<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>Jon-</p>
<p>Your relating of Cantor's predicament/circumstance really reminds
me of how much I sometimes wish I could live my life over again
and encounter these ideas in a more coherent order than I did.
The way I organized my understanding of reality (life, the
universe, and everything) sometimes feels hopelessly tangled in
the early structures I was offered. <br>
</p>
<p> It may seem a leap, but this is what I was referencing when I
challenged Nick (really using Nick as a proxy for one of my own
homunculii in the GEPR (I think) sense) on his implied Cold War
interpretation/apprehension of the current activities/stances of
the Chinese people/government/CCParty). It sometimes feels as
if my brain/mind/consciousness is nothing more (nor less) than a
sorting machine attempting to organize the myriad
factoids/perceptionlets that impinge upon it through my embodied
body-mind. <br>
</p>
<p> In principle, I suppose, there might *be* one final
lowest-entropy organization of the totality of my perceptions (as
if that is ever a done deal, perceiving new things) but it seems
that if 42 (in the Douglas Adams sense) IS the lowest entropy
organization, the superposition (ensemble) of all possible
intermediate organizations is somehow more real than 42 (which
must be nothing more than an index into that ultimate sorted state
of perceptions?).</p>
<p>- Stir<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 11/21/21 2:19 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAH5Jek3zb6Y2iG6dosZdK4X9wb83Tsp=soFzBD9mJWXQADd25A@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">That
water is H20 gets at my confusion. While this is a classic
example<br>
of an a posteriori truth, the stability of truths like these
form<br>
categories that couldn't have been any other way. I feel that
your<br>
follow up questions get at this nicely:<br>
<br>
"""<br>
Would we say something like: Sure, but then it wouldn't be
"water"<br>
<br>
Or would we say something like: Yes, that could definitely be
a possible<br>
world, but their "water" wouldn't be exactly the same as our
water.<br>
"""<br>
<br>
That Thompson's (and I suspect your) flavor of Peircean logic
derives<br>
from an interest in how we get robust generals from sampling
messy<br>
particulars, I interpret his (and possibly your) program (from
within<br>
the framework of Kripke semantics) as an attempt to understand
when a<br>
posteriori truths "lift" to reveal what are effectively a
priori truths.<br>
<br>
"""<br>
There might be a conversation something like it that would
have a bit of<br>
depth, but instead it is almost entirely linguistic trickery
masquerading<br>
as deep thoughts.<br>
"""<br>
<br>
I understand that your post was intended to ridicule an
argument, that<br>
in all likelihood is faux deep[围棋], but elements of the
"linguistic<br>
trickery" reminds me (and may be modeled upon) of Cantor's
famous<br>
argument[א]. Cantor begins his argument by attempting to put
the Real<br>
numbers in correspondence with the Natural numbers
(effectively naming<br>
each real number with some integer) only to show that there is
always<br>
one more real that could not be named. In the p-zombie
argument, one is<br>
*supposed to conclude* that there must always be one more
quality of<br>
consciousness that is not accounted for by naming with the
material<br>
world, and thus more than physicalism is needed to account for
the world.<br>
Whatever the p-zombie argument's final status be, my post was
an attempt<br>
to assess the risk while responding thoughtfully to your
entertaining<br>
and generous offering.<br>
<br>
[围棋] To take the argument seriously is to see it as a kind of
hanami ko,<br>
but it may, in fact, be something more akin to throwing away
stones in<br>
what is clearly another's territory. On the other hand, as the
proverb<br>
goes, "Stones are never truly dead until they're removed from
the board".<br>
<br>
[א] Cantor, probably the greatest of all metaphysician
mathematicians ;)<br>
His Wikipedia article documents the hostility and ridicule
that he and<br>
his transfinite numbers received:<br>
<br>
"""<br>
Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers was originally regarded
as so<br>
counter-intuitive – even shocking – that it encountered
resistance from<br>
mathematical contemporaries (...) Cantor, a devout Lutheran
Christian,<br>
believed the theory had been communicated to him by God. Some
Christian<br>
theologians (particularly neo-Scholastics) saw Cantor's work
as a<br>
challenge to the uniqueness of the absolute infinity in the
nature<br>
of God – on one occasion equating the theory of transfinite
numbers<br>
with pantheism – a proposition that Cantor vigorously
rejected.<br>
<br>
The objections to Cantor's work were occasionally fierce:
Leopold<br>
Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included
describing<br>
Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a
"corrupter of<br>
youth". Kronecker objected to Cantor's proofs that the
algebraic numbers<br>
are countable, and that the transcendental numbers are
uncountable,<br>
results now included in a standard mathematics curriculum.
Writing<br>
decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that
mathematics is<br>
"ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set
theory",<br>
which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and
"wrong".<br>
"""<br>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<fieldset class="mimeAttachmentHeader"></fieldset>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a>
FRIAM-COMIC <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</a>
archives:
5/2017 thru present <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/">https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/</a>
1/2003 thru 6/2021 <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/">http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/</a>
</pre>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>