philosophers or their important contributions were not in philosophy. Whats needed is a defense of philosophy. John's task is based on an unjustified assumption that he made in his opening post. He argues that philosophers are just reporters; that in, for example, the field of method they just report on what scientists have always done. Thats just uninformed garbage. Firstly, there hasn't ever been a method scientists have always employed. Secondly, there is always an argument between scientists over how to proceed correctly. This is particularly evident in the cognitive sciences where there is an acute difficulty in equating some objective measurement to some subjective experience. The benefits and pitfalls of quantitative over qualitative methodologies is argued about within neuroscience departments the world over. Students are preached to about Popper and falsificationism in one lecture and in the next they are told that this methodology is inherently should be abandoned. Even in physics, the 'hardest' of hard sciences, there is trouble afoot with string theory, and a debate rages as to whether it is falsifiable, and then whether that matters. You take your stand and you argue your case and in doing so you engage in: philosophy. So, even if it is a scientist arguing that qualitative methods are (or are not) worth persuing, he is making a philosophical argument. Even John, right now, is doing the very same thing. He is engaging in philosophy. He is expending all this effort on what he has argued is worthless. He is one big hypocrite whose very position defeats itself. The position that the only things that have value are tangible scientific results is of course not in itself a scientific result. John is an unwitting positivist who falls into the same logical trap all positivists do. All the best Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 22:58:21 +0200 Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? From: multiplecit...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 9:18 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:10 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: deep, clear, precise, unexpected, and true + discovered in the last 2 centuries by philosopher who is not scientist by John Clark's arbitrary standards? Ok. Aldous Huxley, writer and philosophical mystic, not scientist in your book, But I loved his book Brave New World, I first read it when I was about 10 and reread it just a few months ago. discovers and articulates to the broad public that mescaline is effective at eliciting a subjective experiences that harmonize with the following kinds of philosophies, observations, and mysticisms: People have been drinking alcohol for at least 7000 years because it alters their perception of the world, and they have been eating Peyote, who's active ingredient is mescaline, for almost as long. I like Aldous Huxley, and like his grandfather and brother even more, but I don't see how reporting on something that people have known for thousands of years is new or unexpected. I am corrupt at times, but not this cheap John! Articulating philosophically the overlap between a first person experience and mystic traditions in Doors of Perception with altered states of perception throughout the ages generally, is pure John Clark philosophy; a philosophy in which 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine and ethanol are just altering user's perception of the world. This implies a logic wherein a person getting shot, going to a store, shooting heroin, enjoying a piece of cake and a cup of coffee, doing nothing, pursuing a career, taking mescaline or having a beer are all just simply altering their perception. This is so vague and general it is philosophical by your own standards: not deep, not clear, not precise, and not true by any measure I can affirm. Children eating ice cream and consuming mescaline are just doing the same thing, just altering their perception? I await your explanation, even just on the level between alcohol and mescaline, as they seem to a) be different chemically and b) elicit different effect profiles both on metabolic levels and on subjective levels of experience. Your equivalency statement is disputed by the Huxley in Doors, who outlines the difference many times, like so: Ours is the age, among other things, of the automobile and of rocketing population. Alcohol is incompatible
