reality ontology infinite universe quantum math

[goDel]

i give up. the diagnosis is clear by now.

 

one point though: math and logic aren't as interchangeable as you make it to be. just because there's math that describes quantum physical phenomena, doesn't mean (imply) it "adheres" to logic.

[goDel]

ASTROPHYSICISTS IN AUSTRALIA FIND SOMETHING THAT IS BUT ISN'T

as i was saying: quantum physics.

 

lol

[GORDO]

lol of course it does. you start with a reasonable set of axioms and a vanilla set of inference rules from there you do all math.

 

but yeah... i can see by the examples you cited that there's no point in the discussing any further.

[goDel]

i can give another example. you gave it yourself actually:

 

a logical system which can't prove a statement now, but can sometime in the future. o wait, such a system is not a logical system. o dear...

[GORDO]

ASTROPHYSICISTS IN AUSTRALIA FIND SOMETHING THAT IS BUT ISN'T

as i was saying: quantum physics.

 

lol

 

 

?

 

you need to think things through.

 

a quantum state is just another possibility. A or B or neither (secret option C).

[GORDO]

i can give another example. you gave it yourself actually:

 

a logical system which can't prove a statement now, but can sometime in the future. o wait, such a system is not a logical system. o dear...

 

....

 

when you observe something that can't be proved from the logical system then it becomes an axiom of it, creating a new one.

 

but then again, I never said logic should be able to prove everything. but if i were arguing that, you'd be doing a very poor job or proving me wrong.

[kaini]

ASTROPHYSICISTS IN AUSTRALIA FIND SOMETHING THAT IS BUT ISN'T

as i was saying: quantum physics.

 

lol

 

 

?

 

you need to think things through.

 

a quantum state is just another possibility. A or B or neither (secret option C).

 

a quantum state is a combination of x% likely to be A and (100-x)% likely to be B, until observed.

[goDel]

look, we can have a really long discussion and tell me all about why quantum physics is counterintuitive but still logical. you can assert that fuzzy logic can describe quantum physics and all. but do yourself a favor: wiki logical positivism and form your own opinion.

we've already reached the point where we're not going to find some mutual ground. i tried to explain. you clearly didn't understand. that's ok.

 

edit: and please don't confuse science with logic. creating axioms is science, not logic. it uses logic as a hammer. nothing more, nothing less.

[GORDO]

kaini: i know. it's the secret option C.

 

 

"creating axioms is science, not logic."

 

 

An i did wiki logical positivism and has close to zero to do with what i was arguing.

 

I have nothing nice to say, have a good day sir.

[goDel]

sorry for being a prick. i know i was, btw.

 

what you were arguing implied logical positivism, imo. feel free to show my wrongs.

[kaini]

gordo, what you seem to be implying is if you had a massively powerful supercomputer capable of storing the position, direction, and velocity of every atom or molecule in the universe, and an amazing 'theory of everything' to process their interactions, you could predict everything that would happen from that point onwards.

 

i strongly believe that isn't the case.

[goDel]

gordo, what you seem to be implying is if you had a massively powerful supercomputer capable of storing the position, direction, and velocity of every atom or molecule in the universe, and an amazing 'theory of everything' to process their interactions, you could predict everything that would happen from that point onwards.

 

i strongly believe that isn't the case.

agreed. ilya prigogine had some interesting things to say about this. you're probably already familiar, but if you aren't check "the end of certainty". in essence it's about the irreversibility of the arrow of time: when things can not change back to the way they were. top stuff.

[Guest Babar]

Hm. I'm only familiar with certain types of formal logic, the rules of which deny many thoughts as logical.

 

"3.03 Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically."

 

Perhaps I am not entirely grasping the context of this statement. As I see it, I am quite able to form illogical thoughts. I've had quite a few already this morning. From what I know of Wittgenstein (admittedly not much), I do not agree with some of his ideas - namely, what passes as philosophy, and his rejection of the (logical) laws of inference... but beyond that I don't know much about the guy.

 

For now I'll have to just politely decline your idea that everything in the universe is logic.

 

well, well, well.

I especially dig his idea that most of philosophical questions are actually meaningless. I interpret it as "when two philosophers argue, most of time the ideas encoded by one of them are not properly decoded by its interlocutor". And cognitive sciences may be able to prove this (or the opposite) during the course of this century.

I disagree with his well known "7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.". If you can't speak about it, the risks are fairly low. + I believe it could teach us a lot about the structure of mind/language.

 

also, to keep the debate rolling on : could you give me a few examples of illogical thoughts (eventually, we'll figure out we don't attach the same meaning to the word "logic".

[Guest Babar]

 

 

IMCOMPLETENESS ISN'T CONTRADICTION.

 

if it's consistent then it is incomplete. this doesn't mean a consistent system can't exist.

 

you can't prove if a system is consistent or not, so what? this doesn't mean there can't be an universal logic, it could even be less complex than the formal systems in Gödel's theorems. when i ask you for examples i'm looking for a big headline saying something like:

ASTROPHYSICISTS IN AUSTRALIA FIND SOMETHING THAT IS BUT ISN'T

 

i thought godel's theory was only about algebra(e).

I read a couple articles for noobs on his theorems a few months ago. Basically, the problem was presented this way:

 

Imagine we build a machine that is able to give the right answer to any question. One day, you ask it : "will you never answer true to this very question ?"

The machine answers : true -- as a consequence, it does answer true at least once. Thus it answers falsely.

the machine answers : false -- as the machine is designed to always give the right answer, it will always answer false. Thus it should have answered true.

 

that seems to be a fucking silly machine. It could say "ahah, you perverted fuck, i know where you're trying to lead me to. I have the answer, but unfortunately i can't give it". Or say "ja"/"nein".

I think the initial question has a double meaning. "true"(sign) stands for both true(signifier) and 'true'(signified).

Now if you implement this convention into the machine, it could always bypass godel's limitation by artificially splitting the sign in two. Or it could pretend to be suffering from anomia (when you have the idea but have forgotten what the corresponding word is). For instance:

"-will you never answer true to this very question ?

-ah shit, i have a knowledge-gap. What is it already ? Blue, foo ? no i think it starts with a 'T'

-you mean "true" ?

-yes

"

 

/win

[kaini]

godel's theory deals with formal logic, that's an oversimplification of it

 

there's a copy of godel, escher, bach available in .DOC format here: http://www.4shared.com/dir/l1L8QjVz/1000_libros_de_Musica.html#

(on page 4)

 

it's very, very good at explaining what exactly his incompleteness theorem 'proves' (or doesn't )

[GORDO]

sorry for being a prick. i know i was, btw.

 

what you were arguing implied logical positivism, imo. feel free to show my wrongs.

 

what i was arguing started as a reply to this post by azatoth. Check the part that he bolded. that's my view on it. Also check the wiki link he posted and note the difference with logical positivism.

 

 

gordo, what you seem to be implying is if you had a massively powerful supercomputer capable of storing the position, direction, and velocity of every atom or molecule in the universe, and an amazing 'theory of everything' to process their interactions, you could predict everything that would happen from that point onwards.

 

i strongly believe that isn't the case.

 

I don't know where you get the idea that this is what i'm implying. I'm not arguing for a deterministic universe. I'm arguing that in this universe statements such as "A is equal to A" are true. Maybe a more interesting question is how many rules does a computer need to simulate the universe?.

[kaini]

but doesn't an entirely logical universe (with a complete set of axioms) imply a deterministic universe, by that set of axioms?

[goDel]

well that explains the confusion. my first post wasn't specifically directed at your post in the first place.

[GORDO]

but doesn't an entirely logical universe (with a complete set of axioms) imply a deterministic universe, by that set of axioms?

 

dunno, maybe? are u saying that sometimes A is not A? i'm pretty confident our universe adheres to this principle. does that make it deterministic?

 

now i'm merely throwing ideas here, but who's to say it's not, even if quantum mechanics says that some things aren't determined until they're observed, who's to say the act of observing it isn't predictable? and there's no way of verifying it or not.

 

imaginary experiment: let's collapse the wave function of this whatever thing 10 times at 12 o'clock today and see if the outcome is the same, well you can't do that, because you can't repeatedly do something at the same moment.

[luke viia]

Hm. I'm only familiar with certain types of formal logic, the rules of which deny many thoughts as logical.

 

"3.03 Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically."

 

Perhaps I am not entirely grasping the context of this statement. As I see it, I am quite able to form illogical thoughts. I've had quite a few already this morning. From what I know of Wittgenstein (admittedly not much), I do not agree with some of his ideas - namely, what passes as philosophy, and his rejection of the (logical) laws of inference... but beyond that I don't know much about the guy.

 

For now I'll have to just politely decline your idea that everything in the universe is logic.

 

well, well, well.

I especially dig his idea that most of philosophical questions are actually meaningless. I interpret it as "when two philosophers argue, most of time the ideas encoded by one of them are not properly decoded by its interlocutor". And cognitive sciences may be able to prove this (or the opposite) during the course of this century.

I disagree with his well known "7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.". If you can't speak about it, the risks are fairly low. + I believe it could teach us a lot about the structure of mind/language.

 

also, to keep the debate rolling on : could you give me a few examples of illogical thoughts (eventually, we'll figure out we don't attach the same meaning to the word "logic".

 

You are right, we will figure out that we don't attach the same meaning to logic -- at least, I think. You may in fact see me concede that all thoughts are logical in the next few sentences though.. let's see how this goes. My definition is that logic requires a system of reasoning. Reasoning is a conscious process. Process is the key word here. When I stated earlier that I have had illogical thoughts, I was attempting to say that I have had thoughts which must be discarded as illogical -- but this can only happen after a process of reasoning. Otherwise, the thoughts remain unconscious perceptions. So, you have seen me admit that my thoughts are all subject to the process of reason, and thus, of logic - even if the outcome is that I have had an "illogical" thought, that is, one that makes no sense upon further inspection. But, just to see if I can put a wrench in my own argument here, what becomes of the images thrown to me from my dreams and perceptions, and what of slippery activities like creativity? I may be going through a reasoning process as I create, but I may decide to act before reasoning out the consequences, later reflecting on my creation as a "spontaneous" act, in other words, one I did not reason into existence but rather was a chasing of a perception I did not fully grasp at the time. Is an act of "spontaneous creation" like this not subject to logic? I realize I may come across as drawing lines in the sand with this notion, but it seems important to me. If something like a jazz musician improvising with extreme skill is not going through the process of reason, is it exempt from being logical? The musician knows he will improvise, that is -- he logically understands that he will improvise -- and this leads me to ask the question: is something like musical improvisation a thought - that is, is it logical? If not, is it illogical, or just not subject to the rules of logic at all? I'm genuinely curious, because it is certainly a mental process...

 

And correct me if I'm wrong, but did Wittgenstein write the epitaph of his own idea with the belief that philosophy is a meaningless activity? The Tractatus has a sort of philosophy, as far as I can tell.

 

 

I dunno about you, but discussing logic always makes me somewhat nervous that I'm committing fallacies left and right without realizing it.

 

[GORDO]

Hm. I'm only familiar with certain types of formal logic, the rules of which deny many thoughts as logical.

 

"3.03 Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically."

 

Perhaps I am not entirely grasping the context of this statement. As I see it, I am quite able to form illogical thoughts. I've had quite a few already this morning. From what I know of Wittgenstein (admittedly not much), I do not agree with some of his ideas - namely, what passes as philosophy, and his rejection of the (logical) laws of inference... but beyond that I don't know much about the guy.

 

For now I'll have to just politely decline your idea that everything in the universe is logic.

 

well, well, well.

I especially dig his idea that most of philosophical questions are actually meaningless. I interpret it as "when two philosophers argue, most of time the ideas encoded by one of them are not properly decoded by its interlocutor". And cognitive sciences may be able to prove this (or the opposite) during the course of this century.

I disagree with his well known "7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.". If you can't speak about it, the risks are fairly low. + I believe it could teach us a lot about the structure of mind/language.

 

also, to keep the debate rolling on : could you give me a few examples of illogical thoughts (eventually, we'll figure out we don't attach the same meaning to the word "logic".

 

You are right, we will figure out that we don't attach the same meaning to logic -- at least, I think. You may in fact see me concede that all thoughts are logical in the next few sentences though.. let's see how this goes. My definition is that logic requires a system of reasoning. Reasoning is a conscious process. Process is the key word here. When I stated earlier that I have had illogical thoughts, I was attempting to say that I have had thoughts which must be discarded as illogical -- but this can only happen after a process of reasoning. Otherwise, the thoughts remain unconscious perceptions. So, you have seen me admit that my thoughts are all subject to the process of reason, and thus, of logic - even if the outcome is that I have had an "illogical" thought, that is, one that makes no sense upon further inspection. But, just to see if I can put a wrench in my own argument here, what becomes of the images thrown to me from my dreams and perceptions, and what of slippery activities like creativity? I may be going through a reasoning process as I create, but I may decide to act before reasoning out the consequences, later reflecting on my creation as a "spontaneous" act, in other words, one I did not reason into existence but rather was a chasing of a perception I did not fully grasp at the time. Is an act of "spontaneous creation" like this not subject to logic? I realize I may come across as drawing lines in the sand with this notion, but it seems important to me. If something like a jazz musician improvising with extreme skill is not going through the process of reason, is it exempt from being logical? The musician knows he will improvise, that is -- he logically understands that he will improvise -- and this leads me to ask the question: is something like musical improvisation a thought - that is, is it logical? If not, is it illogical, or just not subject to the rules of logic at all? I'm genuinely curious, because it is certainly a mental process...

 

And correct me if I'm wrong, but did Wittgenstein write the epitaph of his own idea with the belief that philosophy is a meaningless activity? The Tractatus has a sort of philosophy, as far as I can tell.

 

 

I dunno about you, but discussing logic always makes me somewhat nervous that I'm committing fallacies left and right without realizing it.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc&start=81

[giftcard]

It's all lies!

[Guest Babar]

Hm. I'm only familiar with certain types of formal logic, the rules of which deny many thoughts as logical.

 

"3.03 Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically."

 

Perhaps I am not entirely grasping the context of this statement. As I see it, I am quite able to form illogical thoughts. I've had quite a few already this morning. From what I know of Wittgenstein (admittedly not much), I do not agree with some of his ideas - namely, what passes as philosophy, and his rejection of the (logical) laws of inference... but beyond that I don't know much about the guy.

 

For now I'll have to just politely decline your idea that everything in the universe is logic.

 

well, well, well.

I especially dig his idea that most of philosophical questions are actually meaningless. I interpret it as "when two philosophers argue, most of time the ideas encoded by one of them are not properly decoded by its interlocutor". And cognitive sciences may be able to prove this (or the opposite) during the course of this century.

I disagree with his well known "7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.". If you can't speak about it, the risks are fairly low. + I believe it could teach us a lot about the structure of mind/language.

 

also, to keep the debate rolling on : could you give me a few examples of illogical thoughts (eventually, we'll figure out we don't attach the same meaning to the word "logic".

 

You are right, we will figure out that we don't attach the same meaning to logic -- at least, I think. You may in fact see me concede that all thoughts are logical in the next few sentences though.. let's see how this goes. My definition is that logic requires a system of reasoning. Reasoning is a conscious process. Process is the key word here. When I stated earlier that I have had illogical thoughts, I was attempting to say that I have had thoughts which must be discarded as illogical -- but this can only happen after a process of reasoning. Otherwise, the thoughts remain unconscious perceptions. So, you have seen me admit that my thoughts are all subject to the process of reason, and thus, of logic - even if the outcome is that I have had an "illogical" thought, that is, one that makes no sense upon further inspection. But, just to see if I can put a wrench in my own argument here, what becomes of the images thrown to me from my dreams and perceptions, and what of slippery activities like creativity? I may be going through a reasoning process as I create, but I may decide to act before reasoning out the consequences, later reflecting on my creation as a "spontaneous" act, in other words, one I did not reason into existence but rather was a chasing of a perception I did not fully grasp at the time. Is an act of "spontaneous creation" like this not subject to logic? I realize I may come across as drawing lines in the sand with this notion, but it seems important to me. If something like a jazz musician improvising with extreme skill is not going through the process of reason, is it exempt from being logical? The musician knows he will improvise, that is -- he logically understands that he will improvise -- and this leads me to ask the question: is something like musical improvisation a thought - that is, is it logical? If not, is it illogical, or just not subject to the rules of logic at all? I'm genuinely curious, because it is certainly a mental process...

 

And correct me if I'm wrong, but did Wittgenstein write the epitaph of his own idea with the belief that philosophy is a meaningless activity? The Tractatus has a sort of philosophy, as far as I can tell.

 

 

I dunno about you, but discussing logic always makes me somewhat nervous that I'm committing fallacies left and right without realizing it.

 

 

 

Well, music is not exactly the best example you could find : i mean : this jazz musician could be experiencing some kind of trance, yet his music would still communicate something on the emotional level (something that describes the emotional state of his role/character (a theatre actor could play the role of an happy chap even though he learnt his grandmother died just a few minutes before the play starts)).

Let's try to find another example of trance, or at least self-oblivion, inducing state. Playing a shoot-them-up kind of game in the style of gradius ? You're still communicating something to the machine : the joystick stands for the input interface (and the tv screen and the speakers are the output interface, through which the players builds his own mental representation of the game (you need to see and hear in order to play the game)).

A dreamless sleep ? Apart from the fact that your brain is carrying out some kinds of EventRunLoops in order to look for unusual external signals (and eventually wake you up), your brain is not picturing any world (possible or actual). Yet, someone could still extract infos out of it, the same way you could theoretically extract infos out of a computer in sleep mode (the interface is unavailable whilst datas are maintained in the ram).

In short, it's not because you're experiencing something beyond (or under) words that it's not logical. But I do understand your point : staying in a strictly internal point of view. Even if you experienced the wildest acid trip ever, i think you'd still be able to say "it was beyond words, it was indescribable" which is some kind of … description in itself.

You could also state that paradoxes are not logical (for example "this sentence is false"). It would still provoke some kind of dynamic/iterative logical thinking ("so this sentence is true, thus it's false, consequently it's true, etc"). You could even describe it with an algorithm.

i is an integer with initial value 0

forever:

.....if the remainder after dividing i by 2 is 0:

.........say "so this sentence is true !"

.....else:

.........say "argll it's actually false !"

.....increment i

 

About Wittgenstein. I went as far as the fourth part of the book because i don't understand what he says anymore ! And that's exactly where he starts expressing his views about philosophy. From what I can read about it, wittgenstein's definition of meaning is kinda extreme. Propositions about fictional events are unmeaning. For example,

"Odysseus was set down on the beach at Ithaca"

is unmeaning because it does not correlate to a fact (aRb says that "aRb", not the other way around. Rimbaud was expressing the same stuff when he was mentioning a "flower that tells me its name"). I think it's ok to argue about whether or not Odysseus was set down on the beach, since in this case, you're referring to a book's character. "i'm telling you odysseus was set down on the beach, goddamnit, just read homer's book. -- Ah ! you're talking about homer's version of odysseus ! i was talking about zobizoba's version !".

 

There are also meaningless propositions, those in the style of "this sentence is true". As they're always true, they have no meaning at all. The proposition and the corresponding fact are one and the same thing, or something in this vein...

 

What's funny, is that in regards of these definition, the tractatus and "philosophy is meaningless" are … philosophical statement, thus they are meaningless ! i'm not sure he'd agree upon "philosophy is a meaningless activity", because if so it's a social practice. At least it has a role : clarifying language.

 

 

 

 

I think a lot of philosophical concepts are rooted into a purely intuitive ground.

•Natural/artificial : when it comes to drugs, a drug aficionado could say : i'm only drinking poppy tea because i like my morphine natural". Another one could say "I don't care if it has been chemically synthesized in a laboratory. If it exists in nature, it's okay, i'm doing it. But i'm not doing drugs that don't exist in plants, like LSD". And a chemist could say, "LSD's structure is natural, it can potentially exist in a yet-to-be-discovered plant, here on earth, or on another planet".

•Same thing goes for consciousness. At first, the mirror test looked like a good test, but when we discovered elephants, monkeys, or crows pass it, it wasn't a good definition of consciousness anymore (some pigs even pass it !), since what matters is that our intuition, the common sense, the doxa tell us humans only are conscious.

[luke viia]

Well, music is not exactly the best example you could find : i mean : this jazz musician could be experiencing some kind of trance, yet his music would still communicate something on the emotional level (something that describes the emotional state of his role/character (a theatre actor could play the role of an happy chap even though he learnt his grandmother died just a few minutes before the play starts)).

 

Yeah, I probably could have thought of a better example. However, I do not think that quickly improvising music is a state of trance (just so we're on common ground here, I took the immense trouble of googling an excessive definition. trance = "A half-conscious state characterized by an absence of response to external stimuli"). It is a very active mental state. There have been MRI scans of musicians investigating this sort of thing. Improvising is a complicated, spontaneously creative activity - that is what I was mainly trying to say earlier. Since my definition of Logic is: a conscious activity performed by reasoning - this sort of thing does not call under the umbrella of a logical activity, unless we use GORDO/Sagan's notion that (correct me if I'm wrong, gordo) the brain is always performing logically because its processes can be logically understood long after they have occured. That's a notion I certainly won't deny... I think it's pretty beautiful that nature works that way. But my definition of logic necessitates Reason, in the Greek sense - Reason as a faculty of mind (remember, I was originally arguing against the notion that "all thoughts are logical").

 

So I'm back to this: is skillful spontaneous creation - an activity of the mind - a thought? In my example, it had to be learned. But at this point I am going to give up my argument; I concede that what we are currently categorizing as thoughts are logical by their nature, and my example of the jazz improvisation as a 'thought' is admittedly shaky (my mind may change about all this if the evidence presents itself). BTW, I still need your personal definition of the word logic (explicitly, please), so we can be sure we're talking about the same thing (otherwise Wittgenstein might call us out on our meaninglessness).

 

What's funny, is that in regards of these definition, the tractatus and "philosophy is meaningless" are … philosophical statement, thus they are meaningless ! i'm not sure he'd agree upon "philosophy is a meaningless activity", because if so it's a social practice. At least it has a role : clarifying language.

 

I pulled the notion that he believes philosophy is an activity from here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#Nat1

 

(I had to do at least a little bit of reading to keep up with you in this conversation, Babar... I don't know much about philosophy... and unlike the French elephants, I forget)

 

•Same thing goes for consciousness. At first, the mirror test looked like a good test, but when we discovered elephants, monkeys, or crows pass it, it wasn't a good definition of consciousness anymore (some pigs even pass it !), since what matters is that our intuition, the common sense, the doxa tell us humans only are conscious.

 

Yeah, the mirror test is good for self-awareness, but that is not the same as the rich imagination that humans possess (we have the capacity to very easily render non-existent objects in our minds, for example, and then bring them to reality... other animals may possess this skill in some dim way, I do not know, but they've not made use of it in the way we have).

 

Regarding anything you typed that I did not quote: In short, I agree.

**posting in the cat box**

[GORDO]

If were to get all philosophical we could draw a line between a priori logic and a posteriori logic, and argue if the a priori type exists at all.

 

One way I like to see things is that reason is just another sense, just like sight or hearing, it allows us to perceive reality. allows us to see the logic in reality. but like all senses it's not perfect.