Hi Bruno,
Thank you for your kind considerations and comments. I will
interleave my replies below.
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 10:44 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: What's wrong with this?
Hi Stephen,
The 1004 fallacy is when people argue, generally on vocabulary, by demanding
precision which is actually not relevant with the concerned issue. It come from
a passage of "Sylvie and Bruno" by Lewis Carroll. Bruno was looking at a flock
of sheep. Sylvie asked how many sheep there are, and Bruno answered "about
1004". Sylvie said that "about" contradicts the four in 1004, and that he
should have said "about 1000". To say about "1004" is what I like to call the
1004 fallacy. It is very common in some kind of pseudo human science, and is
akin to "jargon". (Of course Bruno likes to have the last word, and justified
his "1004" by saying he was sure about the "4", given that he distinctly see
four sheep here and there, and that the "about" applied to the "1000" which
could have been "100" or "10000" (something like that).
[SPK]
Ah! I understand and I beg your indulgence on that point. I am trying to
communicate an idea for which I do not yet have a precise and well-formed
symbolic representation and thus am throwing a lot of notions your way hoping
that you might intuit a rough version of the idea and ignore the extraneous
noise. I am using several ideas that are similar, within my understanding, to
several ideas that are present in mathematics and logics and so I beg your
indulgence.
[BM]
Now I do have that feeling a bit with your last posts, where you refer to hard
technical works when at the same time I have some difficulties to understand
your position (just to make sense of it).
[SPK]
Yes, we are coming from differing backgrounds and learning and thinking styles.
My position is to look at interactions and the implications of such as a
possible source and origin for notions that have been usually assumed and even
postulated to be primitive and fundamental, but I am also aware that my ideas
are a bit divergent of the kinds of things that you are focused upon. As I
understand your work so far, you are building a model of the internal and
grundladen structure that is an alternative to the diffuse and sometimes naïve
metamathematical and metaphysical underpinnings of current physics and that
model seems to focus on a single and static entity. I am focused on the
external and interactive aspects that highlight many entities in an ongoing and
even eternal dialogue with each other.
[BM]
I think that you try to defend the idea that "time" is fundamental. Now do you
mean some physical notion of time, or do you mean the first person feeling of
duration?
[SPK]
No, time is not fundamental as I understand it. I am advancing and defending
the idea that Change is fundamental; time is merely a particular measure of
such within finite perception and interactions. I try to go further and advance
the idea that we can recover the usual notions of "substance" and "being" in
terms of isomorphisms within this underlying and fundamental Change. This is
done from a Hereclitian perspective informed by the ideas of Plato and others,
the latter of which focused upon Being and changelessness as fundamental.
I see in most logics and mathematics a tacit axiom of changelessness and I
understand the reasoning for such. Truth must be an invariant, but such
invariance, I argue, does not necessitate that changelessness be fundamental
and primitive. Thus I bet on Arithmetic Realism as True but point out that
there is more involved that cannot be captured only within the framework of AR
+ digital substitution.
I argue that we need to have a place within our models for
interaction and time, even if that notion of time is emergent and not
fundamental. I take duration to be a 1st person aspect that is part of what
generates an emergent notion of 3rd person duration for many, such that an
appearance of an evolving "Common universe" obtains. My argument on this are
based on my study of computational complexity, concurrency and intractability
issues that I found in many philosophical systems. I found that Leibniz'
Monadology offered the best framework to explain my reasoning and possible
solution. I see your work on modal logics as part of the structure of a Monad,
aspects that even Leibniz did not consider and thus am very eager to understand
the subtle points of your model.
[BM]
Are you aware that in both case you have to abandon the mechanist hypothesis,
because the digital mechanist hypothesis makes the ultimate reality
undistinguishable with arithmetical truth (which is something
atemporal/aspatial). In the first case you introduce some physicalism, and in
the second case you make consciousness primitive, like Rex. Both are emerging
from arithmetical truth once we assume mechanism.
[SPK]
Yes, but I have tried to explain that Change and Time are not the same thing.
Yes, time and consciousness are taken as derivative and secondary notions in my
model, but I am also arguing that at the level of ultimate "reality" – that I
denote as "existence itself" – there does not exist a notion of distinguishing
for the same reason that an infinity cannot distinguish itself as a whole from
a proper subset of itself. It is only within the finite subsets or "filters" of
Existence that we can advance the idea that there exist notions of measures and
other means to relate contrast and compare parts to each other and to wholes.
Physicality, within my thinking, is co-emergent with consciousness.
In your SIENA.pdf paper you wrote:
"This makes Matter prone to acquire or to represent distinctive and possibly
alternative incidental (contingent) qualities, but in such a way that matter
itself remains invariant and separated from any of those qualities. This makes
Matter literally the opposite or the negation of the intelligible."
It is this "opposite or negation" that, I believe is the same as
what I see in the duality that Pratt is using. If we can coherently model most
of the "classical" aspect of "the intelligible" as a Boolean algebra then its
"opposite" or Dual (via the Stone/Pontryagin duality) is a featureless dust,
technically a completely disconnected Hausdorff space. Thus my model is
dualistic in this sense. This is consistent with Plotinus' idea and thus should
not be problematic for you, if you are following Plotinus' framework. I move,
following Pratt's reasoning, from a static and changeless thought to one were
we have relative measures of change for considerations of interactions and
communications between many "persons" (considered non-anthropomorphically as
Leibnizian Monads) and am trying to sketch out a model that recovers the
classical picture of physics and is consistent with quantum mechanics and try
to look forward from that model toward questions about quantum gravity.
[BM]
Also, in your last paragraph (see below) you seem to confuse the set of natural
numbers + its ordering, with the set of true propositions (or true sentences)
about those numbers. The first set is recursive, the second is not.
Arithmetical truth is not even recursively enumerable, and in a sense is the
most complex thing a *computationalist* machine can believe in (analytical sets
becomes "useful fiction" in some sense).
[SPK]
OK, this is something that I need to discuss with you in depth. Is
the set of true propositions about natural numbers + its orderings isomorphic
to some proper subset of Natural numbers? In other words, is Natural Numbers
*all that Exists* in your thinking?
[BM]If you identify arithmetical truth with the set of Gödel numbers of true
arithmetical sentences, you can consider that arithmetical truth is a subset of
the set of natural numbers, and indeed a very complex subset. It is the union
of all sigma_i sets, of all the Pi_i sets, of all the Delta_i sets. It is the
union of all the arithmetical hierarchy.
[SPK]
Ok, this goes partly to my question above but let me be more pointed. Is that
subset a "proper subset"? As per this definition:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ProperSubset.html
"A proper subset S^'of a set S, denoted S^' subset S, is a subset
<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Subset.html> that is strictly contained in Sand
so necessarily excludes at least one member of S. The empty set
<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/EmptySet.html> is therefore a proper subset of
any nonempty set <http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NonemptySet.html> ."
Note that this notion of Set seems to be the usual well-founded one. I have
discovered that my model uses the non-well founded sets and thus there is some
further work that I need to do to recover a good and well-formed definition. So
far it is the idea that "at least one member of S is excluded" that needs to be
weakened so that one can have something like "asymptotic exclusion" or "almost
always exclusion".
[BM]
May I suggest you try to write a text on your conception of reality which
should be understandable by a 15 years old person. Then you could try to
explain informally Pratt's work, and why you think it might be used to develop
your conception. I can make sense of Pratt's work with mechanism, but more at a
phenomenological level, than ontological (and thus it relates to some relations
between the first person hypostases, without making one more fundamental than
another).
[SPK]
I am in the process of doing that using Leibniz' Monadology, but I still need
to work out some of the language that I can use for part of the idea is
non-intuitive for many people. This notion of a vanishing duality and the
notion of concurrent bisimulations that I use have caused me a great deal of
pain. It is as if I am trying to explain the color Red to a blind person L and
so I have been working to improve my understanding of how logical, metaphysical
and fundamental notions are explained to the general public.
[BM]It is hard for me to see if the math you allude too should be taken as
(interesting) analogies, or literally. The advantage of the comp hypothesis, is
that the math (computer science) can be taken literally, so we can do science
instead of continental like philosophy. (Not that I have anything against *all*
continental philosophies, but it is not really my expertise, except by modeling
them through the 1-hypostases).
Bruno
[SPK]
Thank you. What I am working on is a task that is far greater than my single
ability to express and so I must lean on the work of others that is similar to
make progress. I greatly appreciate your kindness and patience.
Onward!
Stephen
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