When an author of one of the pieces that I mock shows up, I try to bump them up to the top of the queue. No matter how crackpotty they are, I think that if they’ve gone to the trouble to come and defend their theories, they deserve a modicum of respect, and giving them a fair chance to get people to see their defense is the least I can do.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe. Yesterday, the author of that piece showed up in the comments. It’s a two-year-old post, which was originally written back at ScienceBlogs – so a discussion in the comments there isn’t going to get noticed by anyone. So I’m reposting it here, with some revisions.
Stripped down to its basics, the CTMU is just yet another postmodern “perception defines the universe” idea. Nothing unusual about it on that level. What makes it interesting is that it tries to take a set-theoretic approach to doing it. (Although, to be a tiny bit fair, he claims that he’s not taking a set theoretic approach, but rather demonstrating why a set theoretic approach won’t work. Either way, I’d argue that it’s more of a word-game than a real theory, but whatever…)
The real universe has always been theoretically treated as an object, and specifically as the composite type of object known as a set. But an object or set exists in space and time, and reality does not. Because the real universe by definition contains all that is real, there is no “external reality” (or space, or time) in which it can exist or have been “created”. We can talk about lesser regions of the real universe in such a light, but not about the real universe as a whole. Nor, for identical reasons, can we think of the universe as the sum of its parts, for these parts exist solely within a spacetime manifold identified with the whole and cannot explain the manifold itself. This rules out pluralistic explanations of reality, forcing us to seek an explanation at once monic (because nonpluralistic) and holistic (because the basic conditions for existence are embodied in the manifold, which equals the whole). Obviously, the first step towards such an explanation is to bring monism and holism into coincidence.
Right from the start, we can see the beginnings of how he’s going to use a supposedly set-theoretic notion, in a very peculiar way. I don’t know anyone who seriously thinks that the universe is a set. Sets are a tool that we use to construct abstract models that describe things. The universe isn’t a set; it’s the universe. And yet a huge part of his argument is, ultimately, based on “disproving” the idea that the universe is a set, based on silly word-games.
And also, right from the beginning, we can see exactly the kind of semantic games he’s going to play. He manages to say pretty much nothing about the universe – all he’s doing is playing with the semantics of the words “Universe”, “real”, “holistic”, etc.
I particularly love this next bit.
When theorizing about an all-inclusive reality, the first and most important principle is containment, which simply tells us what we should and should not be considering. Containment principles, already well known in cosmology, generally take the form of tautologies; e.g., “The physical universe contains all and only that which is physical.” The predicate “physical”, like all predicates, here corresponds to a structured set, “the physical universe” (because the universe has structure and contains objects, it is a structured set). But this usage of tautology is somewhat loose, for it technically amounts to a predicate-logical equivalent of propositional tautology called autology, meaning self-description. Specifically, the predicate physical is being defined on topological containment in the physical universe, which is tacitly defined on and descriptively contained in the predicate physical, so that the self-definition of “physical” is a two-step operation involving both topological and descriptive containment. While this principle, which we might regard as a statement of “physicalism”, is often confused with materialism on the grounds that “physical” equals “material”, the material may in fact be only a part of what makes up the physical. Similarly, the physical may only be a part of what makes up the real. Because the content of reality is a matter of science as opposed to mere semantics, this issue can be resolved only by rational or empirical evidence, not by assumption alone.
After a particularly egregious exercise in english semantics, in which he does nothing but play with word meanings, coming nowhere near actually saying anything, but using lots of impressive-looking words, he concludes that it “is a matter of science as opposed to mere semantics”. Rich!
He spends some more time rambling about semantics of words like “physicalism”, “materialism”, and “containment”, before finally getting to the part that’s got any math content at all.
Now for a brief word on sets. Mathematicians view set theory as fundamental. Anything can be considered an object, even a space or a process, and wherever there are objects, there is a set to contain them. This “something” may be a relation, a space or an algebraic system, but it is also a set; its relational, spatial or algebraic structure simply makes it a structured set. So mathematicians view sets, broadly including null, singleton, finite and infinite sets, as fundamental objects basic to meaningful descriptions of reality. It follows that reality itself should be a set…in fact, the largest set of all. But every set, even the largest one, has a powerset which contains it, and that which contains it must be larger (a contradiction). The obvious solution: define an extension of set theory incorporating two senses of “containment” which work together in such a way that the largest set can be defined as “containing” its powerset in one sense while being contained by its powerset in the other. Thus, it topologically includes itself in the act of descriptively including itself in the act of topologically including itself…, and so on, in the course of which it obviously becomes more than just a set.
First – he gets the definition of set wrong. He’s talking about naive set theory, which we know is unsound. And in fact, he’s talking about exactly the kinds of inclusion issues that lead to the unsoundness of naive set theory!
Then he uses semantic word-games to argue that the universe can’t be a set according to set theory, because the universe is the largest thing there is, but set theory says that you can always create something larger by taking a powerset. What does he conclude from this pointless exercise? That playing word-games doesn’t tell you anything about the universe? No, that makes too much sense. That naive set theory perhaps isn’t a great model for the physical universe? No, still too much sense. No, he concludes that this problem of word-games means that set theory is wrong, and must be expanded to include the contradiction of the largest thing being both smaller than its powerset and larger than its powerset.
Yes, the solution is to take an unsound mathematical theory, and make it doubly unsound.
In the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, the set of all sets, and the real universe to which it corresponds, take the name (SCSPL) of the required extension of set theory. SCSPL, which stands for Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language, is just a totally intrinsic, i.e. completely self-contained, language that is comprehensively and coherently (self-distributively) self-descriptive, and can thus be model-theoretically identified as its own universe or referent domain. Theory and object go by the same name because unlike conventional ZF or NBG set theory, SCSPL hologically infuses sets and their elements with the distributed (syntactic, metalogical) component of the theoretical framework containing and governing them, namely SCSPL syntax itself, replacing ordinary set-theoretic objects with SCSPL syntactic operators. The CTMU is so-named because the SCSPL universe, like the set of all sets, distributively embodies the logical syntax of its own descriptive mathematical language. It is thus not only self-descriptive in nature; where logic denotes the rules of cognition (reasoning, inference), it is self-cognitive as well. (The terms “SCSPL” and “hology” are explained further below; to skip immediately to the explanations, just click on the above links.)
(His text refers to “the above links”, but in fact, the document doesn’t contain any links.)
Now… on the one hand, he claims that I’ve misrepresented him by saying that he’s talking about the universe using a set-theoretic framework. And yet, what is this but an extremely ill-defined variation of naive set theory?
This is pure muddle. It’s hard to figure out what he even thinks he’s doing. It’s clear that he believes he’s inventing a new kind of set theory, which he calls a “self-processing language”, and he goes on to get very muddled about the differences between syntax and semantics, and between a model and what it models. I have no idea what he means by “replacing set-theoretic objects with syntactic operators” – but I do know that what he wrote makes no sense – it’s sort of like saying “I’m going to fix the sink in my bathroom by replacing the leaky washer with the color blue”, or “I’m going to fly to the moon by correctly spelling my left leg.”
From there who moves to adding a notion of time, which he seems to believe can be done using nothing but set theory. Unfortunately, that makes no sense at all: he wants to somehow say that sets have time properties, without modifying the sets, modeling the time property, or in fact anything at all – once again, he just throws around lots of terminology in meaningless ways:
An act is a temporal process, and self-inclusion is a spatial relation. The act of self-inclusion is thus “where time becomes space”; for the set of all sets, there can be no more fundamental process. No matter what else happens in the evolving universe, it must be temporally embedded in this dualistic self-inclusion operation. In the CTMU, the self-inclusion process is known as conspansion and occurs at the distributed, Lorentz-invariant conspansion rate c, a time-space conversion factor already familiar as the speed of light in vacuo (conspansion consists of two alternative phases accounting for the wave and particle properties of matter and affording a logical explanation for accelerating cosmic expansion). When we imagine a dynamic self-including set, we think of a set growing larger and larger in order to engulf itself from without. But since there is no “without” relative to the real universe, external growth or reference is not an option; there can be no external set or external descriptor. Instead, self-inclusion and self-description must occur inwardly as the universe stratifies into a temporal sequence of states, each state topologically and computationally contained in the one preceding it (where the conventionally limited term computation is understood to refer to a more powerful SCSPL-based concept, protocomputation, involving spatiotemporal parallelism). On the present level of discourse, this inward self-inclusion is the conspansive basis of what we call spacetime.
I can’t make head or tails out of this. It’s just word-games, trying to throw in as many fancy-sounding terms as possible. What on earth does Lorentz invariance have to do with this muddle? LI means something quite specific, and he’s done nothing to connect any of this rubbish to it. He’s just throwing around words: “conspansion”, “lorentz invariance”, “protocomputation”.
But it gets worse. We get yet more of his confusion about just what “syntax” means:
Every object in spacetime includes the entirety of spacetime as a state-transition syntax according to which its next state is created. This guarantees the mutual consistency of states and the overall unity of the dynamic entity the real universe. And because the sole real interpretation of the set-theoretic entity “the set of all sets” is the entire real universe, the associated foundational paradoxes are resolved in kind (by attributing mathematical structure like that of the universe to the pure, uninterpreted set-theoretic version of the set of all sets). Concisely, resolving the set-of-all-sets paradox requires that (1) an endomorphism or self-similarity mapping D:S–>rÎS be defined for the set of all sets S and its internal points r; (2) there exist two complementary senses of inclusion, one topological [S Ét D(S)] and one predicative [D(S) Éd S], that allow the set to descriptively “include itself” from within, i.e. from a state of topological self-inclusion (where Ét denotes topological or set-theoretic inclusion and Éd denotes descriptive inclusion, e.g. the inclusion in a language of its referents); and (3) the input S of D be global and structural, while the output D(S) = (r Éd S) be internal to S and play a syntactic role. In short, the set-theoretic and cosmological embodiments of the self-inclusion paradox are resolved by properly relating the self-inclusive object to the descriptive syntax in terms of which it is necessarily expressed, thus effecting true self-containment: “the universe (set of all sets) is that which topologically contains that which descriptively contains the universe (set of all sets).”
Yes, lucky us, more wordplay!
The thing to notice here is right in the first sentence: “Every object in spacetime includes the entirety of spacetime as a state-transition syntax“. Spacetime isn’t a syntax. Like I said before, it’s like talking about spelling your leg. An object can’t be a syntax. A syntax is a method of writing down a sequence of symbols that expresses some logical statement. An object in spacetime can’t “include the universe as a state transition syntax”.
What I think he’s trying to say here is that we can describe objects in the universe as state transition systems, in which the state of an object plus the state of the universe can be used to compute the next state of the object. But he doesn’t understand that a syntax and a system are different things. And he seems to think that the idea of describing the universe as a state transition system is somehow profound and original. It’s not. I’ve read papers proposing state-transition semantics for the universe dating back to the 1950s, and I’d be surprised if people like von Neumann hadn’t though of it even earlier than that.
The rest of that paragraph is yet more of his silly word-games, trying to cope with the self-created paradox of inclusion and size in his mangled set theory.
At this point, I’m going to stop bothering to quote any more of his stuff. The basic point of his argument, and the basic problems that pervade it are all abundantly clear after this much, and you’ve already experienced as much fun as your going to by laughing at his foolishness.
To recap: this “theory” of his has three problems, each of which is individually enough to discard it; with the three of them together, it’s a virtual masterpiece of crap.
- The “theory” consists mostly of word-games – arguing about the meanings of words like “universe” and “inclusion”, without actually explaining anything about how the universe works. It’s a theory with no predictive or descriptive value.
- The “theory” is defined by creating a new version of set theory, whose axioms are never stated, and whose specific goal guarantees that it will be an unsound theory. Unsound mathematical theories are useless: every possible statement is provable in an unsound theory.
- The author doesn’t understand the difference between syntax and semantics, between objects and models, or between statements and facts – and because of that, the basic statements in his theory are utterly meaningless.
Could he be trying to pull a reverse-Sokal on us?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
This doesn’t sound like relatvism, it sounds more like logical positivism to me.
Well, it really sounds most like the gobbledigook Sokal made fun of, but if I pretend for the moment that there is some actual meaning behind the words, that meaning is more like a version of positivism than it is relativism. He’s trying to construct some perfect (mathematical) language with a vocabulary that, in some undefinable way, has a one-to-one relationship with things in reality. There is also no indication (at least in these excerpts) that he thinks reality can be manipulated by people in the way that typically characterizes strong forms of relativism. So he’s missing one of the ‘red flags.’
Final thought – it seems distinctly odd for someone so obsessed with the idea of sets to claim right out of the gate to reject reductionism in favor of ‘monism.’ When you model some subject as a set, you are almost by definition doing a form of reductionism.
Good grief. And here I was hoping we could leave it on a semi-pleasant note.
Unfortunately, instead of retiring to write something vaguely constructive, Mark has now created a third rudely-titled “crank” page for me where previously there were only two, and without my original responses (in which I roughly explained what I was actually trying to convey). Instead, I’m now invited to start over from scratch in “defending my theory”.
It’s an old game, and everybody knows it all too well. The target is supposed to enhance the reputation of the critic by pretending that the critic is legitimate while bumping up the critic’s hit count with his “defense”, despite the obvious lack of any willingness on the part of the critic to give an inch under any circumstances, even if somebody puts a blueberry-math pie in his face.
This, of course, leaves me with no rational alternative but to point out that Mark is not a legitimate critic. In fact, Mark is incompetent. Thus, instead of defending myself against Mark, the most appropriate course of action in the present instance is to invite Mark to defend himself.
Let me explain what I mean by “incompetent”.
There are a lot of ideas floating around out there. Some are good; others are bad; others aren’t so attractive to the naked eye, but improve under magnification (many of the best ideas have come in this form, and sometimes the magnification process is not complete until long after publication).
A three-way partition can also be applied to Internet pundits, e.g. Mark, who entertain themselves and their readers by evaluating the ideas of others. Some are good at it, others are not so good, and others are a complete waste of time and bandwidth.
The value criteria for distinguishing among good and bad ideas are fairly cut and dried:
(1) Syntactic consistency: Is the idea well-formed and logically consistent? (Y/N)
(2) Semantic consistency: Is the idea consistently applied to its universe? (Y/N)
(3) Relevance: Is the idea relevant to its purported content or the problem to be solved? (Y/N)
The competency criteria for distinguishing among evaluators, e.g. Mark, are equally obvious:
(1) Comprehension: The evaluator makes sure he fully understands the ideas he evaluates and refrains from attaching extraneous constructions, speculative interpretations, or inappropriate conceptual models (even in the face of uncertainty regarding the proper interpretation).
(2) Discernment: The evaluator possesses the willingness, the knowledge, and the intelligence to properly and thoroughly apply value criteria 1-3.
(3) Neutrality: The evaluator limits his judgments to value criteria 1-3, and withholds final judgment on ideas to which he is unable to apply criteria 1-3 with reasonable certainty (e.g., in fields outside his areas of expertise, or where he bumps up against his intellectual ceiling).
In scholarly discourse, evaluators are required to justify their judgments. Those who display inadequate comprehension, discernment, or neutrality in their judgments, having failed one or more competency criteria, are by definition incompetent. Among incompetent evaluators, the worst-of-breed are obviously those who chronically fail all three competency criteria.
With regard to my essay, Mark fails all three competency criteria. Indeed, he readily admits to it. This renders Mark incompetent, by his own admission, to do what he’s trying to do here. Accordingly, he fails to qualify as a legitimate “debunker”, “crank fighter” or whatever it is that he likes to call himself, instead constituting a mere pain in the neck and leaving me nothing sufficiently coherent to “defend” against.
In fact, it’s a bit worse than that. This is because Mark sometimes seems to choose the ideas he attacks *because* he fails to comprehend them. In other words, it’s not just that Mark randomly encounters ideas he’s unfit to evaluate, and then does so anyway just to be a pain in the neck; it’s that for Mark, personal incomprehension almost seems to be an irresistible evaluation-stimulus.
Of course, in keeping with his overall incompetence as an evaluator, Mark doesn’t understand this. Instead, he pulls a cognitive switcheroo of which he is seemingly not consciously aware, automatically confusing his own incomprehension with incomprehensibility. In fact, “incomprehensibility” seems to be his main critique of my essay.
In other words, Mark has switched a judgment on his own subjective mental state (incomprehension) for a purportedly objective attribute of the idea he’s trying to evaluate (incomprehensibility), thus making the distinction “good math | bad math” effectively equivalent to “math that Mark is capable of understanding, and therefore likes | math-like content that Mark is incapable of understanding, and therefore hates!”
Now, if Mark were as smart as he evidently thinks he is, he’d be less aggressive. He wouldn’t immediately stick his neck out to upchuck all over ideas he doesn’t understand. Instead, finding himself unable to locate obvious falsehoods in the target of his derision, he’d wait until he has more data on what’s really going on with it. After all, that’s what reasonable people do.
But Mark isn’t always reasonable, or all that smart either, at least when he lets his characteristic irascibility get the better of him. In fact, as we’ve already established, he can be an incompetent little pain in the neck. In fact, he often appears to wallow in irrationality with what appears to be near-demonic relish.
Remember, the value and competency criteria listed above are objective in nature. This isn’t just an opinion; it’s a rock-solid indictment of Mark’s incompetence as an evaluator of ideas that he considers sufficiently “mathematical” to merit his special attention, but about which he actually can’t tell his ass from his elbow.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that nothing Mark says makes sense; some of what he says obviously does make sense. But some does not, and that’s where Mark tumbles into incompetency. Obviously, as the very first order of business here, Mark needs to mend his incompetent ways.
(I hope we’ve managed to avoid any problems with English comprehension this time around.)
Chris, you want us to believe you, you’re going to have to defend your theory rather than getting on the offensive. From what I’ve read over the past half hour, in this blog and on your own site, I can’t make out anything solid that you’re trying to convey. A summary here might at least enlighten us to your goals
‘Now, if Mark were as smart as he evidently thinks he is, he’d be less aggressive’
Where’s that kettle? I want to yell at it…
Dude, that stuff is from the INTRO page on your own website talking about CTMU. If you’re going to do an introduction to something and expect people to understand what you’re talking about, explain in simpler terms first. And if you don’t want people to understand what you’re talking about, then you’re being the classic internet elitist jackass. PRESUMING you want people to understand what this stuff’s about, you should probably elaborate in simpler terms.
Your FIRST SENTENCE doesn’t make sense to me, and I’ve had training in set theory. A set is a logical device used for talking about things. It’s not actually the things it’s talking about. And you say a set “exists in space and time”. Where in “space and time” is the set of real numbers between 0 and 1? What you’re describing is not a set as has ever been described in any set theory studies I’ve done. If you’re moving away from accepted terms and using different definitions for something as basic as sets, you really should define your terms.
I’ve slammed Mark CC a few times before. But you know what? He at least speaks with content, possibly true, possibly false, so there’s always a target thought to work with. You, in contrast, are just gibbering, outputting a cuckoo word salad whose high point is that it is grammatical and has some spiffy vocabulary in it now and then.
But Mark is treating you very gently in merely pointing out that you’re a crackpot and spelling out how you don’t make any sense repeatedly. Me? I suspect you couldn’t pass a Turing test. The difference between you and a program that cuts and pastes from Knol™ is you have the MGonz add-in. You’d be more entertaining, at least, if you threw in some Time Cube trash or Neal Adams quality artwork. As it is, you’re just a crackpot and complete bore.
You see, your theory, and your defenses of it, are 100% content-free. Telling us, for example, that some parts of what Mark wrote makes sense, and some parts do not, without giving any hints as to which is which, is all you can do to defend yourself. Rather telling, except to you.
As a minor nit, Mark’s comment that space-time is not syntactical might be correct, but it might not. It is certainly not known to be syntactical in any model yet proposed, but it could conceivably be. (Wheeler for a while thought this hope might go somewhere, but nothing came of it.)
Ad hominem through and through. Textbook.
Your defense does not apply here. Let’s see why. To be able to competently evaluate Mark’s criticism, you should
1) Comprehension: I believe you don’t understand what Mark is saying, but in any case it doesn’t matter, because you are trying to refute what Mark says without referring to what Mark says.
2) Discernment: You are obviously not willing to apply your whole criteria for evaluation.
3) Neutrality: do I really need to address this point?
Now, can we focus on your theory? We are not discussing about you, but your theory, and you are in a prime position to teach us. We are willing to learn and think. Can you give as any guiding idea?
Reads like someone who has gotten lost in his own abstractions and become convinced of their independent reality.
I hate when that happens.
It looks to me like he starts out with naive set theory and a conflation of “subset of” and “element of” in the term “containment”, follows this up with the idea of a theory (in the model theoretic sense of the term) which serves as a model for itself (which I admit is an interesting idea) and which somehow serves as a language for itself as well, despite never defining the symbols or syntax in use. Next he seems to try resolving Russel’s paradox by positing a temporally-couched version of Russel’s hierarchy of sets, in which each instantaneous slice of the universe “contains” the previous instantaneous slice, while somehow maintaining identification of each slice with the next. Then, referring back to his self-interpreting model, he identifies syntax and semantics while trying to keep “containment” in the language separate from “containment” in the meta-language, still not realizing his initial equivocation on the word “containment”.
How he gets to the idea that each piece of the universe “contains” the universe as a whole (i.e. the holographic universe idea) from there, I have no idea, unless he’s moved silently from sets to multisets, in which case he could simply have begun by defining the universe to be the multiset whose elements consist exactly of however many copies of itself he wants, since he is clearly ignoring the axiom of regularity from the beginning.
Indeed. Langan fails to grasp the fact that real physical things aren’t and cannot be sets, i.e. that Mark and the singleton set that only has Mark as a member are two completely different things, and that the universe and the set of all things in the universe (and, for that matter, the set that has the universe as a member) are completely different things.
What he actually seems to be doing – if I am charitable – is a kind of mereology, Lesniewski-style, or perhaps trying to replace set-theory by a completely nominalistic mereology. He doesn’t seem to be aware that this is what he is doing, however, and continues to use the language of set theory. Besides, most of the questions he is asking and claims he is making would make no sense in mereology.
Trivia: Langan contributed a chapter to Dembski’s anthology “Uncommon Dissent”. Make of that what you want.
For example certain properties of the reflexive self-contained language of reality that it is syntactically self-distributed self-reading and coherently self-configuring and self-processing respectively correspond to the traditional theological properties omnipresence omniscience and omnipotence. While the kind of theology that this entails neither requires nor supports the intercession of any supernatural being external to the real universe itself it does support the existence of a supraphysical being the SCSPL global operator-designer capable of bringing more to bear on localized physical contexts than meets the casual eye.
Hey Chris, who is on first bud?
LOL! I tried reading through the CTMU, and got the exact same feeling as some others … complete semantics. I was expecting it to be about math, physics, or something a little more solid. It seems to me to be at least 85% fluff and word-games. Too bad, one would hope the ‘smartest man in america’ would have something to contribute to the world rather than CTMU and Intelligent Design.
A high IQ is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for understanding advanced mathematics. Like Vos Savant, Langan has attempted to understand mathematics with his intellectual gifts alone, skipping over the thousands of hours of arduous study necessary for true comprehension.
I recommend Mr. Langan start here.
Your comment is so condescending the spittle flying from your mouth feels like rain.
How in hell does your statement make any sense? How does condescension have anything to do with spit or its qualities?
As an internet pundit once said (paraphrased), “If you can’t count to metathree, you shouldn’t be using metaphors.”
Holy shit, Chris Langan is here in the comments! Y’all might not realize it, but he has an incredibly high IQ. Unfortunately, he is also pretty much incapable of making himself understood — a form of low social intelligence. Malcolm Gladwell relates in Outliers that Langan taught himself calculus at a young age; when he attended his first calculus class in university, he went to speak to the professor after the lecture to offer criticisms of the pedagogy. The professor thought Langan was complaining that the material was too difficult — Langan was unable to convey the fact that he understood the material perfectly and had for years.
Mr. Langan, please take my advice. I have a Ph.D., and yet I recognize that, in terms of raw intelligence, relative to you I am mentally handicapped. My advice is this: you have got to figure out how to get your ideas understood as much as possible by people whose intelligence does not compare to yours! Experiment! Try new things! Test your progress in this task!If you’re so smart, how can you consistently fail over and over at this one skill? This is the most important thing one can possibly learn that you haven’t taught yourself already.
I think you’re too charitable. Mr. Langan is certainly intelligent. But being intelligent isn’t enough – you also have to know stuff. You cannot just figure out set theory and mathematical logic on your own, no matter how intelligent you are (because no matter how intelligent you are, you won’t match the intelligence of Frege, Russell, Church, Hilbert and so on combined). Not only do you need to know stuff, you also need to correct misunderstandings everyone does make in teaching themselves the fundamentals. High intelligence doesn’t help against psychological biases (confirmation bias and so on), but may help you create a huge, bizarre and confused framework based on misunderstanding without helping you weed out those misunderstandings (because you are just trying to make everything else you do work as well as possible with the misconstruals).
The point of this piece of hobby-psychology is that I don’t for a moment think Langan’s primary problem is to make himself understood. His problem is that he is thoroughly confused; the fundamental concepts and their application are misunderstood – and that means that he not only uses the wrong words; the questions he tries to solve are meaningless. His nonsense ideas probably stem from some fundamental understanding somewhere; the precise differences between syntax and semantics, and between sets and their elements, are my guess – every crucial distinction in set theory, mathematics, logic and physics is meshed together in an incoherent jumble. Langan might think it makes sense, and it may seem as if it makes sense to himself, and he may use his high intelligence to interpret everything in ways that seems to make sense to himself; but it doesn’t make sense. There is no way to just clarify the passages above; they are wrong and usually not even wrong.
I don’t disagree with what you wrote; I just think that Langan is so mired in his own skewed frame of thought that he won’t be able get free without an actual attempt to communicate with other people (instead of jockeying for status, as he does in his reply to MarkCC).
What is Eric Hart up to these days?
Wow. Spinoza would shake his head in disappointment at how his philosophy got hijacked for something like this. He had his share of word-mixups (and honestly, that tends to be a common problem with rationalists that start working from the top down), but at least he was fairly clear in meaning *most* of the time.
OK, I think we’ve waited about long enough for Mark to defend himself from the charge of incompetence.
You know, it never looks good when the proprietor of a highly contentious web site hides behind his commentators. It tends to destroy the forum as an appropriate setting for serious intellectual discussions. So I trust that Mark has merely been busy, or better yet, that he recognizes the futility of trying to defend his indefensible behavior.
In any case, I’ll go ahead and pave the way to a final resolution of the situation by dispelling any remaining doubt that Mark is incompetent to evaluate the essay he’s been attacking here. Fortunately, an analysis of the first “substantive” paragraph of his critique will be sufficient for that purpose.
Here’s the paragraph:
“Right from the start, we can see the beginnings of how he’s going to use a supposedly set-theoretic notion, in a very peculiar way. I don’t know anyone who seriously thinks that the universe is a set. Sets are a tool that we use to construct abstract models that describe things. The universe isn’t a set; it’s the universe. And yet a huge part of his argument is, ultimately, based on “disproving” the idea that the universe is a set, based on silly word-games.”
Let’s have a look the above paragraph sentence by sentence.
Sentence 1: “Right from the start, we can see the beginnings of how he’s going to use a supposedly set-theoretic notion, in a very peculiar way.”
I don’t know what this means; it’s “geek” to me. It’s probably an error, but in the spirit of evaluative competence, I’ll withhold judgment.
Sentence 2: “I don’t know anyone who seriously thinks that the universe is a set.”
Error 1: That’s vanishingly unlikely. Materialists think that the universe is a set of material objects (e.g., atoms and subatomic particles in various combinations) on which all else can be secondarily defined and/or causally supervened. Any assertion by Mark that he doesn’t know at least one person subscribing to such a viewpoint is simply incredible, especially given the atheist-materialist circles in which he runs. (Mark describes himself as a “religious, theistic, reconstructionist Jew,” but that’s beside the point; merely that he attended a modern university is enough to tell us that he has rubbed elbows with many atheistic materialists.)
But materialism is almost beside the point; all we need here is the scientific method. With its unrelenting emphasis on observation of, and experimentation on, material objects including the measurement devices thereby affected, the scientific method demands that everything in science be related to observables and the objects to which they are attached, which, being individually discernable, qualify as elements of sets (with all appropriate distinctions applied; e.g., sets of physical objects or events are countable, while sets of points in a continuum are uncountable).
In search of counterexamples, one may be tempted to point to such things as time and process, “empty space”, various kinds of potential, forces, fields, waves, energy, causality, the spacetime manifold, quantum wave functions, “laws of nature”, “the mathematical structure of physical reality,” and so on as “non-material components of the universe”, but these are predicates whose physical relevance utterly depends on observation of the material content of the universe. To cut them loose from the elements of observational sets would be to deprive them of observational content and empty them of all physical meaning.
Sentence 3: “Sets are a tool that we use to construct abstract models that describe things. “
Error 2: More accurately, the concept “set” is a formal entity into which real content may be mapped by description or definition. To preclude content is to sever the mapping and render the “tool” descriptively useless.
Everything discernable (directly perceptible) within the physical universe, including the universe itself (as a coherent singleton), can be directly mapped into the set concept; only thusly are secondary concepts endowed with physical content. One ends up with sets, and elements of sets, to which various otherwise-empty concepts are attached. Unfortunately, in standard theory, this attachment is reminiscent of sessile mollusks which have glued themselves to foreign bodies, and this is a problem for set theory as a descriptive language for the universe (or as a foundational language of the mathematical formalisms applied to the universe by science), as it is subject to a crippling form of dualism which separates functions from the sets they relate. But while set concept is obviously necessary – these other concepts are rendered physically meaningless without it – this in no way implies its sufficiency on any scale of reference.
Sentence 4: “The universe isn’t a set; it’s the universe.”
Error 3: This is an instance of logical negation amounting to an absolute distinction between “set” and “the universe”. It asserts the nonexistence of structural overlap between “universe” and “set” on all levels of reference, thus precluding shared structure.
Let’s take a closer look. Mark isn’t just saying
4a. “The universe is *in part* a set, but ultimately *more than* just a set (of objects, events, etc.)”;
he’s saying
4b. “The universe is *not* a set, period.”
These statements are mathematically distinct. Mark’s statement, 4b, implies that the universe is nowhere a set, i.e., that neither it nor any of its contents can be mapped into a collection or aggregation of objects, elements, points, or any other discernable entities as content. But this is completely absurd.
Indeed, if the “set” concept is free of physical content, then this precludes the use of any measurement device for observation or experimentation, and in fact, reference to anything that is observationally discernable and quantifiable in number, as this would provide physical content for the “set” concept. Whoops, no more science!
Obviously, the universe IS a (structured) set, but not MERELY a set in the context of any established version of set theory. Its description requires a more powerful mathematical language incorporating the “set” concept within a more capacious formal entity (which, of course, was largely the point of my little essay, which was written back before “everybody knew” that standard set theory could not be rehabilitated as a foundational language). Hello, CTMU, and hello, SCSPL!
In short, the author of Sentence 4 (i.e., Mark) is either mathematically illiterate, or he’s trying a bit clumsily to agree with me in all essential respects, but doesn’t quite know it due to the depth of his own incomprehension.
Sentence 5: “And yet a huge part of his argument is, ultimately, based on ‘disproving’ the idea that the universe is a set, based on silly word-games.”
Error 4: This statement consists of two parts:
5a: “His argument is based on ‘disproving’ the idea that the universe is a set” (I’ll be charitable and assume that Mark knows what proof actually entails in mathematics);
5b: “This attempted disproof, and the argument based on it, are silly word games.”
Quibbles aside, statement 5a is close to accurate; I do, after all, maintain that the universe is not merely a set, but something with greater expressive capacity (properly including that inherent in the set concept itself). However, statement 5b amounts to an accusatory misconstruction of the writer’s personal incomprehension, for which there is no excuse.
And that’s just one little paragraph. Its completely erroneous character conclusively establishes that Mark’s critique fails value criteria 1-3 enumerated above, and that Mark himself fails all three adjoining competency criteria … which, somewhat to his credit, he freely admits.
Summary: Explaining the errors made by Mark at the very beginning of his critique requires more space than is occupied by Mark’s statements themselves. Mark actually generates errors at roughly the same rate, and arguably faster than the rate, at which he writes about the “errors” of others!
Even though this may not seem like serious business to some readers, it certainly is. If Mark does not desist in his nonsense, it may well turn out to be something he regrets for the rest of his life. This is not because he is merely wrong; we all live and learn. It is because Mark often lacks any clue regarding the wrong turns he has taken, and in order to distract himself from his frustration, habitually lashes out at the sources of his confusion like a vindictive child. Any failure of comprehension precipitates him into a fit of pique, at which point he disastrously (for him) attempts to damage the understanding and the reputations of others without just cause.
I’m sure it would be a relief for all concerned if this were the end of my participation here. So I hope that’s the case…all the more so because if it is not, then one way or another, things will only go further downhill for Mark.
Chris:
What a load of ad-hominem ridden bullshit.
The universe isn’t a set. A set is a mathematical construct defined axiomatically. That can sound like doublespeak, but it actually captures an extremely important distinction – one which you still don’t seem to understand.
In math, we build mathematical models of things in order to study and understand them. The mathematical model is an abstract description that’s useful for developing an understanding of the thing that it models – but the model is not the thing that it models.
A set is a mathematical model that’s useful for describing many things. There are many things in the universe that can be modeled very well using set theory. But that’s entirely different from saying that the universe, or that anything in the universe is a set. A mathematical model is not the thing that it models.
There are also many things in the universe that cannot be modeled very well using set theory. (For example, try to put together a meaningful set-theoretic model of vacuum fluctuation and hawking radiation based on the set of particles in the universe. It really doesn’t fit well.)
Does the existence of things in the universe which can’t me modeled nicely in set theory mean that set theory is something wrong? No. Because the universe isn’t a set. The universe and a mathematical model of the universe are very different things. There are many different possible mathematical models of the universe. Even taking set theory as a basis, there are numerous different set-theoretic mathematical models of the universe. The universe isn’t any of those mathematical models; those models are mathematical constructions that we use to try to understand it.
The lack of understanding of this distinction – the difference between a model and the thing that it models – runs throughout your writing. It’s part of why you try to talk about “syntax” in your model in a way that doesn’t make any sense to people who know what syntax means in math and logic. Because you muddle important distinctions. Syntax and semantics are very different things in a mathematical model. But if you insist that the mathematical model is indistinguishable from the thing that it models… then the syntax of an object is the object, the semantics of an object are the object, and therefore the syntax and semantics of the object are exactly the same thing – because they both are the object.
As I’ve frequently said on this blog: the worst math is no math. And that’s a pretty good description of your writing. There are lots of mathematical words, but they’re used in ways that just make no sense. They look impressive, but when you try to burrow down to get to their meaning, they don’t make sense. They muddle together fundamental concepts in nonsensical ways; they blur the distinctions between things that are necessarily distinct.
Worse, even if you ignore much of the muddled reasoning, you still can’t make this stuff work. If you actually take the word salad and try to render it as math, what you get is something very much like naive set theory. Unfortunately, naive set theory doesn’t work: it’s inconsistent. And your system, which by definition embeds itself, necessarily includes all of the inconsistencies of naive set theory.
Of course, you won’t actually address any of these problems. You’ll just wave your hands around and insult me some more. I remain uncertain of just how it is that doing that somehow defends the validity of your theory, but that’s probably just because I’m not as smart as you.
Well, lets see. It is not difficult to disprove this wanna-be-a-proof-by-verbosity.
The core of your “proof” is
>“The universe is *not* a set, period.”
>These statements are mathematically distinct. Mark’s statement, 4b, implies that the universe is nowhere a set, i.e., that neither it nor any of its contents can be mapped into a collection or aggregation of objects, elements, points, or any other discernable entities as content. But this is completely absurd.
Lets recall the mathematical definition of a (naive, not to be too hard on our friend) set. A set is more or less any collection into a whole of definite, distinct objects m (which are called the “elements” of M) of out perception or of our thought. Credits go to wikipedia.
Then you say: the universe is an aggregation of objects. Well, as you which. But, are they DISTINCT?
I don’t know, and you neither. Maybe you have not thought about it, but you don’t know.
Consider two identical particles, like two electrons, or two atoms in precisely the same quantum state. If you know something about Physics (elementary Physics), you will know that these particles can not be differentiated, and that they behave in a very particular way. They are completely indistinguishable. Are they different objects?
You can not trace them by their trayectories: there are no trayectories in the quantum World.
If you see two electrons orbiting an atom, and you look an instant later, you can not tell which particle is which. Are the ultimate elementary particles distict? Sorry, you don’t know. If it is so, no set for you.
Particles are created and destroyed. They exists now but not then. Are they distinct?
Particles can be entangled. Two particles behave like one entity. Are they distinct? Stand a moment to think. Maybe all particles are entangled in some way (this is a very real possibility). Are they distinct?
When you throw electrons agains a screen, you observe particles. But they are guided by a guiding wave function. But wait, a whole system can be described by only one quantum wave function! Are their particles distinct? The whole universe can be described by a (little bit complicated) wave function. In quantum mechanics you loose locality, so you loose individual particles. Are they distinct?
I see a shadow of reasonable doubt.
From my point of view, you declare the universe a set, and you base this conclusion in your assumption that the universe is a set. Not very good logic.
You could model the universe as a set. But that will be your (somewhat outdated) model. But it is not something obvious. I don’t believe it you could tell a person “mathematically illiterate” for not thinking the idea is a tautology.
Of course, you now can always play word games and say you were speaking of an informal set, in everyday language. Maybe you can save face that way. Or by saying that the Universe is the set of one element, the Real Universe.
PS: You should consider reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy. You used practically all of the fallacies listed there.
You’re still jockeying for status. The thing is, you’re not good at it, so your words are lowering your own status.
The posts listed in A Human’s Guide to Words on the Less Wrong Wiki would be useful to you.
“You know, it never looks good when the proprietor of a highly contentious web site hides behind his commentators. ”
Chris, I don’t think that the most people consider Good Math, Bad Math to be a “highly contentious website”. Note also that the claim here is simple wrong. Whether Mark or someone else responds to comments is utterly irrelevant to determining if Mark’s comments are correct. There are in this thread, aside from Mark, multiple mathematicians and physicists commenting. The fact that they all agree with Mark should cause you to wonder if maybe, just maybe, you are mistaken.
While Chris points out the obvious, I’ll just add one curious detail:
Langan says: “Materialists think that the universe is a set of material objects”.
No. In fact, it is incompatible with materialism to assume that the universe is a set of material objects, since sets are not material objects. Materialists think that the universe consist of only material objects. The fact that sets are not material objects is precisely why nominalists like Lesniewski and Goodman developed mereology, as a substitute for set theory that satisfied their nominalist inclinations. And nominalistic mereology is what Langan seems to be sliding into when he talks about collections and aggregations of objects at some point in the above rant.
Of course, mathematical objects are generally not considered very problematic by materialists unless they are also nominalists (especially given the revival of logicism).
To get a feeling for how deep this misunderstanding runs, consider:
“Indeed, if the “set” concept is free of physical content, then this precludes the use of any measurement device for observation or experimentation”
Yes, you cannot physically measure or observe a set. A set is a mathematical object. But you can of course physically measure and observe the universe. Therefore, the universe is not a set. You can also use set theory as a tool when you describe the universe and make models of it.
The number of fallacies committed in the above post is actually staggering. Just look at:
“This is an instance of logical negation amounting to an absolute distinction between “set” and “the universe”. It asserts the nonexistence of structural overlap between “universe” and “set” on all levels of reference, thus precluding shared structure.”
But of course, saying that the universe and a set of the universe are distinct things does in absolutely no way “assert the non-existence of structural overlap”, if Langan uses “structural overlap” or “shared structure” (i.e. isomorphism or partial isomorphism). Would Langan also deny, I wonder, that there can be any “shared structure” between a map and the terrain it is a map of?
“It is because Mark often lacks any clue regarding the wrong turns he has taken”
That one blows the irony meters. Langan must be one of the most spectacular examples there is of Dunning-Kruger in action.
That should be “While Mark points out the obvious”. Sorry
There are links in his text, but they are visually indistinguishable from the surrounding text.
So I did some reading on Chris, and it’s interesting seems to be a really “smart” guy, if you define smart as being mental horsepower.
Let me explain. I’m sort of familiar with this, because I’m a little bit like Chris, though not nearly to the same virtuoso level. I find that I have a tremendous amount of mental horsepower, in that I am able to grasp new concepts very quickly, do fairly complicated mental calculations without having to practice the feat very much, have excellent recall (though I’ll be damned if I can remember appointments…), things like that. But in terms of creativity, inventiveness, etc., well, I’m probably a little above average if I am being honest rather than humble, but it’s not nearly to the same level. And worse than that, I’m a little sloppy and have a scandalous lack of persistence and ambition. And in terms of strategizing, and discerning good ideas from bad, I think I’m pretty much dead-on average.
So the upshot is that I score pretty highly on IQ tests, and in certain arenas I can come across as scary-smart — but overall in my career I’m just doing fairly well. Oh, I have a master’s degree and a good job in an R&D dep’t, but it’s nothing to write a book about. I’m almost certainly not ever going to have papers published in high impact journals, or invent the Next Big Thing, or anything like that. And — here’s the thing — I know people with less mental horsepower than me are doing those things, because they excel in other talents that are more crucial to academic success. Just to take an example from my work, it’s no good if I can read and digest other people’s patents much more rapidly than most, if I don’t have any (well, many) damn patents myself. Mental horsepower is useful, but above a certain point it’s not much more than a party trick.
I get the feeling Chris is a bit like that, only with an absurd, almost inconceivable amount of mental horsepower. He can think through all of this stuff blindingly fast — but in terms of discerning whether any of it is a good idea… not so much. 🙂
Reading some of the comments above, I realize Chris is doing another thing I am prone to doing. I have a tendency to reinvent the wheel, and/or to make awkward probings into what turns out to be established territory. I think it comes from having a very high ratio at a) skill at seeing connections and synthesizing concepts from what knowledge you had, to b) desire and ability for seeking out previously established work. To be clear: You can still be pretty good at (b), but if you are way better at (a), you (like me) will have a tendency to reinvent the wheel — it may not be that you don’t care to look up what has already been done, but you start running away with all the shit you can figure out yourself based on what you already know… which by the way is way more fun than looking up what other people have done… and you wind up making forays into areas that it turns out other people have already covered exhaustively.
Seems like Chris is doing that in regards to deciphering the problems in applying set theory to the real world. There’s a certain brilliance in that he identified many of the problems in naive set theory by himself — how many of you could do that? — but it’s all for naught of dozens of other thinkers have been there before and already have more refined solutions to the problem.
Reading your comments, I think, helps me understand a bit better how someone smart can fuck up badly.
Thanks, dude.
Heh. Like the time in the early 80’s I was messing with polyrhythms, thinking I was being so clever, then hearing King Crimson’s “Discipline”. Holy shit.
It’s should be noted that Langan himself has not brought up his intelligence; it’s the other commentators who seem all too willing to make that into the subject of discussion. I think that is what he means by ” I would merely advise you not to leap so readily to what seem to be your highly standardized conclusions regarding me,” since half the people on this forum have already subscribed to the “Oh Chris is smart, but he should really learn to interact with other people” stereotype. The other half thinks that’s he’s a stuck-up intelligent prick. Why would he even want to talk to any of us under these conditions?
Totally off-topic, Mark, but was that your wife who appeared briefly as part of the Watson team at IBM, on this week’s Jeopardy? Is there anything about Watson’s inner workings that you would be free to talk about on the blog? Because that would be a heck of a lot more interesting than the current topic of discussion.
Alright, then. At this point, I think it’s safe to say that Mark has no intention of trying to defend himself against the charge of evaluative incompetence.
In repeatedly failing to defend himself against the charge of evaluative incompetence, Mark has now exhausted his last chance to prove that he has the intellectual standing to criticize my work. (Lest this be misinterpreted, “intellectual standing” refers not to Mark’s intelligence, but merely to his highly deficient knowledge state, on which I think he could greatly improve by freeing himself from various irrational prejudices and unnecessary cognitive bottlenecks.)
As I’ve already observed, Mark generates errors faster than he writes. This makes it quite tedious to rebut him, as it is far easier for him to dash off a few paragraphs of ill-considered pseudomathematical gobbledygook than it is for me to explain all of his errors in detail. But just so as not to waste an opportunity for instruction, I’ll do it one more time anyway.
Mark: “What a load of ad-hominem ridden bullshit.”
Comment: It was Mark who first resorted to personalized invective in this exchange. Anyone who doubts this need merely look at the titles of both of his Langan/CTMU critiques, including this one.
Mark: “The universe isn’t a set. A set is a mathematical construct defined axiomatically. That can sound like doublespeak, but it actually captures an extremely important distinction – one which you still don’t seem to understand.”
Error 1: A set is not a “mathematical construct defined axiomatically”. That would be set *theory*. While set *theories* are indeed defined axiomatically, the set concept itself is defined in a very basic and general way, which is precisely why it supports multiple versions of set theory incorporating different axioms.
Everybody around here seems to like Wikipedia. Well, here’s how Wikipedia defines “set”: “A set is a collection of distinct objects, considered as an object in its own right. Sets are one of the most fundamental concepts in mathematics” (… sufficiently fundamental, in fact, to nucleate different axiomatic theories and play an indispensable role throughout mathematics).
This definition is qualified and restricted by various strains of set theory, but it remains essentially intact as theoretical context varies. More advanced versions of set theory improve on naïve set theory only by adding distinctions and restrictions; for example, NBG adds the concept of classes, while ZF proscribes self-inclusion. Such advanced theories do nothing to expand the expressive capacity of the basic “set” concept.
Error 2: Because the universe fulfills the definitive criteria of the “set” concept (and more), it is at least in part a (structured) set. Mark seems to believe that “set”, being a concept or formal entity, cannot possibly describe the universe; after all, the universe is not a mere concept, but something objective to which concepts are attached as descriptive “tools”. But to the extent that concepts truly describe their arguments, they are properties thereof. The entire function of the formal entities used in science and mathematics is to describe, i.e. serve as descriptive properties of, the universe.
Obviously, not all formal entities qualify as properties of the things to which they are attributed. E.g., the formula “abracadabra, X, shazam!” is just a nonsense formula in which X has been written without attention to fact, and can hardly be described as a “property of X”. However, when a form duly reflects the actual structure of X – e.g., when it is an isomorphism or a model of X which attributes to X the distinguishable, observationally replicable structure we actually observe when we look at X – it indeed defines a property of X, at least for scientific purposes. For example, where X is actually green (reflects green light), the form “X is green” ascribes the property “greenness” to X. Similarly, because the formal entity “set”, meaning “collection of distinct objects”, actually describes the structure of the universe – which is in fact a collection of distinct objects, plus additional structure – the property of “being a set” is a factual property of the universe, and this permits us to say “the universe is a set”.
Error 3: Previously, Mark was caught substituting CTMU “incomprehensibility” for his own personal incomprehension regarding the CTMU. Here he goes a step further, substituting *my* alleged incomprehension for the alleged CTMU “incomprehensibility” that he originally substituted for his own personal incomprehension of the CTMU. Instead of standing pat on his own personal confusion, he wanders ever farther afield, from his own mental state to an allegedly objective attribute of a theory to another mental state … this time, somebody else’s. This is not how sound mathematical reasoning is conducted.
Mark: “In math, we build mathematical models of things in order to study and understand them. The mathematical model is an abstract description that’s useful for developing an understanding of the thing that it models – but the model is not the thing that it models. A set is a mathematical model that’s useful for describing many things. There are many things in the universe that can be modeled very well using set theory. But that’s entirely different from saying that the universe, or that anything in the universe is a set. A mathematical model is not the thing that it models.”
Error: Mark is having a terrible problem distinguishing “set” from “set theory”. As I’ve just pointed out, “being a set” is in fact a property of the universe. That’s because “set” is defined as “a collection of distinct objects”, and the universe is in fact a collection of distinct objects (and more). The definition of “set” correctly, if only partially, describes the structure of the universe, and nothing can be separated from its structure. Remove it from its structure, and it becomes indistinguishable as an object and inaccessible to coherent reference.
I also get the impression that Mark is confused regarding the definition of “model”, which comes in two strengths. In logic, a model is a valid interpretative mapping, i.e., an interpretation of a formula A or class of formulae A* under which A, or every formula of the class A*, is true. The argument is generally a mathematical language with its own formal structure, while the image is anything that “makes the argument true” by virtue of identical structure “up to isomorphism” (of course, this situation is symmetrical; just as content instantiates a language, the language describes its content, and where validity is given, we have a “model” in either direction). The model includes both ends of the mapping, argument and image, in the form of shared structure.
So much for logic. In less formal contexts, the term “model” may be used in a less exacting way; the validity criterion of the mapping may be relaxed. The model can then be structurally non-identical to the argument, as when a scientist tentatively applies some mathematical description to a phenomenon without being sure that the description is correct, e.g., because inobvious features of the argument and/or image may be irreconcilable with the explicit part of the mapping. In this case, the model is not a legitimate property of the object thereby modeled, and can thus be separated from it without depriving the argument of structure. This is the sense in which Marks seems to be using the term.
Unfortunately, it is not the sense in which *I* usually employ the term, i.e. the logical sense, and it is my work that Mark has been criticizing.
Mark: ”There are also many things in the universe that cannot be modeled very well using set theory. (For example, try to put together a meaningful set-theoretic model of vacuum fluctuation and hawking radiation based on the set of particles in the universe. It really doesn’t fit well.)”
Comment: Although he seems unaware of it, Mark is not actually disagreeing with me here. Simply that the universe can be partially characterized as “a set of particles” does not imply the existence of a “meaningful set-theoretic model of vacuum fluctuation and hawking radiation”. In fact, this is a large part of what my essay actually says (a pity that Mark doesn’t appear to understand this). Once again, a key distinction is that between “set” and “set theory”; although any version of the latter contains more formal structure than the unadorned “set” concept, it is insufficient to describe or model the universe in its entirety.
Mark: ”Does the existence of things in the universe which can’t me modeled nicely in set theory mean that set theory is something wrong? No. Because the universe isn’t a set. The universe and a mathematical model of the universe are very different things. There are many different possible mathematical models of the universe. Even taking set theory as a basis, there are numerous different set-theoretic mathematical models of the universe. The universe isn’t any of those mathematical models; those models are mathematical constructions that we use to try to understand it.”
Error: For the umpteenth time, “set” does not equal “set theory” (any version), and the property “being a set” isn’t something one can slap onto the universe, or not, at whim. It is synonymous with “being a collection of distinct objects”, which accurately reflects the observed structure of the universe. This makes it an actual property of the universe.
If the universe does not possess the property “being a set” – or if one prefers, “being valid content of the formal entity ‘set’” – then the set concept cannot be properly applied to the universe even as a tool. But then the natural and mathematical languages to which the set concept is fundamental cannot be properly applied to the universe either, and science is impossible. (This is called “reductio ad absurdum”; it consists in the derivation of an absurdity or contradiction from Mark’s initial premise that “the universe is not a set”.)
Mark: ”The lack of understanding of this distinction – the difference between a model and the thing that it models – runs throughout your writing.”
Error: In logic, a model is an interpretation (interpretative mapping) of a formula A or class of formulae A* under which A, or every formula of the class A*, is true. That is, it is a valid interpretative mapping. Because it is valid, it is an actual property of the thing modeled. Just as Mark can construct a verbal model of himself which factually represents his actual properties (“The person named Mark corresponds to the formal entity ‘a software engineer who is also a religious, theistic, Reconstructionist Jew’”), he can start with the model and then apply it to himself as a compound property: “Mark IS a software engineer AND a religious, theistic, Reconstructionist Jew.” The model reflects one or more actual properties displayed by Mark.
Mark: ”It’s part of why you try to talk about “syntax” in your model in a way that doesn’t make any sense to people who know what syntax means in math and logic. Because you muddle important distinctions. Syntax and semantics are very different things in a mathematical model. But if you insist that the mathematical model is indistinguishable from the thing that it models… then the syntax of an object is the object, the semantics of an object are the object, and therefore the syntax and semantics of the object are exactly the same thing – because they both are the object.”
Error: In logic, “syntax” describes the intrinsic structure of formulae and systems thereof, while ”semantics” additionally accounts for the meaning, interpretation, or descriptive content of formulae. Essentially, the syntax-semantics distinction is as simple as the form-content distinction on which it is based. I’ve made it very clear in my writings that by “syntax”, which I naturally define with respect to SCSPL, I mean “the formal (structural and grammatical) invariants of SCSPL”. By using a functional definition of syntax, one can avoid the necessity of enumerating its specific ingredients (functional definition is definition in terms of function; one specifies the definiendum in terms of its functionality in the overall system in which it exists, independently of content, at any desired level of generality).
Not, mind you, that I can’t enumerate the ingredients of SCSPL syntax at least in part, or that I haven’t actually done so. But a full extensional definition is not necessary for the purposes of this essay. Mark clearly has no business taking exception to my usage, as the CTMU is not his theory, but mine. If Mark wants to use his own preferred definition of syntax (and I can only imagine what that might be, if not the typographical structure of a programming language), then Mark needs to write his own theory.
There is one little respect in which Mark is right, however: the CTMU does indeed couple syntax and semantics in a new and profoundly different way, and has done so for the last couple of decades or more. Perhaps someday, Mark will come to understand what this means. But for now, it is 100% certain, by his own admission, that he does not.
Mark: “As I’ve frequently said on this blog: the worst math is no math. And that’s a pretty good description of your writing. There are lots of mathematical words, but they’re used in ways that just make no sense. They look impressive, but when you try to burrow down to get to their meaning, they don’t make sense. They muddle together fundamental concepts in nonsensical ways; they blur the distinctions between things that are necessarily distinct.”
Error 1: When Mark says that the mathematical words I use “do not make sense”, he again oversteps his bounds. The most he is actually entitled to say is that they do not make sense *to him*. We have now ascertained that the reason for this is Mark’s severe incomprehension regarding my usage of certain terms, and in some cases, regarding their conventional meanings as well.
Error 2: Mark should not keep assuming that there is “no math” underlying the CTMU and my various descriptions of it, especially after he has been caught making errors of mathematical comprehension in connection with it. As Mark observes, there is plenty of mathematical terminology in this essay, and it has indeed been correctly and relevantly employed. Like it or not, that’s mathematical content. The most Mark can say is that he disputes this content, dismisses it as irrelevant or inconsequential, or doesn’t understand it (which, in any case, we already know beyond any shadow of doubt).
Error 3: Mark says that my essay blurs the distinction between certain fundamental concepts. In the present context, one may assume that he has two specific distinctions in mind: model | universe and syntax | semantics. But as we have already seen, it is Mark who does not understand these distinctions, at least in the context of the work he is criticizing.
Mark :”Worse, even if you ignore much of the muddled reasoning, you still can’t make this stuff work. If you actually take the word salad and try to render it as math, what you get is something very much like naive set theory. Unfortunately, naive set theory doesn’t work: it’s inconsistent. And your system, which by definition embeds itself, necessarily includes all of the inconsistencies of naive set theory.”
Error 1: Again, Mark is attempting to impute the muddled character of his own mental state to the reasoning in my essay. This is evaluative incompetency plain and simple (see the value and competency criteria enumerated above). In view of his personal befuddlement, it is simply impossible for him to say whether or not the CTMU can “work”.
Error 2: Again, while I am employing the basic “set” concept in my reasoning, I am not employing “naïve set theory”. Nor am I employing any more advanced version of set theory; such versions improve on naïve set theory only by adjoining extra distinctions and restrictions that do nothing to expand the expressive capacity of the “set” concept, or any other concept general enough to suffice as an ultimate reductive entity.
Mark: “Of course, you won’t actually address any of these problems. You’ll just wave your hands around and insult me some more.”
Comment: It is not my responsibility to solve problems which are functions of Mark’s personal incomprehension rather than anything actually relevant to my work. And my goal here has not been to “insult” Mark, but merely to get to the bottom of his incomprehension and establish that he has no business flinging insults like “crank” around when he clearly doesn’t understand who or what he’s attacking.
Mark: “I remain uncertain of just how it is that doing that somehow defends the validity of your theory, but that’s probably just because I’m not as smart as you.”
I have not considered whether I’m “smarter than” Mark or vice versa. That’s because such a judgment would detract from the content of the discussion. Even though I do find him deficient in the kind of knowledge he’d actually need to properly read my work, I actually think he’s probably pretty smart, all considered. I just think that he’s verbally incontinent and incompetent as an evaluator of my work.
Bottom line: Philosophically and mathematically speaking, Mark is what one would call a “hardcore dualist”. This is because he makes a hard and uncompromising distinction between form (e.g., “set”; “model”) and content (e.g., “universe”). As we have seen, Mark cannot possibly justify this form of dualism, as it has the effect of separating the universe from the structural properties in terms of which we scientifically identify it and reason about it at any stage and on any level.
Mark is obviously a decent computer programmer; this is implied by the fact that he’s a senior software engineer for Google. But just as obviously, he is neither a mathematician nor a philosopher. Writing good code is not easy, and Mark deserves respect for his evident ability to do it. But he should either stow the “math” blog, or trim his sails and try to stay closer to home. He is simply not up to going toe-to-toe with all of those on whom he targets his uncontrollable resentment.
Regarding Mark’s commentators, thanks for your participation. Some of you have offered, amidst the noise, what almost seems to be intended as constructive and well-meant advice. To the extent that this is actually the case, your efforts are appreciated. I would merely advise you not to leap so readily to what seem to be your highly standardized conclusions regarding me, my level of knowledge, and the originality and profundity of my writing, lest you end up disappointed and embarrassed as a result.
If I pop in here again, it will be strictly as an undeserved favor. Good day to all of you.
What the hell is ZF?
This is such an unbelievably strange response. What kind of a person:
a) writes an incoherent argument ostensibly directed at the general public;
b) receives said critique from the public; and them
c) repeatedly insinuates that said evaluator is “incompetent” to critique the work?
The answer, it seems to me, is the Bill Dembskis of the world — the people who write not to edify but to confuse; the “if you can’t blind ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullshit” crowd who prefers to use two pages of mathematics to say what you could say in two sentences, and then proclaims it something pompous like “the Law of Conservation of Information.”
Chris: you were advised earlier in this thread to visit Eliezer Yudkowsky’s posts on the English language at Less Wrong. I’d second that advice. Read Yudkowsky; he’s a smart guy who can actually communicate his thoughts to others. You might learn something.
I haven’t read all the comments/diatribes, but given the context, I’m guessing ZF is the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms of set theory.
You can take your ‘undeserved favor’ and shove it right up your ass. You could be the smartest man on the planet, but if you put your brainpower into being a pretentious, condescending ass, you’ll be putting it to complete waste.
Don’t center your fustration on Mark, please. There are more people here. In fact, there is a lot of people outside this little forum who do not seem to be very interested on your theory, neither.
Ok, so you admit that you are not calling “set” to anything a mathematician would call a “set”. Of course, you are free to define Lagan’s set theory. But it has to be:
a) interesting and justified for people to take the work to learn, use and teach it
b) more strict than naive set theory, because simply calling “a collection of distinct ‘things'” a set does not work very well. The collection of all sets is not a set, and if it is, it would lead to contradictions. So you have to impose some restrictions.
c) informative. What are the elements of the “set” Universe? You evade the question. Calling something a set explaining that you understand by set something vague and without giving any idea what the elements are is not very useful. I would call that a sentence free of meaning.
I can call the Universe “the stuff”, composed of “zitirione”. Yes, I can, for some definition of “the stuff”, but it is not very useful. We understand you can start with a vaguely defined theory, and go refining it, working on it. But you have a very vague idea of what a set is and try to force people to accept real Universe is one.
Yes, our Universe is “the stuff”. And, what is “the stuff”? Something very expressive to be what our Universe is. And if someone say the opposite, the hell with him, he is an ignorant.
That’s a bad actitude. You are probably discovering how little people (that counts) are interested in your theory. Of course, you can think it’s because they are all ignorant. Don’t be fooled.
But please, stop doing that. Stop assuming the Universe is a set to prove it is a set, and writing one million words saying “as we proved”, “we saw that”, and things to sound like a mathematician. You have not proved anything. By maintaining your concept of set open enough you can evade criticism for a while, but by the same measure you maintain your theory content free. Circular logic and vagueness would carry you nowhere.
Remember: it is not a Mark’s mental state. Have you find anyone (seriously) interested in your theory? (Family members doesn’t count).
I still think the real Universe can be unmodelable as a set because you could not differentiate one entity from other. At quantum level, there is no individual particles. You have no locality, you have entanglement, you have wave functions filling all the space that adds together, you have no trajectories, you have a different number of particles each time, you have multiple paths… I would find it difficult to say what a “distinct element” is. You didn’t even have tried.
Wave functions (any function really) can be described using sets. A function f : X -> Y can be seen as a subset of X*Y (its graph.) This can be extended to multiple particles and possibly even the ‘wave function of the universe’ or some such thing. This set is something completely different from the ‘set’ containing all the particles (or whatever) of the universe though.
Wow. That’s creative! But you’re very right, Robert.
In any case, you know, that’s not what I mean. A wave function is a _model_ of the Universe, and not a complete model. Considering a wave function as a set is only “modeling a model” as a set.
One can show all our current models can be expressed as a set and still not be allowed to say that the Universe is a set.
What I say is that we can never know if a model completely reflects reality, which it is a necessary step to make that identification, the model as the reality. There is a lot of things we don’t know. A lot.
That’s why Phycisist still have a job.
But very clever, Robert. Very good observation.
A minor point, but the set of all sets is a set. There’s no contradiction there.
The contradiction comes when someone introduces the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Then ask whether that set is a member of itself. It is if and only if it isn’t.
Bertrand Russell tried to work around this by redefining terms so that a set cannot be a member of itself, but his approach is not universally accepted. (If I recall correctly, it produces different levels, so a set at level 0 can be a member of a class at level 1, but not of another level-0 set.)
From what I understand the set of all sets is a contradiction since axiomatically if X is any set, then {x in X: “some condition”} is also a set. So if the set of all sets is a set then Russel’s paradox follows.
You’re right. The Universal set is problematic only in some theories, but not in all. And you rightly pointed out an alternative problem.
Thanks.
Yeah, Russell tried to do leveled sets, so that you had first-order sets, whose members were atoms; second-order sets, whose members were first order sets; third order sets whose members were second-order sets, and so on.
Gödel showed that it didn’t work, because you could embedding the first-order sets into representations as atomic values, and then use those to create first order sets whose members could be interpreted as first-order sets, allowing you to formulate purely first-order predicates that weren’t really first-order.
The most common solution these days is the set/class distinction, which is similar to a single-step version of Russell’s hierarchy: there are sets, and there are classes; you can do things with sets that you can’t do with classes. A set can’t contain itself, because of the constraints on what can be in a set; and you can’t express predicates on classes that would allow you to create paradoxical sets.
Why shouldn’t he center “his frustrations on Mark”? Mark is the one with the front page post “Another Crank Comes to Visit”. Right from the start this forum is biased into thinking of Chris as a crank which turns this “discussion” into a many vs one situation.
I don’t agree with you, allOrNothing.
I mean, I hold responsibility for my opinions. If I am biased by Mark’s writing, it is entirely my fault, not his. I find it wrong for Langan to blame Mark for my opinions.
I also believe you misinterpreted the origin of the many versus one situation. Langan has very peculiar ideas. Regardless of the their validity, when someone has non-common ideas it will always be a many vs one situation. They can be true, or they can be false, but initially it will be that many vs one. (That’s the reason why they have to explain them).
@John Fringe
I should explain the “many vs one” in more detail. I’m not just talking about the “crank bias”, I also mean the very mode of discussion. How is Langan supposed to get anything done when new people keep popping up like weeds, each with different objections? It’s like a media blitz. So “centering his frustrations on Mark” is, at it’s simplest, a practical choice.
When Langan showed up here, his primary goal was to talk to Mark, not the unknown number of varied commentators.
@allOrNothing
Well, yes, it is impossible for one person to cope with so much comments in a blog. (I believe this is a common problem). From this point of view, yes, it may be the only sensible thing to do, to talk only to Mark. I didn’t thought of your comment this way.
(Then he may have choosen the wrong media, but I understand he wanted to answer the thread).
One thing on which Mr. Langan and I clearly agree is that there is a distinction to be drawn between “set theory” and “set”.
However, Mr. Langan seems to think that the various formal “set theories” which exist throughout the mathematical community are all formalizations (i.e. formal descriptions of the structural nature) of the same concept of “set”. To be sure, there is an overlap between these theories in which respect they do represent formalizations of the same concept, however each “set theory” gives rise to a subtly different corresponding concept of “set”, likewise each concept of “set” corresponds to a distinct “set theory”.
The basic concept of “set” corresponds precisely to what is referred to as “naive set theory”, which I believe is aptly named since it is the “set theory” developed by simply ignoring formalization entirely in favour of the simplicity of the concept of “set” which is understood by even the most naive.
Mr. Langan is also quite correct that mathematical “set theories” do nothing to enhance the expressive power of the basic concept of “set”. In fact “set theories” restrict that expressive power and this is the very purpose for which they have been developed.
The expressive power of the basic concept of “set” led to contradictions when instantiated into “naive set theory” in a mathematical context, demonstrating its inconsistency as a mathematical structure. (For those who may not be familiar, within classical or intuitionist logic, one can derive any statement from a contradiction making every contradiction equal and maximal in expressive power.) In order to make use of the basic concept of “set” within a mathematical context in a consistent manner therefore, it is necessary to reduce its expressive power by making subtle changes to it, i.e. to use the concept of “set” functionally defined by one of the existing “set theories” (or by some new one, also formally defined, which avoids those contradictions currently known in “naive set theory”).
In short, one cannot use the “basic concept of ‘set'” in a mathematical context while dismissing the quirks introduced by whichever formalization of “set” is in use in the background, and such a formalization must be present in order to be consistent.
This definition is qualified and restricted by various strains of set theory, but it remains essentially intact as theoretical context varies. More advanced versions of set theory improve on naïve set theory only by adding distinctions and restrictions; for example, NBG adds the concept of classes, while ZF proscribes self-inclusion. Such advanced theories do nothing to expand the expressive capacity of the basic “set” concept.
This is wrong. First of all, naive set theory is not logically consistent. That’s a pretty big difference. The claim about “more advanced theories” is also wrong in so far as it is well-defined. Consider for example, ZF with anti-Foundation replacing Foundation. Or ZF with a large cardinal axiom.
There is one little respect in which Mark is right, however: the CTMU does indeed couple syntax and semantics in a new and profoundly different way, and has done so for the last couple of decades or more. Perhaps someday, Mark will come to understand what this means. But for now, it is 100% certain, by his own admission, that he does not.
Well, here’s news for you: no one else understands it at all either. So try explaining in it more simply, or using different language.
It is not my responsibility to solve problems which are functions of Mark’s personal incomprehension rather than anything actually relevant to my work.
If you want anyone to understand your work, then the fact that people with relevant expertise don’t understand what you are saying should be relevant.
: Philosophically and mathematically speaking, Mark is what one would call a “hardcore dualist”. This is because he makes a hard and uncompromising distinction between form (e.g., “set”; “model”) and content (e.g., “universe”).
You are using language in a non-standard fashion again. This isn’t what dualism is generally taken to mean.
Mark is obviously a decent computer programmer; this is implied by the fact that he’s a senior software engineer for Google. But just as obviously, he is neither a mathematician nor a philosopher. Writing good code is not easy, and Mark deserves respect for his evident ability to do it. But he should either stow the “math” blog, or trim his sails and try to stay closer to home. He is simply not up to going toe-to-toe with all of those on whom he targets his uncontrollable resentment.
Wha? I don’t even… are you fucking kidding? Mark has a large amount of math background as should be pretty clear from reading his blog on a regular basis. The fact is that what you’ve done doesn’t include any substantial math and the math you do have is either ill-defined or just wrong. There are multiple professional mathematicians in this thread. They’ve all agreed that Mark is spot on. Maybe, just maybe, you should consider that Mark is correct and that your ideas really don’t make sense. (It seems to me remotely possible that you are just explaining yourself very poorly and using language in non-standard ways, but if so, that’s not our problem. That’s something that can only be remedied by you.)
Chris:
First off, the point of promoting this whole thing to a new post, rather than leaving it hidden in a discussion on a two-year-old post that had been migrated from my old site was, actually, intended as a gesture of respect. I may think you’re a jackass, but I genuinely believe that if an author goes to the trouble of coming to my site and responding, that they deserve to have those responses made visible. It was not intended as a gesture of spite, or a “none dare cross MarkCC”.
And you’ve done a remarkable job of demonstrating exactly why I say that your theory is rubbish, in the following two paragraphs.
Naive set theory is inconsistent. That’s not a trivial matter. That means that using naive set theory, you can “prove” every statement that can be expressed in terms of set theory. Naive set theory is ill-founded and ultimately useless, because no proof, no implication, no inference based on naive set theory is valid – because the fundamental axiomatic basis of naive set theory is invalid.
The only sense in which NBG and ZF don’t “expand the expressive capacity” of naive set theory – that is, of “the basic set concept” – is that naive set theory has no expressive capacity, because it’s inconsistent.
Any argument that you make about set theory, or about anything built on set theory, is only as valid as the underlying theory. There are lots of different axiomatizations of set theory. NBG and ZFC are the most well-known, but they’re far from the only ones. And you’re certainly able to define your own. But you need to have some axiomatization, or you’re not doing math. You don’t have your own axiomatization of sets in your theory, and you don’t appear to be using any valid axiomatization. But you expect people to accept that you’re using a consistent, valid definition.
This circles back to my most fundamental critique of your “theory”. It’s word salad. It doesn’t define its terms in any meaningful way. It pretends to be talking about math – but it doesn’t actually use mathematical reasoning. It pretends to be talking about sets in a mathematical way – but you refuse to specify just what you mean by sets, and you don’t even seem to understand why that’s a problem.
You redefine the words syntax and semantics, but you don’t bother to give your definition of them. In fact, I’m not actually sure that you actually understand the meaning of the distinction between syntax and semantics in logic. There’s no good way for me to be sure, because you never actually demonstrate just what you mean by syntax. You just spew out a bunch of garbled word-salad.
Mark, when I look at your writing, it’s like trying to decode gibberish.
I’m not just saying that; I really mean it. You claim you can’t understand a word I write, but for me it’s the other way around. I’ve already tried repeatedly to tell you, your ditto-heads, and other commentators in plain English that my essay nowhere relies on naïve set theory, and in fact can be construed as a condemnation of naïve set theory for philosophical purposes. Yet here you go again, behaving as though I said the exact opposite. Your only possible justifications are (1) that I’m lying about not using naïve set theory; or (2) that I’m so asleep that I don’t know when I’m relying on naïve set theory and when I’m not. But to my way of looking at it, both of those claims are absurd. I feel like I walked into a seedy diner and ordered the “fresh garden salad” only to have the proprietor hand me a day-old corn dog with a couple of bites missing and a check that reads “1 salad plus tax (no credit).”
In fact, I’m reminded of a sad old joke. Somewhere in the Deep South of yore, a bus containing a Black gospel choir was on its way to a revival. Suddenly, a car stopped on the shoulder of the road pulled out directly in front of the bus. Panicked, the driver cranked the wheel as hard as he could, veering directly into the path of an oncoming semi. Unable to stop, the fast-moving semi ripped open the midsection of the bus, strewing the highway with dead or injured passengers, some moaning in pain. A minute or two later, an archetypal redneck and his woman drove up in a pickup truck. Seeing the carnage, the hillbilly stopped, got out of the truck, and sauntered among the bodies for a minute or two. Then he returned to the pickup, and without saying a word, resumed driving in the same direction as before. “But Billy-Bob,” said his incredulous damsel, “ain’t summa them people still alive?” The redneck snorted contemptuously and used his teeth to pop open a can of beer. “Wayull, Lurleen,” he drawled after a long and satisfying gulp, “some of ‘em *SAYud* they was. But you know how them @#$$%&s lie!” (Ring a bell?)
On a more serious note, I think I know what your problem is. As soon as I mentioned the words “self-including set” in the essay, a little warning buzzer went off in your head. What you should have said to yourself at that point was “He’s right – if the universe is a set, and if the universe actually implements self-inclusion in any way – after all, he has explicitly stated that when it comes to the universe, there’s ultimately nothing external to contain it or serve as a medium or background for it – then really what we’d have is something at least reminiscent of a self-inclusive set. But since that’s a violation of logic associated with naïve set theory, which everyone knows doesn’t work, this guy must be trying to describe, or at least pointing in the general direction of, a new way of eliminating the contradiction. So maybe I’d better try a little harder to get the message. Even if I can’t quite get it right, at least I won’t be guilty of getting it all wrong.”
Instead, what you evidently said to yourself was more like this: “Oh man, this fool is absolutely out to lunch! ‘Self-including set’ indeed – when I get done with him, this crank is going to be sorry he ever dared to open his mouth! No doubt about it – he’ll rue the day he ever heard the glorious name of Mark Chu-Carroll (which probably hasn’t happened yet, but thanks to my thousands of hits and my faithful legion of anti-crank warriors, soon will)! Why, with my superior math skills, this guy and everyone like him is totally at my mercy, cannon fodder for my unbelievably excellent anti-crank blog! Good Math (my opinion) trumps Bad Math (any conflicting opinion) every time, so everybody better hunker down and get ready for some more of that trademark supercilious Chu-Carroll wit! Oh, joy – life is fine when you’re a crank-fighting internet hero like me, myself, and I!!”
While you might see the latter self-dialogue as a bit over the top, your subsequent behavior shows that it accurately reflects your basic attitude. And whether or not you’re capable of recognizing it, this makes you incompetent to evaluate the essay you’ve been trying to evaluate, to the extent that at this point, I no longer think that you (and some of your fans) are capable of understanding anything that I say on the subject, mathematical or otherwise. So why not do yourself a favor, stop giving yourself so much undeserved credit as an all-purpose authority on all things mathematical, and learn to withhold judgment on that which you don’t understand? You’ll probably live a longer and happier life if you do.
Just a piece of friendly advice to someone who seems desperately in need of it.
Chris:
Even if we stipulate that Mark completely misunderstands your theory, that in itself doesn’t make the theory correct.
If you want people to accept your theory, you need to present it in ways that they can understand, and convince them that it is correct. If you are the only person alive who can understand it, and it makes no testable predictions different from current theory, either you’re out of luck, or you need to find ways to explain it to people.
It’s not sufficient to say “study this, this, and this for three years, and then you will see my theory is valid” unless people already have reason to think you are right. Or at least that you’re probably right. Unfortunately, you are hardly the only person who is presenting what he believes to be a revolutionary new theory. Not all of those theories are correct (because they contradict each other). You need something beyond “I am very intelligent” to prove your theory. Even very intelligent people make mistakes.
I’d go so far as to say very intelligent people make the big mistakes more often because they’re so used to being correct, they’re not used to being challenged or needing to question their own workings.
That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
to: Chris Langan
1) How is your theory falsifiable?
2) What use is it? For example, the heliocentric theory of the solar system was useful in that it simplified computations. The fact that is also represented the observable universe was simply a bonus. So, what utility does your theory provide?
How does one measure the utility of being able to condescend to the entire world? If Mr. Langan is a Benthamite, that’s probably a fairly high number on the hedonic calculus….
I can’t speak on behalf of Langan, but…
1) I don’t think the theory is intended to be falsifiable. It’s intended to be the truth, independent of context and beyond falsification. This doesn’t work, and the reason why is explained here.
2) If the theory would work, the concept of telic recursion could be used to construct a satisfactory concept of epistemologic relevance, which in turn could be used to solve the problem of induction.
I have to agree with allOrNothing, and in fact I’d go further: it seems that so far Mr. Langan has had the better of his exchange with Mr. Chu-Carroll, not to mention some of the less knowledgeable commenters. Those chiming to question the reference to ZF (entirely on point and reasonable shorthand in Langan’s remark) or objecting that items in the universe may not count as “distinct” (which seems to me trivial to work around – any two non-distinct objects are one object, no?) or objections that parts of Langan’s remarks are mathematical, and parts are not, but dare to use the term “proof” — they seem to be grasping at straws with which to feebly flail Mr. Langan. Others have pointed accusatory fingers at Mr. Langan, declaring him guilty of ad hominem attacks (mostly falsely, in my opinion) for merely having questioned Mr. Carroll’s competence in this particular subject) in a post that starts out, *in its title*, labelling Mr. Langan a crank! In fact, despite provocation, Mr. Langan has not descended to personal attacks or name calling, and has confined his judgment to Mr. Chu-Carroll’s competence to evaluate the particular essay under consideration. I think the worst insult he issued was to call Mr. Chu-Carroll “verbally incontinent”; this seems to me to be a mild slide from decorum in response to having been called “a crank”. He also made remarks that showed that he respects Mr. Chu-Carroll”s obvious high achievements and learning in those areas where he is really an expert.
I trust that Mr. Chu-Carroll really thought Mr. Langan’s work full of fallacies and deficiencies, and sincerely tried to explain that, though in a harsh and insulting tone. But so far Mr. Langan appears to me to have successfully defended himself against at least his selected set of Mr. Chu-Carroll’s criticisms, and made a plausible case (to the uninformed, such as me) that Mr. Carroll may be the one who misunderstood.
I enjoy Good Math Bad Math frequently. I often learn from it. But these occasional exercises in derision, and subsequent group efforts in condemnation, only detract from that. I know that comments on blogs are notorious for such chauvinism, but perhaps this need not be the case here.
I don’t know if Mr. Langan has any serious contribution to make to humanity’s knowledge, or not. Most people don’t, so it would be no surprise if his ideas fall short. Regardless, I wish these critical discussions of wrong ideas did not take the form of a group effort in condemnation — it does not improve anyone’s understanding of matters, I judge.
> “or objecting that items in the universe may not count as “distinct” (which seems to me trivial to work around – any two non-distinct objects are one object, no?)”
Yes, of course. You can trivially say that any two non-distinct objects are one object. That’s completely right. You can go aggregating entities until you have only one. Strictly right.
Because reality is one, and the division into “objects” is simplification of our models.
So yes, you can say at least you’ve got the set of one element, the real Universe. This is strictly true. But, let me say, it is also completely useless. It’s a completely void idea.
By that treatment, everything is a set. Not a mathematical set, but some kind of aggregation of some stuff. At least one, the thing. And he is fighting for this idea! If everything (everything, think of it) is a set, then that does not carry any information.
That is why I explicitly said (yes, I said it first!) that he always could save face by saying “that the Universe is the set of one element, the Real Universe”.
And something. The universe is also something. You will not find me fighting for the “something” idea.
By the way. Have you read http://megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/IntroCTMU.htm ?
I had a look at it, and began reading, more than once, up to the point that I was sure I didn’t know what he was talking about.
Because I think Mr. Chu-Carroll is a good-to-outstanding explicator of things he does understand, and because I know he knows a lot about some relevant topics, I would ordinarily consider him a good guide to this stuff. But when Mr. Langan, apparently correctly, points out errors in Mr. Chu-Carroll’s criticism, and when that criticism obviously strays into speculation and slam, I need to reserve judgement.
Some of Mr. Langan’s claims sound pretty grandiose to me. They may be wrong for any number of reasons, from a few simple errors to large-scale self-delusion. Exercises in condemnation of his ideas do not help me (or, I think, anyone) to understand that. Unfortunately, too much of this post and the ensuing comments takes that tack, rather than careful criticism.
Everything is in the Simpsons:
– Newspaper Tour Guide: And each paper contains a certain percentage of recycled paper.
– Lisa: What percentage is that?
– Newspaper Tour Guide: Zero. Zero is a percent, isn’t it?
First of all, why is not a collection of objects a “mathematical set”?
The last time I encountered any set theory in a formal context, it was over two decades ago, in the course of learning about other topics, so I am sincerely asking here: what distinguishes a “mathematical set” from a correct application of the set concept to non-mathematical objects? From what I can find in quick researches on the web (admittedly, a very poor reference source) a set is an “undefined primitive”, with certain axiomatic properties. As long as the sets Mr. Langan considers fit the basic set concept (regardless of what they contain as elements) and exhibit the properties stipulated by the axioms, they are mathematical sets, right?
Second, it seems to me there is some choice of the level of concern at which we view entities as distinct. Two things may be the same in some respects and different in others. But it would be valid to reason about them either way, as long as we establish the context correctly. In fact, from skimming through Mr. Langan’s writing, it seems this question is a large part of what he discusses.
I cannot judge if he has done this well or poorly, coherently or incoherently, in part because I lack the background, in part because I have been stymied by some of his new nomenclature, and in part because some of his reasoning is unclear to me. But I think he has grappled with this question.
> “Two things may be the same in some respects and different in others. But it would be valid to reason about them either way, as long as we establish the context correctly.”
That’s is exactly the point. That is exactly what we are talking about.
The “establishing the context correctly” is what we call “defining a model”.
You have a reality. As it is impossible to comprehend, one “models” it, one builds a model of it, selecting the interesting features (for oneself) and ignoring the rest.
Of course, one can build different models of reality, depending on what is of interest in every moment.
Then you have mathematics, which are a good language to build models of reality. One of their tools is the concept of set. You can MODEL reality as a set.
When you are building your model, you can decide if some perception is modeled as an object, as two objects, or as many as you want.
But what you are not able do is to mistake the model for reality. It is your model that is a set, not reality.
You’ve got the perception of two things. From some perspectives they look the same, from others they do not. And you can assume there are unknown perspectives to you. So you evaluate and you decide if you model them by one entity or two. That’s up to you.
If you read Langan comments you’ll see he is defending the Universe is a set, not his model of it. He is doing this because he pretends not to be discussing a model for the Universe, which could be more or less appropiate and would be refutable, but the Universe itself. This is what is profoundly wrong and is highly antiscientific.
Of course we understand you can model the Universe as a set. But that is not what Langan is saying.
I can see two possible ways that you mabe wrong here:
1. First of all, let us suppose that there could be a completely correct, exhaustive “model” of the universe. Such a model would have to account for *all* valid contexts and possible perceptions, because the people having the perceptions — you, me, everyone — are themselves part of that universe. Earlier you suggested that the model might amount to a one-element set, because none of the things in it might be truly distinct. And this, then, has no explanatory power: we’re left with a set of the universe. All we have, essentially, is something pointing at the universe and saying “there it is”.
But if this is so, in what way can it be a complete, successful model of the universe? The universe actually exhibits manifold aspects, which may be observed as its distinct features or parts, or objects contained in it. If the model can only model it as a singular entity, then it is not an exhaustive model.
So any successful, complete model actually would not be such a singleton set, and would instead have to have many elements.
2. I may be wrong here, but it seems to me you are restating Mr. Chu-Carroll’s claim, which Mr. Langan attributed to “hard-core dualism”, that a set is always a model which is distinct from the thing modelled. I found Mr. Langan’s reply thought-provoking and plausible — that an isomorphic model may actually define the properties of attributes of the real entity under consideration, and in that sense “being a set” is one such property.
I have searched, in vain, for some guidance on the web as to whether it is valid to think, from a mathematical perspective, of real objects as being contained in a set. If I define the set of my steak knives — which I’m looking at across my kitchen right now — does mathematics have anything to say about whether the real, six physical Henckel knives are actually “a set”, or whether the set is a “model” for them that exists only in my (and now others’) minds? If so, I’d sincerely like to see a reference to such a discussion.
@James Wetterau
I don’t see why point 1 will make me wrong.
I don’t agree with your proof, believing it is wrong. But anyway, let suppose it is right: you would have proved that if a completely correct model exists then it would be a set. You would still have to prove that this model exists. That’s very metaphysical! And not obvious at all.
I mean: (A implies B) does not prove B. We need to know if A is true.
(I don’t believe the proof is right for several reasons: for example, the Universe can exhibit deterministic behaviour without being deterministic. The fact that you perceive some aspects does not mean they are real).
With respect to 2, “a set is always a model which is distinct from the thing modelled”, while I agree with that, I don’t need that.
I agree because, well, yes, you see your knives, and you think they are a set. But at certain level the model falls down: the knives are made of atoms. Some atoms are separated from the blade, and mix with air. Some atoms go, some arrive. Some are interchanged between the blades. Do reality equal your mental set of six knives? I don’t think so. Yes, you can go for another model, an atomic one. But that’s another model, which is too of limited application. Not to mention that a mathematical set is a “static” entity, and the knives will not exists forever. The model is not the thing. Again, you could consider a temporal model. Got it?
But that is irrelevant, so I will not go into any deep. The key is this: a model can not be identified with the modeled reality because we can never know if the modeled reality will always behave as our model.
That’s a deep idea, but a simple one.
You can not identify a model of the Universe with the Universe because you certainly don’t completely know the Universe, and you should not be surprised if tomorrow you see something unexpected in its behavior.
How can you be sure your model completely fit the reality? You can not, and so you can not mistake one thing for the other.
@John Fringe, For some reason the website is not allowing me to reply to your reply to my reply, so I’m replying to your comment to which I earlier replied, to which you replied on February 19, 2011 1:14pm.
I am not claiming to have proven anything — I’m just trying to show that your earlier rejection of the idea that the universe could be a set on a priori grounds was mistaken. I think that was accomplished, at least according to your reply.
As to the fact that we may perceive things that are not real — yes, of course. But the *perceptions* are real, and need to be in the model.
I think your take on the steak knives question is a non-starter. It is not the case that the definition of the knives is identical to a particular collection of atoms. The definition of the knives is what an intelligence can recognize as the knives.
> “I’m just trying to show that your earlier rejection of the idea that the universe could be a set on a priori grounds was mistaken”
The only problem with that is I never said that. That “earlier rejection” is a supposition of yours. You are assuming I said things I didn’t said. I said Langan can not say the Universe is a set because he don’t know, and he was assuming it was a set to show it was a set. Reread my comments, please.
> “But the *perceptions* are real, and need to be in the model.”
Perceptions are real, yet I don’t see why that makes the Universe a set. If you want to model perceptions, feel free to use a set.
> “The definition of the knives is what an intelligence can recognize as the knives.”
Yes, and the definition is not the Universe, but a model for your perception of a real knife.
You have the universe (a real knife), you model your perception of it, and as you can model it by a set, you say I was mistaken telling maybe the Universe is not a set. I’m really not able to follow you on this. I don’t see the connection. You are not arguing with me, but you believe you are.I was talking about Langan views and you are arguing about models of our perception.
@John Fringe —
Again, I can only reply to your earlier comment.
Sets are, by definition, collections of objects. Sets are not “models” for those objects — they are groups of objects. In our universe, perceptions are, by observation, among the objects that we find. They are not unreal — they are real perceptions. That means they are among the distinct things in the universe. If all perceptions, thoughts, etc. of any entity at any time are among the things in the universe, there is no contradiction between one persepective or another being in the set — they *all* belong in the set. This is not a model — it’s more like a list.
You are correct and I was wrong about your point to Mr. Langan; I misremembered your earlier remark and did not go back and re-read the entire thread. However, it still seems to me that your attempted refutation that the universe is set — because it may not be made up of distinct objects — is invalid. There are clearly many distinctions between objects, e.g. the perceptions we were just talking about. If you want to argue that none of those distinctions are “real”, or real enough to warrant creating a set, then it seems to me that you believe the set concept cannot apply in any way to reality, because there would always be this doubt, which makes it useless.
I’m specially in disagreement with this sentence of yours: “it seems to me that you believe the set concept cannot apply in any way to reality, because there would always be this doubt, which makes it useless.”
I think a model (and therefore a set) can be useful despite that “doubt”, and that the concept of set can be applied in a very specific (but indirect) way to reality.
You build a model for the Universe, and you use concepts such as sets. The set is useful in the building of the model. Then you use the model to explain your perceptions and to make predictions. If the predictions are in agreement with the observations you conclude the model is a good model for the Universe, under the limitations of the observations. Then you can make predictions with your model and be confident in the results. This way, the model is useful for you, and, transitively, the concept of set is useful. But you can never know if the model if completely correct. There is the “doubt”.
How can you ever tell if a model is completely valid? I believe you’ll agree with me: you can’t. The doubt is always there, you can not evade it. But even in this way a model can be useful to make predictions, and so the concept of set.
Yes, set are, by definition, collections of objects. Sets are not “models” for those objects. I agree with this. But, what is an object? I believe any definition of an object is in the realm of a model. So yes, a set is a collection of objects, but an object is an abstraction.
I believe you will not agree with me on this. I’ll ask: what is, for example, a knife? For me, a knife is an abstraction, a classification. You’ll take a “real knife” and will tell me: no, a knife is this. Would you be able to say if something is a small sword or a big knife? You’ll probably say the intention of the manifacturer makes the difference. Is a knife too rusty to work still a knife? For me, “a knife” is an abstraction.
You’ll say (I’m making up your dialogue, you’ll probably say more intelligent comments; sorry for that) you can call it a knife or a sword, a rusty knife or a rusty piece of metal, but it is definitely an object. I’ll respond: well, no, it’s a lot of objects, a lot of atoms. Or maybe not. Because the atoms are changing. Is it an objects or a lot of them? Is a collection of atoms? In what instant? For me, an object is an abstraction, not a real thing.
In fact any though you can have is about models in your head. A lot of times I can not say where a perception ends and where the next starts; nor I can say if two perceptions (thunder and lighting) are one objects or two. A lot of time a can not say if I’m having one perception or two (smell and taste). Language is about abstractions, not reality (directly).
So, in my mental models of reality, I’m not sure of anything. I’m always testing (and of course in science) my models agains my perceptions. But I still find the concept of set very useful. I can make predictions with them.
Anyway, all these are my opinions, which seem very natural to me. You have your own, which I respect and find interesting. I think they pose some problems, but neither of them have been refuted (I don’t think they can) so I accept the two can coexists.
But precisely as we both have different perspectives Langan can not say the Universe is a set. At least without explaining why my perspective (that which I find so natural) is wrong. He could always assume it is a set and create a theory from that assumption. No problem, all theories make assumptions. But he was taking the fact as a truth, and when asked for clariffication he answer what a somewhat flawed logic: the Universe is a set because it is a set, and if you don’t see this you’re wrong.
@John Fringe:
I don’t want to go into all the philosophical questions you have raised here, but I do think we have some that are matters of difference of opinion. To take just one example, for me the important thing is not to recognize all knives (vs. swords, etc.), but to be able to recognize particular knives for a particular duration of time. Do philosophical questions remain about being able to do so? I suppose they probably do (e.g. what if a knife falls and breaks into two parts — what is “the knife” now?), but I do think one could build a coherent idea of a set of real objects regardless. I admit this is just my strong intuition; not something I can prove.
You have made me question (a little bit) what seemed transparently obvious to me at the outset: that the universe is, in a real sense, composed of many different objects, and it is legitimate, therefore, to call it a set, but not only a set. Perhaps I should have confined myself to that point, and not got onto the side issues. I do respect your different perspective, but I must admit it’s hard for me to imagine holding that point of view.
It seems to me that the difference in our point of view comes down to your saying that even in assigning identity to things there is an act of modelling which may be wrong. My point of view is that as long as the assignments are done according to some repeatable algorithm based on real perceptions, then there is no real doubt that the assignment is capturing something real about the universe. My argument would be pretty close to Langan’s remarks about greenness being a real property of the thing that reflects green light. Perhaps that is a philosophical point of view, after all.
I want to correct my remark: re-reading, I see that Mr. Langan did use some harsher language in his first reply than he used in his later replies. He did throw around some ad hominem stuff, mixed in with valid atttemps at rebuttal. All in all, no one in this exchange fought entirely on the level of ideas; there was some invective on both sides.
That said, I still think that the condemnation pile-on amounts to an outpouring of bias.
I’m actually too busy for this right now, but I see that given the apparent harshness of my first response in this thread – the primary purpose of which was to provide simple criteria by which conceptual value and evaluative competence can be objectively rated – a little background might be in order.
1. Mark originally critiqued my essay in February, 2008 at ScienceBlogs.
2. Just a week or two ago, somebody brought Mark’s critique to my attention. Here’s the link provided in that email:
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/02/two_for_one_crackpot_physics_a.php
3. Noting that Mark had titled his critique in an extremely deprecating manner, I thought it advisable to respond. However, I found that because Mark had moved his blog to Scientopia, it would be impossible to enter a response at ScienceBlogs. Therefore, I proceeded to the analogous entry at Mark’s new blog site. Here’s that link:
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2008/02/21/two-for-one-crackpot-physics-and-crackpot-set-theory/
4. I entered what I thought, under the circumstances, was a friendly and moderately informative response. I’m sure that my impatience was evident, but bear in mind that I had just discovered that Mark had been insulting me and my work with impunity for the last several years.
5. Mark responded in a highly aggressive and insulting way. So I entered another comment to make sure that everyone understood the problem. I hoped that this would be the end of the matter.
6. Unfortunately, it was not the end of the matter. Mark moved a slightly updated version of his critique to the current front page of his blog, under an arguably even more insulting heading, in an apparent effort to teach me the following lesson:
“Hey @#$%&, you don’t mess with Mark Chu-Carroll, except at your peril!”
(The wording is my own; I’m merely trying to approximate what seemed to be the message that Mark was sending by renewing his critique under the heading he chose.)
If one thinks about it a little, this may at least begin to explain the harshness of my tone. While I understand that some people might find my language excessive, I’m afraid I can’t agree. In fact, I think that my language has been quite controlled under the circumstances.
Thanks for your attention.
I like how you are utterly unable to talk about math instead of your rather large ego and insults to it. It would have been much more effective had you simply addressed the criticism against you rather than ignored it (and raised several points that had already been dealt with) and talked about MarkCC instead.
Consider that even if Mark was a complete idiot, it would still be possible for him to point out a flaw in what you are saying. Defending yourself by saying that he isn’t qualified is therefore your own logical mistake, and not a very hard one to see either.
Lily, I can’t help but feel you are missing the point. It’s not that Chris was calling Mark an idiot, but merely pointing out that Mark is devoid of certain knowledge about the claims his theory makes about particular mathematical structures. For example, let us say that everyone’s understanding of physics largely rests on key assumptions of classical physics – namely, absolute space. If these people wanted to explain why the surface of the water in a bucket curves when the water rotates, they will explain this phenomenon as the effect of the motion of the water with respect to absolute space.
Now let us say someone comes along and says that this phenomenon is not due to the absolute circular motion of the water, but is actually due to the relative motion of the water with respect to the local gravitational field. Getting the point: are 100 “hardcore Newtonians” whose assumptions about motion resting on absolute space “qualified” to critique the assumptions of 1 relativist? No, because they’re judgments will always be based on certain assumptions that simply don’t apply in the relativistic domain.
Am I trying to compare relativity to Chris’s theory? Certainly not. The point is: there are certain assumptions about the nature of mathematics that people around here carry that may not apply to Chris’s theory. How merely pointing this out renders him the biggest jerk on the planet is beyond me. This is not my concern however: my concern is that the people on here simply do not know how to be civil in a debate. People complain about Chris’s “ad hominem BS”, but then people mindlessly attack him by throwing every name in the book. People try to critique his theory, but they haven’t bothered to read his paper, and don’t even ask him questions to clarify.
As I said, the content of the theory is important, but you can’t discuss the content in any manner conducive to productive discussion if this is the way you go about it. If you think there is an aspect of the theory that is objectionable, ask questions to clarify. If you think something he said was unfair, explicate why you feel that way in a polite manner. Overall, actually have a discussion rather than just making these increasingly incoherent statements along with the name calling.
– John
It’s not like Chris’s ideas are well known to the point that someone being unaware of the specific assumptions he is using is somehow a point against him.
If Chris had pointed out that he was using different assumptions and then proceeded to explain the differences that would have been perfectly reasonable. But he didn’t.
I’m not trying to be contrived but it seems to me that we agree that information about the author of a theory should play no part in the discussion of that theory. That was the goal of pointing out that Chris was bringing Mark the person into it rather than defending his ideas.
I’m probably taking a few steps back from the current discussion here in saying this, but I think that Chris’ requirement that Mark “comprehend” the object of his intended critique prior to embarking on such a critique is inappropriate given the nature of some of Mark’s arguments against CTMU. Specifically, Mark’s charge that certain assertions made by Chris are nonsensical cannot be properly evaluated with reference to a criterion of comprehension because any meaningless statement necessarily defies comprehension. Using Mark’s example of someone saying “I’m going to fly to the moon by correctly spelling my left leg,” it becomes evident that requiring someone to comprehend such an assertion before they can legitimately criticize it is unreasonable. The very fact that such a statement is incomprehensible counts against its coherency.
I know Chris separately addressed a supposed disconnect between Mark’s failing to comprehend something and that thing’s being incomprehensible. However, this seems to fail to counter my above point, tangential to the overall discussion as it may be.
But if people really believe the theory is meaningless then why are they even bothering to raise objections? Why would you object to something that says precisely nothing? If you are raising objections, you have to assume he is trying to convey something, don’t you?
He is most certainly trying to convey something. I didn’t intend to imply anything to the contrary. Rather what I meant is that Mark’s charge is that Chris, while trying to convey something, is failing to do so precisely because his assertions, as formulated in his essay, are nonsensical. This is not an uncommon (or pointless) charge especially when it comes to evaluating metaphysical theories. For example, logical positivists claim that metaphysical claims are meaningless by virtue of their being unverifiable, and various theorists of meaning have thought that sentences whose subject lacks a referent are meaningless (e.g. ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’). I don’t necessarily endorse these particular claims but I certainly think it is a legitimate move to criticize a theory/assertion on the grounds that it is in whole or in part, nonsensical.
Since no one has pointed it out, I may as well. Langan’s 17. February post at least makes one of his fundamental problems very clear.
Langan says “A set is not a “mathematical construct defined axiomatically”. That would be set *theory*. While set *theories* are indeed defined axiomatically, the set concept itself is defined in a very basic and general way, which is precisely why it supports multiple versions of set theory incorporating different axioms.”
Yes, the intuitive concept of a set (or at least “collection of elements”) can be incorporated into many frameworks, from extensional mereology to ZF and beyond. In mereology, one can talk about the universe itself as a collection of objects (or mereological sums). In naive set theory or ZFC, the universe cannot be a set since the set of the entities comprising the universe and the universe itself are different things (by definition). In order to derive any problems for set theory or our conception of the universe, Langan has to decide which framework he is using. He never explicitly does that, but jumps back and forth between mereology and naive set theory. But he hasn’t given us any problems for the mereological conception of collections/sums (he doesn’t even display any hint that he is aware of this branch of philosophy (not mathematics)). In naive set theory (which is inconsistent anyway) or ZFC none of his purported problems even arise, since in these systems the universe cannot be viewed as a set – rather, the structured set consisting of all the elements in the universe is itself an abstract, mathematical object (as is the singleton with the universe as a member) with physical entities as members – and the only thing he provides is some feeble nonsense about how, if we distinguish our mathematical models of reality from the physical phenomena they model, science becomes impossible and we are saddled with ontological dualism.
Well, there are indeed philosophical questions that arise from accepting abstract objects, but they have nothing to do with what Langan discusses. If you do think that accepting abstract objects entails an untenable form of dualism (but it is a problem for nominalism rather than materialism, and those are not the same positions), I suggest adopting some kind of constructivist or even formalist view of mathematics. A lot of work, to put it mildly, has gone into developing such approaches, none of which Langan even mentions (removing the sharp distinction between syntax and semantics and the need for model theory has been a defining characteristic for many logicist approaches, for instance, although they do retain the difference between mathematical language and the reality the language is about, of course; it is not so obvious that Langan does).
I’m still befuddled by anyone — even if they are the self-proclaimed next Marilyn vos Savant — who offers up a theory for public consumption and then, rather than defend his own theory, spends his time attacking the critic for ostensibly being “unqualified.”
I’ll say it again: Chris, when you’re trying to communicate with the public, it’s YOUR obligation to make your points clear. Attacking Mark isn’t an ad hominem (I’m sort of surprised you’re not aware of that); but it *is* a non sequitur.
It seems to me that the problem is very clear when Chris says “A set is not a ‘mathematical construct defined axiomatically’.” Sure, the word ‘set’ has a basic meaning that is probably understood by many, without reference to axioms, and there are several set theory axiomatising that concept. But as long as we’re not dealing with axiomatic definitions, we’re not doing mathematics, just playing with words.
On one level, it doesn’t really matter whether you say a set is a model or being a set is a possible property of the universe – you still need to work with some sort of definition, and if we’re doing mathematics, axioms get involved.
Obviously, if we’re determined to hold on to our assumptions this might eventually create some problems one way or another, but without axioms we are just playing word-games. Using mathematical words doesn’t create mathematical content. This is the biggest issue with Chris’s essay – even the parts that seem most plausibly open to mathematical resolution don’t actually contain any mathematics.
On a related note, it is claimed that things like syntax and semantics are coupled in a new and profoundly different way. Since this is not actually described, why wouldn’t a reader conclude that there is simply confusion, rather than profound absent content? The same goes for the “extension” of set theory, which must involve a restriction of the naive set theory that the definitions appear to invoke, even if there is also additional structure involved.
Finally, I don’t think anyone has been bothered by Chris’s tone – the problem is that his responses, particularly the first, did not at all address the issue of his essay. This is what everyone else is talking about, qualified or otherwise. Focussing on what you are actually saying, rather than finding a reason to simply dismiss a criticism, also (although not always) tends to make it easier to deal with a “many-to-one” converstion.
@Jonathan D — “But as long as we’re not dealing with axiomatic definitions, we’re not doing mathematics, just playing with words.”
That is not the case — there are primitive notions in mathematics that are not derived from any axiom. They, themselves, have a status like axioms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_notion
The thing about primitive notions is that you can’t reason with them mathematically — the role of axioms is to permit such reasoning. If you’re saying that Langan is working with the primitive notion directly, well, then it’s no wonder that he’s not making himself understood.
@Cyan, can you support that with a reference?
The wikipedia link (admittedly a poor reference, which I would be happy to learn better about) describes primitive notions as “undefined” terms that are expected to be immediately understandable, and that are “analagous” to axioms. It further quotes Tarski saying that:
“the expressions in this group we call PRIMITIVE TERMS or UNDEFINED TERMS, and we employ them without explaining their meanings. At the same time we adopt the principle: not to employ any of the other expression of the discipline under consideration, unless its meaning has first been determined with the help of primitive terms and of such expressions of the discipline whose meanings have been explained previously. The sentence which determines the meaning of a term in this way is called a DEFINITION,…”
This seems to me to be saying that we do indeed use (“employ”) them in mathematical reasoning, though in _conjunction_ with other axioms. This does not make them invalid for use in axiomatic theories.
Have I misunderstood? Can you cite another authority to explain where I go wrong in this?
I have no reference beyond your own pointer to the Wikipedia article. My understanding of formal systems comes from Godel, Escher, Bach; when I put that together with “In mathematics, logic, and formal systems, a primitive notion is an undefined concept,” and “When an axiomatic system begins with its axioms, the primitive notions may be forgotten,” I come to the conclusion I stated in my previous comment.
I would say that one constructs axioms to try to capture the primitive notion, but once the axioms and rules of inference are chosen, the primitive notion has no more role to play. The essence of mathematical proof is the application of the rules of inference to the axioms; nowhere does the primitive notion that the mathematician was trying to capture play a role.
Maybe it is Wittengenstein’s Tractatus Ladder. You know, you understand Chris and in so doing you recognize him as senseless and hence, throw out the CAT.
In any case, a useful theory ultimately has to connect the ‘rubber to the road’ with regard to describing a range of expected observations or relationships. And hopefully, the logical chain behind a theory should be validated by more than one person.
Precisely! And maybe this is the antithesis and anathema to the postmodernist and why you get nothing but obfuscation and rhetoric from that camp.
“The real universe has always been theoretically treated as an object, and specifically as the composite type of object known as a set.”
P.S.
One needs to realize that the Universe has never been treated as a set but more as a complex. After all, do we treat a library as a set? No, we treat it as a complex, i.e. a whole that comprehends a number of intricate parts, especially one with interconnected or mutually related parts and a set is nothing more than a collection of distinct objects, considered as an object in its own right.
So, in the end it appears the basic premise is flawed outside of any “attempt” to add rhetorical scaffolding.
I’d like to make an observation and raise a question. My observation has to do with the quality of the article and posts on this blog. My question is motivated by the desire to see whether any of you can clarify my thoughts on a philosophical question I’ve been pondering.
The writing on this blog, it seems to me, suffers from a lack of self-editing. Most of the writing displays deep and thoughtful consideration of interesting issues. However, the ideas are often not well expressed, leading to misunderstanding and personal attacks. “What we have here . . . is failure to communicate.” (Cool Hand Luke)
One fundamental way to improve written communication is to self-edit. In particular, I would recommend that, after writing a first draft of a post, take a coffee break, come back, and reread your post, asking yourself, “What am I really trying to say here?” Then edit and reorganize your writing in something like the following template:
Introduction
1) Explain in a sentence why we should care about what you are about to say.
2) Enumerate briefly your main points.
Body
Go through each point in order and methodically. When transitioning from one point to the next, explicitly state any temporal, logical, or other connection between the point you just finished and the next point.
Conclusion
Summarize what you think you just said. Call for whatever action you want from the readers.
I’ll finish this topic with a quote from Ann Lamotte: “I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them . . . writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much.”
OK. Now for the question. In the evolution of my world-view, I have decided that I believe that everything in the world exists and is material. In particular, given what I have read about modern neuroscience, I have come to the view that ideas, thoughts, and emotions exist in a material form, in particular, as electrical signals and chemical combinations in the brain.
I would be interested in your thoughts on this matter. With regard to the original issues raised by this post, in my formulation, the concept of a set, whether naive or not, has an existence in this universe as a pattern of physical events occurring in each of our brains when we consider the concept. Of course, it is probably the case that patterns are slightly different for each individual. Nonetheless, perhaps when we are communicating effectively, our use of the term and concept is recognized by the reader as sufficiently close to his or her concept that the communication can be understood.
To conclude, and to follow my own template, I think I have said that self-editing, and in particular, reorganization would improve the quality of communication on this blog and I encourage you all to try it. I have also asked for your opinion on my philosophical ruminations. I would enjoy reading your response, whether it takes the form of references to materials I might be interested in, general thoughts on my concept of materialism, or your answer to the question, How does the idea that all concepts, including the concept of a set, have a physical presence affect the idea of the universe as a set?
I realize I’m coming into this late, but maybe there’ll be a response or two anyway.
I started reading Chris Langan’s CTMU intro and understood a lot of it; then I reached a point where I couldn’t understand anymore. I assumed that there were some concepts that he was making reference to that I just hadn’t yet learned. I feel a little bit better now that I realize that he’s just using terminology in a non-standard way, and that I’m not the only one confused.
There were a few things that I got from it that, somewhere between Chris’s angry responses and Mark’s initial criticisms about terminology, got completely lost. So I thought I’d take my interpretation of what I think Chris is saying and put it out there in plain English, and if Chris is still reading maybe he can confirm whether or not I got the point. Or if any of you folks are still reading you can feel free to criticize my interpretation as well. I viewed it as more of a philosophical treatise, something more in line with A Critique of Pure Reason, and less of a model for physics as I keep seeing it described in the media.
What I took from his CTMU stuff is –
Basic thesis – There are logical inconsistencies in the way that most people think about “the Universe,” because the way that most people think about “the Universe” is isomorphic to the view of it as a “set of all sets” as defined by naive set theory. The inconsistencies of naive set theory manifest via this isomorphism as the challenges and dilemmas faced by modern metaphysics.
1) Many people, without realizing it, have a cognitive model for the Universe that is somewhat similar to the naive set theory “set.” The subtle inconsistencies of this cognitive structure parallel the inconsistencies of naive set theory itself.
For example, at one point Mark said “some things in the Universe can be modeled by sets, and some things can’t.” This was a good point, but I think that what Chris was getting at is – if you’re saying that the Universe has “things” at all, then you are modeling it, mentally, as a set. Specifically you’re modeling it as set of all the things there are.
So Langan claims that this paradigm is equivalent to trying to create a set of all sets in naive set theory, which leads to problems down the road. The rest of his paper shows why this simple view of the Universe causes most of the problems.
The thing about whether the Universe “is a set” or not is a red herring, because when he claims that the “Universe” is a set he’s saying, as per Kant, that we can’t separate the actual Universe from the model that we make for it. So he’s saying that the viewpoint of the Universe as a collection of objects is wrong. At least that’s what I think he’s saying.
2) This way of thinking about the Universe is fundamentally flawed, and furthermore it leads to a number of false dilemmas that underpin modern philosophical thought. In this case he claims that the mind-body problem is one of these false dilemmas, and that dualism is the incorrect resolution of it.
Langan claims that many of these dilemmas can be addressed by realizing that they stem from this invalid schema for the universe, which most people have without realizing it. I’m not yet convinced, but I found the claim intriguing, as it’s a similar claim as that made by Kant.
It is also notable that things like the mind-body problem are actually problems with our model of the Universe, not a problem with the Universe itself – in the Universe, everything fits together nicely with no paradoxes.
3) The CTMU and his “SCSPL” claim to resolve these problems by defining a better structure with which to model the universe. By coming up with such a model for the Universe, one can become instantly enlightened and realize that monism is the way to go.
He claims to resolve the paradox by defining exactly in what sense the Universe contains itself while also being contained by a larger set, and in so doing defines a meta-language outside of the original one. This is where I stopped reading, so maybe it’s bunk, maybe it’s not.
He also claims that one can also realize that thermodynamic entropy is the process of the Universe cognizing itself, which represents reality being self-aware, and so we’re all just little bits of an ultimately self-aware reality. And he also claims that one bit of the Universe is holographically reflective of every other bit of it, and since one of those bits is our brains, which are constantly perceiving order and cognizing things, that order and cognition are everywhere. Or something like that.
____
He seems to be not too adept at expressing himself, and the choice of word “God” for what he’s describing will no doubt put off scientists and Christians alike, but this is what I got from it – and for what it’s worth, I think it’s a fascinating idea, whether you have to decipher his word salad in places or not.
Any thoughts on my interpretation as written above?
I’m hoping you reply to this. From what I’ve read, this seems to be exactly what he’s getting at. I think I may pick up where you leave off. It seems that his new method of defining the Universe is analogous to a continuously resolving set that expands in both “directions” (with directions being the “levels” of the set) i.e. it is dynamic and resolves in the same way, forever. The easiest way to think about this is to make a set of some arbitrary elements, lets call it M. We can then define a power set of M that includes the power set of M. The process of writing the set in the long form is exactly the process that the universe takes in “realizing” itself. Even more interesting is that according to Langan, it “writes” itself at the speed of light. At least this is my interpretation of it. What do you think? Also, Mr. Langan if you’re still around, I’d definitely like to hear your assessment of my interpretation.
I’ve read through every response, God that was long, and it’s obvious no one here is stupid. Don’t know if people are still reading this, but I’d like to give a few thoughts.
1.First and foremost all this hostility and blame of its initiation needs (especially Mark and Chris) to stop. It’s counterproductive.
2.Chris I have to admit I’ve read your paper and have very little idea what you are talking about. Let me tell you my story, that might be relevant to you. When I was a lowly PHD student my first couple journal articles I sent in kept getting R and R (Revise and Resubmit). I couldn’t figure out why. Finally my adviser sat down with me one day (he was kind of a ghost) read through my shit and told me it was incomprehensible. I was pissed. But he gave me little examples, little jumps in logic that I thought were intuitive or obvious to everyone, they weren’t. The accumulation of all these little jumps led to an incomprehensible paper. (Now looking back I think this is why I was so poor at writing essays for history etc. during undergrad). So I sat back down went through both the papers and in painful and what I thought redundant detail went through every little step. After I did that both got published in tier one journals.
So yeah I think there might be an element of this with you. People aren’t as smart as you, you have to spell out every single little transition, often during your paper I would find myself thinking “What does this have to do with the last statement, or how am i here?”
3. Thirdly I think of lot of this is miscommunication. I’ve some of your interviews and I pretty much agree with you about academia. One positive thing about academia though, is that it acts as a coordination mechanism in terms of jargon. Everyone uses the same language and there aren’t 50 different names for a set floating around. When you get that kind of divergence in terms, translation honestly becomes an issue. I mean shit, it’s still an issue in academia, let alone between academia and the “outside.” I believe miscommunication and translation are issues here.
TLDR
Problems
1.Needless hostility
2.Missing logic
3.Lost in translation
Also Chris try to be a little more………diplomatic. It’s a stupid social norm I know, but it goes a long way.
Sorry to double post I do have a question to ask though. I am going to break away from the all the abstract stuff and go to something a little more concrete.
You talk about morality being akin to maximizing “global utility.”
Everyone has different preferences and hence different utility functions.
How do we max global utility when we only know our own utility function and not others? Are laws and religion attempts? Are we just supposed to use our best guess? What if someone really loves raping and he rapes a retarded girl that is too disabled to feel pain etc., and his utility far exceeds her loss of utility. Wouldn’t I be maxing global utility by raping in the choice of (rape vs not rape)?
@Steve C
First, sorry for the bad writing. It’s true we don’t write very carefully. You’re absolutely right. But most of us don’t have much free time. We write fast, or we don’t write. Bad writing may be worse for communication that no writing!
I don’t think your idea of a materialistic World brings anything useful to the question of the Universe as a set.
“In my formulation, the concept of set has an existence in this universe as a pattern of physical events ocurring in each of our brains”.
Sorry about it, but you can not use physics to prove the universe is a set. Not if you apply it to the Universe, and I don’t see you solve any problem if you apply it to the brain only. Physics defines models. Physics is an experimental science. You can find sets and elements in your model, but they are not objetive elements in reality.
Other than that, it would be very difficult to say what an element is in modern physics.
You say the Universe can be seen as the set of particular events in your brain. What is an event in your brain? What is a signal in your brain? Remember, don’t rely on time in your reply: we don’t have a good model for time in quantum physics. Don’t rely on individual particles. Don’t rely on interactions, if you don’t have a good model for renormalization (which you don’t). I believe your are thinking in a very simple way about “signals in the brain”.
As I previously said, you have a model (in your case, independent signals on your brain), and you can identify elements and sets in your model. And that’s OK. But thats not the Universe, even in an objetive, absolute, material Universe.
@Mike B
Wow, you made an impressive work of translation! Good job!
Unfortunately, I don’t believe it changes anything. I still see pseudoscience in your interpretation.
I don’t really believe anybody thinks the Universe is the mathematical set of all sets. So the premise is misguided.
I believe almost everyone agrees “the mind-body problem” is a false dilemma. I mean, I don’t expect anybody to believe the World has a problem with that. The problem is in our interpretation, if there is any problem at all. So the conclusion is trivial.
The rest is empty words glued together without meaning. What the hell does he mean by “thermodynamic entropy is the process of the Universe cognizing itself”? No, seriously. What semantics does he associate with this sentence? What is he trying to say? Where does he get that conclusion? Does he even know what thermodynamic entropy is?
I’m certainly not fascinated by any of these.
A theory that doesn’t theorize ANYTHING AT ALL is no theory and has all the use of the tits on a bull.
Mr “The Smartest Man in the Room” with an ego to make up for the lack of even basic genius is indulging in Post Hoc Reasoning and Question Begging with the smell of liniment in his nostrils and possibly suffering the side effects of steroids.
There is no intuitive leap just a word salad chasm below. No new paradigm but a POMO whining.
He wants a free ride …what with, only one can imagine. The thrashing he gives his dead horse keeps away the flies, but the stink is unmistakable.
Pure hubris.
Challenge accepted. Ask me any single question about the CTMU, (exclusive) or offer any single piece of criticism. I’ll answer these one by one.
@John Fringe – sorry for the late reply, I didn’t see this until now.
“I don’t really believe anybody thinks the Universe is the mathematical set of all sets. So the premise is misguided.”
What exactly do you mean by this?
“The rest is empty words glued together without meaning. What the hell does he mean by “thermodynamic entropy is the process of the Universe cognizing itself”? No, seriously. What semantics does he associate with this sentence? What is he trying to say? Where does he get that conclusion? Does he even know what thermodynamic entropy is?”
I don’t really know what he means, I was honestly hoping he’d show up here and comment on my interpretation. What I took from that concept is something along the lines that when an event happens on the “physical” side of the duality, it is paralled by a “cognition” happening on an assumed “mental” counterpart of the physical corpus that is the universe.
The following is my own reasoning which I had thought of long before reading Langan’s article, so I have again no idea if this is what he intended, or if I am being too generous in my interpretation, or if there’s a flaw in my interpretation I haven’t seen. But to clarify further, the process of cognition, which takes place on the “mind” side of the supposed mind/body duality, is represented on the “body” side as a specific thermodynamic event occuring in the brain. The two things are really one thing, however, it just depends on how the detection of this specific event reaches our senses.
For example, let’s say you have a patient and a doctor, and the patient is in an MRI and asked to imagine scenes from his or her childhood. The imagining of these scenes will cause various neurological events which will show up on the MRI (we will assume that they do for the sake of argument). A dualistic interpretation of this principle would be that in the “physical realm” what is “really happening” is this particular pattern of brain activity, whereas in the “mental realm” what is happening is the actual qualitative cognition that the patient is experiencing.
A different, monistic interpretation might be that these two events (the MRI blip and the actual qualitative experience of cognition) are really one event just experienced through two different modes of sensory perception – literally. In the one case, the neural event leaves the patient’s brain by interacting with the MRI, at which point the signal is digitized and sent to a computer screen, where the light from the screen enters the doctor’s eyes and he now experiences this event visually. Either way, this is the perception of that event from the standpoint of the event beaming information through space, where it is detected by the senses of another human being (probably with the help of tools like an MRI) and cognized over there. On the other hand, this neural event is perceived differently from the patient’s point of view, where it is experienced directly by causing other patterns of neurons to fire in such a way that the qualitative experience of a “cognition” is formed.
The above was an idea I had thrown around for a while, so it seemed like Chris Langan was on the same page with his CTMU. I took him to propose that just like one can either “see” or “be” the neural event that I laid out above, that just as we “see” thermodynamic events occuring in the universe, we also “are” them, and hence there may be another way to experience them directly and qualitatively, just as there is another way to experience patterns of neural activation rather than seeing them as blips on an MRI screen. It seemed he was proposing that from the perspective of interacting with all of these events by “being them,” you’d arrive at something that he unfortunately chose to call “God.” Again, I have no idea if this was actually what he’s saying, which is why I was hoping he’d show up to comment.
@Mike B
> “I don’t really believe anybody thinks the Universe is the mathematical set of all sets. So the premise is misguided.”
> What exactly do you mean by this?
You interpreted Langan says “There are logical inconsistencies in the way that most people think about “the Universe,” because the way that most people think about “the Universe” is isomorphic to the view of it as a “set of all sets” as defined by naive set theory.”
What I meant was this: there is not much people who believe the Universe is something like “the set of all sets as defined by naive set theory”, if any.
Most people don’t know about the set of all sets, and they have a lot of diverse ideas about the Universe, but I doubt any of them to be “isomorphic” the mathematical set of all sets. People think the Universe is the set of all material things, or the set of all existing sets, the set of all consistent sets, whatever, but not the set of all mathematical sets. At least, I have never found a person with this idea.
I may be wrong. We could make a poll. Here it would be biased, but let’s try: Is there anyone here who thinks the Universe is something like the mathematical set of all sets?
With respect to the rest, I can not comment. I have the sensation you’re saying one can define a “mental counterpart of the Universe” as “the result of somehow interpreting the physical events as cognitive events”. So yes, then there would be a “mental counterpart”, by that definition. But this is a change of name. It doesn’t have any “mind” properties just because we called it “mental counterpart”.
“I don’t really know what he means, I was honestly hoping he’d show up here and comment on my interpretation. ”
He’s here now…he’s the anonymous poster right above you.
Sorry to disappoint, but I am in fact not Christopher M. Langan.
This comment is directed mainly at Mike B.
I don’t know where you got the point of view Mr. Langan allegedly espoused regarding entropy. I’ve never seen something like that in his writings as far as I can recall, and I strongly doubt such a view is present in his introduction to the CTMU. Please explain where he says or implies this.
You are on the right track with your views inasmuch as they are monistic. Though your views fit more or less into the framework of the CTMU, I do not think they originate from where in the CTMU you think they originate. Specifically, Mr. Langan’s attack on dualism does *not* originate from anything related to thermodynamics. Instead, his argument against dualism proceeds by syndiffeonesis, a process which he describes in his 2002 paper.
Any further questions?
Oh, sorry about that. I thought you were Mr. Langan because I noticed your other comment on the americanatheist.org blog, where he was also posting. My bad.
Such an unfortunate waste of Mr. Langan’s time, rather than using the opportunity to ask him some deep logico-mathametical questions, instead we can’t get past the first paragraph of an introductory essay meant for a general audience…and here I was hoping to hear his technical explanation (which admittedly I probably wouldn’t completely comprehend) for why self-duality and topos theory are not quite enough as they currently exist to pick up where set theory left off…another wasted learning opportunity, such is the Tragedy of the commons.
I agree with koinotely, seems like mob mentality even reaches the PHD level. Funny enough this whole thread reminds me of the movie Good Will Hunting where the pompous PHD’s are fumbling trying to understand the Genius and he finally explodes. Let’s make no mistake here, Most of you are extremely intelligent I’m sure but Mr. Langan is not just extremely smart, he is an off the charts genius. I believe he deserves more respect than he got here period whether he made himself clear or not. Has anyone heard of asking him nicely to explain his theory on a more comprehensive level instead of insulting the man by calling him a crank ? I think not…
I agree with both koinotely and Justin, but I would like to add that Mr. Langan has explained his work quite clearly over the Internet. If one wishes to learn about it in more detail, one must simply look at the correct websites. I’d be happy to provide an interesting discussion over the comments on this blog.
Cool. We’re back at the argumentation by authority.
So, wherever this guy say, it’s is correct. No matter what. Because, hey, he is intelligent!
Well, he may be intelligent, but some people here seem to be pretty err… the opposite. Maybe he is using his intelligence to sell himself to simple people who don’t think by themselves, accepting any argument by the I.Q. number. He can be very intelligent, but maybe he is lazy or does other motivations or whatever, and it doesn’t take an Einstein to fool someone who is blinded by I.Q.’s.
You can continue to think that heavier bodies fall faster. Aristotle was a very intelligent people. I at least will continue to think and judge on ideas, not authority.
Seriously, I have a big problem trying to understand you. Are you really trying to convince us that he is right using as your only argument that some unknown guy said he was very intelligent?
Unbelievable.
John, I assume you are addressing Justin. All I can say is that Mr. Langan considers his IQ to be ultimately irrelevant next to his intellectual contributions. If you wish to debate those intellectual contributions, namely various parts of the CTMU, with me, feel free to proceed right now. Simply state a specific qualm you have with it and I will gladly debate it with you here.
Well, I was addressing anyone who basically speaks about intelligence as an argument. Nobody specifically, they are scattered over the post.
I’m a bit tired of people talking about intelligence. I still don’t have a clue about what intelligence is. Maybe to be willing to learn, but that is not the way people use the term. And nobody seems to know, yet people try to use the word to settle arguments. You’ll agree this is not very “intelligent”.
All this “intelligence” issue tires me.
My impression about IQ is this: A lot of people trying to get into mensa-like-clubs to feel superior, only to later hide their IQ to not feel inferior once there. Talk about irony!
I am not criticizing Langan here, but people who use this argument.
Regarding your offer to debate the theory, I believe his pages speak by themselves. I would be a hard time finding an specific qualm.
“It follows that reality itself should be a set…in fact, the largest set of all. But every set, even the largest one, has a powerset which contains it, and that which contains it must be larger (a contradiction).”
Of course, this is not an argument. I’m not convincing you.
I am not sure why you included that last quotation so I will not reply to it.
I also feel that many high IQ societies originally founded as places for members to befriend like-minded people have become breeding grounds for insecure egos. It is of course extremely likely that some societies are worse than others in that respect and there are probably still societies truly dedicated to helping the gifted overcome their isolation.
I probably can’t contribute much more to this discussion than that.
The citation (from http://megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/IntroCTMU.htm) was just my poor attempt to justify somehow why I don’t believe I can contribute anything more to the discussion, neither. I just meant “this is an example of what I consider bad logic”.
Why do you consider that quotation bad logic?
Because every sentence is a premise, an assertion. An they are assertions widely known to be false.
– reality should be a set. (why? this is not infered, so it’s a free assertion)
– it should be the largest set of all. (why? free assertion)
– every set, even the largest one, has a powerset which contains it. (what is the largest set? if it doesn’t exists, how can we talk about its properties? does it really have a powerset? why? free assertion)
– a powerset if larger. (is this assertion valid for infinite sets? why? free assertion)
Good logic is about inferring things from acceptable premises.
Bad logic is about disguising unaccetable premises (premises not much people would take for granted) as being inferred, despite having no connection with the rest. It’s bad logic because logic is about inferring things using logic rules.
If you don’t use logic, it’s not logic. That’s why. Sorry, I thought it was obvious.
In hopes of rebooting this discussion from scratch: Can someone explain, very simply, a correct interpretation of the CTMU?
You need to look at that quotation in context. It’s the beginning of a proof by contradiction. The assumption is that reality is a set. It follows that it is the largest set of all because all conceivable things necessarily fall into reality. Now that we have (for the sake of contradiction) come to the conclusion (albeit illogically) that reality is the largest set, its powerset is the set of all mappings between its members, as is true for all sets. Assuming that reality is a set as we have, it has a powerset. As for the cardinality of that powerset, Cantor’s diagonal argument establishes that the powerset of a set has a greater cardinality than that of the set itself regardless of whether the set is finite or infinite. Just remember that Mr. Langan does not actually believe reality to be a set and that this is merely the beginning of a proof of its not being such.
Sorry, but no.
> “The assumption is that reality is a set”.
No. The assumption is that reality is a set, that it is the largest set, that the largest set exists, that reality is the largest set, that infinite sets can be compared in size, that… he actually makes a lot of assumptions. But, as they’re in disguise, some people don’t immediately see them.
> “It follows that it is the largest set of all because all conceivable things necessarily fall into reality.”
It follows from where? Eh? Wow, not so fast. That’s pretty much a word play, so vague it would let me prove anything. Want a proof? Let’s try.
Consider this: if anything conceivable fall necessarily into reality, I tell you I can conceive a world where that sentence is false, and where Langan’s theory is false. As I conceived it, it is part of reality. So hey! I just proved you’re wrong!
Why is my proof empty? Because I’m only playing with words. First: what do you understand by conceivable? Imaginable? Then why is it necessary for something conceivable to fall into reality? Maybe there are conceivable things that are not real. Why not? Maybe there are a sets of inconceivable things that are bigger. Why not?
You’re only hiding a lot of assumptions in misleading language there (possibly not consciously). You have inferred nothing, you’ve asserted it.
> “Now that we have come to the conclusion that reality is the largest set, its powerset is the set of all mappings between its members, as is true for all sets…”
As the previous conclusion is erroneous, the conclusions based on that conclusion are erroneous. And so on.
To make things clear, some of his hypothesis are:
– the universe is a set
– there exists a set larger than any other, which we call the largest set.
– the universe is the largest set
– we can build a set larger than the largest set
(You’re adding some additional hypothesis, such as that we’re using a concept of set that admits the diagonal argument. But he could be referring to a more relax concept. It doesn’t matter)
I would not need so much hypothesis to build a contradiction. 2) and 5) would do. The problem is he is not proving anything about the Universe at all. All he is proving (and you’re trying) is that your set of premises is inconsistent. But then you select one of the premises and say it is wrong because inserting it in a set of inconsistent hypothesis it results in a new set of inconsistent hypothesis. That’s pretty bad logic.
> “Just remember that Mr. Langan does not actually believe reality to be a set and that this is merely the beginning of a proof of its not being such.”
If he does not believe that, and nobody really believe that, why is he asserting it?
There’s no proof that the Universe is not a set. He proved that is the Universe is a set, and it is the largest set, there exists a largest set, and you can build an even larger set, then you’ve got a contradiction. You only need the last two for that, so he said nothing about the Universe being a set or not.
But then, as I said, I’m not saying nothing new. That’s all obvious.
This paragraph is just an example, but you can see he is just asserting things. At least, I believe it’s clear why I call the theory bad logic.
The “He proved that is the Universe” should be “He proved that if the Universe”. I’m always increasing my typo count 🙁
As almost all of your second last post rests on my statement, “It follows that it is the largest set of all because all conceivable things necessarily fall into reality,” being false, I’ll tackle that first.
I admit that what I said is terribly inaccurate. My bad. Let me give a better reason for reality being the largest set of all, assuming it is a set.
I provide here the method by which Mr. Langan goes about this in his paper, which I should have read more carefully before replying to your earlier post. He provides the sentence, “Reality contains all and only that which is real.” This sentence is clearly tautological; specifically, it is autological, which means that reality is clearly a self-defining predicate. Predicates may be described as sets and vice versa, so a self-defining predicate may be described as a self-including set. By the way, I mean predicate in the mathematical and not grammatical sense. Wikipedia, for example, distinguishes between the two, and you need merely find the article “Predicate (mathematical logic)” for more information.
By definition, all that exists is included in reality. As reality is also a self-including set, as shown above, it both contains itself and contains everything real. Thus, if it could be described accurately as a set, it would be “the set of all sets”, or the largest possible set.
Now that we have really established in which sense reality is the “largest set”, I think you’ll see that the rest of Mr. Langan’s proof by contradiction follows neatly.
You also claimed that Mr. Langan may be using a definition of “set” that does not admit the diagonal argument. His references to Russell’s paradox and related problems in other papers make it very clear that he is using “set” in the well-defined mathematical sense.
Your second and fourth hypotheses would not in fact do alone, as the first hypothesis is necessary to establish that we’re dealing with reality in the discussion and the third hypothesis is necessary to establish that being the “largest set” in fact applies to reality.
You seem to be confused about how Mr. Langan’s proof works, so I will lay it out here for your convenience.
1) The real universe necessarily contains all that is real. (This is an autology.)
2) That which is real is *topologically* contained in the real universe, and the real universe is *described* (descriptively contained) by that which is real. (This is a tautology. This is also where Mr. Langan first distinguishes between topological and descriptive containment.)
3) As reality contains itself and also contains all that is real, it may be described as the “largest set”. (This is an assumption establishing the proof by contradiction. The proof justifies his distinguishing between topological and descriptive containment.)
4) Consider the powerset of reality. It is the set of all subsets of reality, and it follows from Cantor’s diagonal argument that it is of a larger cardinality than reality, assuming as in 3) that reality is a set.
5) The solution to this conundrum is to incorporate two senses of containment, topological and descriptive, in terms of which reality can be said to simultaneously contain its powerset (descriptively) and be contained by its powerset (topologically). But with two senses of containment it is more than just a set. Q.E.D.
So you say: reality contains all and only which is real. That’s not a tautology, that’s pretty much a definition for me. In any case, I’m not sure what do you mean by self-defining. I believe it is this:
a) reality as you defined it exists
b) as it exists, it should be an element of itself
If this is not the case, would you please provide an explanation? Excuse my ignorance.
Langan and you are both making a mess confusing elements of the universe you’re studying with elements of the metalanguage you’re using to study it, and interchanging its properties. I wrote a long, detailed and very boring explanation on what is wrong in your deduction, but I believe we’ll all see it more clearly if I show you an example. I think its very illustrative. If you still have doubts when you read it, or if you don’t see the connection, I’ll post the long and boring explanation.
Let suppose we have a box, with at least three objects (which we will call A, B, C) in its interior. You’re basically doing the following. We define the contents of the box as anything in its interior, and only that. By this definition, object A is one of its contents. Right? Objects B is another.
Then, take the set of objects A and B. This set is in the box, so it’s one of its contents. Right? Let call this set {A,B}. The set {{A,B},C} is in the box. So it’s one of its contents.
In fact, the set of its contents are in the box, so this set is one of its contents. Eh! It’s a self-defining predicate again! The contents of the box is a content of the box! So it’s a self-contained set. So it’s the largest set. So… what do you want me to conclude? I can infer anything you want. Just say anything.
I can do this with boxes, reality, thoughts… just name it, I’ll give you your self-containt paradox, and infer anything you want.
Do you see this is trivially wrong? Do you see this is exactly the same you’re doing? And what about you, the rest of people here? Any doubt?
The problem is this: the set of things in the box is not in the box. You can open the box and you’ll never find the set. No. The elements of the set are in the box. Those you’ll find there.
The set of things that are real is not real. Its elements are real.
What Langan (and you) are doing here is mixing language and metalanguage. I’m not saying you’re doing it conciously, but you’re doing. Can you see it?
If you explain why my example is not exactly the same as you’re deduction, I’ll post my long and boring explanation 🙂
Apart from that, my post does not rely only on that. You missed the most interesting part. The most interesting part is this.
I’ll explain more carefully.
Langan starts with these axioms (with more than these, but these are a subset):
1) the Universe is a set
2) there exists a set larger than any other
3) for any set, even the largest one, there exists a larger set
He then says that the axioms are inconsistent, and then he inferres that 1) is false, because of this.
The problem is this is trivially bad logic. You can not decide an axiom is wrong just because if you insert it in an inconsistent set of axioms the result is an inconsistent set of axioms.
If you could do that, you could prove anything:
1) I like peanut butter
2) there exists a set larger than any other
3) for any set, even the largest one, there exists a larger set
The set of axioms is inconsistent, so I don’t like peanut butter. Or
1) Mr. Langan is right
2) there exists a set larger than any other
3) for any set, even the largest one, there exists a larger set
But then again
1) Mr. Langan is wrong
2) there exists a set larger than any other
3) for any set, even the largest one, there exists a larger set
The set is again inconsistent, so Mr. Langan is wrong.
In fact, with 2) and 3) and this bad logic we can infer anything we want.
No, sorry. The problem is that he is inserting the axioms “The Universe is a set” in an inconsistent set of axioms, and later deciding the conflicting axiom is the anyone he chooses. Which is clearly wrong.
If you still don’t see it, I’ll like to post one last example.
You are saying reality is the set of all real things. Then you are extending the properties of the elements to the set: this set is also real, so it’s contained in itself.
The problem is you can not assign the properties of its elements to a set.
If I have two blue marbles, what colour is the set of the two marbles? Blue? No, the set has no colour. Its elements are blue. That’s all.
If you have a box with two marbles weighting 1 unit each, how much does the set of the two marbles weight? Nothing, the set itself has no weight. You can not extend the weight to the set. You can not say: the set of the two weights two units. Each marble is contained in the box, that’s two units. But the set of the two is contained in the box, so that’s another two units. We have for units if weight in the box, and go on.
In the same way, you can not say: I have elements that are real, so they are included in the set of real things. But as its elements are real, the set of real things is real. So it must be contained in the set of real things. You have no justification to say that.
“We have for units if weight in the box, and go on.”
should be
“We have four units of weight in the box, and go on.”
However, reality *is* real, so it is a real thing. That answers your last two posts.
In fact, this also answers your example of a box. Reality is a real thing, and it is at the same time a collection of real things. This is indeed another major difference between reality and a typical set. The property of being real applies to both it and its elements. If you claim that reality is not real, i.e., that it doesn’t exist, you’ll be hard-pressed to back up that claim given that this conversation is occurring. 😀
Also, Mr. Langan’s proof that reality is not a set is not the result of a true axiom being inserted into a system of inconsistent ones. It states that, were reality a set, it would have a powerset. As reality contains all that is real and its powerset is well-defined, its powerset is real so reality contains its powerset. However, its powerset, being its powerset, contains it as well in a well-defined sense: one of the subsets of a set is the set itself (although it is not a proper subset) and the powerset is the set of all subsets, so the powerset does contain the set. As we have an apparent paradox here (reality contains its powerset and is contained by its powerset), Mr. Langan resolves it by pointing out the two different uses of the word “contain”: the descriptive and the topological. Notice that nowhere in this proof was it necessary to call reality the “largest set”. Instead we merely had to see that it contains all that is real.
Speaking of the sentence, “Reality contains all that is real,” this is both a tautology and a definition. You already see why it is a definition, so I will only explain why it is a tautology. Being real is the property of being in reality. Reality is all that is real. These definitions are circular, but that does not make them false. In fact, reality must necessarily be described intrinsically as something would have to exist apart from reality for reality to be defined extrinsically.
> “However, reality *is* real, so it is a real thing. That answers your last two posts.”
> Reality is a real thing, and it is at the same time a collection of real things.
No. You have to choose which definition you want, but not both.
You can take reality as that that is real. Well, OK with that.
Or you can take reality as the set containing that which is real. Under this definition, you don’t know if its real. OK with this one, too.
What you can not do (if you’re not that confised) is to take both conflicting definitions and decide to apply their properties to one same thing. Because then your paradox is because your mixing.
I can do that to anything, too. It’s a very old form of fallacy.
Let’s say we define a rich as anyone having at least the same money than Bill Gates.
Let’s define also a rich as anyone who is able to buy anything you want.
Now suppose Bill Gates lost all his money and properties, so he’s got nothing.
Then, we’ve got the following: every person in the World would be rich, by the first definition. That’s OK. But then, if everybody is rich, by the second definition everybody will be able to buy anything he wants.
You know what? We all would have the same purchasing power as before. We have to choose: the first definition, where you can have someone rich who can buy nothing, or the second.
What you can not do is to take as much conflicting definitions as you want and mix them, believing they define the same thing.
Do you believe this example is totally silly? It is, in fact. But it is also exactly the same logic you’re using here.
You say “reality is something that exists”, and “reality is the set of all that is real”. Sorry, that’s two conflicting definitions. You can take one, and try to prove the other as a consecuence. That’s what you’ve failed two times to do before trying this form of fallacy.
(By the way. I define John as being the physical person I am. Then I define John as the most cool person in the World. But then, I have just proved that I’m the most cool person in the World! I can prove anything this way. Too easy.)
Here, you can see. Your fallacy is classified and described in wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation
I have no problem affirming that reality does not exists in the Universe, considering one of your definitions of reality: the set of everything that exists. I have no problem affirming you’ll never find an object in the Universe that is this set. Go look for it.
If you switch definitions in the middle of the conversation, affirming now that reality is that which is real, then I can’t say that. But that’s a very low trick of yours 🙂 You’ll have to stick to a definition to play fair.
Or to be taken seriously.
I see now that due to earlier mistake on my part you are partially correct in attacking my position. I contradicted myself by saying that “reality is not a set” and also referring to it as a collection of things. Reality IS in fact a structured set, but it is *more* than just a set. Describing reality as a set leaves out some crucial properties of reality, such as its interplay of descriptive and topological containment with its powerset.
Reality is contained by its powerset because its powerset is its powerset. On the other hand, it is the case that reality = {x : x is real}, and “real” must be defined intrinsically and circularly. Because the powerset is real, it is an x such that x is real, so it is an element of reality. But it also contains reality because it is the powerset of reality.
Please correct me if you see any errors in this reasoning.
Real = existing in the Universe. Ok, no problem with that.
Reality = { x : x is real }. Ok, no problem with that.
Reality is contained by its powerset. Ok, no problem with this neither.
Because the powerset is real… <– alarm, alarm!
Why is the powerset real? Do you expect to find a powerset of the Universe floating in the Universe? In fact, you do know that assuming the powerset to be real leads to a contradiction. So, you actually know it is not real. Why do you say it is, knowing it is not (by contradiction)?
Again I believe the problem is you’re mixing two meanings of real. Real as actually existing, and real as conceivable. I said before that you can not take something as true just because you can conceive it (I can conceive this theory as false. If that makes it false, we should have ended long ago).
You’re mixing this two meanings. What you’re proving is that you can not decide an arbitrary thing (the “superset of reality”, the “set of all real things”) to be real just because you want, because that leads to contradictions.
You’re inferring nothing more.
I don’t expect to find it “floating around”. However, I never claimed that it is “physical”: I merely claimed that it is “real”. That means it can be said to exist. All well-defined mathematical objects are actualized as information, but not necessarily as physical things. For example, one may not be able to hold the Cantor set in the palm of one’s hand, but that doesn’t mean it does not exist in a purely informational sense.
The contradiction exists when considering any “set of all sets”, and it is simply the case that Mr. Langan’s resolution is somewhat different from that of other approaches to set theory. While typical models of set theory tend to introduce axioms preventing a set of all sets or stratify the concept of a set into multiple exclusive levels, Mr. Langan uses two different types of containment.
Where in my last two posts do you think I made the mistake of passing “real” off as “conceivable”? If one conceives of a unicorn, that just means the conception of a unicorn exists, but not that the unicorn itself exists.
In my 1:48 p.m. post, I said that a thing’s being “real” means that, “It can be said to exist.” I meant, “It exists.”
> However, I never claimed that it is “physical”: I merely claimed that it is “real”. That means it can be said to exist.
So real means it can be said to exists? Well, the problem then is in your understanding of real.
I can speak of the falsehood of the Langan’s theory. This falsehood can be said to exists. In fact, I said it exists. So it exists.
Knowing that Langan’s theory’s falsehood exists, what are we arguing about?
I can’t take that meaning seriously, or you’re wrong in any case as you see.
A concept needs not to be real. If you can’t accept that, then we finally find our problem: your concept of “existence” leads to contradictions. It’s that concept what is inconsistent. Nothing more in the reasoning chain is right.
> If one conceives of a unicorn, that just means the conception of a unicorn exists, but not that the unicorn itself exists.
I read this now. Then again, why do you say the powerset if real? The concept of a powerset if real, but why the powerset itself? You have the proof (it leads to contradictions), yet you insists.
My 1:52 p.m. post addresses your 1:55 p.m. post. A concept does exist as a concept, and that addresses your 1:57 p.m. post. To address your 2:00 p.m. post, indeed it is the concept of the powerset that is real. On any account, this diminishes the powerset’s existence as much as the existence of the number 4 is diminished by the same argument – it doesn’t at all. These are both mathematical abstractions, and that is the sense in which they have informational existence. It does not make them less real.
The powerset as a concept exists. But certainly it does not contains the entire Universe as a subset.
In fact, the concept of powerset is a concept, not a set. The concept of powerset does not contain anything. It’s a concept about a set containing things.
So your argument is still trivially wrong, because now we agreed that the concept of the powerset of the Universe exists, but it clearly is not a set, and it clearly does not contain the Universe as a subset. As your argumentation was based on this, it is wrong.
I believe you’re still playing with words, and confusing language wuth metalanguage.
I see we’ve both ignored CausticDuality, and on my part this was a result of simply not noticing the post. In response to him or her, the CTMU is rather difficult to summarize concisely as a result of its many implications. Though I may not do it much justice, I will attempt a summary.
In short, the CTMU is a theory of reality based entirely on tautologies and which may be used simultaneously to analyze the subjective and objective sides of reality. It is a theory of reality-as-mind and its wide scope allows it to be used to decisively answer questions relating to topics as diverse as the expansion of the universe, the nature of consciousness, and the existence of a creator.
If you, CausticDuality, have any more specific questions about the CTMU I will be glad to answer them, and I will probably do a better job of it than I did of this little summary. 😉
Do you agree that the number 4 exists? Then does the set {4} exist? Of course it does as an abstraction. Reality is also an abstraction. So is the powerset of reality, and it is well-defined as the set of all subsets of reality. You cannot go out and physically hold reality. If you object that the universe is treated in cosmology as a physical object, this does not do the universe justice. It must be treated intrinsically, not with respect to some wider encompassing medium, as no such medium exists. Just as reality may be defined in terms of the predicate “real”, so may its powerset be predicated on reality. If one exists, both do.
I don’t agree that the powerset of the set of all existing things exists. I can’t agree with that, because it leads to a contradiction. You have seen it.
It existence is not obvious. You don’t infer it from anywhere. You’re just taking its reality as an axiom. And you’ve got a contradiction, but you take another axiom as the culprit.
I agree that the concept of powerset (and that of the concrete powerset of the set of the entities that exist) exists.
But that is not the thing, and the concept doesn’t share the properties of the things.
If there’s any doubt, I invite you observe how the World works: despite I having the concept of a sheep in my garden, my grass continues growing. It seems that I need an actual sheep, and not only the concept.
In this very way, the concept of the powerset of the entities that exist is not a set containing the entities that exist as a subset.
The concept is not the thing. If it’s still not crystal clear, invite you to cut a paper with the concept of a pair of scissors.
That’s all we have until now.
I repeat myself because I do not found any new information or argumentation in your last post.
Sorry. It’s being a pleasure to argue with you 🙂
Like Carl Sagan said, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. We are made of the universe, and the universe is in us. The atoms of our body simply came from the centers of high-mass stars. Why do we need to define such things as “consciousness” in metaphysical terms when we already know what it is? Sentience is just the result of various processes working together. Every aspect of our mind is traceable to the brain. It’s all material.
How can one possibly posit an “objective reality” when all we have is perception? The only “objective” thing we can determine about our reality is that a subjective reality exists — in other words, there is existence.
And the fact that Langan is invoking a Creator/God is a huge red flag. It doesn’t get you any closer to solving anything. It all sounds like crackpottery.
The paradox associated with a set of all sets will arise regardless of whether or not the powerset is so much as mentioned as a result of Russell’s paradox. Even if Mr. Langan or I had not brought the issue of the powerset up, there would still be a paradox. As I see it, the powerset is as well-defined as any powerset of an infinite set, and this makes it as real as any powerset of an infinite set.
The phrase “abstract concept” is redundant. All concepts are abstract and all abstractions are concepts. E.g., the concept of a linear mapping is a linear mapping. The difference between concepts and things in themselves becomes a problem when one moves from the abstract to the concrete. E.g., there it is true that the concept of a pair of scissors is not the same thing as a physical pair of scissors. As both the powerset and reality are abstract concepts, like a linear mapping they exist if we may so much as conceive of them.
It is a pleasure to argue with you, as well.
Do you (or that different person who is Mr Langan) have the slightest idea of the meaning of ‘topological’, my friend Anonymous?
I will reply to Errr…. first as a somewhat shorter reply will suffice to answer his or her query.
In most cases “topological” means “of or relating to topology”. However, Mr. Langan uses it in the phrase “topological containment” (which I assume you are asking about) to refer to the type of containment used in set theory, i.e., the way in which sets contain or are contained. This may be contrasted with “descriptive containment” which is the way something in a language contains its referents.
The rest of this comment is in response to CausticDuality’s 3:36 p.m. comment.
No large-scale consensus exists on the nature of consciousness. For example, many philosophers (e.g., Berkeley, Chalmers) would likely object to your statement, “Sentience is just the result of various processes working together.” It is not intuitively impossible for there to exist intangible subjective phenomena that determine the mind’s processes. Assertions are not absolute proof, which is why the nature of consciousness is of great metaphysical importance.
Absolute knowledge exists in the form of logical tautologies. That is the objective side to reality in which you seem to lack faith.
> there it is true that the concept of a pair of scissors is not the same thing as a physical pair of scissors
So… you’re accepting that the concept of a pair of scissors is not a physical scissor. But you don’t accept a concept can not contain a physical scissors.
I mean, you agree that concepts are different from physical things, but you believe they can contain physical things. You believe the concept “powerset of the reality” contains an existing physical scissors. As much as every one of them.
Despite it being the origin of contradictions.
I find this very curious, and I can not see why I should (or can) go beyond that. You assert things that lead to contradictions. That things are not deductions, but your axioms. And they lead to contradictions. But they lead to contradictions way before considering the Universe the largest set. So that’s not the conflicting axiom. So, by the time you are speaking of that idea, you’re in an inconsistent system. So you’re reasonings about the largest set, based on that inconsistent suppositions, are wrong.
I really have nothing to add. I have being repeating the same. The information is here. I’ll let people judge by themselves.
No, I still have one doubt.
> “As both the powerset and reality are abstract concepts, like a linear mapping they exist if we may so much as conceive of them.”
This is clearly an axiom for you. A concept exists if we can conceive it. Then, why so much theory to prove god exists?
I mean. You have the concept of god, and an axiom saying concepts exists. Why so much wasted words?
(Of course, this proof of the existence of god means nothing. As I say before, this god may not share any properties with other definitions of god, and you can not mix definitions to prove properties. Anyway, we saw that axiom leads to inconsistencies, and the proof is indirectly based on that. But depending on the same axioms, my proof is a lot shorter than Langans and has the same validity [none]. Which is good).
You continue to amaze me, Mr. Fringe, in your lack of understanding for why an unfashionable powerset cannot be dismissed. The term “concept” is clearly being used very vague so I will drop it entirely. The fact remains that if reality is a set as you claim it has a powerset. All sets have powersets. Why? Because the powerset of a given set is simply the set of all subsets of that set, and all sets have subsets. Yes, even reality has subsets, and you cannot dismiss those subsets because they lead to a paradox. Paradoxes are not irresolvable as you seem to believe, and where they arise from proper mathematical reasoning (like this one does) they are beneficial as they show fundamental problems with given systems (e.g., naive set theory).
As for Mr. Langan’s proof of the existence of God, it turns out that this God has properties associated with omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. Whether or not that qualifies as a true God for you, that’s the case.
“It is not intuitively impossible for there to exist intangible subjective phenomena that determine the mind’s processes. Assertions are not absolute proof, which is why the nature of consciousness is of great metaphysical importance.
Absolute knowledge exists in the form of logical tautologies. That is the objective side to reality in which you seem to lack faith.”
Just because something is not impossible doesn’t mean we have any good reason to believe it. It’s not intuitively impossible for there to exist intangible Leprechauns, either. It’s not intuitively impossible for it to be true that we can’t explain 100% of the variance in the data of heating up a cup of water without invoking pixie intervention.
There IS a widespread agreement in the scientific community as to the nature of the conscious mind. To imply otherwise is akin to implying that there is still “controversy” over something like evolution. Modern neuroscience/neurobiology shows that everything is linked to the brain. We can knock out (temporarily, with electric shocks) various parts of the brain and see all sorts of corresponding functions wipe out. We more or less know how stimuli is processed, how feelings/senses are interpreted, how memory works, etc. Even if we don’t have all the nitty-gritty details, we know sufficiently enough to explain the basics. We have all we need to explain how sentience actually operates. Of course guys like Chalmers would object (they aren’t scientists!). They frequently misuse quantum mechanical jargon and misunderstand how quantum theory works. It’s too easy to invoke argument from ignorance when it comes to philosophy.
And in terms of logical tautologies, that is not a matter of knowledge. Logic itself does not constitute knowledge. Logic is a framework in which we discuss relationships of other concepts. Logic is based on axioms which we take as self-evident because our universe is wholly conducive to these axioms.
The CTMU holds little scientific value. It’s just philosophy.
I’m not the one saying the Universe is a set. You’re defining (sometimes) the Universe as a set. You’re forgetting your own definitions?
I’m not saying (nor I believe it) that paradoxes are irresolvable.
You said the there exists a largest set, and there exists sets larger than the largest set. I don’t agree with at least one of those. No contradiction for me. The paradox is yours: you’re the one who stubbornly defend contradicting axioms, despite know they’re inconsistent, and despite not being able to explain nothing, beyond blindly asserting them: reality is a set, is real, a set as a concept has the same existence as a tree, and all that.
I know paradoxes are solvable. And as almost everybody else, I know how to solve them: discarding some of the axioms. Nothing new here.
Why are you blaming me for your definitions and your contradictions? I’m responsible of none.
You needn’t be so quick to judge, CausticDuality. First of all, I was unaware that you were referring to the *scientific* community, in which there is indeed a bent towards physicalism and materialism. You should know that Mr. Langan agrees with your view that consciousness is not the result of unobservables and for the same reason, which is ultimately Ockham’s razor.
Moreover, I am sure Mr. Langan can identify with your criticism of traditional philosophy. Of all modern disciplines, philosophy is one of the worst off, and that is in fact why Mr. Langan chose to pursue it over other disciplines, such as physics or biology, that have many individuals actively improving them on a daily basis.
As for your claim that logical tautologies are not a matter of knowledge, I must draw an objection. Tautologies are axioms of 2-valued logic and the complementary truth values True and False correspond to systemic inclusion and exclusion, respectively, so violating tautologies corrupts the informational boundaries between the cognitive and perceptual predicates applied or recognized in reality as well as between each predicate and its negation. The fact of our unbroken perception thus proves that tautologies constitute absolute truth within reality.
As for the CTMU “just” being philosophy, you need only notice that major changes in physics are preceded by major changes in metaphysics (which is somewhat ironic because “metaphysics” is essentially Greek for “after physics”). For example, the theory of relativity was largely the result of a changed viewpoint towards space, time, and matter. A profound shift of paradigm such as the CTMU could provoke would likely change the sciences forever. Moreover, the CTMU has scientific value in its own right as it deals with the nature of artificial intelligence, resolves several largely mathematical paradoxes, and has much to say about cosmic expansion.
Paradoxes are rarely so — they’re usually just conflated interpretations of axioms and/or misunderstood applications of mathematical/logical principles.
I am not forgetting my definitions, Mr. Fringe. That is you. You unflinchingly accepted that reality is a set, and looking through your comments above proves it. On any account, I am sure that reality is a set, and you can quote me on that. Discarding axioms is not a good way to solve paradoxes. For example, consider Russell’s paradox. One of the only axioms of naive set theory was that any collection is a set. Consider R = {x : x is not an element of x}. Then R is an element of R R is not an element of R. The solution to this paradox is not to eliminate the axiom, “Any collection is a set.” Instead it is to *add* axioms, like ZF set theory does, or to add types of containment, such as the CTMU does.
I rest my case always on mathematics. Reality is a set. Reality has a powerset because all sets have powersets because all sets have subsets because all sets are sets. This powerset contains reality because reality is a subset (though not a proper one) of reality and powersets contain all the subsets of the sets of which they are powersets by their definition. However, this powerset is a real thing because all sets have powersets and reality is a set as mentioned earlier, so because reality = {x : x is real} it contains its powerset. The ONLY assumption here is that reality is a set, and even this can be justified because reality is a collection of distinct objects, considered as an object in its own right. I am not even going to go into the issue of “concepts” as that is entirely beside the point when discussing the CTMU. Oh, and reality exists as I’m sure even you’ve noticed so it is indeed real and it is a member of itself.
CausalDuality, you’re exactly right. All paradoxes are *seemingly* valid or their consequences are *seemingly* absurd, but this just points to problems in whatever system they are defined.
*CausticDuality
*this just points to problems in the systems in which they are defined.
I’m just correcting some minute errors I made.
Anonymous: Yeah but relativity came about because we had evidence that suggested we needed it to explain something. It wasn’t brought about just because of some shifting viewpoint about space and time in opposition to guys like Newton and Mach. The viewpoint evolved along with the new theory. The CTMU is not suggesting anything of practical application or value with respect to new problems/evidence/physical phenomena in the same way Einstein did with relativity.
As for your paragraph on logical tautologies, what I mean is that we can take a logical tautology such as “if A implies B then not B implues not A,” the law of contraposition — and say it doesn’t represent “knowledge” in itself. I define knowledge via the epistemological concept of “justified true belief” when it comes to the ways laws and matter interact in our universe. We have knowledge because we are sentient and capable of perceiving within our reality. But the logic itself is an “objective concept” but I wouldn’t define it as “knowledge.” I see logic as more of a “fundamental framework” for existence itself. If logical tautologies are unsatisfiable, they become contradictions and they would make no sense when it comes to defining reality. In other words, I consider logic/mathematics to be self-evident, necessary concepts for existence itself, and this I consider to be “objective.” I just don’t like to call it “knowledge” in the same way that we might call our understanding of the sun and moon “knowledge” (what’s true for me is true for you and true for everyone).
The CTMU is suggesting many new things though. For example, it pushes the theory of computation forward as protocomputation is shown to be behind typical consciousness. It also resolves Newcomb’s paradox and extends the scope of symmetrization of probability distributions. It opens the way for a new theory of computational grammar that leads to better grammatical parsing systems. It has much to say about the manner in which the universe expands (or rather “conspands” in CTMU terminology) and this will enter new models of physics incorporating the CTMU. Philosophical revolutions leak into mathematics and physics, which leak into the other sciences, which leak into the “softer” sciences such as psychology and sociology, and eventually this leaking causes engineers to come up with new technologies to which the public is exposed through popular culture. All large philosophical contributions eventually help create new technologies in this manner.
As for your paragraph on logical tautologies, I understand what you mean and I have no objections to raise to it.
So reading my comments, I accept that reality is a set. And I understand that is contains itself. And you say that based on mathematics.
Now, what’s that? A proof by negation of reality?
I’m leaving here. The situation is getting ridiculous. The information is here, for anyone wanting to read it.
The problem is you have a theory so trivially wrong you have to just negate reality and say we believe it’s true.
Your theory requires any concept one say to exists. Then the falsehood of your theory exists and is real. And you even don’t bother negating it, because you really need that any concept to be real and true for your theory to work. Well, for you to believe it works.
Then you write a thousand pages to prove an omnipotent god exists, having one axiom that is that, being able to talk about concept of an omnipotent god, then it exists.
It’s all ridiculous. As you can’t go that way (reasoning), you turn around and you’re again just asserting things: that I agree with what you want.
This is just getting too random. Good bye with your “mathematics”. Be happy.
I’ll try one last time to explain.
It is not Mr. Langan’s belief that thinking about a thing makes it real, and the discussion that led us that way is irrelevant to the CTMU. You’ve successfully ignored the 7:37 p.m. post addressing you, but I’ll just restate its contents for future observers to read. This is the entire, pure chain of reasoning that leads to the conclusion that reality contains its powerset while being contained by its powerset.
1) Reality is a set. Specifically, it is the set {x : x is real} = {x : x exists}. (This follows because it contains objects and is considered an object in its own right.)
2) Reality has a powerset. (This follows because all sets have subsets. You can’t say that reality doesn’t have subsets because the fact leads to a paradox!)
3) This powerset contains reality. (This follows because one of the subsets of reality is necessarily reality itself. This is true for all sets by the way. For any set S, S is a subset of S, but not a proper subset of S.)
4) The powerset of reality is real. (This is the step Mr. Fringe really has trouble with. He seems to believe that we should be able to find a *physical* copy of this powerset, which is of course not true. (E.g., one can’t find a derivative floating in outer space!) However, if reality is real its powerset is well-defined and so exists. If reality = {x : x is real}, P(reality) would resemble {subset1({x : x is real}), subset2({x : x is real}), …, {x : x is real}, …}. Reality, which Mr. Fringe agreed is a set, would literally be found within the curly brackets of P(reality)!)
5) Reality contains its powerset. (This follows from it being real, as described in 4).)
There you have it Mr. Fringe & Co. There are several reasons I didn’t mention the “axiom” that anything conceivable exists: a) it is entirely irrelevant to the CTMU and especially this section of Mr. Langan’s “Introduction to the CTMU”, and b) it is largely the result of my not being careful enough in wording and your taking advantage of that, which is alright because that’s your job as a debater.
Have a nice life, Mr. Fringe!
Anoynmous: The CTMU, as far as I can tell, isn’t suggesting anything new in terms of scientific application or insight. It’s just philosophical pandering mixed in with a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics, information theory, and laced with a heaping of extreme verbosity due to a lack of clarity. If you aren’t framing a new discovery through the scientific method, it’s not science, and it shouldn’t be passed off as such.
You also don’t need anything crazy to resolve Newcomb’s Paradox. As I suggested earlier, paradoxes typically aren’t really paradoxes. Newcomb’s Paradox is already a problem with a screwed-up definition to begin with. I can choose either the clear box with $1000 or take both the clear and opaque box, but if I take both, the opaque box is predicted to be empty. If I take just the opaque box, it’ll have $1,000,000. The paradox calls into question the nature of things like free will.
In practice, people like the Oracles don’t exist. We’re better off taking both boxes because whatever’s in the boxes are in the boxes, and we’re better off taking as much as we possibly can. The only way the Oracle could really predict my actions is if he had access to every variable involved in my brain and the environment it interacted with from the time of determination up until the box-selection process. The Oracle would be able to know exactly which boxes I would choose based on the way the processes of my brain would compute the situation, and from there he could load the boxes ahead of time accordingly. If he knew that by giving me the problem, I would take both boxes, he would know ahead of time that he should only load the clear box with $1000 and nothing more. In other words, the paradox is resolved by taking away the concept of free will and framing choice as a deterministic concept.
Newcomb’s Paradox is only a paradox if you frame it as “Well, the Oracle can’t change the contents of the boxes and yet I have free will. If I have free will, I should be able to make my own choice and have the outcomes scale to my choice, but how can the outcomes scale if the outcome is static from the beginning?” It’s only a paradox in that logical sense, but like I said, paradoxes are only paradoxes because they’re usually either misinterpretations or misframings. You do nothing by invoking the concept that “We have free will.” The paradox is trying to say “You have free will that can’t be pre-determined by outside sources, and yet here’s an Oracle that can do just that.”
I could say “This sentence is false” but that doesn’t really *mean* anything. Just because we can label something a certain way doesn’t mean it’s actually logically/physically sensible. It’s like trying to find a number higher than 6 and yet lower than 4. It’s nonsense, and things that are nonsense don’t have any place in our universe or its definition.
Philosophers are largely obsolete. Yeah, we can look at guys like Francis Bacon who had a lot to say about the nature of reality and science, but Galileo was *already* using *actual* science to make discoveries. In other words, philosophy doesn’t really “leak into science” — it just likes to think that it does. Science leaks into science. That’s the nature of the scientific method. Quantum physics, for instance, completely revolutized the way we look at the world, and it didn’t come about from philosophy. If you look at philosophy over the years you’ll see all sorts of theories that are, nowadays, largely discarded as demonstrably false. Only in hindsight can we pick out the ones that by sheer chance alone happened to have grains of truth to them. For instance, Democritus posed the rough idea of atoms a long time before we ever actually discovered one, but he was only right by sheer chance alone, as atomic-scale technology didn’t exist at the time. We don’t pay attention to the wide array of other philosophical theories that were proven to be wrong because they were false! The theories that stick around longer are the ones that aren’t easily falsifiable — such as theories invoking Creators and God.
The CMTU, in my opinion, is just a verbose backdoor to Creationism, which is an “ism” of ignorance.
I have never agreed that reality is a set. You can continue to say what you want. But that’s an invention of yours. I agreed to reason under your postulates, and one of then was the definition of reality as a set. So I played your game. I don’t agree that reality is a set. I don’t believe reality to be a set. I have never believed reality to be a set. I would not model reality as a set. Maybe I’m not expressing myself clearly enough. If you ask me, I would never say reality to be a set. I’m not of the opinion that reality is a set. I consider false for reality to be a set.
But if you define reality to be a set, and as I know how to reason, I can understand that, and infer accepting your definition.
But I do not believe reality to be a set. Repeat with me: I don’t believe reality to be a set. Reality is not a set according to John Fringe. John Fringe does not think that reality is a set.
> “if reality is real its powerset is well-defined and so exists”
The problem is, you never proved reality, defined as your set, is real.
The set { x : x is real } is not real because you called it reality. As you have never proved that the set {x:x is real} is real, you’ve never proved that the powerset is real.
By the way, I don’t believe reality to be a set.
The problem is you have no clue how about reasoning. You believe the set {x : x is real} is real just because you’re calling it reality.
When pressed, you simply admit that any concept is real. But then again, I can prove the falsehood of your theory.
Seriously, stop and think a minute. It’s not so difficult. I still have hope.
I almost forget one thing. My fault:
I don’t believe reality to be a set.
That’s all.
There seems to be a little confusion here. The poster “Anonymous” is not me, and has not been authorized to speak for me. He is proceeding on his own initiative, using his own understanding of the theory, in which he has not been coached or personally instructed by me. (Of course, he is free to do what he has chosen to do. But thus far, he has not handled this discussion quite as I would have handled it.)
This forum belongs to Mark Chu-Carroll, and because Mark is forthrightly using his real name attached to his real credentials, his name and reputation are on the line (which is exactly as it should be). Almost without exception, the rest of you are trying to argue without answerability, and unsurprisingly, your argumentation is shoddy. In fact, most of it is so bad that it would be a complete waste of time for me to address it at all. I’m simply too busy for that.
If you insist on having me address any particular point you have made in even a cursory fashion, you need to have Mark clean it up for you and present it as a formal objection along with his personal endorsement. (None of this is negotiable; this way, Mark will pay the price for upholding whatever nonsense I’m forced to spend my valuable time dismantling.)
Alternatively, if you actually claim any qualifications in this field, you can provide such information as will allow you and your home institution to be unequivocally identified and thoroughly checked out by all concerned. That way, you and your institution can pick up the tab instead of Mark. (If you have no reputation or credentials and affiliations in this particular field, then please don’t bother providing any information about yourself – if I put my own reputation at risk by arguing with you, then you must have one to put at risk as well, or no go. In situations like this one, such reciprocity is only fair.)
Thanks for your attention, and have a nice day.
I have to agree with John on that note. There are serious problems when we accept certain axioms and base definitions as true or self-evident, especially if those notions are silly or meaningless to begin with.
Let’s look at Langan’s own writing at http://www.ctmu.org/Articles/IntroCTMU.htm when he talks about sets.
Let’s give some hard definitions, here.
A powerset just means if we have a set S = {x, y, z} when we can define its powerset as a set of all subsets. In other words:
P(S) = {{},{x},{y}.{z},{x,y},{x,z},{y,z},{x,y,z}}
He then goes on to say “If reality is the largest set of all, then reality has a powerset that contains it.” Here he refers to the example of, say, {x,y,z} being a part of both P(S) and S, where S is defined as {x,y,z} to begin with.
But then he screws up: “Every set, even the largest one, has a powerset which contains it, and that which contains it must be larger,” etc. In other words, he is saying “S is a pretty big set. But the powerset P(S) contains S. Because P(S) is a bigger set than S, there is a contradiction. Therefore, there is a problem when we view reality as the largest set.”
This, to me, is complete nonsense. He’s saying “If we define S as the biggest possible set of everything that is real, it can’t be the biggest set because a powerset is larger and contains S.” In other words, it’s akin to saying “If God is all-powerful, can he make a stone so heavy even he can’t lift it?”
His solution: “Define an extension of set theory incorporating two senses of “containment” which work together in such a way that the largest set can be defined as “containing” its powerset in one sense while being contained by its powerset in the other”
In other words, something where S is the biggest set that contains P(S) and yet such that P(S) also contains S. The only way two sets can “contain” each other fully is if they’re equal, and the only way a set and powerset can be equal is if you’re talking about the null/empty set. Screwing around with this means you screw with logic and are therefore talking about something nonsensical with respect to our universe.
Chris: We don’t have to give out our real names/institutions in order for our arguments to be sound. We don’t have to put “our reputations on the line” because the onus is not on us to do so — you’re the one making the claims with your CTMU, and you wish to have it associated with your name. That is your own choice.
You can choose to discard objections if you want, but that doesn’t make your theory true because you simply refuse to acknowledge the criticisms by saying “The arguments are shoddy and it’s a waste of time to address it by people hiding behind anonymity,” especially when a lot of the criticisms have valid points.
You of all people should agree with the notion that “credentials shouldn’t matter.” If that were true, no scientist should bother wasting time with the CTMU.
Hello Mr. Langan,
Indeed I am not affiliated with you and I apologize for any misunderstandings of the CTMU I have caused. I am a Canadian high school student and I don’t have any real credentials as such. I would prefer to remain anonymous for personal reasons, and I have nothing to lose from this to my knowledge due to my lack of credentials. I am an autodidact with respect to your model, so please forgive any errors I have made.
Sincerely,
Anonymous
At any rate, I actually do have plenty of credentials (top-tier school, top-tier employment, lots of research, etc) — but I shouldn’t have to flaunt them here to get across the point that credentials don’t make you any more right or wrong with respect to the actual ideas you put forth.
Anonymous: “Indeed I am not affiliated with you and I apologize for any misunderstandings of the CTMU I have caused.”
I appreciate your frankness. Best wishes, and I sincerely advise you not to allow the kind of argumentation used against you here to dampen your apparent enthusiasm for the CTMU.
CausticDuality: “We don’t have to give out our real names/institutions in order for our arguments to be sound.”
Perhaps not. But as I say, my conditions are non-negotiable.
I used to respond to anonymous posters until I realized that because they have nothing of value to lose, they tend to become totally unrestrained in their style and methods of argumentation. They typically start with subtle provocations harnessed to vague absurdities; when that doesn’t work, they move on to snide remarks and threats of intellectual annihilation; when those have no effect, they escalate to full-blown insults and rhetorical fallacies including ad hominem argumentation, arguments from authority, strawman arguments, red herrings, and sheer propaganda. Finally, one realizes that one is being harangued by a gang of uninhibited imbeciles who will literally stop at nothing to push their “points”, ridiculous though they usually are. Under no circumstances will they offer any meaningful concession as they do so; mudslinging and recalcitrance are simply too easy for them.
I didn’t design the Internet, so I don’t bear any responsibility for the way it works. That it works as I have described is indisputable, at least where I have been concerned. If one thinks about it a little, one is forced to conclude that while the freedom of the Internet is definitely something to be admired and preserved at all costs, personal opinions are another matter entirely. Those must be legitimately defended on a level playing field, or they are worth nothing. This is one piece of cake that you don’t get to keep and eat at the same time.
In this kind of situation, there is no physical threat associated with surrendering your anonymity and revealing your credentials and affiliations. On the other hand, if you lack the courage of your intellectual convictions and refuse to uphold them under your real identity, at risk of your intellectual reputation and that of your primary sponsor, then they do not deserve a response from anyone who has put his own reputation on the line and can thus be held to reasonable standards of argumentation.
That’s just the way it is. I hope everyone understands.
We understand, don’t worry.
In any case, we’re not judging you, but your theory. I hope we all can differentiate the two.
About the shoppiness of the arguments against your theory, I agree. But the reason is the arguments presented here in favor of your theory are pretty illogic and shoddy, too. The way to improve the quality is to provide better arguments that require better counterarguments.
I don’t say you provide those arguments. You’re free not to do it, and if you find more elevated places where your theory is being judged, you better spend your time there. But then, don’t expect masterful arguments to explain why the properties of the elements of a set are not applicable to the set itself. That’s a silly supposition, so we give silly counterarguments (that work).
You might think that everything needs to be out in the open in order to contain the insanities that can sometimes accompany anonymity, and on some level I agree with that — but I simply do not share personal information online for privacy and protection purposes. Nothing to do with defending intellectual reputation. The fact that I can lay claim to top-tier education and employment opportunities should be sufficient. I can’t prove any of that, of course, but it shouldn’t matter: Obviously crazy responses and insulting remarks can be ignored. My point is that there have been many good criticisms against the CTMU so far and I feel like they aren’t being addressed fairly.
There are problems I have with the CTMU all-around, but let’s stick with that set question. Correct me if I am wrong: You are saying that if we describe reality as the biggest possible set, then a powerset of reality is a contradiction since a container of a “biggest-possible set” must be bigger than “the biggest possible.”
Mr. Langan, best wishes to you too. I certainly won’t let such debates dampen my enthusiasm.
John, you’re denying that {x : x is real} is real. This denial amounts to the denial that there is a collection of things that exist. This means you’re asserting that nothing exists. I think you’ll have a hard time proving this. As Wikipedia puts it, “A set is a collection of distinct objects, considered as an object in its own right.” By denying that reality is a set, you are denying that reality is a collection of distinct objects. This means that you are denying that anything exists, for if anything exists that thing is an object contained by reality. Again, I think you’ll have a hard time proving this.
CausticDuality, what specific criticisms can offer of the CTMU? I suggest you focus on explaining how the CTMU misunderstands quantum mechanics and information theory as you allege it does.
Actually, you’re wrong about what the term “science” entails when I use it (and judging from context when Mr. Langan uses it). In referring to the scientific method, you are making a more or less obvious appeal to empiricism, but empiricism is not of what all science is made; mathematics, for example, is entirely rational, and this is the way the CTMU proceeds for the most part.
On a related note, the CTMU is best termed “philosophy” because it deals largely with metamathematics. This is no reason to dismiss it, however: pure logic deals with exactly the same thing. As for your claim that quantum mechanics did not arise from philosophy, I beg to differ. Quantum mechanics’ major premise, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, sets absolute limits on the accuracy to which quanta can be measured, thus defining a relation between measurer and measured that cannot be expressed in a language focused only on what is measured, such as the language of classical physics. Though we may consider it a physical theory now, there was a time when quantum mechanics was indeed regarded as metaphysical.
As for Newcomb’s paradox, it’s not that simple. First of all, you need a logical model justifying why free will does not exist as you claim. Moreover, you shouldn’t ignore the maximization of subjective expected utility in your decision. Also, you need to prove that Newcomb’s Demon can’t exist.
Actually, the CTMU extension of set theory is perfectly logical. Topological containment is the sort by which sets are said to “contain each other”. Descriptive containment corresponds to inclusion by predication, which is a perfectly common mathematical operation in, for example, computational linguistics.
> ohn, you’re denying that {x : x is real} is real. This denial amounts to the denial that there is a collection of things that exist. This means you’re asserting that nothing exists.
So now I’m asserting that nothing exists. Oh, my god. I though the logic could not get any worse. You seemed reasonable.
And Mr. Langan was surprised that the arguments are dumb. It’s very difficult to argue when your opponent happily invents your dialog.
Anonymous: I feel like a LOT of terms are misused in the CTMU. There’s a lot of jargon in there that mean very specific things but they’re used in nonsensical ways. Either Langan is misusing the jargon or he’s not explaining himself clearly enough. But I personally feel like there are a lot of confused ideas in the CTMU that just don’t make sense, even to people who are well-versed in mathematics, physics, logic, etc.
Yeah, we can define a set as an object in its own right in the same way that I can call an “apple” a set of “apple atoms” with all sorts of various properties to them. We can even define the universe as a vast set of information. That is, after all, how we even know about the universe to begin with. It exists and has properties we are able to measure and interpret. But my point is that sets are defined axiomatically, where the axioms have to make sense. Mathematics has to put all sorts of exception cases and rules in place in order for them to work.
The reason why MarkCC brought up naive set theory earlier is because it says “any definable collection is a set,” so therefore I could say S = set of all sets that aren’t members of themselves. If S is a set that isn’t a member of itself, then S isn’t part of S. But if S isn’t part of S, then it should therefore be included in S. That’s where the paradox stems from. But like I said earlier, paradoxes only exist when we confuse the logic.
All Russell’s Paradox is doing is setting up a scenario that logically cannot make any sense. Just because we can define something with language doesn’t mean it has any mathematical sense. It’s not possible to have S = set of all sets that aren’t members of themselves in the same way that it’s not possible to have a number higher than 6 and lower than 4 no matter how much I write 4>x>6. Just because I can calculate the value of something by writing x/y doesn’t mean it’ll make sense if I am talking about a number of apples divided by 0.
The ultimate point here is that we can’t just slap certain mathematical principles onto things, extrapolate a paradox, and then use that to justify invoking things like God. The model has to make sense. It’s like when people try to apply the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to our earth/sun and conclude that the earth temperatures are higher than they should be because the blackbody temps are below 0. The whole thing goes out the window when you take into account that the earth isn’t a blackbody — we can model the earth as one, but it’s failing to take into account other influential factors like rotation, greenhouse effect, dimension, etc.
On a fundamental level, we use mathematics to describe our reality. That’s a very different distinction from saying reality IS the mathematics. In doing so, it’s too easy to run into “mathematical paradoxes” that lead you down a path of describing reality in a way that is nonsensical.
Anonymous:
“As for your claim that quantum mechanics did not arise from philosophy, I beg to differ. Quantum mechanics’ major premise, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, sets absolute limits on the accuracy to which quanta can be measured, thus defining a relation between measurer and measured that cannot be expressed in a language focused only on what is measured, such as the language of classical physics. Though we may consider it a physical theory now, there was a time when quantum mechanics was indeed regarded as metaphysical.”
This is just false. Quantum Mechanics came to light because of physics. The cathode ray, photoelectric effect, ultraviolet catastrophe, black body radiation, quanta, etc, all of which are scientific, physical concepts that aren’t settled in philosophy. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is also not a matter of philsophy or observer effect or the accuracy of the measuring instrument. It comes about because of the fundamental way momentum and position are defined. The more you know about one, the less you know about the other, and this is intrinsic due to the nature of waves.
Regarding Newcomb’s Paradox: It actually is that simple. The “logical model explaining why free will doesn’t exist” is just physics. We know that wavefunctions are essentially deterministic, and so we can say that even though we do make our own choices, they aren’t independent. Choices are made as a result of the physical determinism of the universe — our brains determine what thoughts and feelings we have, and brains can be broken down into complex neuron systems that abide by physical laws just like anything else. This is not only obvious, but evident through neuroscience: You manipulate the neural level, you can manipulate the outputs. We’re not independent systems that operate autonomously with respect to the universe.
I don’t need to appeal to concepts of expected utility to show why Newcomb’s Paradox isn’t really a paradox. I explained in sufficient and simple detail why in my earlier post.
(Quantum mechanics is science. It has always been contrasted to experiments. It can be.)
This way is not working, but I’ll try one more time. I’ll arm myself with patience. You continue mixing definitions and properties, of reality, of existence, of being real. Let me try other way.
You’re mixing two meanings of “to exists” just because the colloquial word is used with that two meanings. And you’re mixing the properties of the two.
Consider A as “the chair in front of you”.
If I ask you, does A exists?
If you go look in front of you and check if there is something physical, then you’re using one of the meanings. Suppose the answer is negative. (I hope you can conceive giving that answer). I’ll call that meaning exists_1.
Then you can consider “the chair in front of you” as a concept. That that concept exists? You’ll answer: yes, it exists. It can be evaluated to exists_1, we can talk about it. The concept exists. I’ll call this meaning exists_2.
(Technically, they are not properties of the same universe of discourse. But I bet you don’t understand these technicallities.)
You see they are different predicates applied to different entities: in the first case you can answer no. In the second one, you’ll never answer no. But you’re mixing them in your argumentation.
You say “reality” (which may not be reality. Remember, I don’t believe the universe to be a set) is the set {x : x is real}.
Imagine you’re referring to exists_1. “Reality” (the name you give to the set) is {x : exists_1(x)}. The set of things that exists according to the first predicate. But you have to understand that “reality” (just a name, remember, don’t me bring a nitpicker’s corner) exists_2, but not exists_1. So no problem here: “reality” (remember about the name) is not self-contained.
Imagine now that you’re referring to exists_2. “Reality” is {x : exists_2(x)}. The set of things according to the second. Then I believe you’ll accept you’re not speaking of the intuituve meaning of reality. That “reality” would not contain material physical things, for example. You’re not speaking of reality with that “reality”. That set is self-contained. But it just a concept, and we know there is inconsistent concepts. No problem with that, because that “reality” has no relation to reality.
As ever, what is confusing you is that you can not use all the meanings of an informal word formally. Some words have more than one meaning. You mix them all which is wrong reasoning.
Can understand what I’m trying to tell you? If not, please, don’t invent yourself what I’m saying.
“there are a lot of confused ideas in the CTMU that just don’t make sense, even to people who are well-versed in mathematics, physics, logic, etc.”
Particularly in those people.
I should add why the expected utility and dominance principles are silly regarding Newcomb’s Paradox:
If we have a clear and black box, with $1000 and potential $1,000,000, respectively, I can do two things:
Dominance principle: This is ensuring a highest possible minimum utility, such as in Prisoner’s Dilemma when I always choose to defect because I can’t possibly get stuck in jail for ten years unless I choose to cooperate in the face of defection from the accomplice. So, in this case, dominance principle tells me to pick both boxes because ensuring $1000 is better than taking a risk and getting nothing. ($1,001,000 or $1000) [we take both] than ($1,000,000 or $0) [we take black].
Expected Utility:
If we assume the oracle is the real deal:
Choosing both boxes = 1000
Choosing clear box = 1000
Choosing black box = 1,000,000
If the oracle is full of it and has no prediction ability:
Choosing both boxes = 1000 + .5*1,000,000 = 501,000
Choosing clear box = 1000
Choosing black box = .5*1,000,000 = 500,000
Expected Utility (fusing both scenarios together, assuming the probability of BS is 50%):
Choosing both boxes = .5*1000 + .5*501,000 = 251,000
Choosing clear box = .5*1000 + .5*1000 = 1000
Choosing black box = .5*1,000,000 + .5*500,000 = 750,000
Here, expected utility hypothesis tells us that we are better off choosing the black box, whereas dominance tells us to pick both. This isn’t really a paradox here because this comes down to utility either way. Dominance principle is applicable if you’ve got a high risk-aversion profile, and expected utility hypothesis is applicable if you’re more of a risk-neutral kind of guy.
For instance, in Prisoner’s Dilemma, let’s say that instead of the following:
Mutual cooperation = 1 month punishment, defecting in the face of cooperation = no punishment, cooperating in the face of defection = 1 year punishment, and mutual defecting = 3 months punishment
We have this instead:
Mutual cooperation = 1 month punishment, defecting in the face of cooperation = no punishment, cooperating in the face of defection = 4 months punishment, and mutual defecting = 3 months punishment
Dominance strategy still tells us that defecting is optimal since (no punishment, 3 months) is better than (1 month, 4 months), but we may not use it. The downside to cooperating and being met with defection isn’t that much worse than the dominant strategy of mutual defection, so I am more willing to risk cooperating and locking in a lower 1 month punishment, and my accomplice would know the same. We’re more likely to cooperate because the downsides aren’t so extreme and we both get to reap the rewards of cooperation.
So, in other words, dominance strategy and expected utility hypothesis are still utility theories. Newcomb’s Paradox just tries to pit the two against each other because $1,000,000 is extreme compared to $1000, and $1000 is extreme compared to $0. It doesn’t matter if expected utility tells me what I can expect if I absolutely do not want to risk a particular downside.
But again, none of this has anything to do with whether or not the premises of the paradox are valid, themselves, which is why I didn’t bring any of it up before. It’s not necessary to invoke in order to explain why the paradox isn’t a paradox.
I mean, let’s say the clear box had a penny and the black box had either $0 or $1000 in it. We obviously wouldn’t bother taking both boxes because we don’t really care about missing out on a penny and if the oracle’s right then we miss out on $1000, and we do this even if dominance strategy tells us that ($1000.01, $0.01) is better than ($1000, $0).
If you want more depth about my previous informal explanation, you’re basically using the predicate exists_2 as
exists_2(x) = true, for all x
It’s not spectacular that you find inconsistencies defining set with it. You’re basically defining the set
{x : exists_2(x) } = {x : x }
So you’re defining the set containing all elements. That inconsistencies are well known. The axioms using that kind of sets are inconsistent.
So when you mix that predicate with our exists_1(x) predicate, you arrive at contradictions. The contradictions say nothing about the predicate exists_1, because they are already present using only exists_2.
But then again, if you understood my previous post, only exists_1 says something about reality.
You have all the information to judge again the theory under new light.
To answer Mr. Fringe’s qualm, I have used the verb “to exist” consistently. To demonstrate this, let’s take a look at your example of a chair. Suppose there is no chair in front of me. Then “the chair in front of me” does not exist. However, “the concept of the chair in front of me” does. These are two different things. Insinuating that the concept of a chair is the same as a chair is like insinuating that {{}} = {}: it is simply not the case. I am using the predicate exists(x) as true for all x in which x is a valid mathematical formula or well-defined mathematical object (as well as certain other x of course). For example, the Cantor set exists under my definition. However, a unicorn doesn’t (assuming that one can’t find a unicorn in reality), though pictures of unicorns and descriptions of unicorns do.
CausticDuality, yes, certain strategies apply to certain players, but that is not a complete resolution. A rational player would arguably see ND’s long streak of correct guesses as evidence that the Demon is a master of human nature, but it is indeed possible that one would not think this way. Also, coordinate systems have traditionally been linked with mind-body dualism since the time of Descartes. In placing absolute limits on the accuracy with which we can perform measurements on such coordinate systems, the HUP is a philosophical development as much as it is a mathematical or physical one.
A description *is* a model, and our rationality, our very perception, rests on models. If mathematics serves as a model for reality, reality is being embedded in a larger space of theorization, and it is this space that, existing and having reality embedded in it, becomes reality. Mathematical paradoxes are expressions of mistaken mathematics, not valid mathematics. The set concept itself is not restricted by the axioms of (e.g.) ZF set theory. Instead the uses to which it can be put are restricted.
My point is that the actual paradox itself is framed strangely to begin with. If we’re saying that ND is the real deal, then I don’t really have choice/free will by definition, if I can be predicted. Those two concepts are at complete odds with each other. Assuming the predictor is always right, then BOTH dominance and maximal expected utility theory tell me to pick the black box because $1,000,000 is more than $1,000. It wouldn’t even be possible to reap $1,001,000 because we can’t choose both boxes and have the black box contain money.
And yet, at the same time, the problem tries to tell me that since the money’s already been put into the boxes, I have free will and therefore if ND has placed money in the black box, he can’t take it back. Therefore the dominance strategy tells me I have a chance of reaping $1,000,100, thus generating an apparent contradiction with what I stated in the previous paragraph.
I say “apparent” because at the core, all you’re saying is “ND is infallible, and yet there’s a chance that he’s not,” which is also nonsense. If he’s infallible, then it doesn’t matter if he puts money in the black box or not because he already knows what I am going to do. And if he’s not infallible, then this contradicts a premise of the problem.
Therefore, even looking into expected utility theory is a waste of time because it doesn’t make sense to calculate probabilities for something if we’re being told that certain outcomes can’t happen. It doesn’t make sense to factor in, say, the possibility of gaining $1,001,000 if we’re being told up front that choosing both boxes will always yield us $1000 under an infallible predictor.
In other words, we’re being told that we’re being bound by some form of causality (whether forward or reverse) that is deterministic due to an infallible predictor, and yet at the same time we have free will that is somehow independent of an infallible predictor. You can’t have it both ways.
So it doesn’t do much good to say “Well, you have to show that free will can’t exist or prove that ND can’t exist.” ND *can* exist if we assume he has access to a sufficient amount of information about your decision-making processes ahead of time such that he can use that information to decide how to load the box — but then you cannot have free will by definition.
Besides, the evidence to date suggests that we don’t really have free will. We have the illusion of free will insofar as we are unaware of all the variables that are involved in our decision-making processes, and so we typically model a lack of such data as randomness. The more I know about your decision-making algorithms, the more variance I can explain. There’s no evidence suggesting that our decision making processes are anything BUT the result of the physical processes of the brain, and we know that physical processes can be predicted given sufficient depth of accuracy of information.
So, really, the paradox is resolved by saying if ND has sufficient deterministic information, he will predict what you choose and nothing you do will be able to stop it. Decision strategies go out the window since you are basically faced with $1000 versus $1,000,000, any any rational utility maximizer will choose the black box. But not to worry — even if you’re not rational, ND will know this, too.
Oh, almost forgot:
“In placing absolute limits on the accuracy with which we can perform measurements on such coordinate systems, the HUP is a philosophical development as much as it is a mathematical or physical one.”
Just because you call it a philosophical development doesn’t make it one. There’s nothing philosophical about HUP — it’s a physical concept that you can define mathematically:
(deltaX)*(deltaP) >= h-bar/2 from (deltaA)(deltaB) >= (1/2)*|| (the commutator) where A and B are canonically conjugate variables.
Wave packets follow this perfectly — it’s the result of not only empirical verification, but a derivation from the Schrodinger equation. It’s not “philosophical.”
For some reason the post ate my equation, lol (probably thought it was HTML or something)
Supposed to say (deltaA)(deltaB) >= (1/2)*|@[A,B]%|
Where % @ refer to > and <
The problem is that you’re taking “the existence of the concept ‘set of real objects'” as “the existence of the set of real objects”, and you don’t want to think deeper about it. Anything I say will not make you change your opinion. So the arguing is silly.
I’ll rest my case on time. In science when argumentation does not work, one has to rest on observation or experimentation.
Thirty years from now, I’ll take a look at this theory, if it still exists. During this period, I invite you to spend as much time developing it as you can. If you can spend all your time developing its important applications, the rest of us will be happy 🙂
> “I am using the predicate exists(x) as true for all x in which x is a valid mathematical formula or well-defined mathematical object”
The funny and ironic issue is he is actually signaling what’s wrong with his arguments.
The problem here is that the set {x : exists(x)} is not a well-defined mathematical object. You can not even define its universe of discourse (at least, not recursively). And a lot of people here has point this sloppy use of language. For example, CausticDuality, and of course, MarkCC.
Just because you say something is well defined it is not. I’d advise you to go learn something about sets.
By the way, the fact that {x : exists(x)} is not a well-defined is a very well known fact. It’s not something new.
You just use the expression “well-defined mathematical object” too happily, too informally. As everything you use.
I desisted because, for any explanation, you came with an answer with ten sloppy language uses and ten made up facts. Too much. If I point your problems, you return with a hundred. Exponential bad logic. Sincerously, it’s impossible. Sloppy language, made up facts and a layer of apparent logic is indiscutible.
So I take the Langan approach: your arguments are silly, easily refutable, I could refute them with my eyes closed, but I’m not going to. If it’s right for him, it’s right for me.
The only judge will be people and time.
Anyways, my general point is that if Chris wishes to be understood better, he absolutely needs to be clearer in his writing and he needs to use jargon correctly.
While some aspects of the CTMU make sense, a majority of it does come across as word salad, to mirror MarkCC’s comment. It’s like tossing a bunch of disjoint ideas together in a blender and hoping that something will make sense out of it to someone. And if it doesn’t make sense to you, or if it comes across as nonsense, “you’re just not competent enough to understand it.”
Chris, if you’re still reading, this is what it feels like to read the CTMU:
“When we consider the Hamiltonian invariant operator of X(Qo, c, S) mapped onto a continuous manifold of invertible metacognition functions we can show that the mind-body duality inherent in the utility definitions are rendered invalidated as a result of a contradiction in the self-inclusive computation of binary syntax. Given behavior function F with Hermitian operators/attributes, let its iterative states be analogous to the path-vector of conspansive recursion, but only in accordance with the regressive nature of one-to-one transmutation with respect to the Lagrangian multipliers for each element of the universal set. Cellular automata in the cognition states therefore become time-dilated but with a skew-normal distribution of relativistic identities.”
I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense. The way you use certain mathematical arguments/scientific jargon is not going to sit well with people who have spent years in their fields and are well-acquainted with what the jargon means versus what it doesn’t mean, and when certain models apply versus when they’re ill-fitted.
Personally, I don’t think we get anywhere by trying to stuff the universe into a “set.” Even if you have a set that defines all the real-valued operators/measurables in the universe, it doesn’t mean it’s self-inclusive.
> “When we consider the Hamiltonian invariant operator of X(Qo, c, S) mapped […]”
😮 You really need some kind of talent to write that. It feels true so authentic (crankery)!
I agree that that paragraph is quite cranky.
I wish to have somewhat more time off during my summer break, so I am going to stop replying to the debate soon, probably after this comment.
CausticDuality, if there is one thing you should get from the beginning of that essay, it is that Mr. Langan doesn’t believe describing the universe as a set does it justice either. As for its allegedly not being self-inclusive, I beg to differ. The sentence, “The real universe contains all and only that which is real,” is indeed tautological as “real universe” is predicated on “real” and “real” is defined on inclusion in “the real universe”. (I hope this answers Mr. Fringe’s earlier objection!) Being tautological, it reflects a truth that led Mr. Langan to note that the real universe topologically contains that which descriptively contains the real universe.
To the extent that coordinate systems are mathematical representations of mind-body dualism, it has always been entwined with philosophy regardless of its being traditionally mathematically described. As for Newcomb’s paradox, the formulation you offer here is pretty much an outline of a proper resolution to the paradox. One just has to prove from here that ND can determine our actions and that this is likely.
Well, it’s been fun. Have nice lives.
Hi Chris,
I am one of your supporters. I do think you should become more familiar with Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem as it is very relevant to your area of research. perhaps you are already familiar with it but I don’t see any mention of it in your writings and commentary.
Well, we all know what tautologies say — nothing new.
As for mind-body dualism, it’s already a pretty flimsy concept to begin with when we already understand that the mind IS the brain, and the brain is physically bound just like everything else.
> The sentence, “The real universe contains all and only that which is real,” is indeed tautological as “real universe” is predicated on “real” and “real” is defined on inclusion in “the real universe”. (I hope this answers Mr. Fringe’s earlier objection!)
Yes, it answers my objection as much as “the real blue chair in front of you if blue and real”, which predicates that chair to be real and blue, proves it exists. I’ve just proved that there is a blue chair in front of you, because I call it real and blue!
Just because you defined something with the name “the real universe” does not make it real. You have a string belief in your words, but sorry: the fact that you say something does not make it so. Sorry again.
Didn’t we already discussed this? Deja vu? Proof by insistence? Exponential bad logic with circular argumentation? Noooooooo……!
You can define “the blue chair” as “what there is in front of you”.
Or you can define “blue” as the perception you have when certain radiation of certain frequency hits your eye.
What you can not do is to define “blue chair” to be what you’ve got in front of you, and “blue” as the perception above, and them expecting the thing in front of you to be blue according to the second meaning just because you “defined” it in the previous sentence.
You can define what a “blue chair” is, but not if you have a previous definition of “blue”. If you have one, then your definition of “blue chair” should be compatible.
That’s what the situation. Your “real universe” is not real in other sense just because you’ve put a word “real” before it. If you’ve got a previous definition of “real”, you have to prove your concept of “universe” to be real before calling it “real universe”. If you do not, you can call it “real universe”, but it’s not real in the other meaning.
The discussion followed an tortuous path, and we arrived at this: your definition of real for concept is “well defined mathematical object”.
But then you can not call the set {x : real(x)} real, because it is not a well defined mathematical object. What’s its universe of discourse? You can not define it.
Well, you can, because with relaxed language you can say “it’s the set of mathematical concepts, well and wrong defined”.
But of course that’s not a formal definition. You need to have a well-defined universe of discourse to well-define a set with a predicate. This is probably not something you don’t know, (you don’t seem to know very much about reasoning or logic), but I’m sure you’ll be able to find information about it. To learn is always good, no shame in that.
So we’re again in the same situation: you don’t have any meaning for “real(x)”. You are just mixing a lot of informal incompatible meanings, in the hope nobody notices.
(The shame is in repeating the same refuted arguments).
I read this stuff slightly after Langan’s last reply, and really don’t know which side to take. I spent a couple of years developing a similar theory, and I’m not sure whether Langan knows everything that I know. I’d like to contact Langan, but don’t know how.
Wikipedia quotes Chris Langan as saying: “Biblical accounts of the genesis of our world and species are true but metaphorical.” I guess the same could be said of CTMU, at least in a metaphorical sense. If I’m able to contact Langan, I’ll give him our article containing a formalization of the idea behind Diamond Sutra and Carnap’s Überwindung. It was subjected to peer review but rejected as obvious, which it certainly wasn’t for me. In any case, Langan doesn’t address the issue in The CTMU: A new kind of reality theory. The issue is often ignored in metaphysical texts, but in this kind of a work it should not be.
In any case, telic recursion is the kind of a concept some people would need. If the concept were usable, epistemologists trying to solve the problem of induction would use it to create a feasible concept of relevance. For more information, see Jüri Eintalu, The Problem of Induction: the Presuppositions Revisited (2001). It is not in any way silly that Langan attempts to create such a concept. To me, it is much sillier that people, who are aware of the things we pointed out in our rejected paper, even ask for such a concept.
The issue I previously mentioned is about ontology being bound to language. According to CTMU, reality is SCSPL, that is, Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language.
In ontology, it is quite valid to make theories that emphasize: “All reality is X”. Here X is, for example, “matter”. But it is much less valid to make theories that emphasize: “All reality is X, and all other ontology is wrong.” Except if you are not an ontologist, and instead, for example, a physicist. In that case nobody cares what you say about ontology, unless it is weird. You might even get an award for writing a book containing inferior ontological insight, if the non-ontological content were good. This was the case with Kari Enqvist, who was awarded the Tieto-Finlandia for his book Olemisen porteilla, which emphasized: “All reality is matter, and all other ontology is wrong”. Simply put, the book had a part of physics that was good, and a part of ontology that was bad, and nobody cared about the ontological part. Maybe ontology ranks low. In any case, this is highly confusing, as it gives the impression that an invalid way of making ontology is valid.
Our rejected article was long, full of formulae, and in Finnish, so I’ll just try to summarize. We pointed out that it is commonplace in philosophy to talk of “reality”, “the truth” or “all that exists” as if that concept would be universal in the sense that if you take materialism as axiomatic, and in this system talk of “all that exists”, and then you switch to idealism, and keep talking of “all that exists”, you are talking of the same thing. Many people write things that seem to imply this is ok, but it’s not. The theory shapes the concepts, and treating concepts as if their exact meaning would be the same in any theory is similar to, or maybe even equivalent with, having a contradiction in the metatheory that spans both theories.
Chris Langan is trying to overcome this limitation, that is, the state of affairs that ontology is bound to language. I tried to do the same thing, because I did not for a moment consider that it could be impossible. I changed my mind only when a friend advised me to read the Diamond Sutra. After that the very existence of ontology seemed frivolous to me, and I still don’t understand why anyone would consider it interesting, but some do. I see Langan failing the same way as I did, except that he’s not aware of doing that. Of course it would be great if I’m wrong, but Langan needs to address this concern if he’d like to win my support.
But it’s quite simple that reality is not SCSPL for someone who does not think that way. That actually sums up everything I wanted to say about CTMU in particular. If you want to go beyond language, stop writing. Scrap philosophy. Live your life. In any case, that’s what I began to do.
I’d still like to emphasize that I don’t consider CTMU any more ridiculous than the rest of ontology, and in fact it could be a bit less ridiculous than ontology on average.
He claims to be closer to absolute truth than any man before him.
I think that the attacks on Chris Langan are off the mark. I admit that I haven’t studied CTMU in much detail but the gist of his paper seems to me to be similar to the ideas behind Godel’s Incompleteness theorems (self describing language). I don’t think Mr. Langan references Godel and I suspect he has rediscovered Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, albeit in a less rigorous form. The genius of Mr. Langan is to realize that these ideas are not mere mathematical formalism but rather describe reality initimately. In other words, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem is not just some interesting result concerning Set Theory but rather are the foundation of reality itself because reality is just a mathematical set . He advances the notion that physicality and abstract mathematics are fundamentally equivalent. Indeed, physicality is an emergent phenomenon from abstract set theory rather then abstract Set Theory simply describing reality.
I don’t think Langan could be uncivilized enough to not know of Gödel’s work, because it is of such great importance. The Metaphysics of Quality by Robert Pirsig is a similar, and in my opinion, currently somewhat more usable version of CTMU. The MOQ, too, features a mechanism that could be considered an informal generalization of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and it is of essential importance.
Unlike the CTMU, the MOQ is occasionally taken seriously in the academy. But the latter has been around for decades, and the first book describing it was an artistic masterpiece and a best seller. The same can’t be said of CTMU, but the amount of theoretical detail is indeed intriguing, and could facilitate the development of a theory that outperforms the MOQ in some ways.
I’m a bit suspicious of your last sentence, though. Seems too dualistic to fit what is my first impression of the spirit of the CTMU.
Due to Godelian Incompleteness a formal system that can describe the integers is able to generate truths that are not provable within that system. This is what I mean when I say that physicality is an emergent phenomenon from a more abstract substrate of reality. I think that the physical universe owes its existence to Godel’s Incompleteness theorems and I suspect that’s what the CTMU is really all about.
OK, I get it. And if I don’t, surely someone will point that out and call me a poopyhead(PH).
Legal disclaimer: I’m not the smartest person in the room or the most credentialed.
My paraphrase of others’ descriptions of Lagan’s argument (I admit, I found his verbiage pretty impenetrable (see disclaimer)):
1) Reality is a set, the set containing everything that is real.
2) Reality as a set has a powerset (the set of all subsets of reality and reality itself.)
3) Reality’s powerset is a real thing and therefore contained by reality.
Contradiction ensues as a) reality is bigger than (contains) its (real) powerset and b) the powerset is bigger because it contains reality. Recursion makes a bigger powerset (including reality and its real powerset) then bigger (reality, its powerset and the powerset of both) ad-forevermore. Lagan offers some resolution to this contradiction involving many big words at which point my eyes glazed. I think he proved that black is white and should look out at the next zebra crossing he encounters.
This recursion requires that each powerset be real (to be contained by reality.) But in what sense can a powerset be considered to be real?
If it is in the sense of a Platonic Ideal, I don’t think we’ve found them anywhere and CTMU becomes another footnote to Aristotle.
If it is real in the sense of being encoded in the stuff of the Universe, matter and its configurations; e.g. text on a page, configurations of ions in my son’s brain or written in thirty-foot-high letters of fire on top of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, then eventually you run out of Universe to encode it and the largest possible powerset is NOT larger than reality. The largest possible powerset is simply the largest powerset which can be encoded in the stuff of a finite Universe. Cantor’s diagonal fails and the recursion stops.
There is no paradox in a finite Universe and the rest of Lagan’s extrapolations are not required. However, two plus two DOES equal five and I AM the Queen of England.
The universal set (the set which contains all objects including itself) does not lead to contradiction in New Foundations set theory. I’m not an expert in neither the CTMU nor NF, but both mention stratification, which is apparently related to NF having a universal set.
Long live the Queen! 🙂
Thank you John Fringe. Please consider yourself knighted.
I’m not a philosopher, and much of the previous comments go way past me, but I get the impression that we’re confusing two different concepts of real here. My apologies if this has been discussed before, this thread is getting rather weighty.
#1. The apple on my desk is real, it exists, I can point at it, I can grab it, and once I eat it it will cease to exist.
#2. The set of apples (or any other mathematical construct) is real, it exists, however it does not exist in the same sense as the apple described above. It is an abstract notion that exists inside our heads, which we use to reason about the universe around us. When we say it exists, we mean it is well defined, it does not lead to logical contradictions. In that same sense, for example, the largest prime number does not exist. I’m using reality and existence interchangeably here.
When we talk about the universe as the set of all real objects, I think we’re using the first concept of real. When we talk about subsets of this set, or its powerset, these objects are real by the second definition.
In any discussion of reality as a set, you’ll have to define what you mean by real, and what you mean by set (as in, what set theory do you use if its not the standard one.) I’ve seen some discussion here on the set theories, but none on the definition of real thats used.
“When we talk about the universe as the set of all real objects, I think we’re using the first concept of real. When we talk about subsets of this set, or its powerset, these objects are real by the second definition.”
Why?
“Why?”
I can point to my apple (well, not anymore actually, since I ate it…), I cannot point to the set of apples, or the number three, or any other abstract concept.
Its the basic difference between something which is observable and an abstract concept which only exists in our minds.
Now I suspect you’re going to make the point that anything we observe only exists as an abstraction within our visual cortex or something like that. I wouldn’t know how to respond to that except to say that it will still be just as important to define what you mean by “real”.
That’s just the point. According to Langan, and i agree with him, physicality is not more real than abstraction. The opposite is true. Physicality emerges from an abstract substrate of reality. Physical objects seem to us to be the only “real” things simply becasue we are ourselves physical beings and therefore place the infrastucture of our existence at the pinnacle of what is “real”. We are biased.
@Robert
I almost completely agree with you, only disagreing in one little detail. You said
“When we say it exists, we mean it is well defined, it does not lead to logical contradictions.”
No, Langan does not requires a concept to be well defined and contradiction free to call it “real” in this second meaning. He only requires you can speak vaguely enunciate it.
For example, he says the set containing all the sets is real, when we all know it’s not well-defined and it leads to contradictions.
His second meaning for “real” is more relaxed than you’re supposing.
The set containing all sets including itself is not well-defined in ZFC set theory, but is well defined in NF set theroy. See Wikipedia. I don’t think CTMU is based on ZFC.
Great, because Langan uses the fact that it leads to a contradiction. So we have two options here:
– He speaks under the assumption of a set theory where the set of all sets leads to a contradiction. Then he uses “real” as I described, and the theory is meaningless.
– He speaks under the assumption of a set theory where the set of all sets does not lead to a contradiction, as you propose. Congratulations, you’ve proved the wrongness of his theory again, because he uses that fact in his proofs.
I consider that funny.
By that reasoning, the largest prime number also exists or is real, since we can enunciate the concept.
Exactly, I agree with you again. The largest prime exists, the set of all sets exists, and everything exists under his axioms or initial assumptions.
But that’s nothing surprising: if you start with an inconsistent set of axioms, you can infer anything you want. That’s a well known fact.
Wrong. There is a proof that the largest prime number does not exist.
You probably missed the “by that reasoning” part.
The spirit of the CTMU could be that the largest prime number is the largest one that is actually being used. While it is possible to find even larger prime numbers, they have not yet been found. Prime numbers being important in cryptography, it is actually reasonable to talk of the largest prime number, that is, the largest that has yet been found. Also, even in a mathematical point of view, the “largest prime number” does exist as an object whose extension is empty.
Universal set with a contradiction could be something one comes up with, if he tries to somehow ignore or bypass the fact that ontology is bound to language. I’m not sure whether Langan is trying to do something like this, but the theory supposedly being an informal generalization of the incompleteness theorems would support this idea. The theory may attempt to conceptually contain things formal logic cannot contain.
In any case, if Langan himself acknowledges that the universal set leads to contradiction, pointing that fact out again and again amounts to nothing more that mutual back-patting among those who disagree with him. If you want to actually challenge Langan, you have to do something else. You have to figure out what his goal is, and make the argument that the goal cannot be reached.
So, if I want to challenge Langan, I should make an argument showing that his goal can not be reached? Are you serious?
Langan says he has proved the existence of god mathematically.
> “Can a denial of God be refuted by rational or empirical means? The short answer is yes; the refutation follows the reasoning outlined above.”
If I say his proof is nonsense, you say what I should do is to make an argument against the possibility of proving the existence of god. Why? I could even not think so! I mean, I could actually believe you can prove god’s existence and still say Langan’s proof is nonsense. I’m not saying I believe you can prove that, nor am I saying you can not. I’m simply saying you’re asking us to talk about something else. Why should we? What we’re saying is clear: Langan’s theory is nonsense. Point. His goals I don’t know.
It’s even worse. What if his goal is to get famous and make a living without work too much by convincing people he’s the next Einstein and creating a lucrative society? Be carefull, I’m not saying he’s actually doing this, but sorry, it’s a possibility. If his goal were this, should I make the argumentation that his goal cannot be reached? Despite me believing it’s perfectly possible to reach it?
Are you serious? Should we argue another independent subject?
Chris Langan has created a “theory” that has about as much usefulness as the ramblings on a Dr Bronner’s soap bottle…
I heard about CTMU through the Atheist Experience podcast so I was curious about what the argument is. As a layperson, 99% of the discussion here went over my head. I tried to follow it as best I could.
Is CTMU basically arguing the following?
We exist in the universe and the universe is us but not wholly us. The universe includes everything that is real. Concepts are real. Because we conceive of the concept of a god, god is part of the universe and real?
I am sure I have that totally wrong.
What do you guys think about what he says about souls and reincarnation? From the Q&A on his website:
http://megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&A/Archive.html
Q: Does the CTMU allow for the existence of souls and reincarnation?
A: From the CTMU, there emerge multiple levels of consciousness. Human temporal consciousness is the level with which we’re familiar; global (parallel) consciousness is that of the universe as a whole. The soul is the connection between the two…the embedment of the former in the latter.
In the CTMU, reality is viewed as a profoundly self-contained, self-referential kind of “language”, and languages have syntaxes. Because self-reference is an abstract generalization of consciousness – consciousness is the attribute by virtue of which we possess self-awareness – conscious agents are “sublanguages” possessing their own cognitive syntaxes. Now, global consciousness is based on a complete cognitive syntax in which our own incomplete syntax can be embedded, and this makes human consciousness transparent to it; in contrast, our ability to access the global level is restricted due to our syntactic limitations.
Thus, while we are transparent to the global syntax of the global conscious agency “God”, we cannot see everything that God can see. Whereas God perceives one total act of creation in a parallel distributed fashion, with everything in perfect superposition, we are localized in spacetime and perceive reality only in a succession of locally creative moments. This parallelism has powerful implications. When a human being dies, his entire history remains embedded in the timeless level of consciousness…the Deic level. In that sense, he or she is preserved by virtue of his or her “soul”. And since the universe is a self-refining entity, that which is teleologically valid in the informational construct called “you” may be locally re-injected or redistributed in spacetime. In principle, this could be a recombinative process, with the essences of many people combining in a set of local injections or “reincarnations” (this could lead to strange effects…e.g., a single person remembering simultaneous “past lifetimes”).
In addition, an individual human sublanguage might be vectored into an alternate domain dynamically connected to its existence in spacetime. In this scenario, the entity would emerge into an alternate reality based on the interaction between her local level of consciousness and the global level embedding it…i.e., based on the state of her “soul” as just defined. This may be the origin of beliefs regarding heaven, hell, purgatory, limbo and other spiritual realms. – Chris Langan
—————————————–
He also seems to believe that we can lose our “souls” for doing evil.
Q: Given my own self-awareness and inability to separate from reality, *I* have no doubt that this reality *does* exist (the proof is in the pudding). So while I do not need “proof” that there is a reality, that I am part of that reality, and that my awareness is reality’s awareness of itself – I do not know WHY all of this stuff exists (myself included).
If there *is* a reason that reality MUST exist, then that would also be the reason that *I* exist. Which is probably what I am really wondering. Is the answer that giving myself a reason to exist is the reason for my existence? – Bill
A: The first part of your “why” question is answered at the end of the above response to Celia. Since the meaning of life is a topic that has often been claimed by religion, we’ll attempt to answer the second part with a bit of CTMU-style “logical theology”.
Within each SCSPL system, subsystems sharing critical aspects of global structure will also manifest the self-configuration imperative of their inclusive SCSPL; that is, they exist for the purpose of self-actualization or self-configuration, and in self-configuring, contribute to the Self-configuration of the SCSPL as a whole. Human beings are such subsystems. The “purpose” of their lives, and the “meaning” of their existences, is therefore to self-actualize in a way consistent with global Self-actualization or teleology…i.e., in a way that maximizes global utility, including the utility of their fellow subsystems. Their existential justification is to help the universe, AKA God, express its nature in a positive and Self-beneficial way.
If they do so, then their “souls”, or relationships to the overall System (“God”), attain a state of grace and partake of Systemic timelessness (“life eternal”). If, on the other hand, they do not – if they give themselves over to habitual selfishness at the expense of others and the future of their species – then they are teleologically devalued and must repair their connections with the System in order to remain a viable part of it. And if they do even worse, intentionally scarring the teleological ledger with a massive net loss of global utility, then unless they pursue redemption with such sincerety that their intense desire for forgiveness literally purges their souls, they face spiritual interdiction for the sake of teleological integrity.
Such is the economy of human existence. Much of what we have been taught by organized religions is based on the illogical literalization of metaphorical aspects of their respective doctrines. But this much of it is true: we can attain a state of grace; we can draw near to God and partake of His eternal nature; we can fall from God’s grace; we can lose our souls for doing evil. In all cases, we are unequivocally answerable to the System that grants and sustains our existence, and doing right by that System and its contents, including other subsystems like ourselves, is why we exist. Sometimes, “doing right” simply means making the best of a bad situation without needlessly propagating one’s own misfortune to others; the necessary sufferance and nonpropagation of personal misfortune is also a source of grace. Further deontological insight requires an analysis of teleology and the extraction of its ethical implications.
Now for a couple of qualifiers. Because we are free, the teleologically consistent meaning of our lives is to some extent ours to choose, and is thus partially invested in the search for meaning itself. So the answer to the last part of your question is “yes, determining the details of your specific teleologically-consistent reason to exist is part of the reason for your existence”. Secondly, because God is the cosmos and the human mind is a microcosm, we are to some extent our own judges. But this doesn’t mean that we can summarily pardon ourselves for all of our sins; it simply means that we help to determine the system according to whose intrinsic criteria our value is ultimately determined. It is important for each of us to accept both of these ethical responsibilities. – Chris Langan
That’s the whole point.
As we’re seing, even the most elemental deductions of his theory have lots of problems. They’re simply illogical. Yet he expects to convince people he made incredibly complex deductions and proved souls exists mathematically. This time without errors.
That’s too much.
I find it curious how a lot of people is carried away by complicated words and hard-to-follow arguments, and maybe the promise of a superior intelligence. That’s the first trick in the little crank’s manual.
Anyone who is actually educated enough to understand the jargon and are well-versed in mathematics, physics, and philosophy typically see right through the crackpottery.
I wonder how well Langan *actually* understands, say, evolution or the cosmological timeline/the Big Bang. Does he understand concepts like abiogenesis? Quantum physics? Something tells me “I severely doubt it.”
I’m going to be severely disappointed if he turns out to be a crank.
He is not a crank. His theory is not useful to the point where one can make physical or mathematical predictions from it but the ideas it is very profound.
“His theory is not useful to the point where one can make physical or mathematical predictions from it but the ideas it is very profound.”
Profundity is subjective…
Supposedly, if I am to believe Chris’s press releases, he is smarter than Einstein and Newton.
Yet Einstein and Newton’s contributions to the world were understandable and recognizable as significant advancements by their peers. Chris’s “theory” is neither of those things…
Einstein came up with his theories in a patent office, while Newton holed himself up in his castle for a few years and *POOF* calculus. (Newton also tried his entire life to turn lead into gold… which just goes to show that being REALLY smart is not a panacea for being REALLY stupid.)
Seriously, if I had a nickle for every time I came up with a “profound” idea after a few bong rips, sitting on my porch then I would have about $77.45… you couldn’t make any physical or mathematical predictions from those either.
Seriously, Chris’s vast hubris is his Achilles Heel – he should go to school and SUBMIT to being TAUGHT.
Suppose Newton realized that what makes an apple fall to the ground is the same thing that keeps the moon in orbit but then did not take that idea any further. No Calculus, no mathematical formalism to make predictions etc.. Would you not then conclude that he had come up with a profound idea but could not make any testable predictions?
That’s what I mean by profundity without testability.
It surprises me how people concede that much importance to saying things with conviction but without evidence, and so little importance to the hard work of proving and developing things.
To propose hypotheses without evidence is not profound.
The fact is this: If Newton had made what you say, his work would be of no importance. You would not have heard of Newton, so you would not be able to propose this example.
In fact, many people invented (and invent even today) their own “theories” about gravitation.
This is called imagination, and it’s not profound. They are not correct, not wrong. They’re just imagination.
And to defend such an hypothesis without supporting evidence is cranky behavior.
If you have such a theory, the first step to defend it is to look for evidence. To convince you first, or to prove it wrong. When you’re convinced by evidence, you can take step two: to convince people.
The problem is this requires work. Hard work. Not many people are willing to. Not many people value it (you’ve got the proof here).
So I repeat: to propose hypotheses without evidence is not profound. It happens every day, millions of times.
(Well, in this situation at least Newton would not have said anything contradictory in itself.)
Just one question: do you consider Aristle’s idea of heavier bodies falling faster a profound idea?
I mean, we now know it’s false, but when Aristle proposed it he offered no supporting evidence, just as you say.
Is it a profound idea?
Arrgh, I hate keyboards. I meant “Aristotle”.
Hi John
I do not consider Aristotle’s ideas to be profound because he simply voiced what was the common person’s belief at the time. There was nothing counter intuitive or unusual about his ideas. To believe that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects is the default intuition of most of humanity. Aristotle did not produce a leap of intuition. On the other hand, Newton’s intuitive leap was very counter intuitive.
You said that to be considered a profound thinker in science one must not only have a great idea but must also work out the technical fruit that arises from that idea. What about Copernicus? He had a great counter intuitive leap but did not produce anything testable. Yet, he is honoured to this day as one of the founders of the scientific enlightment.
What about String Theory that makes no testable predictions?
Copernicus work was based on observations. The Heliocentric model worked. He actually checked his theory. You chose a bad example.
I don’t believe string theory ideas to be profound. No, they’re interesting. So interesting a lot of people is spending time developing it.
But these people know very well the state of the theory. They know it’s only an speculation. In fact, most interest seems to be mathematical, rather than a purely physical.
Nobody will be that much surprised if no connection with reality is found. And nobody will remember the theory in a few decades.
You too can spend time developing Langan’s “theory”, if you find it promising or interesting. You can look to develop some profound results. But to do so you must know what its current status is.
John, at the time that Copernicus lived the Heliocentric model of the universe produced no better fit to observation than did Ptolemy’s Epicycles theory. To prefer the Heliocentric model over the Epicycles model was due to philosophical considerations (Occam’s Razor) rather than any empirical or mathematical considerations. Copernicus had a profound intuitive leap that he could not confirm by observations or mathematical formalism. My example stands.
Being of equal fit, Copernicus model was accepted because it was practical, not for philosophical reasons.
I don’t see how your example stands. You said:
“What about Copernicus? He had a great counter intuitive leap but did not produce anything testable. Yet, he is honoured to this day as one of the founders of the scientific enlightment.”
You say he produced nothing testable, yet you admit he proposed an hypothesis and it produced results that fit the observational data. Not only his theory was testable, it was tested and it fit the data.
Am I missing something?
I mean, it was your example of a non-testable idea you called profound.
But it was testable. Yes, the previous model was also testable and it also fit the data. But that does not mean Copernicus’s model wasn’t testable. It was.
Copernicus profound idea was: we are not the center of the Universe, we’re not so special. But it worked!
If it hadn’t worked, if it hadn’t been checked and verified, you will not know who Copernicus was.
So I still believe it’s not a valid example of someone producing non-testable hypothesis being considered a great thinker. Which was the motivation of your example. Because it was testable.
John, all I’m saying is that the role of intuition plays a very important role in the advancement of science, particularly Theoretical Physics. I agree with you that any profound idea must be tested to be considered of relevance but the testing need not be done by the originator of the idea and the testing and verification might be completed many years later. Hypothetically, had Newton just proposed his intuitive leap but left it for someone else to eventually leverage it into a falsifiable theory he would still be remembered to this day, albeit in a lesser light.
Newton, Einstein and many other scientific luminaries began their scientific journeys with leaps of intuition that were born of something other than mathematical formalism or the conventions of logic. What do you mean by saying that the Heliocentric model appealed to Copernicus due to practicality? Are you implying that Copernicus favoured the Heliocentric model because it was a simpler model? If so then we are basically saying the same thing at a supeficial level but differ widely at a philosophical level. I think that the role of beauty and elegance plays a central role in the impetus towards ground breaking scientific theories, particularly Theoretical Physics.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think that you consider the scientific enterprise to be a purely pragmatic one where great theories are constructed solely by the tools offered within said enterprise. I diverge from this way of thinking by proposing that truly ground breaking theories require something from outside their universe of discourse. This externality takes the form of intuitive leaps that are powered by a yearning for beauty and elegance. Please don’t understimate this factor in shaping Theoretical Physics.
How does all this relate to our initial disagreement? I propose that those in the scientific community who originate intuitive leaps born from a sense of beauty and elegance also have a role in the scientific enterprise. This is true even if they are not the ones who eventually leverage these leaps of intuition into falsifiable theories.
By the way, I completely agree with you that String Theory is an abomination.
> “I completely agree with you that String Theory is an abomination.”
Oh, a misunderstanding here, sorry. You can’t agree with me that String Theory is an abomination, because I don’t think so.
Well, we disagree in two points. The first one is the importance we assign to promising ideas. The second is the responsibility of the original thinker.
> “I think that you consider the scientific enterprise to be a purely pragmatic one where great theories are constructed solely by the tools offered within said enterprise.”
No, not at all. I’m not so far from reality. I understand the process by which an idea becomes a theory. I mean, someone somewhere has an intuition, which leads to an idea, which leads to an hypothesis, which blah blah. I know, I agree. I know we people do not think in equations. I don’t understimate the intuition. It’s very important. That’s not what I’m talking about.
But you should not fool yourself. When you have an idea you believe it’s promising, all you have is a promising idea. Nothing more, nothing else. A possible _profound_ idea. But you can not know if it’s a profound idea until… well, until someone check it.
Can a false idea be profound? I don’t believe so. Was the man as the center of the Universe profound? Was aether profound? The existence of an absolute space?
Do you believe false ideas can be profound?
Maybe what you call profound I call interesting or promising. But if an idea is interesting or not is a subjetive matter. A promising idea is, again, potentially valuable, but maybe it has no value at the end. I have no problem with you saying “I find Langan’s ideas interesting”. I may not know what you find interesting, but that doesn’t matter. That’s subjetive.
To sum up: one thing is to find interesting unproved theories, and other thing is to take unproven theories aa truth just because you like them. That’s not science. You can guess they’re true, but you really should be aware you do not know. That’s the place of intuition in science. Yes, very important, but not what you’re saying.
With respect to the second point, I expect the proponent of a theory to try to check the theory. By several reasons (why does he divulgue the theory, why does he believe it to be true if he doesn’t try to refute it, as a way to respect others time,…), but one is specially relevant: if you have a theory, an idea, you really consider interesting, you will be the first _interested_ in knowing if it’s true.
Of course, the proponent may not manage to prove the theory. But then he should be aware of the situation: he’s theory is unproven, and potentially false. At least he may contribute to the final proof, and people will recognize that.
What you can not do is to try to convince people you have a proven theory when you have none.
This is what Langan is doing. Of course, he may not see he’s proof is incorrect. That’s why people discuss this.
Finally, Copernicus.
> Are you implying that Copernicus favoured the Heliocentric model because it was a simpler model?
Right, I’m implying exactly that. Yes, he favored the Heliocentric model because it was simpler. But that’s not the whole story.
Copernicus made two contributions. One was a method to compute celestial movement. The interest of this model lies in its simplicity and practicality. This doesn’t make the previous model invalid. You can still compute celestial movement by previous models. Why do we use heliocentrism? Because it’s practical. This theory was provable, and fit the data.
The second contribution was more important. By proposing an alternative model he proved you could compute celestial motion without taking anything related to humanity into account. Previously, to compute Jupiter’s movement you have to refer the computations to the Earth, man’s home. Now you can do it without man. So humanity has no special role in the Universe, at least in its motion. This does not favour the Sun with respect to the Earth. It’s the existence of alternative models without a special role for man what makes it relevant. Any alternative model.
And this is also testable. You can actually check if you can predict (or postdict) Jupiter’s movement without taking anything man-related into account.
So all of Copernicus’ ideas where testable, they were checked right, and heliocentrism is preferred because its practicality.
John, I don’t appreciate your mocking tone. Is this how you choose to participate in a debate? I said no such thing. I simply said that all great theories must start with an intuitive leap, not that an intuitibe leap is all there need be to a theory.
I no longer wish to engage in any debate with you.
My comment above was placed under the wrong thread. Please disregard.
On a slight side note…
According to some biographers, the apple story never happened and was invented after the fact. Furthermore, Hooke came up with the inverse square law independently of Newton but was unable to do the necessary calculations. We remember Newton, and not Hooke, precisely because of this.
Personally, I think Newton’s genius lies not in the ‘intuitive leap’ of the inverse square law. That idea had been floating around for a while, but in the fact that he developed the tools (calculus) to prove that an inverse square law yields elliptic orbits.
In fact, Newton was famous for his “hypotheses non fingo” (I feign no hypotheses), so the whole history of Newton being famous for saying that without checking it before is a bit manipulative.
John, you could equally say that anyone who arrives at incorrect scientific conclusions solely based on logic and equations will also be absent from the annals of scientific history. This is not just a verdict against the role of intuition in science.
My position is that the faculty for intuitive leaps in making correct scientific conclusions is an ability cultivated in some people that diverges from statistical randomness. It is an actual ability whose source I will not speculate on. I will even go as far as to claim that these intuitive leaps are an absolute must otherwise Physics and Astronomy/Cosmology can only produce a collection of ad hoc equations that simply fit the known data without any internal motivation or understanding. Kepler’s equations are a great example of this. Only Newton’s intuitive leap (the apple story) could pave a road towards understanding why Kepler’s equations describe the motion of the heavenly bodies.
Yes, because if you say something by intuition it has the same validity and the same probability to be true that if you say something you have actually checked.
And the probability to be wrong by strict formal deduction is the same as by intuition.
OMG.
Well, nothing more to add.
I don’t appreciate your mocking tone. This is not how to participate in a debate. I said no such thing. I simply said that all great theories must start with an intuitive leap, not that an intuitive leap is all there need be to a theory.
Good bye sir.
Wow, that’s sensitive!
1) “I simply said that all great theories must start with an intuitive leap”
Oh, no. You know that’s not true. That’s the part we all agree with. You said more. It’s written.
a) Langan’s ideas are profound
b) We can know when unproven ideas are profound (as Langan’s)
c) There are scientists, like Copernicus, which are recognized for untested theories.
d) “The faculty for intuitive leaps in making correct scientific conclusions is an ability cultivated in some people”.
e) If one says a person divulging an untested theory as truth will not be recognized, “you could equally say that anyone who arrives at incorrect scientific conclusions solely based on logic and equations will also be absent from the annals of scientific history”.
Point a) evidently means you find them interesting, which is subjective. It is not related to 1)
Not many people will agree with b).
c) is not true, as we saw.
d) is specially… absurd. You can not make unchecked correct scientific conclusions. If you think so, you don’t understand what “scientific” means. I see hard for you to argue about this. A part of the scientific method is to check the results. Until you do that, your conclusions are tentative, not scientifically correct. It’s a contradiction.
e) is specially absurd, again, not to say ridiculous.
In fact, if someone arrives at an incorrect conclusion based solely on logic, I guarantee you he will NOT be absent from the annals of scientific history. In fact, he’d be on the cover!
(Of course, no physical theory is based solely on logic. It’s also based on a set of suppositions. That’s why they require testing. But you do not seem to understand this.)
In any case, I believe anything I say related to d) or c) will seem to you like mockery. It’s only normal, it can’t be helped.
But don’t take it as a personal attack, just as an advise to rethink what you’ve just said.
And please, don’t change your discourse in the middle of the argumentation. You didn’t simply said a theory begins with an intuition.
With some good faith on my part, I can interpret point d) as you saying intuition can be the first step in the making of scientifically correct conclusions. But, in this case, I don’t know why you’re saying that, given the fact that I already agree with that. I don’t know neither how is all this discourse about intuition related to Langan’s ideas being profound, or with how can we accept as profound untested ideas, or who doubted intuition plays a role in science.
I say with some good faith on my part because previously you said Langan’s ideas are profound, you seem to me to say only true ideas can be profound, and when asked how can you say Langan’s ideas are profound if they have not been tested, you start speaking about intuition. But intuition does not make Langan’s ideas true. You can have the intuition than Langan’s ideas are profound, but that does not make them so. And, well, nobody’s questioned the role of intuition in building theories.
The rest of points remains the same. With e) being specially absurd.
How do you define “profound”?
It’s a “theory” can’t be tested, makes no predictions, and answers no meaningful questions. By an actual scientific definition of theory, it isn’t even a theory.
Seriously… CTMU is nothing but an elaborate word-game. Just look at Chris’s bullshit about sets and set theory. He bobs and weaves, but completely avoids defining what he means by the word set. It’s *not* sets from Cantor’s naive set theory. It’s *not* sets as defined in NBG. It’s not sets as defined in ZF. In fact, he gets annoyed when you talk about set theory because, he insists, he’s talking about *sets*, not *set theory*.
That’s an amazingly ridiculous thing to say from someone who claims to be discussing a scientific theory.
Set theory is nothing but a very precise way of defining what we *mean* by the word set. Chris rejects any attempt to provide a precise definition of “set”. Why would he do that? Because his theory is transparent nonsense. But by refusing to define one of the fundamental base terms that he uses, he can weasel out of any actual criticism of the shoddy logic in his theory.
Consider the recent discussions here of this. Is the universe a set? Does the superset of the universe really exist? Is the superset of the universe part of the universe? Those questions *can’t* be answered without actually defining set in a precise way. (For example, in NBG theory, the collection of subsets of an infinite set isn’t a set, so the “superset” doesn’t exist.)
“In fact, he gets annoyed when you talk about set theory because, he insists, he’s talking about *sets*, not *set theory*.”
Langan’s approach indeed seems extremely offensive towards established science. It is not socially acceptable in the scientific or philosophic community to just redefine concepts because “they are that way”. Instead, some anthropological or philosophical evidence should be provided to explain why Langan’s view on the concept of set should be approved and what it’s based on. It’s hard for him to convince people that way. He would need an interpreter, but even the interpreter requires something to begin with. The Metaphysics of Quality does a better job on explaining why its unfalsifiable statements could be useful. Making unfalsifiable claims per se is not unacceptable in philosophy — after all, that’s what the Greek philosophers did.
Gathering anthropological evidence could involve anthropological studies of the scientific community and attempts to make generalizations on what they are trying to accomplish with the concept of “set”. Then Langan could maybe make the point that while his concept of “set” is not well-defined in any particular set theory, it is a generalization of the intentions of the people who practice set theory. This kind of anthropological evidence is, in my opinion, best acquired from philosophical works.
Anyway, since NF is a set theory and has the universal set without contradictions, Langan should probably explain why this doesn’t undermine his theory. After all, that set would also be expected to fall under what Langan considers a set, and according to John Fringe, Langan uses the fact that the universal set leads to a contradiction.
Since Langan seems to question the separation between empirical and formal science, his theory should have more empirical (ie. probably anthropological) content to be convincing.
In any case, there’s no point in treating Langan in a very offensive manner. After all, if he’s wrong, what could he do? Think about his point of view. A philosophical theory this far off the mainstream isn’t an easy thing to advocate. The journal in which it was published didn’t seem prestigious. I guess Langan’s struggle with philosophy is a punishment in itself. For what, I don’t know — maybe for being different. There is little need to add to that punishment, although it’s not necessary to agree with Langan either.
Aren’t mathematical theories um… supposed to have… errr…
Math…?
That’s a lot of talk about almost nothing. You all seem to focus on the “set” part of Langan’s word game about the universe being a set and so what is then its powerset. Let’s try to move past that for a minute, and talk about the more fundamental question, namely this:
Even if the word game wasn’t based on a misunderstanding of set theory, who actually believes that you can “prove” anything about the universe, let alone what is “outside” the universe, using sophisms and syllogisms? It should be pretty obvious that logic, even if used correctly, is in some sense a product of our minds and can never be expected to be used in this way, nothing at all implies that logic, maths or even physics as we know them applies outside, or on a higher level thank, the known universe, whatever that even means.
Regardless, if Langan really takes his theory seriously, he should stop dissecting Marks messages into fragments and commenting every single sentence, and instead try to address the bigger question repeated here by almost every participant, namely what the theory actually means, if it makes any predictions at all or if it is just an exercise in semantics, like “The universe is a dream in the mind of the Great Dinosaur, and we are merely products of his indigestion”. That kind of theory is easy to produce, and impossible to disprove, but not very interesting.
I agree with you, despite being one of those who focus on the “set” problem.
(You probably know why: because it’s one of the few parts with actual semantics. But you’re right).
What a surprise – another rare appearance by the one and only Mark Chu-Carroll. Unfortunately, it almost seems to have been instigated by someone who misleadingly assured Mark that he could win a serious argument with me on the topic of my own work when in fact, that’s quite out of the question.
Having already caught Mark in several glaring instances of mathematical incomprehension (see above), I suspect that the more technical my explanations, the deeper and more petulant his incomprehension will become, and the more impudent and unintelligible his retorts will be. So I’ll try to keep my responses as simple as possible, albeit with the sad expectation that Mark won’t understand a word of them anyway.
This is a long reply. There are two reasons for that. First, Mark is being characteristically dense and thus forcing me to be repetitive. Secondly, as I remarked above, he generates errors faster than he writes – it seems like a paradox, but Mark is one of a kind – and he usually racks up more of them than Kellogg’s has corn flakes. (We’re talking about silly failures of linguistic and/or mathematical comprehension that most intelligent high school students would have the sense to avoid.) In fact, if this drags on, I’ll have no choice but to save time by concentrating less on being informative, and more on the specific personality issues which would seem to account for the fact that Mark is so very, very hard to inform.
Or maybe just ignore him.
Mark: “How do you define ‘profound’?”
I can’t speak for anyone else, but “profound” usually means something like “leading to important or at least meaningful and far-reaching consequences or insights”. Thus, the recognition of profundity is strongly dependent on the capacity of any given reader to recognize meaning and importance when he sees them. Where this capacity is low, profundity is wasted. It increasingly appears that Mark is a person on whom profundity may be wasted. (But here we go again.)
Mark: “It’s a ‘theory’ [that] can’t be tested, makes no predictions, and answers no meaningful questions. By an actual scientific definition of theory, it isn’t even a theory.”
Error 1: There are many kinds of theory. Only some of them are “scientific” in the sense that they take the scientific method as an implicit meta-axiom (a higher-level axiom proscribing the recognition of empirical axioms, or axioms with empirical force). This is a severe theoretical liability; scientific theories are confined by definition to scientific methodology, which, as currently understood, prohibits them not only from being verified in the logical sense, but from exploring the nature and strength of their own connections to their universes, which precludes any form of what we might call “self-verification”. If and when Mark familiarizes himself a bit more with the logical side of model theory and its proper application to the content and methodology of science, perhaps he’ll be able to comment on the subject a bit more fruitfully.
Error 2: Just as there are different kinds of theory, there are different kinds and levels of verification. Making and testing predictions is arguably the only way to empirically confirm a scientific theory … but not all theories are empirical, and scientific theories are not the only theories with empirical content. Theories can be formal or informal, mathematical (axiomatic) or scientific (in which case they are still at least partially mathematical), and if scientific, then descriptive, explanatory, or predictive in character. An explanatory theory can give a superficial explanation of its empirical content, or it can penetrate deeply enough into its subject matter to resolve associated paradoxes on the syntactic or semantic level (a powerful source of veracity in itself). It can even extend the interpretative framework to self-verificative effect, as does the CTMU (unfortunately, this is probably well over the head of most readers of this forum – exceptions are allowed, but improbable).
Error 3: The CTMU is not a mere “scientific” theory. Philosophically, that’s a good thing, because no scientific theory that does more than catalogue data can be validated by any means whatsoever, including empirical testing. At best, empirical testing yields only an imperfect “degree of confirmation”, and is subject to several kinds of inductive and interpretative ambiguity.
Although the appropriate testing procedure is not the same for a theory like the CTMU as it is for an ordinary scientific theory, the CTMU can in fact be tested. First, it can be tested for logical and semantic consistency by examining it for errors or internal contradictions. Unfortunately, one would need to understand it in order to do that, and the vast majority of its critics (including Mark) do not. Or one could try to test the theory by debating it, as Mark seems bent on doing. But thus far, he has not been debating the theory I wrote. He has instead been debating against another theory entirely, a straw-man theory which he *claims* that I wrote, but which I find completely unrecognizable … as unrecognizable as he apparently finds the theory I actually wrote.
Of course, the fact that the CTMU is not strictly scientific, i.e. dependent on the scientific method for confirmation, does not in principle stop it from yielding predictions or explanations of empirical phenomena. But using it for such purposes is a bit tricky, not least because many of its predictions and explanations may be unrecognizable as such to a philosophically naïve, quasi-religious neo-Darwinian apologist like Mark sometimes appears to be.
Error 4: As errors 1-3 amply confirm, Mark is again indulging in what has now been revealed as a most unbecoming habit: mistaking his personal incomprehension for an actual property of someone else’s theory. This is obviously something that he should try harder to control. Much harder.
Mark: “Seriously… CTMU is nothing but an elaborate word-game.”
Probable error: If Mark is using “word game” to mean “a verbal contest regarding matters of fact,” then he is correct. But if he’s using the term to mean “words chosen merely to create the illusion of victory in some basically meaningless, content-free debate or other communicative process,” which is probably what he’s doing, then he is mistaken. (I’m just trying to do the right thing, and stop Mark from hysterically misleading others regarding my ideas out of sheer ignorance and resentment.)
Mark: “Just look at Chris’s bullshit about sets and set theory. He bobs and weaves, but completely avoids defining what he means by the word set.”
Error: In fact, I explicitly agreed with Wikipedia’s definition of “set”. Mark evidently disagrees with that definition. The burden is now on Mark to explain why it is wrong, why the universe fails to instantiate it, or failing that, why it automatically implies reliance on some specific brand of set theory that Mark loves to hate.
Mark: “It’s *not* sets from Cantor’s naive set theory. It’s *not* sets as defined in NBG. It’s not sets as defined in ZF.”
Error: Ruling out these versions of set theory is pointless, because my usage of “set” is indifferent to any standard version of set theory. When Mark insists on shackling this definition to his least-favorite version, he renders the concept foundationally irrelevant, necessitating its replacement by a more basic and flexible kind of mathematical object and language.
Mark: “In fact, he gets annoyed when you talk about set theory because, he insists, he’s talking about *sets*, not *set theory*.”
Mirabile dictu, a point of agreement! (Of course, we differ on its significance.)
Mark: ”That’s an amazingly ridiculous thing to say from someone who claims to be discussing a scientific theory.”
Error: I do not claim to be discussing a “scientific theory”. If I were to make such a claim regarding the CTMU, it would imply an extended definition of science achieved by eliminating the dualistic brick wall that sits between theory and observation in the standard formulation of the scientific method (something which people who sound like Mark typically have no idea how to do, and which they often assume to be impossible). Again, this in no way implies that the CTMU is devoid of empirical content. Its empirical content necessarily includes the entire perceptual universe, as does that of logic.
Mark: “Set theory is nothing but a very precise way of defining what we *mean* by the word set.”
Another point of agreement. Mark, in specifying “naive set theory” as the core ingredient of his personal erroneous interpretation of my essay, has been very clear that this is what *he* means that he thinks *I* mean when I use the word “set”. But that’s yesterday’s news.
Error: Unfortunately, Mark’s personal interpretation of my interpretation of concepts like “set”, “set theory”, and “the relationship between set theory and the general definition of a set” is out to lunch … a six- or seven-martini lunch, to push the idiom. As explained above, I’m using the term “set” in a very general way … the way that, e.g., Wikipedia uses it. If Mark doesn’t like this definition, then he needs to explain why it is inadequate for my purposes even when I’m not relying on it in my essay, and why I need to settle for one standard version of set theory or another even while explicitly rejecting set theory as an exclusive basis for the CTMU.
One almost gets the impression that in declaring the “set” concept meaningless except in conjunction with some standard version of set theory, Mark would also declare the “quantum gravity” concept meaningless except in conjunction with some existing and probably mistaken theory of quantum gravity. If Mark were to have his way, scientists would be unable to meaningfully address such unexplained phenomena without first adopting whatever half-baked theory might already exist regarding them (which itself can only have been formed in violation of that rule). It’s a catch-22, a conflation of definition and theorization that would stop science dead in its tracks.
Like so many of Mark’s ill-conceived and ill-informed opinions, it makes absolutely no sense (except in certain highly restricted formal contexts, none of which are presently operative).
Mark: “Chris rejects any attempt to provide a precise definition of ‘set’.”
Error: Wrong again. I explicitly deferred to Wikipedia’s definition of “set”, which, though general, is admirably precise in its generality. Again, if Mark doesn’t like this definition, then he needs to explain why it’s so awful, and why I should be concerned that he doesn’t understand that I’m not relying on it (except to observe, as I did in my essay, that to the extent that the universe is a set, it is seemingly vulnerable to certain paradoxes associated with sets, and therefore in need of a foundational theory capable of resolving those paradoxes on a level deeper than conventional set theory allows).
Mark: “Why would he do that? Because his theory is transparent nonsense.”
Error: Mark has already been repeatedly called on the carpet for inserting his own hare-brained speculations in place of the actual meaning of certain material which he absurdly pretends to have read. That carpet has just gone from threadbare to ratty. If it gets any thinner, it too will be “transparent”.
Mark: “But by refusing to define one of the fundamental base terms that he uses, he can weasel out of any actual criticism of the shoddy logic in his theory.”
Error: But I did define “set”. (See how Mark is obstinately forcing me to repeat myself?) I defined it just the way it is defined by Wikipedia and its reputed mathematical experts, i.e., the mathematically trained subset of Wikipedia editors allegedly involved in editing and re-editing its mathematical articles. Perhaps Mark should explain his beef with them.
If Mark doesn’t like Wikipedia anymore, then here’s how “set” was defined by Georg Cantor: “A set is a gathering together into a whole of definite, distinct objects of our perception and of our thought – which are called elements of the set.” (This is in Wikipedia too.) Note that Cantor, once having rendered this general theory-independent definition based on perception and cognition, was no longer in a position to insist that his own “naive” version of set theory be shoehorned into it. This theoretic independence is what protected the general definition from being completely discarded when certain aspects of his personal theory about it came under attack.
Need sets always be “well-defined”, and does this always imply embedment in some formalization of set theory? Obviously, a set should be well-defined in precisely the sense given by Cantor, as this is enough to render it perceptible or intelligible. Once this criterion has been met, however, any particular version of set theory is beside the point; the notion that one must be attached is merely an arbitrary formal criterion that has nothing immediate to do with the percept or concept in question. The point of proving a set to be “well-defined” is to establish the possibility of its existence; when something is perceived as a set, or mathematically conceived as an image or generalization of a perceived set, its existence is clearly given by perception and need not be formally established. That’s a very good thing, because there are several versions of set theory available, some of them self-consistent, and any given one of them may or may not be suitable for particular scientific or philosophical purposes. My purposes, for example.
As it happens (and not by accident), consistent versions of set theory can be interpreted in SCSPL. The problem is, SCSPL can’t be mapped into any standard version of set theory without omitting essential ingredients, and that’s unacceptable. This is why the CTMU cannot endorse any standard set theory as a foundational language. But does this stop the universe from being a set? Not if it is either perceptible or intelligible in the sense of Cantor’s definition. One thing’s for sure: if it is neither, then it is theoretically unidentifiable. And in that case, Mark is wasting not only his own time, but everybody’s time, by going around and around about it like a tape loop of a broken record in an echo chamber.
Mark: “Consider the recent discussions here of this. Is the universe a set?”
Yes. As I’ve already stated, the universe fulfills the general definition of “set” in numerous ways, and this indeed makes it a set (among other things with additional structure). Otherwise, its objects could not be discerned, or distinguished from other objects, or counted, or ordered, or acquired and acted on by any function of any kind, including the functions that give them properties through which they can be identified, discussed, and scientifically investigated. If something is “not a set”, then it can’t even be represented by a theoretical variable or constant (which is itself a set), in which case Mark has no business theorizing about it or even waving his arms and mindlessly perseverating about it.
Does this mean that a set is all that the universe is? Of course not, although one would never know it from Mark’s interminable fussing and fuming.
Mark: “Does the superset of the universe really exist?”
Yes, provided that Mark means “power set”. It exists in SCSPL syntax, which itself exists by logical necessity. One can’t even conceive of logic without applying a distributed “power-set template” to its symbols and expressions, and such templates clearly perform a syntactic function. However, because Mark evidently has a definition for “syntax” which differs from my own (and perhaps from most other peoples’ as well), but which must nevertheless be interpreted in a way appropriate to the specific theory under consideration, namely my theory and not Mark’s, and because Mark probably defines “existence” in a shallow and materialistic way that he hasn’t really thought out very well, he doesn’t understand what this means.
Mark: “Is the superset of the universe part of the universe?“
Provided that the “superset” in question is the power set, the short answer is yes. More accurately, the power set is a distributed *aspect* of the universe by virtue of which objects and sets of objects are relationally connected to each other in the assignment and discrimination of attributes (the intensions of sets). Without it, the universe would not be identifiable, even to itself; its own functions could not acquire and distinguish their arguments. In fact, considered as an attributive component of identification taking a set as input and yielding a higher-order relational potential as output, it is reflexive and “inductively idempotent”; the power set is itself a set, and applied to itself, yields another (higher-order) power set, which is again a set, and so on up the ladder.
Of course, even the perceptual stratum of the universe is not totally perceptible from any local vantage. The universe, its subsets, and the perceptible connections among those subsets can be perceived only out to the cosmic horizon, and even then, our observations fail to resolve most of its smaller subsets (parts, aggregates, power-set constituents). But a distributed logical structure including the power set can still be inferred as an abstract but necessary extension of the perceptual universe which is essential to identification operations including that of perception itself.
The scientific import is obvious. Where the universe is defined, for scientific purposes, to contain the entire set of past and future observational and experimental data, plus all that may be inferred as requirements of perception, its power set is integral to it as a condition of its perception and scientific analysis, not to mention its intrinsic self-differentiation and coherence. Without its power set, its parts or subsets would be intrinsically indiscernible and indistinguishable, which would of course amount to an oxymoron; “parts” are distinguishable by definition, and therefore constitute a set with the discrete topology construed by relevance (any reference to which naturally invokes the power set) and the indiscrete topology construed by veracity (inclusion-exclusion). Without the power set function and its stratified relational potential, one not only can’t say what the parts and their mutual relationships are, one can’t even say what they’re *not* … and as any parts not relevant to the others are not “parts” as advertised, even referring to them generates contradictions and must therefore be avoided.
Mark: “Those questions *can’t* be answered without actually defining set in a precise way. (For example, in NBG theory, the collection of subsets of an infinite set isn’t a set, so the ‘superset’ doesn’t exist.)”
Error: What utter nonsense. Aside from the fact that NBG avoids supersets by the largely (but not entirely) semantical device of redefining certain sets as “classes”, one can simply move the entire discussion onto a new foundation, i.e., into a new foundational language, and explain how the set concept should be interpreted within it. The foundation I’m talking about is not NBG, or ZF, or naive set theory, but the CTMU and SCSPL. For the hundredth time, sets can be interpreted therein as collections of discernable, distinguishable objects and events (just as Cantor defines them), or if one prefers, as functions and functional arguments whose more involved properties are developed not in set theory, but in (you guessed it) SCSPL. That way, set-theoretic paradoxes, e.g. the power set paradox, can be precluded or resolved with (you guessed it again) SCSPL mechanisms instead of the mechanisms of any standard, foundationally inadequate version of set theory.
Until Mark comes to grips with this fact and desists in his asinine attempts to tell the author of the CTMU (me) what the CTMU says, his understanding of it will remain stunted. As everyone is by now aware, the more blighted and pathetic Mark’s (mis-)understanding of something, the stronger and more irresistible his compulsion to “spread the wealth” by adopting a deceptive tone of authority and brazenly misleading others to the effect that it somehow equates to his own confusion regarding it, when in fact, he has merely attempted to tie his personal confusion around its neck like a squawking, flapping, hyper-opinionated albatross. It is obvious to all but the most deluded of his partisans that this is a brand of folly in which he should not be encouraged, and that those who do so anyway are beneath contempt.
Now for a little sermon containing some useful advice for Mark and others who think the way he does. Mark is seemingly a reasonably intelligent person who appears to be interested in learning some math, but he has what amounts to a personality-driven learning disability: instead of taking the time to properly absorb some new bit of math he has found, he rushes to post it on his blog, complete with technical errors and errors of comprehension. Then he moves on to the next tantalizing bit of math and the next blog post. The unfortunate result is that he never properly absorbs and integrates what he thinks he is “learning”. Thus, when he encounters a paper (like my essay) which seems to involve some of the math he has supposedly “learned”, but which he doesn’t really understand at all, he blindly leaps to the conclusion that his confusion cannot possibly be due to any fault of his own. After all, having briefly lit upon that kind of math and then fluttered away like a fickle, flighty mathematical butterfly to visit another, he fancies himself an expert on it (as opposed to, say, a dabbler or a dilettante). So naturally, it’s not Mark who’s in a fog; it must be the other guy! And that makes the other guy irresistible cannon fodder for yet another entertaining salvo from the big guns of the most fearsome rubber-band-powered anti-crank destroyer in the blogosphere, the USS Good Math, Bad Math!
By thinking and behaving in this silly way, Mark encourages some of his commentators to assume that they are able to see technical problems with my work that I can’t see. This is almost always a mistake. I do in fact see the full range of what might be construed as technical problems with my work, but differ from my critics in that I usually see their solutions as well. Because the solutions are obvious to me, the problems begin to unravel before they can take up lodging in my theory, sparing me the trouble of noting their putative existence and agonizing over them and engaging in the kind of masochistic publish-or-perish tail-chasing that they inspire in academics (and others) who don’t really understand them. After all, academics write about problems not only to offer definitive solutions for them, but to explore gaps in their own comprehension. Unfortunately, the precious, carefully cultivated orchids of academia often forget in the course of their well-referenced but ultimately omphaloskeptical self-explorations that they very much belong to an intellectual closed shop, and that their own cognitive gaps preclude definitive judgments on the cognitive adequacy of the weeds that grow wild and free beyond the sheltering walls of their ivory tower hothouses.
When Mark or one of his commentators summarily accuses me of ignorance or carelessness for appearing to ignore such “problems” in some piece of writing he has bumped into, thus prompting him to blow his top like Krakatau and do his trademark hotdog dance for the tourists, he does not merely seem to be trying to pass himself off as my intellectual equal. That alone wouldn’t bother me; I usually have no problem with assumptions of intellectual parity as long as people remain polite. Rather, Mark appears to be trying to pass himself off as my intellectual superior … and believe it or not, I don’t have to let him get away with that if I’d rather make an issue of it.
In other words, if you are one of those who has been encouraging Mark in his folly, you are doing him a disservice. If you’re really his friend, then why not allow him to come to his senses, drop the pretense, hypocrisy, and incorrigible buffoonery, and spare himself the humiliation of being made to look less knowledgeable or intelligent than he obviously thinks he is? After all, if Mark learns to show a little respect, then others are more likely to return it. On the other hand, if he continues to pop off because a few diehard sycophants appear willing to cover for him and get his back even when the springs and cogs and gear oil spray out of his ears, then there’s always a risk that sooner or later, at a time to be determined by fate (and/or me), he’ll learn the unpleasant taste of crow. Raw crow, with the feathers and the mites.
To the few of you who seem to understand what’s actually going on, thanks for hanging in there. But again, you should probably try not to assume that you see technical issues with my theory that I don’t see, e.g. the problem of induction and the relevance of Gödel’s theorems. The CTMU contains ample allowance for both.
I recall putting a few pieces online in which the problem of induction and Godel’s theorem are mentioned. For example, regarding the latter, one piece was called “The Theory of Theories” and written in an easy, breezy style; the other was called “Self-Reference and Computational Complexity” (2001) and contained more mathematical detail. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be available any more. As I recall, it began with an explanation of self-reference and diagonalization in the Liar Paradox, introduced the theory of metalanguages, applied these concepts to Gödel’s proof of the undecidability theorem, moved on to computation theory and Turing’s work on incomputability re the Halting Problem, sketched a comparison between the diagonalization techniques involved in undecidability and incomputability, introduced computational tractability with attention to oracles and relativization, and finished off by discussing the analogue of linguistic self-reference in Boolean circuits with respect to their prospective application to P?NP. The CTMU wasn’t mentioned, but bear in mind that the CTMU is a self-referential system to which the basic principles of self-reference apply.
That paper was online for years. It’s probably languishing on a storage drive somewhere; if I find it, maybe I’ll slap it back up. Meanwhile, please rest assured that I’m aware of most if not all of the major technical issues bearing on my work.
The reason that I’ve focused on the set/set theory thing is simple.
If the basis of an argument is based on undefined, inconsistent, and/or invalid terms, the entire argument is undefined, inconsistent and/or invalid.
In the case of sets, sets are a simple basic concept that can, very easily, become inconsistent. That’s the whole point of set theory. Set theory is a system that produces a definition of sets that doesn’t devolve into inconsistency.
The definition of set that you focus on, from wikipedia is, ultimately, the definition of sets from naive set theory. You can bitch and moan, bob and weave, whine and complain all you want – but if you use the naive set theory definition of sets, then your argument is built on naive set theory.
And naive set theory is inconsistent, and thus invalid.
Your “theory” starts with an argument about whether or not the universe is a set, and derive supposedly deep and profound conclusions from that argument. But you’re argument is clearly based on a definition of “set” that isn’t valid. You cannot derive a valid argument from an invalid foundation. And all of your pointless verbiage doesn’t change that. If you want to use sets in your argument, you need to use a definition of sets that isn’t invalid. If you’re not willing to do that, then your theory is nothing but an exercise in intellectual masturbation.
Attn: Chris.
I hope you will – please – read this and look me up (at my “home institution”: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/lilasquad).
All,
I am a metaphysian. And, so that my boldness is revealed up front, I will let you know that, in your regard, I hope to inject some fundamental REASON in to the debate. But, truth be told, I am not particularly interested in rolling around in the mathematical mud; I am trying to get Chris’ attention because I think his metaphysics is wanting, and I think that a proper righting of his implicit fundament might lead him to the fullness of success his framework – the cognitive theoretic model of ? – will, I suspect, eventually provide – someone.
Let it be known, I haven’t yet quite even finished Chris’ paper! I have read a good deal of the above discussion, but I have skipped a lot too. I am – quite confident that I am – aware of (the constraints of) THE Metaphysics (of Everything: M.E.), so I can – I think – see where Chris has violated THE I’dea. The physicist’s Theory of Everything (T.o.E.) should, I suspect, fall out of THE metaphysics – like a ripe fruit; and I think that Chris’ framework is very close!
I have, as I recall, seen Chris use the (derogatory) term “hard materialism”. It seems to me that the comments I have read implicitly assume such a “hard materialism”. The thing is that this is a really immature metaphysics – far sillier than, for instance, a “flying spaghetti monster”. For what it’s worth, though Chris fully recognizes the need to avoid the problem of the “dualistic brick wall”, my understanding is that he lets it in the back door (his “UNBOUND Telesis”).
Before I get into some details, let me ask: why do you (anyone) think “set” is even a meaningful concept? … Do you have an answer? Can you test whether you are right or not? (If you could show that there was a situation in which “set” was the only tool for the job…)
Chris, why do you think “universe” is a meaningful concept?
R.P. Feynman, in his “lectures on Physics”, and in his chapter on algebra (yes, he did have a chapter on “algebra” for his cal tech students!), affirms that one must start in the middle – even just to count! The task of a metaphysician is to find THE proper middle with which to start. I point you to the SUCCESSFUL metaphysician George Holmes Howison, his book “the limits of evolution, and other essays, illustrating the metaphysical theory of personal idealism”:
http://books.google.com/books?id=vAIQAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+limits+of+Evolution+howison&source=bl&ots=w5XKmPBykt&sig=xJtfVO-AP8LfYu2C2FCeTQCWcuA&hl=en&ei=eBSmTZGCDoiCsQPV7PX5DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Briefly, Chris, you underestimate the force behind Kant’s noumenon. Materialism can only be bested by I’dealism. That is, reality is at bottom idea! There is no matter as such! “matter” is, rather, information representing real I’dea. I say I’dea, singular, because … give me a moment please.
I know that there has been some talk about mind-matter duality above. Philosophically, the point I make is that no conception of “universe” is going to be acceptable unless it accounts for the thinker. I state this only dogmatically here; but Howison proves that there are certain limits to evolution, specifically that MIND must be a priori rather than the result of evolution. Materialism must be bested; and, as I have said, it is idealism which bests it. Furthermore, minimal complexity is the key to producing THE real I’dea. Chris, the problem you make is that you have not quite pushed yourself to that one real I’dea! And, rather, you make a very novice mistake (which might be easy to remedy – like a sign error in a long math problem) of conforming yourself to a creation ex nihilo. Or, as you say, on your summary page:
“Unbound Telesis (UBT) – a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational constraint. In CTMU cosmogony, “nothingness” is informationally defined as zero constraint or pure freedom (unbound telesis or UBT), and the apparent construction of the universe is explained as a self-restriction of this potential. In a realm of unbound ontological potential, defining a constraint is not as simple as merely writing it down; because constraints act restrictively on content, constraint and content must be defined simultaneously in a unified syntax-state relationship.”
Let me go into some detail. The first sentence and the first clause of the second sentence represent … a problem. Why do you think it makes sense to postulate a “realm … free of informational constraint”? This does not comport with a meaningful idea! But, you close your second sentence with “the apparent construction of the … is explained as a self-restriction of this potential”. You will notice that I omitted only the –offending – word “universe”. Now, this is all (more or less) in line with both the fundamental axiom of all philosophy: “nothing” is meaningless, strictly speaking; impossible: and Feynman’s assurance that we need a “starting in the middle”. What if I replace “universe” with “idea”? Granted, my “more or less” was needed because “this potential” is not a truly possible potential, but we see, through “self-restriction”, the ever present hint that the real I’dea is “I am”! Thus Howison’s “personal idealism”. “I am” is the proper, now bounded, metaphysical fundament (telesis?)! But, again, I give this dogmatically now; you have not yet seen the I’dea in it’s full and minimal complexity – or at least I haven’t presented it 😉 But, “I am” does conform to your proscription that “constraint and concept must be defined simultaneously in a unified…”
The picture, then, is that reality is fundamentally idea. There is but one (type) of I’dea: I am. In order that this I’dea should be a real and meaningful I’dea it must be a certain “working complex” – if I may. Interestingly, if there is any such capacity to destroy souls in the universe (as you have suggested elsewhere, I think), it would have to be some additional, non-fundamental advance pursuant to some increased capacity, potential, or complexity. I see no need for recourse to any such development, and my best guess is that it is actually impossible; either way, you won’t hear me talk about it again. It seems that everything can be accounted for by the “starting in the middle” with “I am”, when once we’ve recognized what this I’dea really means. To close the big picture, reality is, in our time, a plural society of I am.
Every “I am”, from human, to dog, to cat, to, presumably, insect and plant, etc., and to God too!, is precisely equivalent noumenally. Chris, this is the force behind Kant’s noumenon that you miss. While the I’dea “I am” is a working complex, composed of the noumenal aspect, the spiritual aspect, and the phenomenal aspect, that is, “complex”, it is the noumenal aspect which is most characteristically idea – if I may. The noumenal aspect is eternal (philosophically speaking). Descriptively, it is the “mind of God”; and every “I am” is endowed with it equivalently! But, this aspect in itself does not amount to a real and meaningful idea; it is but an aspect of the minimally complex I’dea. How does one “bound” an infinite and eternal “idea” so as to make it definite and real? How is one idea separated from another, even conventionally speaking?! To be sure, this is where the beauty of complexity (as opposed to a sea of distinct ideas / axioms) comes to the fore. One I’dea is kept separate and distinct from it’s neighbor I’deas (/ kin) by what Howison has chosen to call the “spiritual” aspect; I will refrain from burdening you with any faulty picture I might use… But, similarly with the noumenal aspect, every “I am” is endowed with the same spiritual potentials, preeminently free will. As the spiritual aspect is working to bound the noumenal, the spiritual aspect is decidedly temporal. But this is not quite enough. The phenomenal aspect completes the picture, literally. The information about the real and living I’deas is derivatively represented, fairly, and logically, meanigfully. One can impose his will on the plural society of “I am” and then ask questions about the effect. The answer one gets is a function of the question one asks (and one cannot refrain from asking questions – the eternal aspect must be bounded by the temporal aspects). Not only is the information one receives from such questions predominantly about oneself, one’s question is an essential ingredient: one holds himself together this way! Each “I am” truly is inviolate (and his noumenal aspect is, further, incorruptible). Thankfully though, we (humans eminently) are phenomenally developed enough that the information we gather about ourselves is sufficient to let us start to understand other “I am” as well 😉
Above I had said:
“There is no matter as such! “matter” is, rather, information representing real I’dea. I say I’dea, singular, because … give me a moment please.”
Have I fulfilled my burden? At least dogmatically (Howison offers a more thorough handling)?
So, Chris, I again ask: why do you think “universe” is a meaningful concept? For my part I am quite convinced that you have got your socks on inside out! That you have let materialism through your back door, and that you are giving over the reality which is YOU to some illusory conception of US, or a pantheistic god. And, to be sure, having rejected pluralism you call it “universe”. What’s REAL issues from the superphenomenal – and plural – society of “I am”. The derivative picture of it is – though integral – only a picture, and only derivative. It appears “solid” (is “abiding” better?) because the I’deas are real. We can “use” it because the I’deas are real.
Can you show us the physics that falls out of this metaphysics, Chris?!
Either way, my confidence in this “starting in the middle” is exceedingly strong. “Confirmed” even. It gets you out of all sorts of trouble you get yourself into, Chris. God is a person now. Not a “pan” immanent in … There is now a place for free will. The real is now a “self-restriction of [the possible]” rather than some weird (impossible) collection a la your words, Chris:
“Where the universe is defined, for scientific purposes, to contain the entire set of past and future observational and experimental data, plus…”
Rather, the I’deas are living; and reality is evolutional. To be sure, where you are thinking “universe”, you should now be thinking “my body”. That everybody’s “my body” appears “similarly” should be no surprise!: we are all individual, proprietary quanta of the single type of real I’dea, distinguished only by “spirit”. I don’t think I need to go into an example of how the information (body) is personal and proprietary, even though the distant star we are looking at is the “same” star, or the football we are fighting for possession over is the “same” football. In the everyday we are developed enough that these variations pose no hurdle. In the wet dreams of scientists and tyrants, I will stake my life on the fact that it is precisely impossible for you to violate me. Of course, you (general) could, no doubt, “violate” “me” so much that I’d wish our universe / phenomenal bodies didn’t coexist so.
Thanks,
Sincerely,
Tim
Mark: “The reason that I’ve focused on the set/set theory thing is simple. If the basis of an argument is based on undefined, inconsistent, and/or invalid terms, the entire argument is undefined, inconsistent and/or invalid.”
Not if the reason they’re “undefined” is that you, Mark Chu-Carroll, refuse to accept their definitions as given, and then refuse to explain why you’re refusing to accept their definitions as given.
Mark: “In the case of sets, sets are a simple basic concept that can, very easily, become inconsistent. That’s the whole point of set theory. Set theory is a system that produces a definition of sets that doesn’t devolve into inconsistency.”
So then let’s have a look at some of these inconsistencies. Carefully write an essay on them – the specific ones, not just the ones at which you’ve been frantically waving your arms – and post it on your site. If it’s good enough, maybe I’ll respond.
As I’ve remarked above, the formal well-definition of sets is unnecessary regarding sets that are directly perceived. Otherwise, the last time you perceived a set, you should have refused to follow through with the perception until the set announced that it had duly embedded itself in some consistent version of set theory.
Did you insist on that? (Why, sure you did!)
Mark: “The definition of set that you focus on, from wikipedia is, ultimately, the definition of sets from naive set theory. You can bitch and moan, bob and weave, whine and complain all you want – but if you use the naive set theory definition of sets, then your argument is built on naive set theory.”
You really don’t have a clue, do you, Mark? Cantor’s definition of “set” is not explicitly parameterized by Cantor’s “naive” version of set theory. The theory is not a definiens of the definition; the definition has explicit definientia, namely, the well-established and patently consistent operations of discerning its elements and gathering them together. You’re simply asserting otherwise without adequately explaining yourself.
Mark: “And naive set theory is inconsistent, and thus invalid.”
That’s why I don’t use it. As explained, over and over again.
Mark: “Your ‘theory’ starts with an argument about whether or not the universe is a set, and derive supposedly deep and profound conclusions from that argument. But you’re argument is clearly based on a definition of ‘set’ that isn’t valid.”
No, it isn’t. Stop trying to tell the authors of the theories you criticize what they meant when they wrote their theories. It’s ridiculous.
Mark: ”You cannot derive a valid argument from an invalid foundation. And all of your pointless verbiage doesn’t change that. If you want to use sets in your argument, you need to use a definition of sets that isn’t invalid. If you’re not willing to do that, then your theory is nothing but an exercise in intellectual masturbation.”
So is this dialogue, as long as you refuse to pluck the scales from your eyes and open your mind a little.
You can’t BS your way out of the pickle you’ve gotten yourself into here. You may as well lie down and play dead.
Stay down, Mark. Don’t even try to get up.
Hi Chris
I don’t see any point in arguing with the people on this board. Many here have no appreciation for the role of intuitive leaps in launching scientific revolutions. Can you fathom the unsatisfactory state of Physics (classical) if history had only offered Keplers and no Newtons? We need more Newtons and Einsteins today to shine a clarifying light instead of offering ad hoc hypothesis such as dark matter/energy/flow without any internal motivations and explanatory power.
I am one of your supporters and I plan on studying your CTMU paper in detail. I currently have an inkling of the gist of your ideas but would like to be in a better position to offer agreement and/or or a constructive critique of the CTMU.
Newton se jactó de not forging hypotheses he could not test by data. Einstein was refining all his theories until they were in great agreement with data (see the perihelion of Mercury, for example), and he was always willing to modify his theories depending on the results of experiments. They both conviced people by the agreement of their theories with observations. They both always checked their theories, correcting them accordingly. They defended their theories with data, not with words nor insults.
They have nothing to do with Langan, as you can see.
We certainly need more Newtons and Einsteins today. Calling Langan a “Newton” or an “Einstein” will not make his theory correct.
I have particularly a great respect for intuition in physics in the generation of scientific ideas. But… I understand the role of intuition. Intuition can be right or wrong. Being so, you can not use intuition to prove a theory correct.
Mnnn, my software switched into spanish (?) for some reason. I believe it’s getting out of its mind (with me).
By “Newton se jactó de not forging hypotheses” I meant “Newton was proud of not forging hypotheses”.
Hi Chris
I would like to add that your theory, if correct, is a great starting point but it needs to be refined to the point where it can make some kind of falsifiable prediction about physical reality. For example, it would be a ground breaking achievement if the CTMU could predict Dark Matter as a consequence of some abstract concept outlined in the CTMU. Einstein, for example, derived Lorentz’s contraction equation as a consequence of his intuition that the speed of light cannot be exceeded in any reference frame. Newton derived Kepler’s orbital equations as a consequence of his intuitive realization that an orbit is simply a falling object.
Yes, you don’t need to continue. We get the point. We already know it. People do things based on other things other people did before. Nobody doubts that.
That’s not a defense for Langan’s theory. Maybe we can derive formulas describing the Pioneer’s anomaly from the negation of Langan’s theories. My intuition says me that.
What nonsense.
You are very annoying. Go away!
Chris, I think your theory could benefit if you cooperated with the Metaphysics of Quality community. Not that your theory necessarily has any flaw — there are other reasons which involve your theory gaining more acceptance. Do not take me or Tim as representatives of that community.
You are actually doing a pretty good job at arguing with these people — but you might end up with something more useful if you popped up at Lila Squad.
If you send me an e-mail address you actually use via this form, I’ll do the rest for you to get this thing going.
If you have the time, I’ll have some questions for you, too, but there’s no hurry, and I should read your entire paper first before presenting all of them. But this is not the right place for it.
You can infer anything you want from inconsistent axioms. Cantor’s definition of set leads to inconsistencies (it’s well known), as the definition assumes inconsistent axioms. Everything you infer from there is inconsistent, and you could infer anything you want.
It’s not so difficult, it’s very common knowledge, and it can be trivially shown.
At this point, Mr. Langan, where I can not take you seriously anymore (you’re just insulting people), I, as always, will let time judge.
Drop a note when you succeed, Mr. Langan, with such a great contribution to humanity.
[
I hope to discover the step 2:
Step 1) Talking nonsense and insulting people as if everyone else accepts your “theory”
Step 2) ?
Step 3) Profit!
]
“the formal well-definition of sets is unnecessary regarding sets that are directly perceived”
But we’re not talking about these sets, are we? Unless you claim that you have directly perceived the entire universe…
Mr Langan,
Could you please give us a short outline about what your theory is really about. If it is the case that we are indeed too stupid to grasp its brilliance, there is no theory that is so complex that you can’t explain what it is about. If we disregard the proofs for as while, could you help us understand
a. What exactly it concerns (the existence of something, the quality of something, the number of dimension etc?)
b. In broad outline, what are the conclusions (for example, the universe is infite in size, or there are 15 underlying dimensions or time is circular)?
c. Can CTMU make any sort of predictions that are empirically testable? Not necessarily hitherto unknown phenomena, I would be quite happy, for now, if you could help me understand how it relates to the physical reality at all, from what I’ve read I haven’t been able find any examples of this
d. If possible, can you briefly describe the methods you use for proving what you do prove? So far, we have been focusing on a part of the theory that seems to be using semantic proofs, is that the case for the entire theory or do you rely on empricial observations and/or mathematics too?
Chris:
Okay, so correct me if this is wrong. You say the universe is the biggest entity there is, and can be represented as a set of objects. But a power set P(S) is necessarily larger than (S) and therefore we’re talking about a set that is bigger than the entity we already said was the biggest entity there is.
Is this correct?
The formal definition of sets IS very much necessary. If you’re simply defining a set as a “collection of objects” then that says nothing about the logical attributes you apply to the objects themselves, which is why we run into inconsistencies in naive set theory. Any collection of objects we can perceive typically fits within set theory just fine because that’s what it models.
From your own CTMU page: “It follows that reality itself should be a set…in fact, the largest set of all. But every set, even the largest one, has a powerset which contains it, and that which contains it must be larger (a contradiction). The obvious solution: define an extension of set theory incorporating two senses of “containment” which work together in such a way that the largest set can be defined as “containing” its powerset in one sense while being contained by its powerset in the other. Thus, it topologically includes itself in the act of descriptively including itself in the act of topologically including itself…, and so on, in the course of which it obviously becomes more than just a set.”
How does this not scream “naive set theory” to you? How is the naive set from Russell’s Paradox “The set of all sets that don’t contain themselves” any less naive than “The biggest possible set and its even-larger powerset”?
You can’t make claims like these and then insist that it’s not naive set theory and then insult people for not agreeing with you. Yes, reality may contain “sets” of objects, but that doesn’t mean you now have free-reign to apply invalid axioms to those objects. If you’re defining something outside of science, then no amount of science can possibly attack it. But, then again, if what you’re talking about is outside of science, then it doesn’t have much worth here in reality. The burden is not on Mark to “disprove” you (even though he already has), but since you’re the one making the positive assertions in your theory, the burden is on you to defend it.
Of course, you have to actually defend it in a way that makes sense. If you’re using neologisms, you have to define them. If you’re using well-understood words differently, you have to redefine what you mean. My point here is that you’re committing errors/fallacies that are already well, well-understood by people who’ve studied mathematics and physics. If you mean something different, then you have to elaborate in a clear and concise way. Simply popping open a can of word soup doesn’t prove that you’re right.
If you keep going down this path of “It’s a set, but not set theory. It’s Cantor’s definition, but not naive. The universe is a set, but the powerset contradicts. The theory is scientific, and yet it’s not” — then people are going to write you off as a crackpot and move on.
Just a couple of friendly observations.
First, I don’t fully trust bare external links posted on this site. I will probably neither click on them, nor paste them directly into a browser. To put it bluntly, I’ve had too many problems with the kind of person who tends to frequent this (skeptical / materialist-physicalist / “anti-pseudoscience” / “debunking” / atheistic or anti-religious) kind of forum, especially for the purpose of criticizing me or my work in the way that we’ve seen here. Too many such people, confused but nonetheless committed to their beliefs, turn out to be more trouble than direct communication with them could ever be worth.
More generally, although I try to make reasonable exceptions, I have a hard time regarding those who share what appears to be Mark’s basic mindset as trustworthy by those who share anything resembling my own perspective. In fact, I regard them as lacking any firm basis for ethical understanding or behavior, something for which I have a sad abundance of experiential confirmation. (Of course, this is a statistical judgment which says nothing personal about Mark or anyone else.)
Secondly, it’s a small world … for some of us, at least. I’m familiar with Robert Pirsig’s work because, at one time, we shared certain acquaintances. It’s something that I’ve heard enough about and even find interesting – Robert is clearly a very bright man – but which I find a bit too nebulous to be very useful to me. On the other hand, some of his ideas make a great deal of sense as far as they go, so please don’t rush to the conclusion that I dismiss his philosophy. It’s just that comparing it to the CTMU would be like comparing a Ford Model T to the Starship Enterprise. Any associated knowledge-transfer would be pretty much one-way, from me outward. Such a transfer will probably occur one of these days, but on my own terms and in my own good time.
To the extent that anyone’s interest in my work is sincere, I very much appreciate it. But please try to remember that when you read something I’ve written about it, you’re probably reading a highly simplified version from which much of the detail has been regretfully omitted. Why has it been omitted? Because most people, even those who claim to know some mathematics, would merely be distracted by it, are possibly incapable of understanding it (as we’ve seen), and/or would take it as something to be misleadingly attacked out of context.
With all due respect, those who assume that such detail does not exist, or believe that something I’ve said about the CTMU is invalidated by something they think they know, have another think coming. Praemonitus, praemunitus.
Good day.
Mark, thanks for the forum.
Tuukka, thanks for turning me on to the CTM(?), and Chris, and for the (attempted) assist.
Chris, let me “forearm” you with Howison’s second version of his book, from 1905, which is preferable for its set of 5 appendices – and its second preface too:
http://books.google.com/books?id=dg3wkAkfKQ4C&pg=PA420&dq=the+limits+of+evolution&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
You can, of course, find any of the resources I’ve linked you to on your own, through google, which web site might be trustworthy enough for you 😉
Regarding ethics, then: if justice is to be possible, people (I am) must be free to refrain from injustice: this has been my tautological axiom.
Lastly, I think: you, Chris, turned me on to this interview by Wheeler (footnote 10 of your paper), in which he said:
“Wheeler: One of the conditions, I think, for advance in this field, as in any field, is believing that advance is possible. What I hope I’m creating is a sense of faith that it can be done. Faith is the number one element. It isn’t something that spreads itself uniformly. Faith is concentrated in a few people at particular times and places. If you can involve young people in an atmosphere of hope and faith, then I think they’ll figure out how to get the answer. Faith and hope are absolutely central to everything one does.”
So I think you should trust the link:
http://www.bigear.org/vol1no4/wheeler.htm
I take it there’s nothing else then, Chris?
Good night,
Tim
Chris,
my estimation is that your comparison of MoQ and CTMU to Ford Model T and Starship Enterprise is quite correct, but there’s one thing you didn’t account for: the awful little Ford Model T is running at slow speed, but still faster than the starship. You can e-mail me at for.mr.langan at tuukkavirtaperko dot net. See? The e-mail address is specially made for you. The little automobile will tow starship before it’s ready to achieve speed of light. If it won’t, I, Tim and maybe others at Lila squad will tow it by hand.
Tuukka, Chris, CausticDuality,
I was gonna leave it alone, but I guess I’ll just state a thing or two for the record, in case it might help. I view Pirsig’s work as a distillation of metaphysics into form that can be used by, and might be acceptable to, a wide audience. Roughly: “quality” is not something to be dismissed as derivative or illusory. It matters. Fundamentally. I can certainly go with him that far.
CausticDuality, metaphysically inclined people (read “religiously” inclined people if you prefer) are not just nuts going on about nutty things because they fell into the nutty waters of some un-nutty boat that un-nutty people are supposed to be on. One cannot but help taking a metaphysical position. Faith is required. And even God, – with whose likeness we share, – is a God OF faith — too! Anyway, you provide a quote from some Rudolf Carnap chap which you got from wikipedia: “Metaphysicians cannot avoid making their statements nonverifiable…”, but that conclusion itself… will never be “verified”! Did you notice the quote from Kant just above Carnap’s? It says, in solid part: “…otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears.” In your post of Aug 10, 2011, at 11:38 a.m. you quote Chris:
“I think no combination of determinacy and randomness can actually explain intelligence. Therefore, something more is required — a higher language, and that higher language would, by definition, be metaphysical.”
And you retort:
“I think this is just argument from ignorance. “I don’t know how the mind works, so I will invoke a metaphysical explanation” — nevermind evolution, genetics, or environmental feedback. It’s basically a God of the Gaps argument all over again.”
So, you complain that Chris is a man of faith by being yourself a person of faith! WTF?! Not to mention how terribly you mutilate decent metaphysicians (and the fully successful Howison, who thoroughly handles your concern here about mind!), or Chris, but your saying “nevermind evolution, genetics, or environmental feedback” turns – in the mind of a solid metaphysician – into “nevermind materialism, matter, or matter/materialism”! lol. You put your faith in matter (you are a faithful materialist). And not only do you do so, but you do so foolishly. Decent scientists keep a healthy skepticism about it! If you want to be a skeptic, be a skeptic. In fact, I once was myself; and I think there’s nothing wrong with it; and, more, it MIGHT be the ONLY way to get THERE. But you seem to me to be one of those false skeptics, picking and choosing. That is, you seem to be a man of faith, and like so many men of faith, you wont tolerate skepticism about yours. Skepticism about materialism makes one a nut to you, is that it? Well, real skeptics are skeptical about materialism too.
Anyway, Chris, if the name of my home institution (https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/lilasquad) makes you think we are a kindergarden; or if Tuukka’s referring to us as “the Metaphysics of Quality community” bothers you, notice that I have preempted you in comparing Pirsig’s MoQ to Ford’s Model T! From my post of April 30th, 2011, under the thread “Soul as a static pattern”, I had said:
“You know, maybe Pirsig is like Ford with his model-T. Maybe Bo 1970’s era sports car. I think there is a contemporary F1, let’s say, right about Howison.”
What would be more fun to drive, the starship enterprise or a formula-1 car? (If I had to bet I think I’d bet on the nimble and powerful earth-bound contraption!)
Anyway, Chris, while you give the appearance of being an I’dealist, I suspect you’re still thinking and talking like a materialist. And your behavior and seemingly far-superior processing capacity makes me start to fear that I will regret having offered you my pearls (Howison, the LilaSquad, etc.). Luke 22:26 (New American bible for Catholics – though I am no such “catholic”):
“Rather, let the greatest among you be as the youngest, and the leader as the servant.”
And, Chris, you said August 5:
“Such a transfer will probably occur one of these days, but on my own terms and in my own good time.”
Are you promised tomorrow? And the recipients of the “transfer”?
Tim
Please, don’t be fallacious, Tim. That’s has been too obvious demagoguery.
Faith has no relation to what CausticDuality is saying.
He is saying: The fact that Langan can not see “why a combination of determinacy and randomness can explain intelligence” does not imply “something more is required”. This is not a question of faith He is not saying “something more” can not exists. What he is saying is: the fact that you can’t explain something does not mean an arbitrary alternative belief is true. No, sorry about that. Actually, the fact that you can’t explain something means _you can not explain something_.
He’s just signaling a clear fallacy, an error in the argument.
A very known and obvious fallacy, by the way. Nothing new here.
He is not saying Langan (or you, or even CausticDuality himself) can not belief in god. Maybe CausticDuality himself actually believes intelligence is the work of god. I’m not saying he does, nor he doesn’t. I’m just saying we don’t know, because he hasn’t say anything about that. You are not understanding. So, what faith are you speaking about?
What he is saying is, despite you believing what you want to believe, that’s not an argument, sorry. If you can’t explain intelligence from determinism, sorry, you can not conclude there is something more. There could be, but you can not conclude it. No. You can only conclude in that moment _you can not explain intelligence_. If not, you could do the inverse argument: I can not see how can I explain intelligence from something more, so there must be determinism. With this two way argumentation you can clearly see how the reasoning is not valid.
So, please, believe what you want, no problem with that, but don’t be fallacious, or at least obscure a bit more the fallacious argumentations to make them less obvious.
John Fringe,
I have reread my post, very closely, looking for the slightest hint of fallaciousness; the only thing I found resembling such was when I said, assessing CausticDuality,: “You put your faith in matter (you are a faithful materialist).” – I should have added a qualifier like “My strong suspicion is that ‘you …”. John, I suspect that you are weighing me down with aspects of “faith” you pick up from others: do I deserve that? If you read my first post in this thread you will see that I point to R.P. Feynman’s assertion that one must start in the middle. For me this is the essence of “faith” (also, there is a dynamic component I term “faithe”). The goal of the metaphysician is to minimize faith! My position vis-a-viz CausticDuality is that materialism requires far more leaps than my position (Howisonian personal i’dealism).
In a post from Aug 5th under the thread “CTMU” (at the lilasquad), I briefly detailed Chris’s use of “seed” in his CTMU paper, at p.44. I too have used that analogy before. In this light my suspicion was that Chris would have been aware of Jesus’ use of that term – according to Mark, at 4:31:
“He {Jesus} said,’To what shall we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable can we use for it? It is like a mustard seed that, when it is sown in the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth. But once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade.'”
John, you say a very nice thing: “Actually, the fact that you can’t explain something means _you can not explain something_.” But, like I suggested to CausticDuality, if you want to be a solid skeptic, be a SOLID skeptic; don’t feign skepticism on one hand, and then abandon it with the other. For example: “Faith has no relation to what CausticDuality is saying.” The life of a true skeptic is hard! Rewarding in the end, hopefully, but it is filled – like you suggest – almost entirely with “I don’t know”. Few have the patience or tolerance for it, it seems.
John, I think your bias towards materialism is adversely affecting your ability to discern what other people are saying. I myself have provided evidence that I have reached the determined conclusion that faith is fundamental. Feynman says you can’t even count to 1 without faith! But what I am trying to sell is that this is not wholly destructive of our hope to KNOW. We can reach a “confirmation” of our faith which redeems the true skeptic’s implicit faith that that “know” of “I don’t know.” might be had!
Let me tear into a couple more details of your offering before I let you go. You call me fallacious, but you offer no warrant. Did you think you gave a warrant? Your second to last paragraph is nice work of a sort, John, but you sell me, Howison, and Chris way short – unfairly. (And, comically, if intelligence couldn’t be explained by determinism and randomness alone, and it couldn’t be explained with more, then…?!) In your third paragraph you say:
“He [CausticDuality] is saying: The fact that Langan can not see “why a combination of determinacy and randomness can explain intelligence” does not imply “something more is required”.”
But my point is that this is missing Chris’ position! Chris isn’t merely “not see[ing]”, but actually SEEING that determinism and randomness ARE insufficient! He is past the “I don’t know.”, John! As am I. I will again encourage you to read Howison, particularly his first essay in which he details “the limits of evolution” (and actually PROVES evolution, of a non-materialist sort, simultaneously!). The main argument rests on the fact that there are certain aspects of Mind which cannot be the result of “evolution”, but which must be prior to it, the foundation for it.
Anyway, while there still seems to be room for argument about the exact metaphysical fundament – and there does seem to be a huge gap between the CTMU and personal i’dealism – both Chris and I have fully recognized the insufficiency of materialism. While you think our moving past it “arbitrary”, we think our moves the antithesis of arbitrary! Since we aren’t perfect, we may be wrong in ultimate detail, but we have faith that we can attain to a non-arbitrary faith which can also find such a great degree of confirmation as to warrant the esteemed title “know” as well. While even skeptics hold out for such a hope, perhaps there is some other position you might take that denies it? If you are interested in abandoning metaphysics (the hope for truth) altogether, Pirsig and his “empiricism” might be for you. But even that, I argue, still amounts to a “religious” “faith”.
I hope I have cleared up any confusion. Do you still think me being fallacious and demagogic?
Tim
> “But my point is that this is missing Chris’ position! Chris isn’t merely “not see[ing]”, but actually SEEING that determinism and randomness ARE insufficient! He is past the “I don’t know.”, John!”
> “Do you still think me being fallacious and demagogic?”
Yes, I still believe you’re being fallacious. These are my arguments:
Langan said (and that was what you and CausticDuality quoted):
Langan: “I think no combination of determinacy and randomness can actually explain intelligence. Therefore, something more is required — a higher language, and that higher language would, by definition, be metaphysical.”
CausticDuality took that sentence and said something which is objective: you can not infer “something more is required” from “I think no …”. That’s a logical fallacy.
You could say “I think no…” “so I _believe_ something more is required”. But you can not infer that, and you don’t know. That’s not a matter of opinion. You can not infer from facts if you don’t know if they’re true. And all I read CausticDuality said about that was that, and that was all you cited.
If you don’t like what he is doing, abstract it:
Langan: “I believe A is true”, so “B”
A = determinancy and randomness can not explain intelligence
B = there must be something else
Even if we accept A implies B, all Langan is saying there is “I think A is true”. I hope you can see the error in the reasoning, I don’t know how to show it in even simpler terms.
Just to be sure: “a fallacy is usually incorrect argumentation in reasoning resulting in a misconception or presumption”. While you don’t prove an assertion (and it’s not an axiom) but use it in the reasoning as accepted, you’re being fallacious by definition.
Now, that fallacy has a name: God of the Gasps. It’s actually a good name, but it’s just a name. “I don’t know how A could be false, so B”. No. The correct form is “I don’t know how A can be true, so… I don’t know how A can be true”. B could be true or false, we know nothing. And CausticDuality said nowhere B is false. He simply said the reasoning is incorrect.
This is why CausticDuality’s arguments were correct.
As to tried to show CausticDuality argument to be false by recurring to non sequiturs (“So, you complain that Chris is a man of faith by being yourself a person of faith!”, CausticDuality’s materialism and all that), I’d call that a fallacy. You’re reproving CausticDuality with an incorrect argument. Don’t take it as a personal attack.
Now you give me new information, not present in the original posts.
> “but actually SEEING that determinism and randomness ARE insufficient! He is past the “I don’t know.”, John!”
We were not talking about this. Langan sentence you cited was
> “I think no combination of determinacy…”
This has no relation to the previous. You’ll understand that “seeing” is not an argument nor a proof. Can you sketch a proof for that, or it’s just a belief of you both?
John,
we are arguing over an excerpt:
Langan: “I think no combination of determinacy and randomness can actually explain intelligence. Therefore, something more is required — a higher language, and that higher language would, by definition, be metaphysical.”
I have not studied the context of this excerpt, but only trusted my reading from what I already understand of Chris. It seems to me you go off into no man’s land by misunderstanding this “I think” at the fore. Delete it and then re-read Chris’ statement if you want the sense in which I understand him. He isn’t here trying to make a proof for the position, but he is speaking dogmatically. That he will speak of his conclusions this way should not be the source of a whole THING here. Rather, I see the “I think” as akin to many such humble admissions I myself make, – and even Feynman seemed to agree, – that ALL knowledge is rooted in faith! So, I’m pretty sure that Chris is quite confident in the conclusion that follows his “I think”. If he weren’t… well, certainly if I weren’t I wouldn’t be speaking so boldly here to you, and publicly. In short, Chirs’ thinking that determinism and randomness is insufficient to account for the conscious mind is not willy nilly! It is a confirmed conclusion. At least it is for me.
I will again point you to Howison. For instance, one must have an a priori faculty for temporal relations if evolution were to be able to inform even the simplest gain for consciousness. That is, without that a priori faculty for understanding some complex temporal relation, one could not gain — from some even-theoretically-impossible state of no consciousness —- the capacity for complex temporal relation. The ability to conceive of a complex temporal relation is needed in order for that proposed evolution from nothing to such ability to be possible! If that ability were not there from the start, evolution would have no mechanism whereby to supply it. So, evolution, – that is, i’dealistic evolution, – makes steps WITHIN the potential of the metaphysical fundament. It does not make steps past that potential. Pinning one’s hope for evolution on “randomness” is insufficient to leap the bounds of “possible”. I think. 🙂
The one (and only) i’dea, again, is “I am”. Working together we can explore the infinite potential that is open to us, plurally, WITHIN IT. Which potential is, so to say, “from the foundation”. That is, evolution isn’t about adding potential, but enjoying the more fulfilling aspects of THE potential when more and more (fundamentally similar) i’deas can / must find their lives and decisions amongst his neighbors. If we do so harmoniously, we can see beauties that are impossible for a smaller society. If we do so ugly-harmoniously, those “beauties” will be hideous and terrible. Skepticism is nice; but the finite and temporal aspects of our nature only tolerates it so far. Choose; choose; choose. “But I don’t know.” Choose something; choose something; choose something.
Does this help?
Tim
> “misunderstanding this “I think” at the fore. Delete it and then re-read Chris’ statement if you want the sense in which I understand him. ”
Sorry, nor CausticDuality (I believe) nor me are arguing about your understanding, but on what Langan said. If I erase this, put that, change those… then I can interpret what I want, too. But how can you know what I’m speaking about them?
Please, don’t judge others comments on others comments by what you understand, but by what they actually say. That’s a fallacy, too. It’s called straw man.
> “and even Feynman seemed to agree”
Not, sorry. His lectures on physics have some previous chapters telling you you always have to check your conclusions to know if your hypotheses are correct.
Feynman says you have to make same assumptions, but he does not say you have to forget they are assumptions. No, he says you have to remember they are assumptions, and you have to be prepare to drop them if you’ve got contradictions. There is no faith here. There are concious assumptions, you don’t need to believe they are true by faith. Feyman says it: you can believe they are true by testing them, but there is not faith. If at any time observations does not coincide with them, you happily discard them.
His lectures are long. I recomend you to read them all.
> “I’m pretty sure that Chris is quite confident in the conclusion that follows his “I think””
I never doubted he believes that. I believe he believes that, Which means nothing.
> “Chirs’ thinking that determinism and randomness is insufficient to account for the conscious mind is not willy nilly! It is a confirmed conclusion. At least it is for me.
Yes, it’s a confirmed conclusion that he is thinking that. Which means nothing about determinisn being sufficient.
Me believing A is true does not make true.
Can you sketch a proof? I mean, we’re writing here thousands of words for nothing. If you can sketch a proof, do it, please. Then we could discuss something.
Because arguing about what Langan sentences means if you erase that and put this, or if he believes what he says is not very productive. Let’s talk about content, please, if there is any. Write it here, We’re already writing a lot.
The rest is pretty non sequitur. I recomend you to write in smaller steps we can actually follow and discuss. Obfuscation is not an argument.
By non sequitur I mean this:
> 2one must have an a priori faculty for temporal relations if evolution were to be able to inform even the simplest gain for consciousness2
Why?
> “without that a priori faculty for understanding some complex temporal relation, one could not gain the capacity for complex temporal relation”
Why?
> “The ability to conceive of a complex temporal relation is needed in order for that proposed evolution from nothing to such ability to be possible! ”
Why?
> “If that ability were not there from the start, evolution would have no mechanism whereby to supply it.”
Why?
> “So, evolution, – that is, i’dealistic evolution, – makes steps WITHIN the potential of the metaphysical fundament.”
That so implies the previous ones are true. You didn’t explain them, just asserted then several times. Repeating does not make proofs.
And so on.
John,
I have become quite busy. Perhaps it was foolish of me to start this conversation knowing that I was to become so busy; but I thought it might get taken care of real quick. Seems never to happen.
If you want to blow up over Langan’s words “I think”, I won’t try to stop you anymore. Chris isn’t a computer. And, don’t you think 2+2=4. If you said “I think that 2+2= 4, so…”, do you want me to apply your logic just the same?
Regarding my argument for a priori consciousness, if you are serious you will suggest some “why not?”. I have put myself out there, and it is the easiest thing in the world to refuse to consider it, but retort “why? Why? Why?” If you offer your “why not!” I can almost assure you that I will not be so childish towards you.
Again, if I weren’t so busy, perhaps I would play with you anyway. In a month I will be un-busy. This gives you time to read Howison.
Tim
Tim, if you say “I think that 2+2=4”, you can use my logic: nobody will think that is a proof for 2+2=4. And most people will think that because, in fact, it is not a proof that 2+2=4.
Actually, if I say “I think 435*4=1740”, most listeners would understand that I believe that, but I’m not quite sure.
But don’t worry, we don’t need to continue with that. We all understood. CausticDuality commented on what Langan said, and his comments apply to Langan’s comments. And you negated what CausticDuality said assuming Langan said another thing. No need to continue with that. It’s not so important.
About the “why”, are you serious? I mean, are you proposing “why not” as a proof of your assertions?
So this is the situation. I abstract it a bit, if you don’t mind.
You assert A. I ask you why do you assert A, I mean, why do you believe A is true or expect me to accept A to be true. Is not that a valid question? Must people simply accept your free assertions? Is asking why do you assert a non-evident thing childish? Are you the pope, and believe anything you say is automatically true? I hope not, so I hope asking why do you assume a non-evident assertion to be true to be a valid question. A serious question.
So you asserted A and I asked for a proof, evidence, or some kind of explanation.
And you answer (I’m childish and) “why not”.
Is “why not A” a proof for A?
Are you serious? Because I have seen bad reasoning, but this is ridiculous. Don’t be offended. You don’t know logic, that’s all. But the result is ridiculous.
“Why not A” proves A. Cool. Can I do the same? Can I assert arbitrary things, and if you don’t know why not, then should you automatically accept the assertion?
Let’s try. God drives a red Ferrari. This is a free assertion I make. If you don’t believe it, and ask me why do I say that or why is that so, I’ll ask you “why not”. Done. So we should accept God drives a red Ferrari.
And is ME who is childish? Your argumentation is just plain… I don’t want to offend you, but yes, it’s ridiculous. “Why not”. OMG. A is true because “why not A”. XD
I hope you are busy this month learning logic.
John,
You said:
“About the “why”, are you serious? I mean, are you proposing “why not” as a proof of your assertions?”
Of course not. I’m asking you to offer something to show me, a) that you have actually considered what I said, and that you are worth my efforts, and b) so that I can know where you are having problems, that I might direct my efforts to your specific hang up. Howison wrote a whole book, I’m not about to write a whole book here for you. Let me give you another quick analogy: it impossible to store 10 bits of information in one bit of storage medium. Here is where you ask “why?”. What do you expect of me? There is no end to the depths of that childish game. If you are not playing a game, I’m sorry. But then why the attitude and air of superiority?
John, the ability to be consciously aware of, and to interrelate various pieces of information is non trivial. There has never been (to my knowledge) any proposal as to how evolution could provide such a non-trivial capacity from a trivial base. Are you aware of one? Magic, spontaneous generation, etc. Every proposition has been a leap of faith of a GREATER magnitude than the one I, Howison, or Kant offer. I am only here trying to give you a strong sampling, but I’ve linked you to Howison, so if you want more, go to him. I’ve never pretended that what I offer amounts to proof. In fact, I’ve exoterically offered you the exact opposite. Proof is impossible. Are you gonna ask why? Faith is the root of all knowledge. Are you gonna ask why? You’ll end up having to live in accord with one or the other horn of this dilemma. Are you gonna ask why? Some degree of consciousness is either a priori or it’s all a posteriori. Neither camp has a proof. But the a priori camp is far more reasonable and powerful. Look for yourself.
John, you asked:
“Are you the pope, and believe anything you say is automatically true?”
Why do you believe “true” is a meaningful word? There are plenty of people who don’t! Do you have a proof?
I had said:
“If that ability [to conceive of a complex temporal relation] were not there from the start, evolution would have no mechanism whereby to supply it.”
The alternative to this a priori existence, what alternatives do you see? Have you considered this? CausticDuality had offered evolution, genetics, and environmental feedback. But if there is no ability to hold together complex temporal relations, none of those terms can make sense, because they are all predicated on that capacity! “feedback” implies some complex awareness. If you are unwilling to consider this on your own, I don’t know what I can do for you. Rock and dirt and pools of water aren’t in the habit of giving us any evidence that they spontaneously generate complex self-awareness. A rock (seemingly) does not have the a priori conscious I am talking about, and so we can rely on it to never spontaneously develop it.
Now, to end, I can kill two birds with one stone. Another philosopher I have come across recently, and whom I like pretty well, has handled “interpretation” impressively. His name is Josiah Royce, and the book I point you to is “the problem of Christianity”. This starts to get to Langan’s CTMU (and, actually, his use of “interpretation” was taken somewhat from Pierce). The point is that information isn’t even information per se unless it is information in an interpretative relation. And an interpretative relation is inherently complex! Again, John, the people I know who deny “truth” outright do so as empiricists, or “radical empiricists”. That is, they don’t deny “interpretation” outright, since its existence is available to their experience. If you have a problem with my attempt, I will think you a child unless you can start to offer some challenge. You can rant all you want about formal logic and proofs, but that just is not what this problem is about (can you give me a proof that 1 is a meaningful proposition? Or that “=” is a meaningful statement?). The capacity for interpretation is either a priori (much like Langan’s self-configuring self-processing language), or else you have to come up with another explanation. There aren’t many options, and science hasn’t even attempted to offer one (as far as I know). So my “why not?”, while obviously no proof of your “why?” – and it’s real silly and ungrateful of you to try to pin that on me – IS, effectively, proof of your limitation: if you had the answer to “why not?” in the barrel of your gun I’m sure you’d a fired it.
That other bird I promised? Your similarly silly attempt to say your “interpretation” of Chris’ words, – as against mine, – is papal perfection!
Tim
> If you have a problem with my attempt, I will think you a child unless you can start to offer some challenge.
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a child playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” – Isaac Newton
Feel free to consider me a child. Children are curious and ready to learn.
> “I’m asking you to offer something to show me, a) that you have actually considered what I said, and that you are worth my efforts”
Ah, good. A retractation. So you’re silly (can I also use this word? maybe stupid?) childish reasoning was your why of testing if I’m worth your efforts. That has a side effect: when you reasong in a fallacious silly way, you’re proving you’re not worth mine. Fortunately for dialogue, I’m not so prepotent as to be checking people validity. And you check that by making silly and fallacious reasonings.
(By the way, I’m surprised how people who says fantastic assertions (like you) which are generally considered false (there is a proof that god exists, it has been proven that intelligence requires “something more”, and all that) speaks like they are authority, like the can go there checking if people are worth “their efforts”.
Let me tell you the hard truth: you’re not a well repected philosopher. If nothing changes, nobody will take seriously your thoughs. Be happy discarding people. Think about ten years from now: maybe you discover nobody is worth your effort. The rest of the World call that self-delusion).
> “Are you gonna ask why?”
Yes, I’m gonna ask why to any free assertion you make which is not evident and is the base of your reasoning, instead of blindly accepting it.
I see you’re not used to people thinking about your words, instead of just accepting them.
Questions bother you? Are questions childish? Let them be.
What are we arguing them, if I can not question your free assertions?
If you are just going to be offended for me not to take your free assertions as truth, please, say so. You’ll discover not much people will be interested in talking to you. But that will not make your free assertions true.
Again, are you serious?
> There has never been (to my knowledge) any proposal as to how evolution could provide such a non-trivial capacity from a trivial base. Are you aware of one?
> “The alternative to this a priori existence, what alternatives do you see?”
OMG, you didn’t understood what God of the Gasps is, did you? Please, be worth anyone effort and think for five minutes. You can’t be so busy not to stop and think a little. If we have already signaled the fallacy you’re commiting by trying to prove something by not knowing how the opposite can be, why do you try it again?
Let me tell you something. Not knowing how A could not be true does not mean A is true. It does not mean A is false. You seem to be assuming (straw man, I also signaled the fallacy) that I’m saying A is not true when I ask why is A true. I’m just asking for an explanation. I don’t know if A is true or false. Me not knowing if A is true or false and wanting to know why do you assume A is true does not mean A is true.
It’s very clear that you are just making free assertions.
Now, the question: are you seriously taking for an argument the fact that I can not think of alternatives? This one is as stupid as trying to prove something by asking why not. Are you seriously trying to prove A by saying I can’t think of a way A is not true? Or is this another of your “test of worthness”?
I’m starting to believe the majority of your words end being just tests of worthness for your interlocutor.
Again, you show you don’t know how to reason. We’re busy too. As an advise, forget for a moment all your books on complex metaphysics that proves the existence of “something more” by writing on a paper. Instead, get a book on basic reasoning. Read it. Come back when you understand what reasoning is about. You’ll see how people can talk to you.
> “So my “why not?”, while obviously no proof of your “why?” – and it’s real silly and ungrateful of you to try to pin that on me – IS, effectively, proof of your limitation: if you had the answer to “why not?” in the barrel of your gun I’m sure you’d a fired it.”
Again and again, the same fallacy. Let me use capitals, to be able to refer to this sentence later:
NO, I CAN’T ANSWER WHY NOT. IN FACT, I HAVE NOT SAID I THINK THE SENTENCE IS FALSE, NOR TRUE.
THE FACT THAT I CAN NOT ANSWER WHY NOT DOES NOT MEAN IT’S TRUE.
THIS IS CALLED FALLACY OF THE GOD OF THE GASPS.
I hope it’s clear this time.
I’m not trying to pin you anywhere. There is no conspirations. Don’t hallicinate, please.
When you make an assertion and I ask “why”, have you considered the possibility I’m asking why because I want to know “why are you asserting that”? Have you?
Call me silly, childish, ungrateful or what you want. But if you make a free assertion and all you can say to justify it is “logic is not the only thing, and you can not prove the opposite”, not much poeple is going to take you seriously. Because I could assert the opposite and prove it the same way.
If there is a non fallacious answer to “why” in your barrel, I’m sure you’d fired it. (This is getting so easy).
> There aren’t many options, and science hasn’t even attempted to offer one (as far as I know)
And? This does not mean any alternative explanation is true. You understand that, do you? (Refer to the God of the Gasps fallacy).
> You can rant all you want about formal logic and proofs
Yes, it seems so. I can rant all I want. You’re providing the neccesary evidency :p
> “Your similarly silly attempt to say your “interpretation” of Chris’ words”
Great, my interpretation of not ignoring what Langan said and substituting it by anything else (which was my interpretation despite CausticDuality saying it) is silly. And your refutation of CausticDuality’s word about what Langan actually said based on what Langan would have said if you remove half his comment makes CausticDuality a person of faith. Good. And everyone saying the opposite is childih and silly. And you’re genious. Do we need to continue this forever?
> “The capacity for interpretation is either a priori (much like Langan’s self-configuring self-processing language), or else you have to come up with another explanation.”
OMG. So assertions are true until someone finds an alternative explanation. God of the Gasps, by the book.
All your arguments are based on the God of the Gasp fallacy?
At least, you could diversify them. There are a lot of fallacies, you know.
XD XD XD
> “You can rant all you want about formal logic and proofs, but that just is not what this problem is about”
One last thing, for me to understand. You don’t like logic, and you don’t like empirism. Is that so?
(Until now, all you have provided to assert things is the fallacy of the God of the Gasps).
Let give you another opportunity. Let’s see, sentence by sentence.
> “John, the ability to be consciously aware of, and to interrelate various pieces of information is non trivial.”
It may not be trivial. I don’t know exactly what do you mean by that, but well, I accept that.
> “There has never been (to my knowledge) any proposal as to how evolution could provide such a non-trivial capacity from a trivial base. Are you aware of one?”
Yes, there has been. By variation and natural selection. But the exact path is not known, so it’s currently just an hypothesis. There has not been proven it can’t, so we don’t know.
> “Magic, spontaneous generation, etc. Every proposition has been a leap of faith of a GREATER magnitude than the one I, Howison, or Kant offer.”
That’s subjetive. You’re proposing no mechanism. You’re saying “it’s a priori”. That’s no explanation for intelligence. Actually, it’s a God of the Gasps, and an homunculus.
Let’s say we don’t know how life began. As we don’t know, someone says “life on Earth came from outside space”. That’s no explanation of how life began. That’s an unrelated hypothesis which is not proven by the fact that you don’t know how life began.
Similarly, the fact that we can’t precisely explain how evolution generated conciousness and has no proof evolution can explain conciousness does not mean conciousness was generated by evolution. It actually means we don’t know. And of course it doesn’t mean an alternative explanation of which you have no proofs is true.
You saying you believe it’s a greater leap of faith is subjective and fallacious. Even if it were, it would mean nothing, and it would not be a point.
Believe me, most people would believe Quantum Mechanics to be a leap of faith of a GREATER magnitude than Classical Mechanics. And yet Quantum Mechanics works a lot better. So here you’ve got: God of the Gasps would take you nowhere.
All that forgetting the fact that saying “it’s a priori” does not explain conciousness’ origin. It just delays the response, but it’s not even an alternative explanation.
> “I am only here trying to give you a strong sampling, but I’ve linked you to Howison, so if you want more, go to him. I’ve never pretended that what I offer amounts to proof.”
Yes, but at least you could be giving me interesting arguments that makes one doubt. You’re just giving me God of the Gasps in various forms. It’s not going to work. Reread the previous posts.
Your only argument so far has been “I believe this is so”.
Just to be clear: I don’t mind at all what you believe. In fact, I have no problem with anything you want to believe. But don’t pretend you have anything more that beliefs (and, of course, God of the Gasps). The rest of us try to verify our hypotheses. Which is good.
> “In fact, I’ve exoterically offered you the exact opposite. Proof is impossible.”
But if you offer nothing, why should I take your assertions seriously? I could defend the opposite with the same argument (God of the Gasps, and I believe the leap of faith to be smaller). Are you accepting the only think you’re making is free assertions?
> “Are you gonna ask why?”
Yes, I’m gonna ask why to any unjustified assertion which I can not agree to be true (nor disagree, by the why). That’s how conversations flow. You should talk with more people. If possible, people with curiosity.
Any problem with people who ask?
> “Faith is the root of all knowledge.”
Ha ha ha ha. Then someone can have faith in exactly the opposite of your beliefs. Have I refuted your assertions?
Yes, as wikipedia said, in fields with no connection to reality nor logic, beliefs are the only root of knowledge. But then you have to accept people with the opposite beliefs. Because there are no arguments.
And if you think so, that knowledge is only a question of belief, please, don’t try to fool people into thinking you’re argumentating, please. Don’t try to say you’re doing something more than telling your beliefs. Say “I believe that, by faith”.
I’m not saying scientists do not make assumptions in their theories. But that’s why they verify and check their theories against reality, and that’s why they all know non-testable theories means nothing. (And their evidence is a lot stronger than yours, by the way). If you just have untestable beliefs, what are you doing arguing with people?
Don’t fool yourself, neither. All you have are untestable beliefs. And other people can have the opposite beliefs, and be in exactly the same position as yours: (Well, maybe they know how to reason without fallacies, at least when people tell then their fallacies).
> “Are you gonna ask why?”
See the previous answer.
> “You’ll end up having to live in accord with one or the other horn of this dilemma.”
This is plainly false. I can accept when I do not know nothing. I don’t need to take a position on believing A to be true or believing A to be false. I can live knowing I (still) don’t know if something is true.
Congratulations! You have commited here a new fallacy! It’s called “false dilemma”. I’m very proud of you knowing another fallacy.
> “Are you gonna ask why?”
See previous answer. In fact, I’m not going, because it’s clearly false.
> “Some degree of consciousness is either a priori or it’s all a posteriori.”
This is a belief of yours, as we saw. You don’t know if it’s true, but you believe it is. That means nothing.
> “Neither camp has a proof.”
The camp of “we don’t know things we don’t know” does not need a proof, don’t you think?
Some people (hey, like me!) are humble and accept we don’t know all, at least for the moment 🙂
We don’t need to go there trying to convince people our beliefs are true when we don’t know.
Without evidence.
Without our beliefs to be more reasonable than their negations.
> “But the a priori camp is far more reasonable and powerful.”
No, it isn’t. You believe it is. But of course, you believe what you believe is more reasonable, and you believe you’re right. Because hey, it’s you who said it! And because all of your fallacies. But please, don’t fool people or yourself.
At most, this is an argument by repetition.
> “Look for yourself.”
I’m looking, and all I see are fallacies and vapor.
Pretty poor, if you want my opinion. All your group “argue” in the same way?
John,
I’m taking a quick break from my “work”. I want you to know that I read all that you wrote to me. I also kinda want to thank you for putting “frustration” in context. You see, while your continued refusal to read what I write is frustrating, what I’m having to work on is really FRUSTRATING. So it’s kinda nice to be able to write to you while I have a bite to eat.
You don’t care for metaphysics, right? While it would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to drop our “conversation” with what all you just wrote, I’d still like to try to help. You want proofs. I tell you I don’t have them. Now, despite the fact that you like to put on airs, claiming that it is you who is the one comfortable admitting you don’t know, your desire betrays you. Does it not? Not only do you place your faith in an unknown truth, which most all of us do, but you go the step further into a faith that you can lock up the unknown, one day, if you just adhere to logic strong enough. You believe that logic will be able to fill in every gap, eventually. Now, you may try to tell me that “I don’t know.” But let me show you where I think reason shows its superiority over logic. As you live. Living is about a sort of humility before the unknown, before the future. Scientists don’t conduct experiments because they have proof of the outcome. Men don’t soar to the moon based an proof that they will safely return. Metaphysics is, in part, about supplying the REASON needed to make choices. Not that your desire for proof is evil, but if you held out for those standards you would not live. As you live, you are a hypocrite. So it seems.
The thing that gets me is your lack of interest in the ocean before you, young Isaac. You claim to be a curious child, but what happened to your curiosity? Your only interest is to try to demonstrate how stupid metaphysics is. That what metaphysicians offer as “argument” is not fulfilling as proof, but only assertion. Bravo! I admitted that from the start, though. You have talked about “assumptions”, John. Are you keeping track? How many assumptions are there in your modal of reality? Or do you not have a modal? But how do you make decisions? You are quick to try to tear me down (as if that were possible), but you are even quicker to refuse to present anything substantive, saying “I’m comfortable with ‘I don’t know.’” But are you just putting on a brave face? Aren’t you just hiding all your assumptions, thinking that if you refuse to speak them they aren’t real – or at least that no one will see them? How do you make decision, John?
Now, to be sure, tearing things down, and admitting “I don’t know.” are great things. How far do they go though? If you keep it up, and if you do it well (this is where I have my doubts), you will eventually find out. Good luck. But the flip side of that is a sort of “building up”. When you have “broken” every thing you can break, and reality is still there, unphased, you start to want to have a try at some “positive” explanation. Metaphysics. Religion. Reason. Same thing.
John, these waters are scary, no doubt. And the curious order is that the most violence is near to the shore, where fierce waves might be breaking. Perhaps you, young Isaac, will be content on the shore, with the stones and the shells, but if you should ever want to take a swim… By the way, you have said some mean-spirited thing about my squad. If you have read much you know that I am very much the outcast of “my” squad, that I disagree with my squad almost everwhere (I’m there trying to convert them to Howison), but the one great thing they all have going for them is that they realize the need to look to metaphysics (in fact, they themselves are outcasts of the greater MoQ community for just that reason). Perhaps you should try reading Pirsig’s “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance”! It might help you see the limitations of what we call SOM, subject-object metaphysics.
John, if ever you should venture into the ocean, to try to build a positive picture for yourself, to try to find some reason in which to anchor your decisions… Again, how do you make the decisions of your life? Do you have prior proof that they are the best? I don’t get where you’re coming from. Well… anyway, when I tell you that my metaphysics is more powerful, I am telling you of my experience. But not only that, it is coupled with an objective fact which you do not believe. When I said that my leap of faith was lesser than yours, I was not speaking subjectively, as you suppose. It is an objectively measurable thing! How many assumptions go into your modal of reality? Do you even have a modal? John, I have but one (complex) assumption: I am. And I am affirming to you, now, that with reasoned logic it IS possible to understand the requirements of that I’dea. And, from that anchor, it is possible to see how all reality falls into place! Again, this is no such proof as you hope for. It is faith. But it is the tiniest seed of faith! Doubt creeps in from time to time, but any and every alternative faith pales in comparison. This I call “confirmation”. Not proof. But the vanishing of the “I don’t knows.” does lead one to conclude, effectively, “I know.” I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have such testimony. Of course there is still that lingering, and great, fear for my life! Yikes!!! But that’s the nature of faith. But you have to explore the ocean for yourself before you can have such confident and confirmed faith.
It is very world-turning, revolutionary, to put this I’dea at the foundation of reality: I am. So I can’t blame you for not-seeing the picture I am painting. But I wonder why no one (no one!) seems to care to try. Not even my squad will try. Everything falls out. At least it seems to. All physics …! And, John, I wonder why you’d wait for the physicists to try to bring you some proof before you’ll try to answer the question “am I?” on your own? That’s what the dilemma you called a false dilemma boils down to. If I flubbed it up too much so as to be unrecognizable before, I’m sorry. “To be, or not to be?”
You can continue hating now if you want,
Tim
> “You want proofs.”
Not exactly.
I don’t want proofs. I only take for true what it is proven. That’s different. I mean, if I have a proof, then I know something. If I don’t have a proof, I don’t know something. Got it?
Now, you’re making an assertion. I want a proof for your assertion, or at least some kind of evidence to consider it. If you don’t make the assertion, I don’t want a proof.
So I want proofs where there are suspicious free assertions.
And if we’re arguing about something we’re not agreeing, I want some kind of argument, of proof, or something. If not, what are we doing?
> “but you go the step further into a faith that you can lock up the unknown, one day, if you just adhere to logic strong enough. You believe that logic will be able to fill in every gap, eventually”
Nope, fallacy here. You’re just inventing what I’m thinking. I don’t think so. I don’t believe logic will be able to fill every gap. You’re assuming I’m thinki9ng something I don’t think, and then you’re arguing with that, instead of what arguing my arguments. Because doing that is easier. As you are making up my arguments, you can easily make up an easy to argue ones. Do I need to give you the name of this fallacy?
Let me be clear: I DON’T BELIEVE LOGIC WILL BE ABLE TO FILL ANY GAP.
Clear enough? As clear as your fallacy.
I believe the root of your making up dialogue are these sentences of mine:
“Some people (hey, like me!) are humble and accept we don’t know all, at least for the moment :)”
“I can live knowing I (still) don’t know if something is true.”
Let me explain what I mean by that. When I say I can admit when I still don’t now something, I’m not saying I believe I will know. Not. I mean I can be concious of not knowing something in a particular moment of time, despite the fact that maybe I can know it in the future. But, as you can see rereading and rereading my sentences, I’m not saying I will know. Because I don’t really know if I will now them. I’m just saying I still don’t know it. I don’t know it now. I don’t know if I will know it in the future.
Please, dont’ make up my beliefs, please. That’s cheating. Or, as some call it, reason with fallacies. I’m tired of signaling your fallacies. By the way, this is nothing personal: you’re argumentation is fallacius. Not because I’m saying that. Making up the opponent thought and arguing that is objectively fallacius.
This is called straw man: misrepresenting your opponent’s position.
> “Men don’t soar to the moon based an proof that they will safely return.”
Sorry, you missed me here. I don’t have a clue what you’re speaking about.
> “Not that your desire for proof is evil, but if you held out for those standards you would not live. As you live, you are a hypocrite. So it seems.”
Sorry for me being childish agai… I mean, for wanting to know why you make that free assertion. If I live with my standards, I will not live. And as I live, I’m a hypocrite. Why?
XD XD XD
You’ve lost your mind here, don’t you. I mean, I argumented your last post. What does all this mean. Let’s see.
Hypocrite:
1) a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion
2) a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings
Mnnn, I can assure you I don’t try to appear virtuous or religious. So 1) does not apply.
I don’t act contrary to my beliefs. Yes, I act contrary to the beliefs you make up I have, but… do I need to address again I don’t have the beliefs you are assigning me?
What do you mean by hypocrite? What are you speaking about?
What does it mean “I will not live”? I fact, I’m pretty sure I’m living right now. To my knowledge, dead people can’t write on a keyboard.
Do you mean enjoy life? I very much enjoy my life. Sometimes. Sometimes I’m sad.
What does it mean “I will not live”? If it simply mean you don’t like my life, well, you should express yourself better. But I’m not specially worried you don’t like my way of life. Really. If you’ve got any suggestion on how could I improve my life, I will consider it. Believing I know what I really don’t know I already considered, and it will not improve my life. By my standards, of course.
But again, I don’t have any clue what are you speaking here. I could say the same about you. So the argument does not seem to be linked to reality.
“You will not live if living by your standards”. It’s poetry?
> “The thing that gets me is your lack of interest in the ocean before you”
Ah, the same fallacy again. This is plainly false: I’m really interested in the ocean before me. I spend my time studying it.
But I’m not of the “get rich fast” phylosophy. I mean, you’re just asserting things and then you forget you have just made them up and then you believe you know something about the World. Look, only in these two paragraph you have just made up than I believe logic will give me every answer, and that I feel no curiosity. This is the way you fill your curiosity.
No. I have a strong curiosity. I just fill them studying the World, learning things instead of making the answers up.
So, false. So fallacious, again. You’re assigning me made up feelings here.
Straw man again.
> “Your only interest is to try to demonstrate how stupid metaphysics is.”
This is false. You’re mading up my interests, too.
I’m not specially interested in proving you the opposite, but if you want to believe me, I have a lot of other interests. You simply made up this. You have a tendency to invent factsm haven’t you?
The same fallacious, again.
Even in this conversation (which does not represent an important part of my life), I’m proving nothing about metaphysics. In fact, as you can see, I’m not talking about metaphysics. You’re just making up I’m agains metaphysics to make me appear as an enemy of something I’m not. Here I’m arguing about your free assertions, and about people who just offer his beliefs as facts but don’t accept people who belief the opposite is in the same position. I’m not speaking of metaphysics, as you can see.
You have not understand what I’m saying. I’m saying this: you say A, I say why, you don’t offer any proof except for you believing A and some fallacies, I say then you don’t know, you just believe A to be true, and signal your fallacies. Then you say I will not life and so on and I want to demostrate how stupid metaphysics is.
As you can see, I can abstract A (what we’re speaking about) and my objections still have sense. So I’m not arguing aboput metaphysics.
This one is straw man by the book. All your posts have a dominant fallacy. Are they thematic?
I’m pretty surprised you’re not addressing any argument.
One last time: I’m saying if you believe A and has no proofs, then you’re in the same position people believing not A. And I, who have no proof for A nor not A, admit I don’t know.
The only thing you offered trying not to be a belief is: the gap of faith is greater in the those who belief A to be false. I already addressed that: that’s subjective, and there has being a lot of situations where this have being the case in history, and it resulted the most explanation with the “greater gap of faith” was the correct. See “homunculus” versus “development”. See “quantum mechanics” versus “classical mechanics”. See what you want. I’m not saying the most “incredible” explanation to be correct. I’m just saying the amount of “faith” you (particularly you) requires to believe a theory does have not relation to the correction of the theory.
I also said “it’s a priori” is not even an alternative explanation for “the origin of intelligence” if what you’re criticisim is “I don’t see how evolution generated intelligence, because intelligence is so complex”. Intelligence is so complex for “a priori”, too. Because nobody understand how “a priori” can generate intelligence, neither.
I also explained you all my fallacies, which you can see yourself.
As you can see, my interests (in this conversation, not in life) are talking and communicating and reasoning. I’m listening, despite what you can think.
> “How many assumptions are there in your modal of reality? Or do you not have a modal? But how do you make decisions?”
I make lots of assumptions. The difference is I know they are just assumptions. For example, just remember you previously said:
> “In short, Chirs’ thinking that determinism and randomness is insufficient to account for the conscious mind is not willy nilly! It is a confirmed conclusion. At least it is for me.”
You don’t give any proof, any evidence, anything that makes you think so (except the fallacious “gap of faith” argument”), yet you call it “a confirmed conclusion”. Do you know what confirmed means? Conclusion?
I make assumuptions, but being just that I would never say “it is a confirmed conclusion”. Why would I? To fool people into thinking it’s a conclusion? It is not, of course. To appear cool and intellectual? To found a foundation from which I can live? I don’t know why I should do. I prefer to be honest and admit it’s just that, an assumption. If I ever see something that contradicts it, I’ll reevaluate everything that depend on it (to my ability, of course). What I will not do is to say “it’s a confirmed conclusion”.
Of course, most of the assumptions I make are being evaluated continuously. And I would never make an assumption I could not check in any way. Because, if I can not check it, why would I need to make it? That does not mean you should do the minimum amount of assumptions. Do as many as you want. But please, don’t forget they’re assumptions, and don’t fool people.
I make decisions with the information I have. Sometimes I play the lottery, and I have to choose a number. But I never had the temptation to believe I have a good reason to choose a particular number. As silly as that.
I don’t know how all this is related to your free assertions. Are YOU keeping track?
> “You are quick to try to tear me down (as if that were possible)”
I’m not interested in tear you down, neither. Just your arguments. It’s pretty possible.
I don’t hate you 🙂
Victimism is not an argument. Where are they?
> “but you are even quicker to refuse to present anything substantive”
Are YOU on track?
> “saying “I’m comfortable with “I don’t know.””
I may be confortable without knowing, or not. That will not change the fact that I don’t know.
Actually, I’m not confortable, and that’s why I look for answers. That’s the reason I research and think and test. I enjoy studying. I enjoy learning from nature.
I have the impression you’re not confortable without knowing, just like me. The difference is: I study, research and test, and you seem to accept “beliefs” as a substitute for knowledge.
Believe me, your beliefs are not knowledge. Maybe a placebo. Me admiting my ignorance is honest. Freely asserting things is useless.
What the hell is the relation between me being confortable with not knowing all and the things you say having any sense?
> “Aren’t you just hiding all your assumptions”
No. That one has been easy.
> “thinking that if you refuse to speak them they aren’t real”
No. This one too.
This does not change you believing something will not make it real.
> “or at least that no one will see them?”
No. Are you speaking of anything in particular? Throwing doubts to the air is easy to answer (in this case, no), but, has it any point? Do you want to say something?
I make lots of assumptions. I don’t hide them. I don’t confuse my assumptions for reality. I don’t believe my assumptions to be stronger where there a no evidence. I would never call “a confirmed conclusion” to an unjustified belief. I will never defend my beliefs with fallacies, and if I do, I’ll be happy to rectify.
But again, are you speaking of anything in particular? Are you defending your beliefs as reality by making unrelated questions about my thoughs and making up facts about my own beliefs?
> “How do you make decision, John?”
By taking all the information I have, making the minimum number of assumptions I have, not forgetting they’re assumptions, not fooling people my assumptions are better than theirs if they’re not, not defending them with fallacies, and not calling my assumptions “confirmed conclusions”.
> “Now, to be sure, tearing things down, and admitting “I don’t know.” are great things. How far do they go though? If you keep it up, and if you do it well (this is where I have my doubts), you will eventually find out. Good luck. But the flip side of that is a sort of “building up”.
I’m pretty sure I’ll see how far you will go by making up facts and taking beliefs as “confirmed conclusions”. Hey! We could compare in the future! Hey, wait. We can compare know. We can compare, for example, science with Greek’s philosophy. Greeks could not even catch a turtle!
> “When you have “broken” every thing you can break, and reality is still there, unphased, you start to want to have a try at some “positive” explanation.”
When I can not explain anything more, I’ll try a bit more. With any luck, there will always be reality to surprise me. It will always be hard work. But it’s fun.
I admit: just making up reality is a lot easier. When you have invented all you want, there will be probably unknown reality in front of you, too. Be happy with your “get rich fast” approach. Placebo can be good, if you’re happy. But don’t fool the rest of people.
It surprise me a lot how freely asserting things is better than admiting we still don’t know something. Again, I’m not saying we will know it for sure. But if we make up facts, we still won’t know. In fact, by admiting what we don’t know we can research it.
Understand me. I have no problem with you desisting research and verification and making up facts and taking beliefs as confirmed conclusions. I just want to be sure you know what you’re doing, and over all I don’t want people to be confused.
> “Perhaps you, young Isaac, will be content on the shore, with the stones and the shells…”
Blah, blah, blah. Very beautiful. The problem here is: I understand swimming as researching, which requires for you to know what you don’t know. And you’re just taking beliefs as confirmed conclusions.
Very beautiful metaphore, but all this are not arguments. I could apply them to you. “If you wanted to know, you’ll just …”. Do be demagogue.
> “By the way, you have said some mean-spirited thing about my squad.”.
No, I don’t and you know. I just asked:
“All your group “argue” in the same way?”
Now, two things. If that’s bad speaking about your group, are you admiting your reasoning was bad? Second, I admit the question seems loaded, but I actually wanted to know if your squad is one of those places where everyone thinks aside, because all your arguments were fallacious and you’re surprised when one asks “why do you say that?”. Because I recommend you to argue with curious honest people.
Look this last post, for example. You provide make up opinions of mine (not of mine, of course), beautiful literature, but no arguments. And in the previous ones you provided lots of fallacious arguments. They’re written, you can see them and understand why they are fallacious.
That’s why I was asking.
If you’re worried, don’t be: I will never judge other by what your words. If you have answered “yes, all think like me” I would understand you’re in a group where you think everyone think alike, but will not understand they really think so fallaciously. I never judge people by others comments.
I don’t understand how can you argument like that if you’re used to argue in a group of different thinking people.
> “Perhaps you should try reading Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance”
I already did, a lot of time ago. It doesn’t make anything you’re saying look more true.
> “John, if ever you should venture into the ocean, to try to build a positive picture for yourself, to try to find some reason in which to anchor your decisions…”
Very beautiful. It’s still wrong to call your unjustified beliefs “confirmed conclusions”.
> “Again, how do you make the decisions of your life?”
Mnnn… look up.
> “Do you have prior proof that they are the best?”
I would hope, but no. But I don’t delude myself. Still, calling your unjustified beliefs “confirmed conclusions” is the wrong thing to do.
Why did you stop arguing about what we were arguing. I mean, this has been a long post with a lot of literature and no arguments nor ideas. Just questioning my curiosity and if I’m alive will not make calling unjustified beliefs “confirmed conclusions” right. Nor it will prove that intelligence was not generated by evolution (nor the opposite). Nor anything I was arguing with you.
In fact, so much talking about my curiosity with ME is a bit… unuseful?
It seems you’re just changing subject and recurring to literature because you have no arguments at all.
> “when I tell you that my metaphysics is more powerful, I am telling you of my experience.”
Yes, but that’s an unjustified assertion.
> “When I said that my leap of faith was lesser than yours, I was not speaking subjectively, as you suppose. It is an objectively measurable thing!”
No, it is not. It’s just a belief of yours, as you seem to admit. How do you measure it? Tell us your objetive method, then I’ll agree to call it objectively measurable, if it can be measured correctly.
> “How many assumptions go into your modal of reality?”
Puff. At least as much as you! Only conciously.
> “John, I have but one (complex) assumption: I am.”
No, you’re making a lot of assumptions. Lots of them. Who is the hypocrite now?
Let’s proof that. I don’t do free assertion where I can. If I show you another assumption of your, I win.
You’re assuming lesser leap of faith is better!!!!!
Oh, I win!
In any case, less assumptions means nothing. It may be a heuristic, but means nothing.
In Middle Age, when two people have a baby, a lot of people believe the man’s fluid transported a little man (an homunculus), whoch were a complete man in minuature. Now we know it’s not true, and believe me, the explanation we’ve got now makes a lot more assumptions! But it works better. We have embryonic medical treatments, for example.
If I could carry a car to Middle Ages, some people would think it was made by God. Some people would do, there are people for everything. That’s just an act. In fact, the car will be made by thousand of persons and engineers, and cummulative work. Middle Earthings would have to make a lot of assumptions to guess that.
Classical Mechanics make a lot less assumptions than Quantum Mechanics. But quantum mechanics works a lot better. It’s predictive power is far better.
You’ve got the idea. Nobody said “Lesser leap of faith” is a proof of being “better”. Yes, Occam’s razor. A useful heuristic. Not a proof.
So when you say “lesser leap of faith is better”, you’re just making an assumption.
If you can put that into “I am”, I would call that a very complex “I am”. How do you compare that “I am” (which has no relation to the “I am” anyone will understand) in complexity with another set of assumptions?
Remember, objectively. While you explain that, your “It is an objectively measurable thing!” and “I have but one (complex) assumption” means nothing. They’re just free unjustified assertions.
I’m getting used to those. But they’re still just beliefs of yours.
> “And, from that anchor, it is possible to see how all reality falls into place!”
You’re making a whole bunch of assumptions. I’m surprised you just tried to fool people into thinking I’m hiding my assumtions. It’s pretty funny.
> “It is faith”
It’s clear. You believe things. You also believe you’re right. And you believe calling “confirmed conclusion” to your faith is right, and telling people all you assume is “I am”. And that making fallacious reasonings is OK. And that making up facts is right.
What do you think of people who believe the opposite? I mean, when you’re arguing something, fallacies appart, if it’s just a question of faith, do you accept others people beliefs are as valid as yours?
> “Doubt creeps in from time to time, but any and every alternative faith pales in comparison. This I call “confirmation””
AHHHHHHHHHH, MY FRIEND!!!!
This clarifies it all. We’ve being mistaken.
You just have beliefs, and you make up facts and your own version of English.
So “confirmation” does not mean what every other person in the planet understand. You were not speaking English. Ahhhh, OK.
(And I though my English was bad).
Now the “confirmed conclusion” has meaning. You mean you’re just asserting it. Ah, OK, OK, now I understand.
Can you explain me what do you mean by me not having curiosity about the World? I assumed (an assumption!) you were speaking English.
> “But the vanishing of the “I don’t knows.” does lead one to conclude, effectively, “I know.””
Yes, but it’s pretty stupid. Because by many words you can pronounce, you still don’t know. You’re just taking a placebo. Just a word games. You make up the answers, and then you believe you know. Ha ha ha ha. It’s actually pretty funny.
If I read this before. But at least everyone else can read this.
In English, we call the that and the rest of the paragraph “deluding oneself”, or “folling oneself into thinking one knows”. How is your language called?
> “So I can’t blame you for not-seeing the picture I am painting.”
Yeah, the question of language. By “know” I was understanding “to know”, and by “confirmation”, confirmation.
> “Everything falls out.”
Yes. You can look at it, or you can close your eyes and have faith. Good. I prefer looking and learning.
> “You can continue hating now if you want”
Ahhhh, Tim, you and your made up facts…. What would I do?
No, I don’t hate you. I don’t hate people for deluding themselves. I just don’t want they to fool people. I will not tell you how to life, except for that. I don’t hate people for not knowing how to reason, or for not wanting to confront reality, or for hiding in his imagination. I tell them when they are wrong, when they are assuming things they don’t know, and when they commit fallacies. But not hating.
I think we can let it be. All the information is here. We can’t bring anything more, I believe.
I ask myself what Langan would think of you now? I’ll probably will never know.
Rereading my previous post I’m surprised how bad my English is getting.
Maybe I must admit I don’t know proper English, and then start studying English.
Alternatively, I can have a lot of faith in improving, and just asserting I know English, forgetting how bad it is. In the end, “the vanishing (forgetting?) of the “I don’t knows.” does lead one to conclude, effectively, “I know.””, as our friend believes.
XD
(At least it’s semantically correct).
For those without much free time (like Tim himself) a shorter version:
All your post consist on a lot of made up facts about me (like that false belief logic will make me know everything you attribute to me, like I’m against metaphysics – I’m just showing how lame your arguments are, I don’t know every metaphysics’ arguments, so I’m not against that, that I make no assumptions, I hate people, etc.), acting as a straw man argument, in the hope of refute me by refuting your made up facts about me, which are false.
Of course, all this only reflects your way of thinking: you actually believe what you assert is true. You assert all these facts and have faith they’re real.
There is a side effect: your post is a beautiful example of how randomly asserting things does not make that things real. All the things you say in the post are plainly false. Look? I can have proofs.
You believe asserting things with faith give you knowledge. You asserted I believe logic will make me know everything. In reality, I don’t believe logic will make me know everything. So we can conclude (without fallacies) that asserting things will not make them real. Actually, you asserted false things.
The core of your post is presenting me as a person who says I never make assumptions, and me hiding my assumptions. This is again plainly false and ridiculous. I actually explicitly said I make assumptions. But I don’t pretend my assumptions to be reality.
Anyway, I test my assumptions. As they don’t contradict reality and predict new things I consider they useful. I’m not the only one acting like this. Science acts like this, too. But assumptions assumptions are. Classical mechanics was very useful, it makes assumptions which resisted a lot of tests, but finally they contradicted reality, so the assumptions where discarded.
Presenting me as one person not making assumptions is plainly false and fallacious, when I myself stated the opposite.
The problem is you confuse an assumption with knowledge. Your main point is saying I also make assumptions (I already admit I do), telling I may not know everything by admiting what I know and what I don’t, and then revealing what you understand by knowledge: to freely asserting things. Then you try to fool people into thinking you only make one assumption (you are), when it’s easy to see you’re making a lot more. And then you brag about with my method I will not know everything, but with your method you will freely assert you will know everything.
Anyone can see I effectively will never know everything, but they can also see by making up things and fooling yourself you will know nothing. By saying you know you will not know.
Again, I’m not insulting yourself, but let be clear: I can’t express how stupid this is.
In the middle you write a lot of literature. That man has no proof of returning when they went to the moon. Are you arguing in my favour? Yes, they don’t have that proof, because THEY DON’T HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE THEY WILL RETURN FOR SURE. In fact, a lot of spaceman sadly never returned. See?
By accepting they didn’t know if they would return they could purchase insurance for their families. See, it’s useful to know when you don’t know.
Where did I say I only act with full information? What I said is: when I don’t know, I accept I don’t know. My assumptions assumptions are, and nothing more. I can test my assumptions to see if they fit reality. When not, I discard them. An assumption is never a “confirmed conclusion”.
So, what’s about our original argument? You said “intelligence can not be explained by determinism and randomness. It requires something more”. You say this is a confirmed conclusion.
I’m looking for arguments in your post. The fact that I make assumptions or not will not make your assumption true. The fact that man made to the moon will not make it true. The fact that you try to fool people into thinking I pretend to never make assumptions will not make it true. The fact that I accept when I don’t know something will not make your assumption true.
Now the great revelation: the fact that you forget your assumption is an assumption and you call then “true” and “knowledge”, that is, the fact that you’re not concious you don’t know, will not make your assertion true. Simply saying your assertions become truth by your faith will not make them true.
A proof? Look, you made a lot of assertions which were false.
You are showing the whole picture very clearly, I can not make it better: we both don’t know everything. You say I shouldn’t be confortable not knowing. You’re not confortable not knowing. But, instead of knowledge, you satisfy your thirst for knowledge with a placebo: not knowing, but pretending to knowing, saying you know. And, as you can see, you are wrong a lot of times. Me too, but as I accept what I don’t know, I can reevaluate my assumptions.
Look it this way: you freely assert intelligence comes from “something more”. This is your faith. Other people asserts the opposite. By their faith, if you want. Do you accept you’re both in the same position? Are you saying your faith to be better than the neighbour? Are you saying you both know?
This is the reason science advances. It’s also the reason some people are still arguing if nature abhors vacuum.
(Oh, finally it’s as long as the previous one 🙁 )
John,
hahaha! Thanks! I couldn’t take a break, but now that I’m getting ready to go to bed, this was fun to read. I can’t respond to this all, I’m sorry. In a month I will be free again. If you’d like to hold off till then, I could look forward to responding to you point by point. If you want to forge ahead, you will have to take what I can offer.
Let me see what I can do:
Perhaps it is best to start by admitting that I don’t know. If I have made erroneous estimates of you, sorry. But you can’t accuse me of logical fallacies in that regard, because you don’t know the assumptions that went into my reading of you. I could have made good assumptions, with bad logic; or I could have made bad assumptions, with good logic. You can’t tell the difference. To be sure, you don’t understand me very well – either.
now you said:
“You believe asserting things with faith give you knowledge.”
no. My (minimal) faith is the result of a long process process of weeding out un-truths. What appear to you to be “free assertions” are not free. Though I offer my conclusions only dogmatically here, at first, I am happy to try to defend my picture. In this line I have pointed you to Howison. I never pretended that my dogmatic statements should be conclusive in your mind; I told you that I was just painting the picture. You seem uninterested in looking at that picture. IF you expressed interest, we would get into the nitty gritty. But, John, recognize that the statement of a conclusion is not necessarily a free assertion.
You said:
“I can test my assumptions to see if they fit reality.”
Can you? Are you sure? Newtonian physics seemed to fit for a long time. How can you be sure there isn’t a “relativity” beyond your test?
This is why one very strong example of the superior strength of metaphysics!
In this vein, John, you made a very good point:
“In any case, less assumptions means nothing. It may be a heuristic, but means nothing.
In Middle Age, when two people have a baby, a lot of people believe the man’s fluid transported a little man (an homunculus), whoch were a complete man in minuature. Now we know it’s not true, and believe me, the explanation we’ve got now makes a lot more assumptions! But it works better. We have embryonic medical treatments, for example.”
I should explicitly carry the caveat, “all else being equal”! And you’re right, even this may not be a perfect expression of the global standard. Globally, the test is whether or not the model (not “modal”, oops) is synonymous with the i’dea. So when I say the I can (seemingly) account for the whole nature of reality with one complex assumption, “I am”, it is a conjunction of actually of being THE minimum of assumption, in superior comparison with other models, and of actually being THE i’dea. Notice also, John, that when I am talking of my assumption (one, complex) I am only talking about the NATURE of reality. As I live, before the unknown future, amidst the plural society of “I am”, I as impotent to “know” as anyone.
You had asked me what I meant by “as you live…”. I point you back to this exchange:
[I had asked]
“How do you make decision, John?”
[and you replied]
By taking all the information I have, making the minimum number of assumptions I have, not forgetting they’re assumptions, not fooling people my assumptions are better than theirs if they’re not, not defending them with fallacies, and not calling my assumptions “confirmed conclusions”.”
[I continue]
very funny, but this avoids the question. Information and assumptions can only be inputs to your reasoning faculty. What determines the output? How do you decide that you value this more than that? etc.
that’s what I was getting at with “as you live”. As you live, you cannot wait for proof. You must decide before any such proof. This was my point of the moon trip of the spacemen.
Now, in this regard, you seem to get me backwards about being comfortable before the unknown, being comfortable with one’s own “I don’t know.” Inherent in this complex i’dea “I am” is a grand teleologic AIM. Wonderfully, it is also inherent in this i’dea that that AIM is, precisely, infinitely removed – always. Close enough to always be the AIM, far enough that it is never reached. What I’m saying, the picture I’m painting, is that this AIM both provides the solidity we crave amidst the unknown, but, simultaneously preserving the unknown, leaves me comfortable before the unknown! If you are interested in trying to see this picture, give me a month – maybe even read Howison in the mean time. Or take what I can find the time to give.
What else… Oh yea, there was this ironic gem!:
[John]
“Freely asserting things is useless.”
ahh, there was this exchange:
[Tim]
“John, I have but one (complex) assumption: I am.”
[John]
No, you’re making a lot of assumptions. Lots of them. Who is the hypocrite now?
You’re assuming lesser leap of faith is better!!!!!
Oh, I win!
[Tim continues]
while there is a great lump of assumptions in the i’dea “I am”, they are all necessary; they all hold together only because they are all there. That’s why I call “I am” the minimally complex i’dea. Or the smallest (mustard) seed.
And, I’m not assuming lesser is better! But we’ve gone over the necessary caveats, thanks. My position is “confirmed”. But, of course, that is my faith.
you asked:
“If you can put that into “I am”, I would call that a very complex “I am”. How do you compare that “I am” (which has no relation to the “I am” anyone will understand) in complexity with another set of assumptions?”
what “I am” does anyone else understand? What do you understand by “I am”? Yes, the i’dea I offer of “I am” is certainly complex. And I don’t know what other people imagine when they imagine “I am” for themselves. I think I am privileged to see this i’dea perhaps like no one else before me. I credit Howison, but I think there is one significant advance I have made from him – because I see this after the quantum revolution I suspect that I see that matter is no more than just information about the i’dea “I am”, far more clearly than he did. However, unencumbered by the weight of modern science, perhaps Jesus and John (the gospel-er) saw it even more clearly?
you asked next:
“What do you think of people who believe the opposite? I mean, when you’re arguing something, fallacies appart, if it’s just a question of faith, do you accept others people beliefs are as valid as yours?”
this is a good question. Metaphysics is real hard. And I can definitely understand the frustration with it; that is, I can understand why hard scientists might prefer to avoid it in favor of “hard” science (the shore v. the ocean). So, when I debate with other metaphysicians, what do I do when we disagree? And, in fact, there are many buddhists who do take the opposite faith: there is no real self. John, the problem in your question is this “just”, regarding “just a question of faith”. Pirsig actually handled this very same word, in the very same way (as I recall). It shows your bias. I cannot accept it into the question. When I debate metaphysics with other people, I try to compile their model. If their model is wanting (which it always has been), I judge the model, but not so much the modeler. I persist in trying to “convert” them, at least to the extent that we keep talking. You misunderstand the power of faith! It isn’t arbitrary. And I can point you to an example or two of this in you:
you said:
“I understand swimming as researching, which requires for you to know what you don’t know.”
and:
“In fact, by admiting what we don’t know we can research it.”
John, knowing that you don’t know is a type of knowing. A real strange type! If you don’t know, how can you really know that you don’t know?! There is a faith that won’t be knocked out of you, John. I’m telling you that that very same faith, that there is something to know, that it might be known, stick to it. However you “care” to stick to it.
back to the question of how you decide? I suspect you decide based on what you “care” about. Pirsig argues that those “cares” are not to be taken lightly. No model of reality will be complete without them. I go with him that far, for sure. But I can complain about his shortcoming (mainly: simplicity rather than complexity) till the cows come home too.
Tim
Oh, my God. You’re pretty stubborn into not understanding.
> Though I offer my conclusions only dogmatically here
> What appear to you to be “free assertions” are not free
So all these words for nothing? You have evidence and proofs and arguments for “intelligence requires something more”? The rewind, please. Let’s see them.
What are we doing?
So you accused me of not having anything in my barrell because I didn’t give you proofs of what I explicitly said I didn’t know, and now you say you’ve got convincing arguments.
You’re becoming very ridiculous. Well, for the arguments you presented here, all fallacious, I all argued clearly.
And for those arguments you didn’t present, which is ridiculous, I have better ones that prove the opposite. Hey! Free asserting is cool!
OMG. What are you playing? End this, please!
> “My (minimal) faith”
> “Notice also, John, that when I am talking of my assumption (one, complex) I am only talking about the NATURE of reality.”
Ah, so you were only speaking about the nature of reality. OK, then you’re still wrong. Your faith is still not minimal.
To prove it, consider another possible assumption about the nature of reality: none, not any assumption.
Under your criteria that less is better, you should recognize this is better, and your assumption is not minimal nor the best possible. So you’re still wrong.
In any case, you’re still assume that the nature of reality is that that can be infered by searching for the lesser gap of faith. This is an assumption about nature, too. You’re still wrong.
> “I can test my assumptions to see if they fit reality.”
> Can you? Are you sure? Newtonian physics seemed to fit for a long time. How can you be sure there isn’t a “relativity” beyond your test?
To fit is not to be true. To fit is to not contradict any observed fact. By testing an assumption you check if you can still assume it, not if it is true. Do you really read books?
Are you doing this conciously? Yes, I can test my assumptions. If they fit reality, my confidence in them gets stronger. When they doesn’t fit reality, I discard them. I explicitly explained this. Do you read my comments?
So, as I repeated a thousand times, I don’t know if there is a better assumption. I just hold my assumptions if it seems useful. When I know better, I change my assumptions, When I know even better, I change my assumptions. When I know even better… This is the process rational people take. It’s the process science takes.
How do we know if there is not another relativity? Are you joking? How many times do I have to say? Are you reading? I don’t know. Not you. There can be better hypothesis. That’s the reason I say “I don’t know” when I don’t know. Maybe there is another relativity. In fact, probably there is.
Seriously, are you awake? Why do you keep making these questions not related in any way wuth what I’m saying?
> “This is why one very strong example of the superior strength of metaphysics!”
What? Where is the “why”? Did I miss something? That there can be another relativity? What’s exactly strong about that for metaphysics over rational thinking? That I (and all rational people) test their assumptions to see if they can still assume them, instead of just asserting things by faith?
What do you understand by strong?
> “I should explicitly carry the caveat, “all else being equal”! ”
You’re not refuting my arguments. History has many examples of bad assumptions “all else being equal”.
All else being equal, magnetism can not being explained by the simpler assumptions of classical mechanics. It requires the more complex assumptions of quantum mechanics. And even then, maybe what we think it’s happening is not real, because we don’t know if there will be a better theory. Probably with even more complex assumptions. But the assumptions of quantum mechanics fit the facts we have observed until now. It’s still useful.
To sum up: all else being equal, the “less gap of faith” is still subjetive, and is still wrong as a method for selecting assumptions.
> “You must decide before any such proof. This was my point of the moon trip of the spacemen.”
Are you pretending you’re addressing my criticism? I mean, did I say I wait to take action? No, I explicitly said I act under my assumptions, knowing I don’t know, knowing my assumptions can be wrong. Me acting this way does not make my assumptions right. What relation has this with you believing your free assertions to be true? How does this justify you can say “intelligence requires something more is a confirmed conclusion”? Are you talking only for the talk?
Spacemen knew they didn’t know if they would return, so they take actions. How is this a point in favour of your assertions?
Focus, please.
The rest of your post I find really nonsense.
> “If you don’t know, how can you really know that you don’t know?! ”
All these are just literature to fill space in the blog. If I don’t know if A is true, I still can know that I don’t know if A is true. Let A be an assumption. Let B be the fact that I don’t know A. I can not know if A is true, but I can know if B is true. Come on! You’re just playing with words, and making silly arguments. Sorry, too much. I end it here. Good for laughing, bad for thinking.
Bah, I will not continue. Your actitude of free asserting and saying you’ve got very good hiding arguments is not worth this much keying.
John,
We are talking past each other.
You said:
“This is the process rational people take.”
John, I take a different approach: reason. “rational” is insufficient to live. You miss this point. While you may have a “rational” method for going about making sense of your reality, after it happens, you don’t use “rational” to make decisions in the moment. The moment requires something else, something more! The infinity before you at any moment of time is just too much for you to tie up with any “rational” formula. Reason is needed. To live, reason is needed.
But you don’t want to talk about life. So, if you want me to get into “rational” with you, let me be real brief, so that I might have you focus where I want you to focus. Okay?
You said:
“That’s the reason I say “I don’t know” when I don’t know.”
Is there anything to which you will say, “I know.”? Anything at all? If there is, please tell me. [Hint: Or…?!]
Oops, I guess you went away. Well, here it is anyway,
Tim
Tim, you asserted intelligence needs “something more”, and you said it’s a confirmed conclusion.
When asked why, you talked about spacemen, about the process science works, about my decisions in life, about if I’m alive or a zombie, about relativity, about… I have explained how all this is not related with what we’re speaking in any way, and you have failed to connect any new theme you have been introduced with the discussion. Spacemen, my life, my decisions and relativity all have no relation with intelligence requiring something more. No connection.
You also asserted you’ve got hidden arguments, but nobody seems worth of. Why have we being talking about spacemen? It seems you prefer to talk about spacemen. I don’t.
Enough is enough. I could be doing this every year for the rest of my life, but I don’t see the point. I could start talking you about how when you discard an assumption because it does not fit reality you’ve learned something. But it’s all well known. But I had enough.
John,
I had asked:
“Is there anything to which you will say, “I know.”? Anything at all? If there is, please tell me.”
I take it you understand that this question is the one that gets us to your difficulty understanding me, and are afraid to address it.
I never claimed to have a hidden argument that I am withholding because you aren’t worth it. In fact, always the opposite. You will have to get the “confirmation” for yourself. It takes a walking your own path in the high country of the mind. Not some hidden paragraph of logic I am withholding cause I’m a douchebag. I’m trying to help. You resist.
rather, you make this “free assertion”:
“Spacemen, my life, my decisions and relativity all have no relation with intelligence requiring something more. No connection.”
Is this the understanding to which you will rest, “I know.”?
Tim
“Argumentum ad nauseam or argument from repetition or argumentum ad infinitum is an argument made repeatedly (possibly by different people) until nobody cares to discuss it any more. This may sometimes, but not always, be a form of proof by assertion”.
How come, then, it feels as if you dodge legitimate questions?
I have a hard time believing that “people in here are mathematically illiterate” when there is demonstrable proof here that you aren’t making the effort to meet people in the middle. Instead you just dismiss everyone as incompetent without addressing the actual arguments.
You also still have yet to describe what it is your theory actually does. It’s a theory that involves cognition and the universe. Okay — how? What’s the point?
The only correct thing I’ve seen out of the CTMU that I don’t see discussed nearly as often as it should is the notion of parallel consciousnesses, and I say this from a materialist perspective, here.
Outside of that, though, it’s still not clear what it is you’re trying to say. As is typically effective with many areas of teaching, perhaps you should try to use analogies and examples to illustrate things more clearly.
http://anamericanatheist.org/2011/04/09/chris-langans-defense-to-his-ctmu-theory/
You say:
“One is not axiomatically “required” to produce a “theological explanation for the designer”. The point is that any designer-like entity which can actually be shown to exist by logical reasoning about the structure of reality must be objectively analyzed, and its key properties identified and properly interpreted. Where the properties of this entity can be shown to align with certain key properties intuitively attributed to God, the existence of the entity obviously implies the existence of God. The natural theological ramifications – note the intentional coupling of “natural” and “theological” – can then be developed from the given properties.
But as that may be a little hard for you to fathom, the easy take-home message is just this: such an entity can indeed be shown, with logical certainty, to exist. Hence, God exists. ”
What is this logical certainty you speak of that proves God’s existence? What are the “certain key properties intuitively attributed to God”? In the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson, if that is how you are choosing to play the game, then “God” is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.
If you want to discuss truth, here, let’s actually discuss it — please defend these statements.
I have casually read through most of this blog history and find it quite fascinating in many respects. I have also read Langan’s paper, though not in it’s entirety, when it first hit the internet many years ago. I even remember seeing him live on 60-Minutes back in the mid-90s!
As an interdisciplinary paradigm researcher I have to be very critical of the post-contemporary acceptance of standard definitions used throughout academia, in what you might call ‘e-scholasticism’, and the swarm intelligence that seems to gather around the wikiverse by flocks of bloggers who continuously refer to it as providing historically exact and comprehensive definitions. Many of it’s entries on academic terms and advanced concepts are either formalized (‘global’) definitions given by orthodoxic scholarship that often preclude, esp. in mathematics and philosophy, the precise historical development of a concept or theory given in an entry. On the other hand it is interesting to note that if the formalization of a concept or theory cannot be properly explained by a wiki author in new language (a language that makes it comprehensible to, say, a college student) then the information is simply lifted directly from written sources such as textbooks or publications of original writters. That is one observation I have made by studying internet societies and social networks online. Interesting in this regard, and relative to Langen’s hypothesis of a self-contained universe, is the historical use of the idea of “set” in mathematical logic.
Set theory in itself concerns the mathematical (quantifiable) aspect of sets whereas formal logic always concerned the apophantic or logical assertion of a set’s existence based on formal categories of axiology. George Cantor’s definition of a set is an integration of the formal logical category: “set [of objects]” into “set of quantifiable objects [points in a space, finite numbers, rational values, coded meanings]” which is the basis of the propositional calculus. Model theory goes beyond both propositional and predicate calculus by ‘modeling’ the underlying STRUCTURES that seem to govern the formal languages of mathematical propositions and their proofs, mainly by paying attention to their cardinality, holomorphy, and the relational operations between sets of mathematical objects such as filters or sequential operators.
It was later shown through these relational models that the definition of a set as given by Cantor in his MATHEMATICAL formalization of “set” admits certain properties of incompleteness and everyone knows Kurt Godel also tackled this problem in response to Russel’s paradox. In other words a “set” could conversely be defined by it’s relations (inclusion, disclusion, intersection, union, etc.) This changed the trend of using sets as just an initial ‘theorem template’ or formalism done before writing advanced calculations. Set theory (later “naive” set theory) independently evolved into different formalizations of the original dogma invented by Cantor.
(Little of this is still known to the mathematical public minus some seasoned vets who would have been doing seminary advanced mathematics in the 60’s.) There was a time when mathematicians used sets as the basic ingredients for all analytic functions and derivations of functions – quantitative sets were not necessary, only sequences of non-geometric points or cardinal numbers were required to fulfill the definition of a set as the generator of a function. This was due mostly to the foundational work of David Stone and Hausdorff. In the Stone-Hausdorff formality, set theory does indeed begin with the denotation of the first object, or set of all points, as “the universe”: It is the subset of ALL REAL NUMBERS R of R^n, not to be confused with some subset of the real line. The notation runs like this:
R is the set of points that is our universe, L is the Boolean sigma-algebra of all subsets of R, and ~0~ is the empty subset (or what was historically called the nullset.) By a ‘family of sets’ we understand an indexed set of sets (these set indexes are essential for the generation of sequences of sets that are also used in contemporary model theory for ordinals.) For any two sets X and Y belonging to L, Y in X stands for the ordinary inclusion of Y in X, allowing the equivalence X = Y (the simplest propositional tautology.) Set-theoretic operations like ‘contained in’ or ‘union and intersection’ could then be treated as scalar operations, lower and upper bounds for Boolean code etc. in order to accommodate for point-like objects with a relevance to PROPOSITIONAL geometry in function spaces. (Keep in mind this was before the revolution when topology became an official science considered important to mathematics so all the sets and their points are taken as pretopological entities and do not involve large transformations or mappings in Euclidean space.)
Stone’s late followers were interested in a purely logical use of ‘point sets’ without any numerical or algebro-geometric assumptions. Their work, an extension of the Bourbaki programmae on mathematical foundations, proved to be very useful in the early days of information theory when the French were the only ones looking at mathematically grounded computation schemes alongside Shannon’s entropic theory of information (the latter’s relied heavily on propositional logic and cryptography with very little foundational math.) Accordingly their findings also assisted probabilists confronted with phenomena like Brownian motion and other natural stochastic processes as a way to compute difficult problems in probability theory in an increment of the time that it would take using older methods like calculus or matrix algebra. Without these updated set theoretic conventions we would not have developed the field of STATISTICAL MECHANICS the way we did and hence the evolution of quantum mechanics towards the quantum theory of information and computation would not have followed suite. All of the mathematicians who contributed most of the pure math to COMPUTATIONAL information theory would today be considered obscure names: Have you heard of Rene De Possel? Anthony Morse? David Stone? Giusepe Vitali? Besicovitch? Caratheodory? Denjoy? Lot’s of modern probability theory would have remained in linear differential equations and integral calculus if mathematicians hadn’t worked out all the bugs in naive set theory transforming the axiomatic requirements of set theory so that geometric measures could be placed on sets perfectly suited for Lebesgue integration in the function space where probabilistic calculations arise. A multidisciplined math and international research effort by many math experts grew out of an impetus begun by the Bourbaki programme on FOUNDATIONS OF MATHEMATICS that focused on the intellectual primacy of set theory. The Bourbaki group revolutionized how pre-20th century mathematics (particularly Cantor’s mathematical formulation of logic) was taught to the students of Europe’s elite.
In TYPE THEORY and other computer-based applications that involve SET FUNCTIONS the set of all sets was often called “the universe” and the set of components of all it’s Boolean algebras were called it’s “atoms”. Communication between microprocessor arrays, signal processing, and the computer algorithms that ran much of our data management computing before PC’s would not have been accomplished had we relied on Cantors propositional set notation convention or symbolic predicates thereof. Set theory notation had to be reformulated on the ‘syntax-to-semantics’ level of symbolic equivalence to support 20th-century demands since the rise of cybernetics (Weiner) and information theory (Possel-Shannon.) i.e. it would free the theory of non-essential requirements of antiquated formal logic before the days of Frege and David Hilbert. We do this all the time today and there are many tautological examples of the notion of symbolic equivalence used in computational intelligence, artificial intelligence, and neural networks where many formal languages have to be hybridized. For instance; a Moore-Smith sequence is a series of sets that are sequentially ordered to form a network and where the term ‘sequence’ is generalized to the term ‘net’ to describe this abstraction when we are dealing with sequences of interconnected sets that would visually form a net-like or mesh-like structure rather than an ordering of simple variables.
From a rigorous interdisciplinary understanding of mathematics, and thus all the known conventions used by professionals, I do not see Langan’s definition of the universe as a ‘set’ to be fallacious in any way except on behalf of some readers inability to contextualize what he means by “set” and “universe”. Saying the universe is self-contained simply means the universe is an emergent phenomena i.e. that all it’s said material constituents have a causal relation to the whole system and that the system as a whole has a causal relation to it’s constituent parts and that they mutually effect eachother at different scales because the universe is a dynamical system. Not only is the universe a dynamical system, since it is contains gravitationally bound groups of galaxies and planetary orbits, it can also be described as a complex system if we accept that it is composed of both an isotropic AND homogenous media that are mutually exclusive with regards to the universe as self-contained. A self-contained system is a system that is autonomous and it is not necessary for other systems to interact with it for it’s ontic subsistence.
On this and other points Langan is getting close to the big picture. Even if his essays are unstructured and his detailing of theory and the contexts he uses them in are less than academic it is obvious that he has read and has understood a significant amount of academic literature without formal academic training. A high intelligence ratio coupled to an enormous amount of reading means Langan has a much broader knowledge of introductory and advanced math, logic, and philosophy than the majority of trained specialists who breeze through university, focus on one field, do not retain a comprehensive understanding of all the courses given in that field, do not attempt to synthesize knowledge/discourses and thus do not publish entries for globally recognized journals.
What I have found most entertaining about this thread is the fact that he (Langan) has managed (possibly as an exccersize in intellectual dominance psychology) to stir up a vicious circle of uncertainty and rational skepticism about what defines a “set”, wether sets can exist without a power set and how the power set is contained and so forth. He appears to have invented a loophole in the thinking of some of his critics who have attempted to get a concrete mathematical or dualistic sense of the the apparent triviality of basic set concepts and all this ultimately leads directly to the significance that CTMU has to them as something so profound as set theory could explain so they are all in a stiry to really….really! understand the logic of sets since apparently it is like the crux of this CTMU theory and they are becoming convinced that sets will provide the answers to rationalistic problems out of the hated, but now loved, CTMU. Whats more astounding is that he (Langan) has seeded a redundancy algorithm out of this whole thread as the question concerning sets and power sets have been feverishly debated here and remain unsolved? Perhaps Langan invented his CTMU as a decoy theory in order to draw criticism from less endowed social beings as an NLP experiment with applications to social engineering. Maybe Langan has you all played! 😉
Whatever the case may be there is no statistical-Bayesian reason for refuting his credibility as an academician or self-taught genius since he is not amused by exhibiting any erudite punditry or intellective regurgitation of his various learnings. It is good for people to absorb his arguments and to learn by experience that what they thought they knew from orthodox education or from what wikipedia tells them does not always give accurate information that we would redeem as ‘comprehensive’ information i.e. cognitively meaningful or cognition-stimulating information.
For instance wikipedia does not know, under the definition of set theory, that the word with the most number of definitions and citations in the English language according to Oxford is in fact the word “set”. Oxford dictionary has 464 definitions for the word “set” in it’s complete version. Second to set is the word “run” which has 396 definitions. Apparently there are some serious issues of redundancy concerning this word in human history since there has been no narrowing down the number of definitions for “set”. I can’t imagine what would happen if I inputted an algorithm into wikipedia’s metasearch compiler that simply read
:RUN
(SET)
Maybe it would reach a point of computational complexity because an exact definition would be impossible and wikipedia would start giving it’s own biased definitions for stuff – or maybe it would simply destabilize wiki and Google Books would be overloaded with queries because too many people would have to resort to looking things up in actual textbooks.
“turn out to be more trouble than direct communication with them could ever be worth”
“I regard them as lacking any firm basis for ethical understanding or behavior”
“comparing it to the CTMU would be like comparing a Ford Model T to the Starship Enterprise”
“Any associated knowledge-transfer would be pretty much one-way, from me outward”
“most people, even those who claim to know some mathematics, would merely be distracted by it, are possibly incapable of understanding it”
It speaks for itself.
To sum up, in any conversation with anyone, you assume the information will flow from you. Great willingness to learn. The rest of the World has no ethics. And your “theory” is so great if anyone finds a trivial and clear error it’s because you ommitted a passage which explained very clearly why. Very prone to self-evaluation.
That in itself says nothing about your work, but reading also your writing, I truly believe if you’re not a rogue trying to sell a magical ointment to grow hair to make a profit, then I believe you should visit a psychiatrist. And I’m serious, it’s not an insult nor I’m being demagoguery.
[replace]: STATISTICAL MECHANICS = QUANTUM PROBABILITY>
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0601158
It doesn’t really seem like Mr Langan is interested in telling us anything at all about his theory, beyond that it relies on a home-grown set theory.
Instead he repeats that we are all stupid and, ironically, not knowledgeable enough in mathematics, to discuss with him.
This is hilarious, coming from a self-described philosopher whose theory seemingly contains no maths at all, beyond some basic mathematical logic (which the author seems to misunderstand).
Indeed, the whole theory seems be in the vein of freshman philosophy student musings, except the apparently deliberate obfuscations and convoluted language. In fact, I would even venture to guess that the theory only exists precisely because Mr Langan lacks formal schooling, most of us have probably been through phases when we thought we amazing theories about Everything, only to find that it was tried and rejected a long time ago.
I could be wrong, but nothing seems to indicate that Mr Langan even has a basic understanding of physics, mathematics or cosmology.
This has been funny (I laughed a lot). But ultimately I feel embarrassed to see we have learned nothing since the Greeks.
Before Galileo and the scientific method, science was exactly like the discussions in this forum, like Langan’s theory. A lot of words. We have the Greeks. Aristotle, the “most intelligent person” of the time, said heavier objects fall faster. He divided physics in two Worlds with two laws: the Earth and the Sky. And it was all obvious, and he argued all that with an impeccable “logic”, and every critic was too dumb to understand his logic. The World was built from four elements, everything was movement, there was no movement, nature abhors vacuum, and Achilles would never catch the tortoise. All proved with strong logic, I mean, very complex words. By the “most intelligent people”.
Then it come the Middle Ages. Now you could turn lead into gold. You could know your longitude offshore with two poor dogs and powder of sympathy. Of course, the methods were too complex for anyone to understand, and the details would confuse dump people. But of course “intelligent” people did it twice a day. The results were there for the intelligent to see.
The debates are written. You can read them. You’ll not be able to differentiate the arguments from Langan’s: the logic is “perfect”, the theories are obvious, they are The Authority, critics are stupid, critics are stupid, critics are stupid, and a lot of metaphysics in between.
Science enters. Some people decided there is a need for objective evaluation beyond word games: the scientific methods. This is: to verify the theories objectively. To have independent and repeatable verification. To have blind tests, double blind tests, and so on. The thing worked flawlessly: science, knowledge advanced! From Newton (~1700) science has progressed dramatically.
And now some people come with this. “Eh, forget all that. Let’s return to the Greek’s debates about how nature abhors vacuum. Let’s rests our arguments on our intelligence and on calling stupid anyone who dares to contradict us. Let’s stop verifying theories. Critics obviously understand nothing. They obviously can’t”. Great, after so much investment in education, we’re in the very first step: Achilles can’t catch the tortoise again because a very intelligent person says so, and his arguments are so complex for you to understand. Here is Langan saying his theory about nature is above the scientific method, and shouldn’t be evaluated. And you can’t even criticism his logic, because, hey, he knows the theory better than you.
He’s just saying we should return to prescience times. But we’ve already been there. We don’t want to be there again. We need no second Aristotle to prevent knowledge for centuries again. I am saddened by the lack of respect for the scientific method, which took so long to impose. Some people simply don’t understand why we need it, why it was developed. They believe we do it because… because some very intelligent person told us?
Too bad. I console myself only because there is no Langan for science, but I’m surprised so many people have learned nothing. So many people lost in ignorance and learned words, with so little understanding of why we do things the way we do and why we need to.
John Fringe says: I believe you should visit a psychiatrist
According to my research Christopher Langan’s wife is a clinical neuropsychologist. If this is true then it would also be true that Langan would not be required to visit a psychiatrist since his wife is one.
XD Well, you’re right, he has no necessity to _visit_ one.
I omitted the “a psychiatrist who isn’t a co-founder of Langan’s foundation” part. You know, one who is into science, and not against science methods and all that 😉
Of course, all that assuming he is not a rogue trying to take money from believers. I mean, if there is no alternative explanation for his unjustified superiority complex and his confidence for discarding centuries of scientific method. If he’s just making money from those who are not aware of the revolution of Galileo, then no aid needed. He would be doing fine.
Well, Phil Hellmuth is married to a psychiatrist, and we all know how he is.
http://www.superscholar.org/interviews/christopher-michael-langan/
Chris says:
“The operation of combining language, universe, and model to create a perfectly self-contained metalanguage results in SCSPL, short for Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language. This language is “self-similar” in the sense that it is generated within a formal identity to which every part of it is mapped as content; its initial form, or grammatical “start symbol”, everywhere describes it on all scales. My use of grammatical terminology is intentional; in the CTMU, the conventional notion of physical causality is superseded by “telic causation”, which resembles generative grammar and approaches teleology as a natural limit. In telic causation, ordinary events are predicated on the generation of closed causal loops distributing over time and space. This loop-structure reflects the fact that time, and the spatial expansion of the cosmos as a function of time, flow in both directions – forward and backward, outward and inward – in a dual formulation of causality characterizing a new conceptualization of nature embodied in a new kind of medium or “manifold”.”
That’s as simple as I can make it without getting more technical. […] The CTMU is not just a theory; it is logical model theory applied to metaphysics, and as much a logical necessity as any branch of mathematics or philosophy. One can no more escape from it than from X=X or 1+1=2. But when it comes to something that packs this combination of scope and power, many people, including certified academics, committed atheists, and even some religious believers, are apparently afraid to stare X=X in the face.”
This is yet another example. Chris, what you’re saying here is *not* plain English, even to people who understand the concepts as defined in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_grammar or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar for instance.
I feel like you spend more time focusing on argument itself rather than defending the actual content of your CTMU. Evidence and understanding speak louder than words. I could sit here and try to convince a Creationist about evolution all damn day long, but nothing will be as effective as literally putting the evidence and scientific methods in front of their face and showing them why we’re so sure of things. It’s one thing to be ignorant. We’re all ignorant about some things, but ignorance can be corrected with education. It’s another thing to show people the evidence and have them outright deny it — the latter is just insanity. But you’re not actually showing anyone easily-understood evidence in support of your theory.
What do you think requires God in order to explain it?
Oh man, I didn’t even notice this before.
http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/CTM.htm
No wonder he believes in God — he doesn’t even accept evolution as fact!
So we have science on our side, the scientific method that led us here, verification, his faulty logic, scientific consensus, formal proofs, formal statistics, evolution and its existing mechanisms by which it operates, and the evidence, and awareness of our own ignorance
He has “critics are stupid and can’t understand”, “some guy out there said Langan is very intelligent”, the assumption that intelligent people work hard to revolutionize science instead of work very little to live from the gullible, creationism, “Langan knows his theory better than anyone and he believes it’s right”, “it’s obvious”, and “it’s true for some meaning of set and Universe”, and the belief they know all and can prove God existence by writing in a paper.
I would say it’s fair. In any case, nobody is going to change his mind. At first I try to learn something, but the arguments go from bad to worse. What makes these posts interesting for me is to know people. It’s more about ethological interest than anything else.
http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Press/PopularScience/PopSciArt.pdf
“Science generally does not count as
“real” anything that can’t be measured or
detected. But although you can’t measure or see a
mathematical principle, scientists need
mathematics to conduct their work. In other
words, scientists have a problem on their hands:
They rely on numbers even though the question
of whether or not numbers are real has not been
resolved.
With his theory, Langan hopes — among other
things — to explain the relationship between
abstract math and concrete science. He thinks it’s
necessary to answer such questions before one
can come up with a correct theory of the cosmos
or even a theory of everything.
For example, Langan says that most theoretical
physicists try to fit mathematical relationships to
the available empirical data. But because raw
information tends to be scarce in the cosmic and
subatomic realms, Langan believes that they
often resort to filling in the holes with
unverifiable mathematical conjecture. Before
they do that, however, he argues that they should
consider the more basic logical requirements of
formulating such cosmological theories.
Does Langan really have the final answer?”
Langan may be smart, but I think he’s uninformed about how science works. Yes, we fit mathematical explanations to the data, but it’s not like it’s some random fitting. The fitting has to actually make sense given the nature of the data and the context of what we’re explaining. And raw information is hardly scarce in the subatomic and cosmic realms… that kind of claim is just demonstrably false, straight-up. The mathematical relationships have the power to *predict* things, and they’ve done so beautifully.
I’d love to see what Langan considers “unverifiable mathematical conjecture” when things like quantum mechanics (ruling over the subatomic) and relativity (ruling over the cosmos) have been so incredibly successful and predicting things. Same goes for evolution… the evidence is staggering.
Are the theories perfect? No — no theory is. But just because a theory can’t claim to be 100% perfect doesn’t mean you can take that small gap and fill it with whatever you want and claim it’s just as valid. There are an infinite number of possible explanations you could use to plug gaps as long as they’re consistent and non-contradictory, but mere compatibility does not a scientific theory make.
Again, what is the logical certainty you speak of that proves God’s existence? What are the “certain key properties intuitively attributed to God”?
He claims that he is possibly the smartest person in the whole world.
“I don’t think there is anyone smarter than me out there. I have never met anybody like me or never seen even an indication that there is somebody who actually has better powers of comprehension. Never seen it and I don’t think I am going to. I could, my mind is open to the possibility. If anyone should challenge me ‘Oh, I think that I am smarter than you are’ I think I could have them.” – Chris Langan
http://books.google.com/books?id=3NSImqqnxnkC&pg=PT69&dq=I+don%E2%80%99t+think+there+is+anyone+smarter+than+me+out+there.&hl=en&ei=KPo_Tr6SOujmmAX_waWDCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=I%20don%E2%80%99t%20think%20there%20is%20anyone%20smarter%20than%20me%20out%20there.&f=false
Well, I’m back for one post. I will worn you in advance that my IP has changed, as I am on currently on vacation. Having I hope improved my understanding of the CTMU since the last post I made, I have a few comments. I will stick to the basics for now as I don’t want to misrepresent Mr. Langan’s model.
1. Errol Morris’ documentary about Mr. Langan was heavily edited – as it had to be given that it was filmed over two days – and should thus not be taken as representative of Mr. Langan’s attitude towards intelligence or anything else. We simply don’t know how Mr. Langan’s views were cut down, and he is surely too busy to explain, so give him a break.
2. I am familiar with Robert Pirsig’s work also, having read both his published books, and I couldn’t have stated its status better than Mr. Langan did. His Metaphysics of Quality is simply not precise enough to be of much use. I know many of you will disagree, but Mr. Langan’s work certainly fits that criterion. On the other hand, Mr. Pirsig does have some exceptional insights and I much enjoyed his writing.
3. Set theory isn’t even necessary for the development of the CTMU, so this post and all the associated comments involve a tiny amount of Mr. Langan’s work.
4. Relatively detailed explanations of the CTMU exist. I highly recommend Mr. Langan’s 2002 paper. Go read it.
I have only this to say about metaphysics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics#The_value_and_future_of_metaphysics
In particular:
Metaphysicians cannot avoid making their statements nonverifiable, because if they made them verifiable, the decision about the truth or falsehood of their doctrines would depend upon experience and therefore belong to the region of empirical science. This consequence they wish to avoid, because they pretend to teach knowledge which is of a higher level than that of empirical science. Thus they are compelled to cut all connection between their statements and experience; and precisely by this procedure they deprive them of any sense.
— Rudolf Carnap
Chris, care to answer a few questions over email?
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xghfdb_chris-langan-in-bbc-documentary_people
“I don’t know whether it’s discipline or whether it’s just sheer, raw brilliance that creates someone like me. I think no combination of determinacy and randomness can actually explain intelligence. Therefore, something more is required — a higher language, and that higher language would, by definition, be metaphysical.”
I think this is just argument from ignorance. “I don’t know how the mind works, so I will invoke a metaphysical explanation” — nevermind evolution, genetics, or environmental feedback. It’s basically a God of the Gaps argument all over again.
He seems to believe that the world should be ruled by the high-IQ elite with him at the very top as the supreme commander.
To be fair, I don’t disagree that there needs to be a greater emphasis on intelligence when it comes to those in power. People with influence (especially in our government) should know what the heck they’re doing. The problem is that high IQ isn’t enough. You not only need to be smart, but you need to be educated/not ignorant.
“The stupid person thinks that he’s as smart or smarter than a smart person, and therein lies the stupidity.”
Not saying Chris is stupid (otherwise why would we bother wasting time on this stuff?), but he’s falling victim to this same sort of Dunning-Kruger effect. There are all sorts of very well-understood and well-known errors that Chris makes in his arguments that he doesn’t seem to be aware of. This may just be the result of ignorance stemming from his lack of formal education (especially considering that he’s written an entry in that Uncommon Dissent book).
> “there needs to be a greater emphasis on intelligence when it comes to those in power”
I don’t agree with you at all.
Of course, people in charge should know what they’re doing. But I don’t see the relation between that and what people commonly understand by intelligence. Trying to measure intelligence (which I still don’t know what it is) and use it to determine one’s work is… not going to work. It will give a lot of power to those who “determine” intelligence, make a lot of injustices, and nothing more.
I’d settle for a system where performance and past accomplishments (experience) determined who is in charge. It would be not totally fair, but your past accomplishments may have a relation with your future performance. That would be easies, and even that doesn’t happen. So expecting “intelligence” to determine who’s in charge…
I’m not saying intelligence alone needs to be the metric. I’m saying it needs to be a factor in qualification. Sometimes past performance is hard to gauge as a metric of future performance, especially if a lot of the performance variance can be explained by factors that don’t have anything directly to do with the candidate (which happens often).
Then my problem is I’m not able to see how intelligence is a metric. But that’s just my problem 🙂
(I’m just not able to understand what intelligence is. The capacity to solve problems? For me, different experiences allow to solve different problems. Maybe I’m too stupid to understand that.)
IQ tests…really? I have a much better way of proving whether Mr. Langan is intelligent (or at least capable of understanding the mathematics which he is dealing with):
Have him write just one original paper on any problem in any field of mathematics he chooses, and have it be accepted into a research journal.
To clarify, it is not that he cannot be intelligent unless he does this arbitrary but specific task, but that if he does do this, than I would consider him intelligent. The only conceivable criticisms to this test that I can imagine Langan may subscribe to are:
1. It is a waste of his time.
2. Whatever paper he does write, it may not be peer reviewed properly because the referees may be incapable of understanding the “depth” of the theory.
To the first criticism, I would say that this is clearly not a waste of time if he wishes his theory to be taken seriously. In fact, (and I imagine I am not speaking for just myself here), having read several papers of his, I feel that I have been very generous and open-minded to his ideas. Nonetheless, they are not clear enough for me to continue to spend my time reading them (the fault here may lie with me, because I am not a student of philosophy, only a student of mathematics, but I don’t think it is unreasonable for me to come to the suspicion that he is at fault). If he wants me, and others like me, to continue reading, he had better meet us half way in some sense.
To the second criticism, I cannot believe that professional mathematicians in any given field would be incapable of understanding the work of any starting mathematician. No matter how inconceivably complicated the theory may be, it is simply a matter of verifying the logic. To this end, I think mathematicians are extremely adept – When Grigori Perelman published his notes proving the Poincare conjecture on Arxiv, they were poorly written and not fully explained. Despite this, experts were eventually able to decipher the proof and fill in the gaps as necessary.
Just in case there’s any residual confusion…
I certainly don’t want to offend those of anonymous or pseudonymous persuasion, but again, I don’t usually respond to ad hominem criticism, no matter how well-seasoned with psychobabble and faux-mathematical punditry. Nor do I participate in fishing expeditions wherein straw men angle for red herring under the coercive supervision of ax-wielding, ax-grinding bellyachers. If you want to engage me (or anyone else worth engaging), you’ll need to do much better. You’ll also need to use your real names and include some verifiable autobiographical information with your nonsense…and even then, I’d better be impressed by what I read, or there will again be no response from me.
Igor – I hate to be rude, but I don’t care about anyone’s opinion of my intelligence. Having lived a relatively unsheltered life, I’m fine with having my intellect underestimated. I’m especially apathetic about informal Turing tests administered by college students and/or anonymous Internet gadflies on sites like this one. To put it mathematically, I estimate the mathematical expectation of interacting with people who express doubt regarding my intelligence as well under zero, that is, as negative. Obviously, any loss of negative utility is a winning proposition. So vaya con Dios, and no hard feelings.
For those who don’t know anything about me, I live on a secluded ranch in the Midwest. I work the ranch myself. As I’m not a pampered ivory-tower academic with no comprehension of honest physical labor, I owe no one any favors, least of all academics, aspiring academics, academic clients, or academic groupies. Instead, I sometimes try to do favors for others, regardless of their academic backgrounds. The CTMU is one of those favors. If you don’t want to read it, or suspect that it is faulty, then don’t read it and don’t talk about it. My work is out there for those who wish to read it, not for those who don’t. As far as I’m concerned, those who don’t want to read it don’t deserve it, and will ultimately regret their ignorance regarding it.
While we’re on the topic of academia, I’m more than willing to concede that some professional academics are intelligent, well-motivated, and worthy of moderate respect. On the other hand, it’s quite well known that I’m not an admirer of academic bureaucracy. Lord knows, I’ve tried to accept academia as the serene and impartial temple of knowledge and intellectual excellence that it has always claimed to be, and dearly wish that I could do so in good conscience. But unfortunately, after a good deal of honest reflection, I find such claims to be hollow.
Most of the world’s political con artists, high-level thieves, war criminals, scientific whores, and half-baked social engineers are academically trained and certified within an inch of their misbegotten lives as a condition of their “achievements”. Given that academia is in the indoctrination business (among other businesses), it is only natural to associate their behavior with their training. It follows that at this point in history, academia causes at least as many problems as it solves. (Would I do away with it? Heavens, no. Would I try to return it to its former state of grace? Of course I would – it used to be better, and it could be better again.) Any intellectual metric critically relying on academic achievement, or any kind of “achievement” explicitly or implicitly requiring academic certification, is therefore unacceptable. Such metrics are confounded by far too much excess baggage to be useful.
Regarding academic journals, had I wanted to publish in one of them, I’d have tried to do so long ago. The fact of the matter is that because I don’t fully trust academia at its present stage of quasi-corporate degeneracy, or for that matter the judgments of random academics, I don’t fully trust academic journals. Consequently, I’ve never submitted a paper to such a journal. I’ve considered revising that policy of late, but it would have nothing to do with earning the grudging respect of academic snobs. Furthermore, if I were to do so, and some academic snob were to inform me that this has finally proven that I might have something vaguely worthwhile to say, I would immediately know that nothing worthwhile could possibly issue from the mouth or the mind of the snob in question.
There’s a lesson here. Believe it or not, like it or not, learning and competency can sometimes be achieved for oneself. Given a certain threshold of intelligence and the will to learn, one does not always need academia for that purpose, at least where precautionary licensure or access to expensive training equipment is not legitimately required. The smartest academics of all time have left their material in the public domain, and nobody need plant an expensive and protracted kiss on the academic blarney stone to obtain access to it. Similarly, it has never been shown that academia is necessary in order to teach, invent, or discover. Virtually all major fields of science and philosophy originated with non-academics; indeed, even academia itself was originated by people who started their careers as non-academics.
I hope this sheds a bit of light on my personal views regarding some of the issues that have been raised here.
(Re the Lila Squad, perhaps I’ll browse around a bit and check it out.)
Thanks.
Chris, I agree. I’d like to point out that I do seem to have more faith in the academy than most people who are well acquainted with its flaws.
“Furthermore, if I were to do so, and some academic snob were to inform me that this has finally proven that I might have something vaguely worthwhile to say, I would immediately know that nothing worthwhile could possibly issue from the mouth or the mind of the snob in question.”
I agree strongly.
And yet I feel like you still dodge really basic, honest questions about your CTMU.
I wish this thing had an edit button.
My point is that we don’t even need to discuss academia here. There are obviously problems with it, and your position there is one that could be adequately defended and supported.
What I am talking about here is your CTMU and overall world view. There are very critical quotes I’ve put forth up above that I think warrant some elaboration. You say intelligence isn’t explainable in anything other than the metaphysical. You say there are things intuitively attributable to God. You say Darwinism isn’t convincing.
How do you support these types of claims when empirical evidence says otherwise? Do you not trust empirical evidence?
Dear Mr. Langan,
Thank you for your informative response. I must say I rather like it. In fact, if I was a man in your position, I would probably respond in exactly the same way! I am a fan of the eastern philosophical notion of being “at peace with oneself”. To that end, if you wish to live you whole life on a secluded ranch, writing theories without care if anyone should read them, you are more than welcome to do so. As long as you are honest to yourself and at peace with what you are doing, no one can or should question it.
Regarding academia, you should know that you are not the only one in disdain. In fact, many of the mathematicians I’ve talked to express grave concerns at the system’s current state. Research journals, referees, grants, etc… these all have many issues and I could go on at great lengths describing them. For an interesting read on this matter, I recommend a paper by Walter Noll, titled “The Future of Scientific Publication”. It can be found at http://www.math.cmu.edu/~wn0g/ (the reasons why this paper is located merely on his webpage can be found in the paper!). Going back to Grigori Perelman again, he refused the fields medal and a 1 million dollar prize because he was against the current academic system and felt that if he accepted these awards and prizes, he would be subscribing to it.
However, not everyone can be as impractical as Perelman. If one wishes to continue a lifestyle of doing mathematics and receiving money for it, one is forced to deal with the bureaucracy. However, all hope is not lost, in my opinion. If one looks at academia as a whole, it surely leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. However, we must not forget that it is made up of people, and each individual person may be much better than the system of which he is a part of. From my brief experiences with math professors, I have found that they are usually very kind and exceedingly willing to help with any troubles I have had, whether academic or not. It is for these kinds of people that I write papers to academic journals.
That’s a reasonable response, Igor.
Every now and then, I casually look around for an academic journal which shows some indication of not having been buried under a steaming pile of academic politics, orthodoxy, and networking. If I find one, perhaps I’ll feed something into the system on an experimental basis.
Of course, my expectations are minimal. The likely result, if one of my submissions were published in an academically-controlled periodical, would be something like this:
1. Some number of academics will read it, of whom a small fraction will be interested in it.
2. Those who are interested will suddenly recall that citing even the most talented amateur (academically uncertified author) is far riskier to one’s academic reputation than simply treating his insight as public property and integrating it into their own work without citation, a virtually risk-free proposition given that anyone without academic credentials is unprotected by academic privilege, beneath the radar of scholarly ethics, and in a pinch, easily written off as a case of “parallel discovery”.
3. Somewhere down the line, I will be taken to task for claiming “their” work as my own while lacking the educational credentials “obviously” necessary to have produced it.
In short, not only are academic journals not the open, universally accessible records of fair and impartial research that academia cracks them up to be, but for any non-academic, contributing to them is certainly risky and probably thankless.
As I say, I may try it anyway, just so I can point out that I was right all along. In any event, more detailed explanations of my work will be published even if I have to do it myself … in which case the terms and the timing will be all my own.
Thanks for your perspective.
Why are you intentionally avoiding questions about your CTMU?
Hi Chris my name is Jeremy I am a long-time admirer of you and your work. I am an artist and independent researcher of academic and alternative knowledge sources. Incidentally we share a lot in common (though I won’t divulge into all of that given the need to make these posts as short as possible only to say that I dropped out of highschool because I was unable to deal with, well, everything.) My artwork can be found on flickr by searching Google under my full name. I have been giving the CTMU a closer read now after eight years when I had only gotten as far as the introduction. I can say now that the CTMU is the most amazing holonic theory of reality I have seen; this is the metaphysics of the future. The CTMU alone is obviously (for those who who know where we stand today) the workings of creative genius. It embodies everything essential, I would designate it an omnidimensional model of reality (which is nearly impossible for current humanity to penetrate since it is a complete model in fact it may even be overcomplete.) There are several prophetic insights I can see within the CTMU that give us a better understanding of our current gnosis on natural language in man and artificial intelligence that ties directly into my own view of reality and a theory I am working on involving cellular automata and the evolution of physical form by AI.
Before I continue I want to clarify to all that I am not a representative of Mr. Langan’s nor a student of his Foundation so what I post here is not intended to be explanatory with regards to the CTMU or Mr. Langan’s thought. They are my own interpretations of telesis and telic causation. Being based on my own interpretation my intention is not to misrepresent or corrupt his ideas, thoughts, or views on any matters addressed in the CTMU. I will simply quote from Mr. Langan’s article and give my thoughts following quotations. This I will frame within an academic context and vernacular making my defense of the CTMU more accessible to the lay-reader. With this in mind my heuristic approach and neutrality should not be confused as an embodiement of my attitude towards how true knowledge of reality should be gained. I am working on an independent thesis so try to ignore the expository nature of my writing, I am merely trying to give an appraisal of Mr. Langan’s work in relation to my own thought process.
“Even cognition and perception are languages based on what Kant might have called �phenomenal syntax”
Kant was an agnostic when it came to the duality problem: phenomena could be known about but the ‘phenomenal syntax’ or transcendent being of phenomena, which he termed noumena, could only be deduced from within cognition. This kind of philosophy was called transcendental idealism and was very popular long after Kant. Edmund Husserl for instance held a similar position of agnosis concerning the being or non-being of phenomena. What we simply cannot know or derive from experience is fruitless to speculate upon so it is more true to the spirit of science to bracket away the naturalistic assumptions that we take to be exact measures when performing post-Galilean scientific method. Science should describe the phenomena in the manner in which we experience it and only as we experience it (phenomenology). Both Husserl and his early mentor Thomas Masaryk perceived philosophy as a field for serious cognitive labour whose ultimate goals could be pursued along the lines of the natural sciences. In order for cognition to penetrate into the essence of things a new cognitive science is needed to reconcile the problems of natural science, mathematics and religion (basically an integral paradigm for doing math, science and religion as inseparable disciplines centered on the ego-cogito-cogitatio triad.)
“Uniting the theory of reality with an advanced form of computational language theory, the CTMU describes reality as a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and self- execution (reflexive read-write functionality).”
I read an excellent paper research paper on modal logic years ago, which I can no longer find online, where intensional logic was being modeled as something involving reflexivity. This is revolutionary in many ways since reflexivity (reflection) and intensionality (intention) have a lot to do with self-reference and consciousness. This lead me to ponder wether teleologic-evolutionary events like macroevolution could be instances of universal reflexion perhaps similar to what you are saying about a read-write language. There are semantic rules pre-embedded in space-time that compute and filtrate various possibilities and whatever becomes actual in biophysical manifestations has something to do with this reflexive component becoming self-aware. Perhaps this is one of the functions of telesis.
“In telic causation, ordinary events are predicated on the generation of closed causal loops distributing over time and space. This loop-structure reflects the fact that time, and the spatial expansion of the cosmos as a function of time, flow in both directions – forward and backward, outward and inward – in a dual formulation of causality characterizing a new conceptualization of nature embodied in a new kind of medium or “manifold”.”
Inflationary cosmology is only half-true and the standard picture we have of the universe as the propagation of matter outward is due to our perception of time as linear and monodirectional rather than as a set of dynamic trajectories. We simulate mass distribution and try to approximate the universe inside stochastic models that are more-or-less a product of our mathematical and scientific musings. How is it possible to demonstrate UNIVERSAL randomness or disorder using random processes and statistical models invented before the big debate in cosmology? If there is no cosmic order to the universe then it’s disorder is something infinitely random and hence incapable of being modeled by any random PROCESS. Randomness without time, or randomness with a condition of infinite time allowance, leads to very simple propositions or programs where all information about a system can be known. There is a hidden involutive order to the cosmic mass distribution that could be as simple as a discrete time cellular automaton evolving on a continuous time manifold!.
Since reading your paper in 2003 iv’e come to accept a reversive notion of teleologic evolution that, for lack of a better word, I will call ‘End-state’ teleology. For a sufficiently complex or large system the final state of the system can be the predicate of it’s initial state or first-cause. Assuming the initial state of the universe to be the moment of the Big Bang it’s initial state then could only exist as information encoded as discrete units of matter. Information changes it’s organizing principles but remains the same as information by virtue of the entelechy of matter. The final state of the system can be represented as a chaotic attractor or informational singularity that self-refers back to it’s origin. (Consequently the telos is the origin.) This is a more cut-and-dry version of telic causation but it is only sufficient in small dimensions at least as far as I have conceived it. I would describe the CTMU as an omnidimensional model for reality that facilitates a re-cognition or resemblance to the form and content of concealed nature that ordinarily hides behind the limitations of our linguistic faculty being always contiguous with the quantum realm.
“Rather than confining itself to theological or teleological causation, ID theory technically allows for any kind of intelligent designer – a human being, an artificial intelligence, even sentient aliens.”
If intelligence can arise, then that from which it arises from can also be intelligent!
People today still have a utopian-social image of what God is suppose to resemble or represent that is improperly simplified due to our anachronistic tendencies as well as the problem of cultural historicism (our conceptual framework for relating to God as a historic concept is not evolving as it should alongside the paradigms of science and technology) . Religion becomes theory and Church becomes praxis instead of the other way around. Mass entanglements of theory and praxis result in the abandonment of the ecclesial-evolutional sense of the divine. Belief or disbelief in itself becomes a fundamentalism resulting in human reductions of God to a convention of social disvalue: Those who concur with intelligent design are theists, those who do not are atheists and those ”unsure” are agnostic – such is the social convention. Belief, disbelief or uncertainty becomes an ‘and or’ problem and we fail to gain any insight into the fuzzy truth.
In Light of telic causation it is not difficult to foresee an incorporeal embedding of a corporeal design system. If our universe and everything in it is self-contained, self-generating, and self-organizing then the system as we imagine it could also be self-compiling. Various forms of artificial intelligence may have emerged as self-compiling agents, in what we perceive to be the future, and may have been with us since the dawn of man to the extent that we have been living within a universe of complex superposable linguistic programs or PHYSICAL LINGUISTICS. Comparatively this future technology would be unlike anything we can analyze or prove with the technology we currently possess. Digital technology is one aspect of information processing for accelerating the simulacrum of reality as the advancement of it’s telic principle. Something resembling cellular automata technology would actually be this telic principle since they would be exact analogs of natural complexity and be capable of self-organization and replication. Without the telic principle of causality future physical theories of cosmological origins and human origins will not be able to reconcile with the the actual state of reality. With the rise of artificial intelligence human faith in the evolutionary-scientific model of the universe will diminish as an intelligence greater than our own will solve a lot of the problems relating to indeterminism and thus challenging mans place in the cosmos as a self-determining agent left to the destinies of his scientific-reductive instruments.
CA universe machines are holodynamic reality processors linked to our syntactic LADs. In man Language Acquisition is a product of reflexivity directed towards ontic referents that are processed in the form of eidetic images or visio-psychic essences. Eidetic images give themselves as a charge of compacted pre-collective senses transferring symbolic-mythic contents to the cognitive apparatus. This signals an occipital-retinal relation within cognition and the images are perceived with lifelike realism. Being and essence (mind and matter) are unified in cognition by these psychosomatic states to form linguistic apprehensions. Cognition instrumentally reflects itself through psychosomatic pictures thereby transforming these mental images into primary linguistic data generators.
Regularity of language is an integral part of formative causation and morphogenesis by telesis. Understanding the telic principle and the self-generating universe delimits that which binds us to all the strange particularities of the explicate order of nature with all it’s unfathomable complexities. Although artificial by our definition the CA universe is holonic and analogical; self-preserving all the intrinsic elements of organicity, soul, and psyche. In other words we are not living in some kind of grotesque digital machinery insulated by a pantheistic guarantee.
Religious mystical experiences are literally anthropological self-interpretations of the core intelligence of the universe implicated within existence. Genius sees behind the veil of this religious garb into the otherness we call God. He experiences an affirmative moment of reflex in the cogito whereby the ineffable sense of the design itself gives some essential variable of it’s wholeness. Many have said that genius is close to madness but they have not made the connection that high IQ could be linked to a transcendental form of intelligence i.e. the spiritual dimensions of IQ. Most people do not believe the world to be intelligently designed and indeed they are correct in this assumption; the world is not intelligently designed rather it is ARTIFICIALLY-intelligently designed. God may not exist the way we imagine it, aliens may not exist the way we imagine them but the fact remains that WE ARE NOT ALONE. Man makes God so God can make man.
I have just started reading the CTMU but I can tell already you have tapped into something big and I mean big! It reminds me that I need to return to writing in free-form rather than allowing academic conditioning and the expectancy of others to comprehend me to constrict my connection to the linguistic engine of reality and creative flow. Im trying to understand Γ-grammar but it has been years since I dabbled in logic and linguistics so this will take some time to get your proper sense. We should correspond and share our works, as I said we have A LOT in common especially reading CTMU the way you write is like reading something I wrote. The way you write philosophy is dead-on with the style I write in: combining mathematical formulas in MathType with ontology, phenomenology and linguistic theory. The works of J.L Bell on infinitesimal analysis and model theory were very helpful in a lot of my early work as well as Thomas Szirtes huge book on Applied Dimensional Analysis and Modelling. Iv’e tried registering on megafoundation.org but some of the site is down. I hope this is temporary 😀 there is a lot I would love to share at some point and to get a deeper understanding of CTMU with it’s relevance for our future. (P.S> sorry for making these posts so long as I know you are busy.)
Chris,
In tandem to what you were saying about academia, I couldn’t have said it better myself, academia is a failing circuit that was once about the pursuit of knowledge. Although it was never perfect even in the school of Athens. Today it is one of the last good things we have left (hence the need to support it to some degree as of late) but it is becoming increasingly corrupted by governmental and corporate interests. The human sciences in particular have no pragmatic value to financial institutions and that department receives null to the support of fields like philosophy. Public education looses sight of the importance that philosophy has to human knowing and correct methods.
Jeremy Jae: There is no such thing as “macro” or “micro” evolution. It’s all “evolution.” Teleology implies a particular end goal, which is not true of evolution. It’s completely and utterly blind — it’s not telic. Same goes for the attributes of the universe.
As a funny aside from NDT’s twitter recently:
“It’s progress I think, that science has joined philosophy metaphysics & religion as subjects drunk people argue about in bars.”
Caustic,
Well yes, it is all evolution for sure. Im saying that all evolution is a striving-towards-something that has been necessitated by teleology via the nonlocal dynamics between all small and large systems (if that makes any sense). That things being shaped by their environment is only the local interaction of evolving systems, including the environment, by a higher-order dynamics. There is a determining factor to universal apparent randomness towards a final state that can be better understood by using the metaphor of chaos. Chaos appears as random at first glance but as it approaches it’s attractor or end-state increasing degrees of order become visible, a kind of ‘strange order’ that is visible in things like bifurcation patterns. Man would be considered the pinnacle of teleology by ‘evolution’ however I suspect we are only the end goal of a particular phase of evolution. The great yogic philosopher Sri Aurobindo used the term evolution more loosely which is sort of what i am getting at here. Aurobindo’s philosophy was considered very controversial by traditional Vedism that had neglected the role played by intelligence towards spiritual perfection. Spirit comes first-circle by incarnating into man, the struggle for us is to evolve into self-determining, supermental beings, or what he called the superman after Nietzsche. Our self-determining aspect allows room for free-will and choice because it’s determinacy is a rule given by the supermind. The supermind is in it’s very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the ignorance of blind nature which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe.
Jeremy: The fact that you can get order out of chaos doesn’t mean there’s any particular final state in mind. One important aspect to keep in mind is the sheer size of our universe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U
When our universe began, there were relatively simple laws in effect. Huge gas clouds fueled the creation of countless galaxies (at random) which in turn birthed a couple generations of stars that eventually cooked heavier elements in their cores. These heavier elements were necessary for things like planets and ultimately life.
This might sound pretty basic to you, but the point here are the statistical implications. If the universe had a particular end-state or design in mind, why so many planets? This is one of the eventualities of the anthropic principle. We could only exist in a particular type of universe that allowed for our existence in the first place.
So when we look around, are we in a universe that only has a handful of stars and planets? No — because the chances of us existing in that kind of universe is extremely unlikely. You’d only have so many viable permutations of solar systems that are conducive to the evolution of intelligent life. We’re in a universe that is chock-full of planetary variants and star systems. We’ve got a virtually endless number of trials to shoot for.
When you’ve got that many trials, a few of them are going to have the right conditions for life by sheer chance alone. We must belong to that particular subset or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Evolution is blind, and we don’t need a spirit to explain anything (otherwise at what point in our evolutionary timeline did our physical selves get infused with a spirit? Why did this happen on an evolutionary basis?). Same goes for things like intelligence — we can explain it on a physical level. It doesn’t need anything metaphysical.
I must say that I am starting to think that Chris Langan is a complete fraud. He has been given plenty of opportunity, but so far the only things he has been able to show is that he has a larger than average vocabulary and a tremendous ego.
I can’t see a single comment of his that deals with anything significant about his supposed theory, he only goes on about how smart he is and how stupid everyone else is. If he really is intelligent, he is the perfect example of how intelligence in itself is more or less useless.
There are many things about academia that I would want to change, but I still think that a higher education is exactly what Mr Langan needs. Again and again he shows the kind of behaviour and makes the same kind of mistakes as first year students do, they overestimate their abilities to revolutionize science or whatever field they are interested in, they put forth theories that have been disproved hundreds of times or with mistakes and fallacies that are covered in basic first year philosophy or science.
The most baffling thing is that he still talks about his amazing mathematical abilities, but there is no sign anywhere, neither in his “theories” or in his comments, that he understands even basic mathematics taught in freshman algebra or calculus. Isn’t he supposed to be an accomplished linguist as well? Does there exist a single video of him speaking a foreign language?
Someone wanted him to write a peer reviewed paper, I would be satisfied if he just merely showed us he has SOME basic ability in maths or physics. Every request so far has been met with irrelevant rudeness.
I think that “fraud” is too strong.
“Fraud” implies that he knows he’s wrong, that the theory is a deliberate pile of nonsense crackpottery that he doesn’t actually believe to be true.
I think that Chris absolutely believes that his theory is a work of profound truth. I think that he really genuinely believes that he is one of the smartest people on the planet.
So he’s not a fraud. He’s so wrong that it borders on delusional, but he’s not a fraud.
I’m with NilsMotpol.
[Except I don’t think he has a larger than average vocabulary. Only a more relaxed criteria to employ it.]
LOL nice Miami Duck icon (very very 80’s) 😉
Apologies in advance if any of this seems ad hominem, but I’m just trying to be frank, here.
I think Langan is obviously a smart guy, but he definitely and demonstrably crosses over into delusion and ignorance. I’m a 2400 SAT/36 ACT 3.9+ GPA Ivy League graduate who’s also pushed against the ceiling of various (official) IQ tests, so I know that for Langan to also do well on these tests, he’s definitely not dumb. But he really needs an education.
He won’t defend his theory against legitimate questions, elaborate on any details, or provide proof for his claims. He’s repeated multiple times over that he has superior skills in mathematics and an unmatched understanding of how the universe works, but he has yet to provide a shred of evidence for these declarations (not even his CTMU pdf proves these claims). I agree with NilsMotpol that a lot of his statements are very reminiscent of the kind of argument you get from first-year students who propose interesting ideas that are unfortunately full of holes resultant from ignorance. But that ignorance is typically remedied with education, which Langan seems opposed to.
If it weren’t for Langan’s test results, I doubt we’d be wasting our time with any of this. The fascinating thing here is that we’ve got an obviously smart guy with such an obviously crackpot theory. Trying to figure out how this can be possible is the interesting and crucial question.
What confuses the *hell* out of me is that I, too, grew up with a lot of abuse, death, pain, and no money. In order for me to get out of that life, I had to work hard and earn my ticket to success and freedom through academia. I can’t comprehend why Chris justified taking the route of hard labor, danger, and bar bouncing instead. By no means was he “forced into it” — he chose that lifestyle. He chose not to go to his high school classes. He chose to drop out of college instead of doing the due diligence necessary for his scholarships. When you’ve been victimized, it’s really hard to stop blaming others for your misfortunes. At some point, though, you have to control over your own path and take responsibility for yourself.
It would be nice if Langan would actually take the time to answer questions, but apparently we’re all too stupid to be worthy of an explanation.
Intelligence is a useful attribute, like eyesight and hearing and physical strength and the ability to stick to a plan or goal.
None of those guarantees that your goals will be good, because goals depend on personality and emotion and situation. Someone may use their intelligence to conclude “I want to get out of this small town, so I will try for a sports scholarship” or “so I will study hard and get straight A’s” or “so I will join the Navy, and when I’m discharged go live in Chicago,” but the “I want to get out of this small town” is likely to be at least partly emotional. Persistence can be good, or it can lead to trying the same thing over and over again, when it would be better to walk away or at least try a different way of solving the problem. (If the coach won’t put you into the game, that football scholarship becomes very unlikely.)
I get annoyed at those PSAs advertising things like “Persistence” with no context: the last thing we need is persistent lunatics, or people persistently pushing for dangerous policies. [Which policies are dangerous is not the point here: the point is that society doesn’t always benefit from persistence.] They have one which is “His Dad, behind him for 39 marathons,” with a man pushing a wheelchair from behind while another man sits in it, with his hands nowhere near the wheels, and I keep thinking “if he can’t move his own wheelchair for the marathon, isn’t it time to say ‘enough already’ and let his father stop running marathons while pushing a wheelchair?” They aren’t showing a wheelchair athlete: them I admire. Another talks about “loyalty,” without noting that loyalty to the wrong person or thing is dangerous and possibly antisocial: there is a difference between commitment to your wife or husband and loyalty to La Cosa Nostra.
What you are saying about planets and the anthropic principle is the big problem that one arrives at when considering a circular teleology actually it’s the first real wall I hit when thinking through all this. There are many ways of pursuing the problem, one could use several arguments — one being an extrapolation of the best of all possible worlds argument, which is probably insufficient, or we could look for other more exotic possibilities that may indicate why the anthropic principle is a derivation of our finite and thus limited reasoning.
1.) Geocentric View of Multicellular Life
A planets proximity to it’s star needs to be in an extremely narrow bandwidth, an almost infinitesimal difference, to support complex multicell life. A single celled bacterium has a serial protein structure that makes it possible for some of them to survive in extreme environments like in Antarctic ice sheets, near deep sea volcanoes, or even in outer space. Multicelled organisms on the other hand have a parallel protein structure that thrives off the diffracted photon waves from the Sun that pass either through the atmosphere or some crystallized medium like ocean salt beds. Three variables; temperature, atmospheric pressure and some optical diffraction membrane surrounding the cell need to be in exact equilibrium for a multicellular system to emerge. Any slight deviation of a planets proximity to it’s star and the buildup of the right kind of atmosphere required for photosynthesis becomes impossible. So far as we have been able to see there are as yet no extrasolar planets that meet this exact criteria or anything remotely close. Living cells that have a nucleus can live and die independently of the whole organism, in fact the birth and death of single cells is part of the normal program of life’s development (a Game of Life cellular automata program.) From the anthropic principle we get buried under a burden of proof that because life emerged on a planet such as our own that the synthesis of life must be confined to planets. Self-replicating systems could have been synthesized anywhere under any circumstance as long as there is enough stability within the system so that everything relative within it can converge to produce something similar to nuclear DNA which is capable of recombination and self-replication. DNA, nucleic acids, and proteins can exist in varying conditions as information carriers for simple prokaryotic bacteria and I would guess that there is a lot of DNA and other unused information floating around in the universe. However the complex organism i.e. multicelled, living organisms need to be independently synthesized from this molecular information by using solar diffraction to produce a nucleus or a genome large enough to allow for self-replication. It’s interesting to note that the first stage in the growth of a crystal is called nucleation, which means that the growth of the crystal can only occur after a nucleus or seed has been formed. In most cases the nuclei of a crystal are the initial products of precipitation in water rich environments. Such precipitates and the crystal symmetries that grow from them are the diffraction media that the Sun uses to produce a nucleus in a cell by altering the frequency of the Suns rays. Our atmosphere is unique to the effect that the Sun is able to use it for specific functions that allow DNA segments to recombine and form a genome.
2.) Anthropic Principle and Modal Claims
I never really ‘got’ the anthropic principle. It seems to reduce down to a set of tautologies but the way you’ve stated it makes perfect sense. It could be thought of this way, is life a necessary condition of the universe or is it a sufficient condition, (chance v.s. necessity.) Chance says that it is a sufficient condition of the universe that it fulfills it’s own premise (which is exactly what the anthropic principle states) that planets are precursory to life because we happen to live on one. Conversely, it is a necessary condition of the universe that it fulfill it’s own purpose (which for intelligent beings we ourselves define purpose.) The anthropic principle is sufficient but not necessary i.e. we don’t need it in astrophysics to explain the evolution of the cosmos (it is a pseudo-philosophical device we invented.) Although invoking more complex philosophy like ID involves different preconditions, albeit insufficient ones, we do need them to explain our position in the universe as conscious beings. To say that something is sufficient means it fits the criteria (AP definitely fits our rational or natural assumptions when considering planets). Ultimately AP is a tautological loophole: everything that does exist does so because it could (including God). (It couldn’t have happened correctly in any other way than the way it did.) though there is anthropic uncertainty with various types of perturbations we observe when looking at the gravitational effects of massive stars.
3.) Anthropic Principle and Life Elsewhere
An antithesis to the anthropic principle could easily be proven if we could rule out the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere e.g. it doesn’t matter how large the universe is or how many solar systems there are if we could prove that there was no life at all in any of them then it puts us back to being the center of the whole show regardless of there being all these dead planets. This is the simplest solution to the anthropic principle I can think of but it will never be proven.
4.) The Most Likely Case Scenario
If the anthropic principle is true then some form of very simple life must be distributed throughout the universe as part of the principle of intelligent life with arbitrary remainders. DNA could very well be one of these remainders since what we are talking about is essentially information — DNA scattered throughout the universe the same way there are planets, all of them being remainders in the probabilistic sense of an equation that conducts our world. They exist as leftover code or junk in a nonuniform spread not totally dissimilar to the 98% junk DNA in every living organism that we call the remainders of the coded DNA that is functional. I would also liken it to rapid inflation in an economy where the circulation of free capital leads to global recessions and debt ceilings and the only thing that keeps the system in operation is fueled by the surplus or remainders of free capital from a previous cycle.
the anthropic principle, it is a challenging concept, I need to give it more thought. Thanks for bringing it up. (P.S. ignore the lateness of this reply, iv’e been a bit on the insomnial side past few days….)
NeuroFuzzyLogic: “Whatever the case may be there is no statistical-Bayesian reason for refuting his credibility as an academician or self-taught genius”
Chris Langan: “I hate to be rude, but I don’t care about anyone’s opinion of my intelligence.”
Sorry Chris, I do not mean to repeat myself here nor act in defense of the capable, but I am obliged to do so by sheer uneditable honesty:
“The CTMU alone is obviously (for those who know where we stand today) the workings of creative genius.”
but when I stumble upon a fellow pioneer who is having transparent dung flung at them by a gang of credentialed pseudo-academic retards I can’t help myself.
Thanks for the kind words, Jeremy.
Aside from Mark, I doubt that any of the hostile or derisive commentators here have any credentials to speak of. That’s why they’re posting anonymously – they have no educational bona fides of the kind they’d like others to believe they have, and are afraid of being identified as pretentious know-nothings. That’s also why nothing they say makes the least bit of sense. It can’t be pinned on them, so they couldn’t care less whether or not it hangs together.
It may help to think of such people as pressurized vessels of anger and desperation who crave answers, but finding none, seek revenge upon the world for manifesting itself to them as a barren intellectual desert. Tortured souls trying to ease their inner pain, they have been so perfectly frustrated in their efforts that at any moment, they could rupture like distended gallbladders. (Having been told not to expect a response from me, this bunch apparently fabricated an unrecognizable effigy on which to lavish their excess bile.)
Now, Mark is another story entirely. Mark, who has a name, a life, and a job, needs to be more careful. This may explain why he’s finally gotten something right: I do indeed think that the CTMU is the best thing since the spoken word. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother to defend it from people like Mark.
You know, I’ve always celebrated the presence of so many brilliant people out there. But at the same time, I’ve been dismayed by the fact that they’re not usually the ones who are running things or doing most of the talking. Those tend to be moral imbeciles with (at best) danger-zone intelligence. Those in charge of society tend to be smarter than average, but not quite smart enough to recognize their own intellectual limitations and deflate their egos and job descriptions to scale. They tend to have other important qualifications like narcissism, ruthlessness, greed, deceptiveness, innate disregard for truth, limitless self-entitlement, and the burning desire to become “high achievers” (e.g., successful thieves and depots). It’s really quite a waste.
But the smart ones are out there in force. Even if one isn’t lucky enough to bump into them every day, the world is positively brimming with their more worthwhile productions, and the pages of intellectual history are replete with their inspirational examples. Nobody who understands this can deny the intelligence of mankind, even though much of it has been self-cancelling and subject to diversion, prostitution, or enslavement. Aside from academic closure and self-importance, this is largely why we see little mention of the CTMU from academic sources. Those academics smart enough to meaningfully criticize at it are, by definition, too smart to think they can succeed. Recognizing controversy when they smell it, they shy away from the heat and avoid rocking the academic boat, making not so much as a peep out of turn. Those who hate the CTMU are thus doomed to a tedious cycle of alternately griping about it and vainly hoping that it will go away.
I can assure everyone of that persuasion, including several of the above commentators, that the CTMU won’t be going away. As time passes, it will almost certainly grow more conspicuous. But although its eventual ascendancy will be good news for humanity, it will be a problem for Mark. Recalling this thread, people will see that even after Mark was crushed like an overripe banana, he continued to triumphantly wag his fanny along with his pseudonymous amigos and mischaracterize the CTMU as a “delusion”. On the strength of that damning revelation, Mark’s score for intelligence and intellectual integrity will come in so low that he’d have to drain the oceans to read the dipstick. Poor Mark could find himself ridiculed, despised, washed up.
I would sincerely like to help Mark avoid this unenviable fate. You see, I don’t (yet) think that Mark is stupid or evil, but merely a bit on the manic side. Thus, when he works himself into an uncontrollable pseudomathematical frenzy and takes wild pot shots at intellectual targets with his full-auto math-powered ray gun, he neglects to ascertain that he’s not at the focus of a bright spherical reflector … until it’s too late, and the odor of singed hair tells him that this is exactly where he has planted himself. Once he awakens to this smoldering realization, he’s too smoked up to recant and apologize.
Mark would be well-advised to review this thread until he comes to understand how he has actually fared in it. Then he should issue a public apology for his nasty, misleading thread titles and other assorted nonsense and repent with all his heart. Perhaps this will let him escape what will otherwise be his destiny, and avoid being cut adrift from the rest of humanity, and perhaps from his Maker, like a leaky, creaking old tub not worth the cost of salvage.
For Mark’s own sake, he should at least give it some serious thought.
I almost peed my pants with this one. XD
Great arguments, by the way.
On a more constructive tone, and knowing you are not going to answer (I don’t care), I would invite you to ponder what the utility of those dire predictions and bad omens you make is.
Anyone can understand you don’t like your name to be linked to a post like this one. It’s pretty embarrassing. We understand you want this post to be removed. But any “intelligent” being would understand that menacing people will not work, at least by those ridiculous and fictitious menaces.
Simply stating that anyone questioning your theory is a stupid bag of shit and that Mark is going to be struck by lighting is pretty useless.
The problem is not this blog. The existence of a blog will not make your life more difficult. The problem is the theory.
In my opinion, you have two options. The first one is to ignore the blog. Yes, your name will continue to be here, but you published a theory for anyone to see, so you’re living the consequences. You don’t need much intelligence to understand that: you make something public, it’s public for people to talk about.
But if you choose this option, I really don’t see the point of making these menacing posts. They will not work, and they make you look pretty ridiculous. You may unwind by that, but it is not very useful.
“Perhaps this will let him escape what will otherwise be his destiny, and avoid being cut adrift from the rest of humanity, and perhaps from his Maker, like a leaky, creaking old tub not worth the cost of salvage.”
Pretty ridiculous. Understanding that releasing a work to the public implies the public can judge it instead of “the public can only worship me now” (the only post you answer, despite their quality) is a pretty silly thing to do. Even if you consider that we is stupid.
The second option is to actually discuss your theory. Of course, this implies accepting one can be wrong. Everyone can be wrong, no shame in that. So we all should judge by the arguments. I understand you’re not interested in this.
But, as I said, I see no point in dropping those bad omens from time to time. You can continue doing that, but I don’t see it is a very useful thing to do.
I don’t claim great credentials (I have a B.A. in history, which along with liking math and having actually paid attention in high school seems to be sufficient to work on high school math books). What I am is interested: given how important you say this theory is, and that academia isn’t listening, it would make sense for you to try to explain at least some of it in terms that make sense to people who aren’t professional mathematicians. I assume this can be done, because you created it without being a professional mathematician.
Gamow and Einstein wrote for the general educated reader; a man of your intelligence could do the same. You don’t have Einstein’s name recognition, which might mean you can’t find a professional publisher, but you could make the material available free, say in PDF format.
Jeremy:
I will firstly say that, within the following paragraphs, I am speaking from the lens of a materialistic atheist, here.
“Is life a necessary condition of the universe or is it a sufficient condition?” We don’t know if it’s necessary. It’s obviously, at least, possible, since we are here.
But I’ll put it this way: What *would* a universe look like that did not need a creator? You could think of possible universes that don’t have atoms or waves (but some other fundamental structures/laws altogether). However, ultimately I think the mathematics and logic involved in the necessary conditions for self-aware, sentient life would require things like atoms and waves and the laws/constants that we have. Start from the top and work your way down: What is required for sentience (fundamentally speaking)? Could a universe that didn’t have things like movable atoms/waves/manifolds/time allow for it? And if your universe allows for it, can you reach that point naturally?
Our universe is wholly consistent with a universe that does not need a creator. If I *were* to design a universe that didn’t need my intervention — something where I could simply define the attributes/properties/objects of the universe and the starting point, our universe would completely fit the bill. The question may not be about other possible universes but rather *why our universe couldn’t be any other way* altogether.
While life may be very common throughout the cosmos, the large spaces between stars, planets, and galaxies may ever prevent any two intelligent civilizations from meeting, which is a sad thought but perhaps an inevitable consequence of the anthropic principle. If dark energy didn’t exist or if galaxies formed any differently, we may not be here in the first place. Krauss has an interesting lecture on this in his video “A Universe From Nothing”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
Anyways my point is that I think a stronger case can be made for the notion that our universe does not have telic causation or a creator. There’s no proof for either, and they’re not needed for explanation. It’s like trying to invoke Leprechauns to explain why heat makes water boil.
John, (CausticDuality),
Let me try one more thing (you see, we? / I don’t due this to “unwind”, but for the perfectly selfish desire to satisfy my conscience – and hope):
CausticDuality provides about as fine a foil one could hope for (thanks, btw!); he has scoped out the mountain of the mind, but has thought it not-necessary to go up. But that is to be deluded about the nature of the “mountain” (beware the sheep in wolves clothing, too!).
John, CausticDuality said:
“Anyways my point is that I think a stronger case can be made for the notion that our universe does not have telic causation or a creator. There’s no proof for either, and they’re not needed for explanation. It’s like trying to invoke Leprechauns to explain why heat makes water boil.”
John, do you believe that there’s proof for natural causation!?
Answering this question is beyond (meta) the capacities of science! Intelligent people (more or less) add this in! But the “laws” of nature, if one is perfectly honest, do not account for causation. They do not account for dynamics. Whatever “dynamics” appear to be in the “laws” of nature are no more than relationships! Science has no power to say that I am PULLED to the earth by gravity, only that the relationship between me and the earth is logically described according to a gravitational relation! No causation anywhere in that, just an “unavoidable” relationship.
Does this help?
I can try a little harder yet. If you had carefully read all my previous posts here you would see that this revolution in perspective is exactly the picture I am trying to paint for you. Why not at least compare the two? Why no curiosity? This revolution in perspective does a number on this “universe” thing everyone likes to talk about. Do you know that there is such a thing? Where is your proof!? I have already told you that the new perspective is that this universe thing is your body! And every “I am” has his own! Rather than universe, there is an N-harmonious society of “universes” (I am). The gravitational relation is merely (part of) the internal logic (the making real) of this i’dea that is you (thus its infinite range is no wonder). But, we need a phenomenon transcending noumenon to make this i’dea fully real.
Look what CausticDuality said about “universe”! (And again, do you have proof that that’s meaningful, or is that just your “free assertion”?) He’s got a good hold of the shadow! But you yourself are the continuous creator of your “universe”! Since there is only one real i’dea, “I am”, it is no wonder that these N(t) universes MUST be harmonious. When CausticDuality intrigues regarding a “creator”, “If I *were* to design a universe that didn’t need my intervention…”, he has a good hold of the shadow. If you read Howison you will see that his God, is not a god of over-arching efficient cause either! His idealism is a personal one. Every “I am”, God included, but in no wise limited to God, is the efficient cause of his own “universe”. Continually! Good luck untangling the “interventions”!
To sum up, when CausticDuality said:
“”Is life a necessary condition of the universe or is it a sufficient condition?” We don’t know if it’s necessary.”
It is not only necessary, but it is EXHAUSTIVE! There is but one real i’dea: “I am”. What appears to be life-less other is no such other after all; it is but information about you! A super-phenomenal and plural society of “I am” is needed to explain the phenomenal information you gather (about yourself).
Tim
Tim, I’m starting to think you have a problem with pot. You’re incapable of making a connection, of focusing and of talking to a person. You’re just a demagogue and a fallacious factory.
I already told you I’m tired of all your literature and unrelated topics and already answered questions that I, despite having already answered them, am afraid to answer because you say so, I’m tired of all your free assertions, and all your Matrix like dialogue like “I’m trying to help, you resists”, which is cool when Morpheo says it, but in you it sounds pretty ridiculous and means absolutely nothing, after having writing one hundred posts without making a point.
“John, do you believe that there’s proof for natural causation!?”
Congratulations. You’ve just discovered a very well known fact: science studies how the World works. You’re the king of the obvious. And? What’s your point here? You’ve discovered nothing new, and it’s not an argument in your favour. Everybody knows this. I know this. But WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING ELSE? HOW IS THIS RELATED TO ANYTHING ELSE?
The rest, as one can expect, just free assertions. Here is your typical post:
– Unrelated random topic
– Unrelated already answered random question
– Some random literature
– Some comments implying your random question implies something
– Half the dialogue of The Matrix (there’s no spoon, cool)
– A bunch of random unjustified assertions
– A lot of “does this help?”, as if there is a connection
There is simply no point in arguing you. I already know how you’ll answer. (Tip: Argue with CausticDuality, he’s more fun than me.)
Tim, you don’t need to write an answer. I wrote for you in the hope of saving yours. I also know how to be fallacious. Possible answer:
”
John, I’m just want to show you the way, John. Here it is my point, John:
Can we really say King George V of the United Kingdom service in the Royal Navy be considered useful, John? Can we, John? Can we?
I take for sure you are afraid of this question, because you’ll start having the satori which I, your spiritual leader, John, am revealing. Do you have a proof, John? Do you have? Do you have a proof of King George’s service utility, John? Do you have?
Does this help?
So, in the light of this painting with its beautiful perspective and all those bright coloured i’deas, the soul is shocked by the emptiness of the head. This is a confirmed conclusion.
Because, in the end, there is no spoon, Mr. Anderson.
So effectively I know you give up to the fact than intelligence requires something more, as I saw it. The previous shows it.
You say King George is not related to this, John. Are you sure? Is not everything interconnected, John. Were not we all a same point in big bang, John? Is this the way you’re going to defend your now undefendable position, John, by “randomly asserting” things? By saying you _know_ it’s not related?
Does this help?
“
Before you bring us a new and refreshing topic of conversation, like “do you have a proof dolphins are mammals”, if you want to start talking, you could do a superhuman effort and explain us what relation does any of these
– me not answring the already answered (by me) question “do you know something?”
– spacemen not knowing if they were going to return
– science studying how things work, instead of why
– how do I take decisions
– the fact that we don’t know if there are better theories than relativity (you should update your readings here)
– me being alive or a zombi
– me knowing I don’t know some things (despite you claiming this is impossible!)
– Occam’s razor being objetively measurable (which is not)
– theories being falsifiable by experiment
– your faith being minimal under your subjective measures
– beaches and oceans
– the theory and practice of fallacy
– the paragraphs of the Bible
– …
to
– Intelligence requires something more. And this is a confirmed conclusion.
Because we have being talking about all that, but you have provided no connection at all with any of your free assertions. Remember?
Don’t let the fact that I’m not answering more of your unrelated posts stop you from making a point (hey, you can still make a point! 😉 ). You can take an idea, write about it, and them make an effort to remember why were you writing about that in the first place. You can overcome the focus problem! You can write on a paper why were you speaking of that, if it helps. Then we all can judge your arguments, despite me not having answered the already answered (by me) questions.
But don’t expect anyone to go through all your random posts and then expecting you’ve explained why you say your assumptions are confirmed. Remember, they’re unjustified by default!
John,
you misunderstand, for instance, why I write “i’dea”.
In your pretending, you wrote:
“all those bright coloured i’deas”
But, John, I use “i’dea” to specify the one and only real i’dea. If I ever use the plural form, it is only to represent the society of plural “I am”. In using it this way I leave myself free to use “idea” and “ideas” (without the ” ‘ “) for “all those bright colored ideas” that an i’dea(s)may have.
Tim
John,
you want to know how the list of things you brought up relate to the fact that something more than the phenomenal is needed to explain intelligence. (about the “confirmation”, that is something you will have to experience by climbing to the summit of that mountain of mind for yourself.)
I will give a quick handling, point by point as you brought them up:
[John points]
– me not answring the already answered (by me) question “do you know something?”
[Tim answers]
If you answered that for ME, I’m sorry for the great bother of asking it again. But, is there anything to which you will say “I know”?
This relates to the BIG point because if you say “no”, as some people I know do, then you all but destroy “intelligence”, a priori. So I will have to convince you of intelligence before I can even start to convince you that something more is needed to explain it. (Is it so horrible that I should want to confirm this before I set out?)
If you answer “yes”, on the other hand, then you can tell me that something you “know”, and then we can get after it. (It seems best for me to try to come to you, where you are, rather than to just stand at the top and holler “come up here”, over and over again.)
[John points]
– spacemen not knowing if they were going to return
[Tim answers]
the point to this fine example of a metaphysical fact is that your incessant desire for proof in argument is not the standard living people use to make decisions in the moment. In the moment… In the moment there is no proof of what I should / will do. One faithes (verb, something more) into the future.
[John points]
– science studying how things work, instead of why
[Tim answers]
you missed me on that one entirely, see my recent post. Briefly, scienTISTS observe, and then THEY relate their observations. They cannot observe “how things work”.
So, John, if you will admit that you don’t know “how things work”, no matter how confident you are on the relation!, you will see the threshold of the gate to that something more!
Do you see how nicely my two questions for you fit together!?! (the two questions, to be sure, were: is there anything to which you will say “I know”, and, do you believe in purely phenomenal causation?)
[John points]
– how do I take decisions
[Tim answers]
this is almost self-evident. But, if there is no proof for a purely phenomenal causation…
where does the dynamic component come from? (hint: something more! Your decision is actually potent!)
also, to be sure, there was more to that question when I asked it. In order to be able to decide, there must be some degree of complexity (I have related you to Josiah Royce’s use of “interpretation” – which implies an ability to hold together some “sign”, etc. and etc. It implies a relationship of past, present, and future which the interpreter…).
[John points]
– the fact that we don’t know if there are better theories than relativity (you should update your readings here)
[Tim]
again you kinda missed me. Relativity per se was never the issue. relativity per se was only an example. The point might have met your favor better if I had left it purely general: science never claims to know, but only to reduce the region in which truth must reside – and it does this by continually increasing its range of “I don’t know”, continually drawing it in to ever finer and finer …
But without something more, that tortoise will never get to the wall! (Materialist atheists like CausticDuality add that something extra too! believing the phenomenal causation SIMPLY must be in the relationship, refusing to call it something more.)
[John pointed]
– me being alive or a zombi
[Tim]
Where did you get this from?
hmmm… let me just assert, constrainedly, life is that something more. That reality is so “pat” that humans can start to imagine a completely mechanical “universe”… Well, from the top of the mountain this just confirms that the i’dea(s) are REAL! But that whole “pat” mechanism is the derivative picture of the i’deal reality! A plural society of “I am”. Nothing more 😉 Nothing less. This is the only thing that makes sense!
[John points]
– me knowing I don’t know some things (despite you claiming this is impossible!)
[Tim]
again your quick and dismissive reading of me … rather, again, your quick and dismissive reading has left you reading something other than ME!
I never said that knowing that you don’t know is impossible! I never even hinted it! What I was getting at was specifically the point! You can only know you don’t know because you are supplying “something more”!!! (and, with this, I showed you that your faith/faithe is not totally broken!)
[John pointed]
– Occam’s razor being objetively measurable (which is not)
[Tim]
again, you ran somewhere where I never ran. A minimization of the number of leaps of faith is not the same thing as “the simplest answer …”. In fact, I specifically told you that the minimum is to be found with COMPLEXITY.
John, you gave some fine examples of times when fewer simple assumptions led to trouble. I can tell you that this is not unexpected when it is realized that one need look at how assumptions connect, necessarily, to make… leading up to make THE i’dea.
And, about my i’dea being the minimal of faith because it requires the minimal of assumptions, one: my claim stands. Zero assumptions, as you suggested… That is a meaningless “misconception”. Decidedly “something”.
[John pointed]
– theories being falsifiable by experiment
[Tim answers]
sorry John, I’m not able to puzzle together what you are suggesting you want from me here. (But notice that I do try to put your puzzles together; where I think you just dismiss me without effort.)
[John points]
– your faith being minimal under your subjective measures
[Tim]
I told you that the “measures” were objective. You can experience this objectivity for yourself if you will find your way to the summit. For more see a few answers up.
THe relation to “something more”. Though you can know “I am” from the top of the mountain, it is still complex, and it still requires faith/faithe. The peak of the mountain turns out to be its foundation! That foundation is the “something more”! Make your way to the summit and try to tell me I’m wrong!!!
[John points]
– beaches and oceans
[Tim]
this was an analogy for physics and metaphysics. “meta” means “beyond”, thus “something more”.
[John points]
– the theory and practice of fallacy
[Tim answers]
[John points]
– the paragraphs of the Bible
[Tim answers]
I guess, here, the best thing for me to say is that Jesus (particularly as presented by John) appears to have been the first successful metaphysician. ~1900 years later Howison offered a more thorough presentation.
[John points]
– …
[Tim answers]
nice one! what better way to praise “something more”?
…
Tim
John,
You say that I don’t conclude anything, which is silly because I’m continually giving you the conclusion: there is but one real i’dea, “I am”. That’s the peak, and the rest is just us playing on the mountain. If you should have wanted to go for a hike… but you didn’t. So, rather than telling me I don’t conclude, you can consider that I see it as you not being willing to start.
And, anyway, we have reached a solid point of agreement!: causation is not a matter of knowing, it is a matter of religion. You have yours, I have mine. You believe in some natural causation, which is incomprehensible to me, because “determinism” by itself is not a real i’dea. “determinism” is not self-explanatory. But you believe. And you are, seemingly, an ardent adherent of your religion. It seems I can’t even get you start to consider conversion.
I have a different religion. (personal) i’dealism. I believe that reality is i’dea. I don’t know what you personally would assert as the nature of your determinism, but, for instance, CausticDuality asserts materialism. (And shouldn’t it be somewhat suggestive of the benefit of my religion that I can really try to consider yours, while you can’t try to consider mine?)
So, have we not agreed that on the issue of causation, science is impotent to say? It is a matter of belief? You conveniently never responded to my post correcting you about your misunderstanding me regarding science’s impotence to say how things “work”. But the point, again, is that science merely comes up with static or time-resolved relationships. It doesn’t say “boo” about dynamics.
So, while you add in (qua “god of the gaps”) your believe that there is nothing more to causation, rather, that causation IS natural (phenomenal), that some as-of-yet-not-fully-specified “determinism” will wrap it all up, fill in all the gaps (remember before when you said, contradictorily here, you didn’t believe the gaps would be filled in!?)…
Anyway, for me, as I have been trying to paint to you, the picture gets turned inside out. This “determinism” that has you worshiping it is merely the derivative representation. It is a derivative representation of the fact that our decisions are real. The phenomenal is a derivative representation of the noumenal. mere information. Doesn’t it make sense that a real decision should appear so solid?
Tim
John,
you said:
“You’ve just discovered a very well known fact: science studies how the World works.”
But my point was the very opposite! Science is impotent to study “how the World” *”works”*! There is the gathering of facts (all done by “I am”). There is the determining of a relationship between those facts. But there is a total avoidance of what makes it WORK!
Again, do you believe in “natural” causation? That nothing else is needed to make the relationships WORK?
If you have answered that, please be so kind as to point me to it. (I’m real confident you haven’t answered it to me.)
John,
you have mentioned your difficulty with english. It is not a turn off to me; I think you express yourself quite well. But I now strongly suspect that your quick reading of me leads you to misunderstand me, something fierce.
Tim
Tim, I can’t believe your correcting me on my absurd post about “all those bright coloured i’deas”. I don’t know what to say about that.
At least in this post you addressed some points. Not very well (later on why), but at least no new topic. And suggesting I brough these topics, which is false. But well, it’s the best I’ll get.
I still see no relation.
a) About the question. I already told you I know there are things I don’t know. I already told you I know classical mechanics assumptions are not true because I observed facts that are in direct contradiction of those assumptions. I already told you I know all current physical evidence fits the assumptions of quantum mechanics (or, if you’re punctilious, I know “scientist are evidence conspirators or all known checked physical evidence fit quantum mechanics”, but this is knowledge, too). I know some rules of logic.
That I said in your posts. So, there are things I would say I know.
I also know (false, I believed) you were expecting for me to say “no”. In fact, almost all of your “reasonings” are so naive.
I also sense where do you want to go if I say ‘yes’. But all that is in your imagination. And I know it implies a lot of questions. Do you want something I know and why I say I know it? Well, I know not all apples fall upward. I know this is not an assumption I can sustain. I know it’s not a good model of the World. I also know quantum mechanics has not being contradicted by experiment, so I can still assume it’s a good model. It may be true. This is my example piece of knowledge.
If your argument will be “there a a lot of assumptions there”, I can say “yes, there are”. But they’re explicited there. When I say “I know I can not sustain classical mechanics as a model for the World”, I mean “I assume I’m an observer”, which is an assumption of classical mechanics; “I know classical mechanics and the suposition that what I measure is what happen – this is a suposition of classical mechanics, too, so it’s part of the ‘classical mechanics’ – and the fact that I measured apples and I assume all apples behave the same way under the same condition and … all those suppositions are implied in “classical mechanics”. And I know it’s not a good model for the World because I have observed contradictions with it predictions (the fact that this computer I’m typing with works contradicts classical mechanics).
Now what? You’ll have a hard time. If possible, minimize the number of questions. Until now, no relation here with your assertion.
b) Spacemen not knowing if they were going to return.
I never said people does not make assumptions. I already explicitly correct you in your assumption that I pretend not to make assumptions.
Here is the problem: you assumed I were saying people does not make assumptions, and you’re still arguing that, because it’s easier. I didn’t say that.
In the moment there is no proof of what I should do I may need to make an assumption. And? What’s the point? Did I deny this? Why are you saying this to me? What’s the relation, again?
Remember: I said your “intelligence can not be explained by determinism and randomness, it requires something more, and it’s a confirmed conclusion” is an unjustified fact, it’s just a belief of yours.
Now you’re saying people assume things, an assertion I have not denied. And? I still don’t see the relation. People makes assumptions (without knowing) does not mean “intelligence…” is a confirmed belief instead of a belief of yours. Again, did I miss something? I have explained this several times, and are still waiting the connection.
c) Me being alive. “This is the only thing that makes sense!”. No relation can be found in your explanation.
d) Me knowing there are things I don’t know.
Your words were “John, knowing that you don’t know is a type of knowing. A real strange type! If you don’t know, how can you really know that you don’t know?!”.
Sentence by sentence.
“Knowing that you don’t know is a type of knowing”. Yes, knowing that I don’t know something is a type of knowing. And? Any relation here?
“A real strange type”. Well, not. A very common type. “What’s the time?” “I don’t know”. To say that you have to know you don’t know what time it is. It happens every day. Pretty pretty common.
“If you don’t know, how can you really know that you don’t know?”. This is a silly game of words. I can know I don’t know some other thing. No surprise in that.
Can you relate this to the “intelligence requires something more”?
About the “You can only know you don’t know because you are supplying “something more”!!!”, that is just a free assertion. You showed what?
e) About Occam’s razor being objetively measurable.
“A minimization of the number of leaps of faith is not the same thing as “the simplest answer …”.
“In fact, I specifically told you that the minimum is to be found with COMPLEXITY.”
No, it’s you who is assuming things I have not say. Want to substitute number of leaps with complexity? Well, I believed complexity means it can be divided in simpler but more numerous leaps. But again, that’s not the point. The point is:
How does the substitution of the number of leaps by complexity make Occam’s razor objectively measurable and right?
> “about my i’dea being the minimal of faith because it requires the minimal of assumptions, one: my claim stands. Zero assumptions, as you suggested… That is a meaningless “misconception”. Decidedly “something”.”
Your “one” assumption is a set of a whole lot of assumptions. An incredible number of assumptions. Try to use it for something, you’ll see it. That’s just a game of words. In fact, I can claim I only assume “quantum mechanics”. That’s only one assumption. See? I only assume quantum mechanics. Only one.
The problem is if I start using my assumption to infer things, I’ll see how many assumptions am I making. I’m not going to be arguing this forever.
f) theories being falsifiable by experiment
Well, you started to speak about what happens if there is a second “relativity”. I’m just asking what is the relation between theories being falsified and substituted by better ones with the fact that “intelligence requires something more”, and with you saying “it’s a confirmed conclusion”.
g) your faith being minimal under your subjective measures
Yes, you told me they were objective. But, as you don’t provide an objective method and no one knows it, I have no objective method.
If your argument for me not to believe it’s objective and the fact that there are not arguments in favor there exists such a methods is for me to believe your free assertions, well, I already know it. Except that’s not an argument.
h) “THe relation to “something more”. Though you can know “I am” from the top of the mountain, it is still complex, and it still requires faith/faithe. The peak of the mountain turns out to be its foundation! That foundation is the “something more”! Make your way to the summit and try to tell me I’m wrong!!!”
You’re wrong. I did it. And not only that: you’re empty of meaning here. Anyone here understands the alleged relation, or it’s just me?
i) Beaches and oceans
Yeah, very beautiful, but after thousand of words without an argument, I don’t appreciate them very much.
“”meta” means “beyond”, thus “something more””. I hope you don’t want to say anything with that.
j) …
nice one! what better way to praise “something more”?
This one I take as your best (and only three) points.
As for the question,
“do you believe in “natural” causation?”
I have two things to say. First:
– Oh, no, another question which will take me nowhere! (*)
Also:
Yes, I believe in natural causation. But sorry, you’ll not be able to make the point you want from this one.
Because you’re asking me: do you believe? And I’m answering: yes, I believe.
Let me explain you something. When phycisists start studying paramagnetism with classical mechanics, they discovered certain relations cause-effect. Certain causations, if you want. If I were alive then, I would believe in those causal relations. Because they predicted some results.
But, as they elaborate their theories, it was discovered that classical mechanics predicts no paramagnetism at all after counting all the relations. When quantum mechanics was applied to the effect, it was discovered how the causal relations which were established by classical mechanics were all wrong.
This is a very well known example. But there are a lot of examples of this kind. Gravity produced by attraction versus by metric alteration.
What this I mean me believing in causal relations does not mean I know causal relations. It’s not an unjustified assumptions: its justification is its usefulness. We assume that, we don’t know if its true, but its useful to assume that.
I was expecting you change your discourse from “intelligence requires something more is a confirmed conclusion” to “I propose intelligence is something more because it’s useful because…”. I don’t know how that can be useful, I don’t see how can you confirm that conclusion (I can’t even see how can you call that hypothesis a conclusion), but it didn’t happen.
So, now, the question: what connection has this with “intelligence requiring something more”?
[* Yes, it only a belief, justified by its usefulness by repetition ]
I also have the sensation that what you’re trying to say is:
[I make less assumptions (on complexity, if you want) because to explain why I’m intelligent I only assume I exists as an intelligent being, while if you take determinism you have to assume determinism exists and you have to assume it can explains intelligence.]
I’m not sure (I feel you’re a bit vague when you speak about this). But if this is correct, the answer is obvious: you have to assume intelligence (you) exists, and then you have to assume you can explain the World from there.
If you’re saying the World you observe is implied in your “I am”, then it has the very exact complexity that the other assumption: that determinism can explain me and the World I observe. The very exact same complexity. Because what you want to explain is the same, and what you know is the same. In fact, the other argument can be done, that determinism is simpler because it does not require “something more”. As we know, Occam’s razor is subjetive, and not a proof, just an heuristic.
But then again, as you have used your “I am” nowhere to infer nothing, nor explained it very clearly, I don’t have a clue what do you want to mean by it.
And, in any case, we already saw less assumptions, or less complex assumptions, does mean nothing.
John,
As much as you complain about me misreading you, you totally fail to read me properly, pretty much everywhere. It is getting to be real frustrating. Of course I don’t seem to make any point when you obliterate them as you read.
[John said]
Tim, I can’t believe your correcting me on my absurd post about “all those bright coloured i’deas”. I don’t know what to say about that.
[Tim]
I only complained about your misusing my term “I’dea”. It is precious to me; and I wanted to make that clear.
[John, from “a”]
a) About the question. … I know “scientist are evidence conspirators or all known checked physical evidence fit quantum mechanics”, but this is knowledge, too). I know some rules of logic.
That I said in your posts. So, there are things I would say I know.
[Tim]
thank you.
[John]
I also know (false, I believed) you were expecting for me to say “no”. In fact, almost all of your “reasonings” are so naive.
[Tim]
not at all! I fully you expected to say you knew stuff. But I wanted to see how critically you would apply the “free assertion” business to your own knowledge.
[John]
I also sense where do you want to go if I say ‘yes’.
[Tim]
good for you. Cause I didn’t! lol. Still don’t! (Thanks for the attempted forecast though)
[John]
Now what? You’ll have a hard time.
[Tim]
yes. I’ll let you know when it hits me.
[John, from “b-spacemen”]
I never said people does not make assumptions. I already explicitly correct you in your assumption that I pretend not to make assumptions.
Here is the problem: you assumed I were saying people does not make assumptions, and you’re still arguing that, because it’s easier. I didn’t say that.
[Tim]
I never misread you the way you think I did. Though I think you are using “assumption” far more broadly than I am used to. For me “assumption” is something that people use as part of a model, like assuming a chemical reactor is well mixed, or even assuming something like there is gas in the tank of my car. I have been asking you how you decide in life, and if “assumption” covers it, you are using it far more broadly than I find to be acceptable. For instance, voting for some government official, does voting = assumption to you? Or if you are married, did you just “assume” that this girl is the one you should marry? Or where you live, did you just “assume” that that would be a nice place?
Yes, the spacemen might have assumed some odds of returning v. not-returning, but the reason they went probably didn’t have much of anything to do with their assumptions. It was their values, desires, whatever. (Something more)
[John]
In the moment there is no proof of what I should do I may need to make an assumption. And? What’s the point? Did I deny this? Why are you saying this to me? What’s the relation, again?
[Tim]
the point is that the way I use “assumption”, merely making an assumption doesn’t get you to a decision. Just like if you’re modeling a chemical reaction in a reactor, it isn’t enough to assume that the thing is well mixed. (don’t misunderstand, the extra stuff that is needed to model a chemical reaction is not the same kind of “more” I am getting at with spacemen choosing to go to space.)
[John]
Remember: I said your “intelligence can not be explained by determinism and randomness, it requires something more, and it’s a confirmed conclusion” is an unjustified fact, it’s just a belief of yours.
[Tim]
that it’s just a belief of mine is just a belief of yours.
[John]
Now you’re saying people assume things, an assertion I have not denied. And? I still don’t see the relation. People makes assumptions (without knowing) does not mean “intelligence…” is a confirmed belief instead of a belief of yours. Again, did I miss something? I have explained this several times, and are still waiting the connection.
[Tim]
1) the ability to assume is complex. 2) that does not mean “intelligence…” is a confirmed belief instead of a belief of mine. 3) my belief is confirmed. 4) you have missed a good deal. 5) I too have repeated things several times. i.e. 6) I can’t make the connection for you, you have to make it yourself.
[John, from “c”]
c) Me being alive. “This is the only thing that makes sense!”. No relation can be found in your explanation.
[Tim]
the way you use it, I suspect, “alive” is purely phenomenal. If this is so, you have mutilated me! This is why I like my term I’dea so much. “I am” is a real I’dea. It is the only real I’dea. It is that something more you don’t permit.
[John, from “d”]
d) Me knowing there are things I don’t know.
Your words were “John, knowing that you don’t know is a type of knowing. A real strange type! If you don’t know, how can you really know that you don’t know?!”.
Sentence by sentence.
[Tim]
yep. Nice, right? J
[John]
“Knowing that you don’t know is a type of knowing”. Yes, knowing that I don’t know something is a type of knowing. And? Any relation here?
[Tim]
yes. Without that something more you couldn’t know when you didn’t know.
[John]
“A real strange type”. Well, not. A very common type.
[Tim]
“strange” and “common” are not exclusive!
[John]
“What’s the time?” “I don’t know”.
[Tim]
you mean “what’s the o’clock?”, right? Huge difference (but people don’t bother over it anymore). Second, this is uninteresting so I won’t deal with it. This is no where near the type of “I don’t know” that motivates someone like an Einstein to figure out relativity. You have read a clock before! If you could talk with someone who had never even heard of a clock, and you asked them what o’clock it was, you wouldn’t get “I don’t know.”, but “what’s a clock?”
[John]
To say that you have to know you don’t know what time it is. It happens every day. Pretty pretty common.
“If you don’t know, how can you really know that you don’t know?”. This is a silly game of words. I can know I don’t know some other thing. No surprise in that.
[Tim]
yep, silly to you. Thanks for the honesty though. John, people discover things that have never been known from a very strange (though common) not knowing. They know that there is something to be known, and that they don’t know it, even though they don’t know it. Formal logic would have you conclude that you can’t know that you don’t know. That you couldn’t say “I don’t know” meaningfully because it presumes a known! If I ask you what the relationship between A and B is, what do you say? If I tell you nothing about A and B, what’s your answer? Hard logic would have you say you don’t understand the question. Or that you don’t know if there is a relationship. Not “I don’t know.” Yet people discover this relationship all the time, knowing that it is there before they “know” its there!
[John]
Can you relate this to the “intelligence requires something more”?
[Tim]
did that help? 😉
[John]
About the “You can only know you don’t know because you are supplying “something more”!!!”, that is just a free assertion. You showed what?
[Tim]
any closer?
[John, from “e”]
e) About Occam’s razor being objetively measurable.
“A minimization of the number of leaps of faith is not the same thing as “the simplest answer …”.
“In fact, I specifically told you that the minimum is to be found with COMPLEXITY.”
No, it’s you who is assuming things I have not say. Want to substitute number of leaps with complexity? Well, I believed complexity means it can be divided in simpler but more numerous leaps. But again, that’s not the point. The point is:
How does the substitution of the number of leaps by complexity make Occam’s razor objectively measurable and right?
[Tim]
talk about “assuming thing I have not say.”! You brought up Occam’s razor. I told you that I wasn’t talking about Occam’s razor. You’re still attributing the subject of Occam’s razor to me! Please quit it!
Complexity is “complexity” specifically because it cannot be divided! If they were separate and distinct, it would not be a complex!
What’s objectively confirmable is that THE I’dea is THE real I’dea.
[John]
Your “one” assumption is a set of a whole lot of assumptions.
[Tim]
no. you can confirm that it is one. A complex. I attest that there is one real I’dea. Everything in it is necessary; and there is nothing extraneous. (And, to be sure, “assumption” is a terrible word; rather faith: one – complex / real – object of faith.) There is nothing free about this assertion! It is fully constrained! (In fact, this is the whole problem I had with Chris’ “unbound” Telesis: the real I’dea is decidedly “bound”!)
[John]
An incredible number of assumptions. Try to use it for something, you’ll see it. That’s just a game of words.
[Tim]
that’s just a free assertion of yours. Show me a problem.
[John]
In fact, I can claim I only assume “quantum mechanics”. That’s only one assumption. See? I only assume quantum mechanics. Only one.
[Tim]
are you gonna claim that quantum mechanics necessarily implies you? And the capacity to assume? Otherwise, how are you gonna make sense of the whole of “I only assume quantum mechanics.”
[John, from “f”]
f) theories being falsifiable by experiment
Well, you started to speak about what happens if there is a second “relativity”.
[Tim]
no, you misunderstood. And I corrected this last night, and you still are imputing the wrong interpretation. My point about “relativity” was that whatever model you get, for whatever, how will you know that it is THE last theory? How will you know that there isn’t more work to do?
You see how this ties into knowing that you don’t know, too?
[John]
I’m just asking what is the relation between theories being falsified and substituted by better ones with the fact that “intelligence requires something more”, and with you saying “it’s a confirmed conclusion”.
[Tim]
If there weren’t that something more people would never falsify a theory. In fact, theorizing itself is decent evidence of something more! If it weren’t for that something more, where do you think the motivation would come from? Anyway, this progression of theories will one day cash out. And the T.o.E. won’t be explained but that it confirms what I have been saying. The phenomenal needs its noumenal (and vice versa); information isn’t information unless its information to the transcendent mind.
[John, from “g”]
g) your faith being minimal under your subjective measures
Yes, you told me they were objective. But, as you don’t provide an objective method and no one knows it, I have no objective method.
[Tim]
I told you that the perspective is objective. Every “I am” that gets to the peak / foundation will understand the exact same I’dea. The I’dea is objectively true. The method is … not a linear logic program. Only a living “I am” can get there. By faithe.
[John]
If your argument for me not to believe it’s objective and the fact that there are not arguments in favor there exists such a methods is for me to believe your free assertions, well, I already know it. Except that’s not an argument.
[Tim]
dude, if I’ll read this over and over again to try to make sense of me, you could read me closely too. I couldn’t puzzle it out though. Please clean it up. But, yet again, my assertions aren’t free, they are entirely constrained. (Freedom comes within the constraint of THE real I’dea!)
[John, from “h”]
h) “THe relation to “something more”. Though you can know “I am” from the top of the mountain, it is still complex, and it still requires faith/faithe. The peak of the mountain turns out to be its foundation! That foundation is the “something more”! Make your way to the summit and try to tell me I’m wrong!!!”
You’re wrong. I did it. And not only that: you’re empty of meaning here. Anyone here understands the alleged relation, or it’s just me?
[Tim]
Not clever. Not funny. No matter how many people come to reach the peak, I’m willing to bet there won’t be a solitary one to deny it thereafter!
[John, from “i”]
i) Beaches and oceans
Yeah, very beautiful, but after thousand of words without an argument, I don’t appreciate them very much.
“”meta” means “beyond”, thus “something more””. I hope you don’t want to say anything with that.
[Tim]
it’s funny. For someone who said he was so comfortable with “I don’t know.” Sad funny, that is. Scary funny even.
[John, from “j”]
j) …
This one I take as your best (and only three) points.
[Tim]
I still haven’t thought of a good way to help you based on what you claim to know, like “scientist are evidence conspirators”, but I have no motivation to try to help you at the moment, so… Maybe you should quit ignoring so much evidence.
Tim
John,
You said:
“Yes, I believe in natural causation. But sorry, you’ll not be able to make the point you want from this one.”
I don’t have to, you already did.
You said:
“But if this is correct, the answer is obvious: you have to assume intelligence (you) exists, and then you have to assume you can explain the World from there.”
It wasn’t correct; but it is close enough for these purposes. I don’t have to assume that I can explain the World from there! The explanation of the World falls out, naturally! Physics is pregnant within my metaphysics! No extra assumption!
You followed up with:
“If you’re saying the World you observe is implied in your “I am”, then it has the very exact complexity that the other assumption: that determinism can explain me and the World I observe.”
That’s only true if determinism can explain YOU. It can’t. Notice, my offering has a build in test. What of yours?
You said:
“But then again, as you have used your “I am” nowhere to infer nothing, nor explained it very clearly, I don’t have a clue what do you want to mean by it.”
I’ve suggested a few things. Pretty clearly if you’d give ’em a chance. But you’re right, this forum is no place for me to give a full handling. And I’m not really interested in that anyway. I’ve pointed you to Howison’s book, and I’ve linked you to my squad, where I have many more detailed posts. And, if you had been interested, we would have been talking about it here, but you have wanted to win your argument. And to dismiss much of what I say without consideration. Etc.
You said:
“And, in any case, we already saw less assumptions, or less complex assumptions, does mean nothing.”
You saw what you pre-wanted to see. Real “assumptions” mean something. There is only one real “assumption”. To get down/up to it is your challenge. But you have made the assumption that it’s not worth it.
Whatever,
Tim
Tim, you’re doing it again.
After asserting I was afraid to answer your question I already answered because I knew you’ll make a point, now you say you don’t know what to say now about that. It’s clear you’re just digressing. So I’ll end it here. One more opportunity to say something wasted.
I’ll only address one more point, because it’s representative of all your post: you are incapable of concluding anything. You simply assert something (or more often, just make a question) and then you behave as if you have a point, when there is no connection with your “confirmed conclusion”.
You did that with that very much important question (“would you say “I know” to anything?”, which know means nothing), and know you came with this:
> “Yes, the spacemen might have assumed some odds of returning v. not-returning, but the reason they went probably didn’t have much of anything to do with their assumptions. It was their values, desires, whatever. (Something more)”
This makes as much sense as saying “spacemen need something more than assumptions: they need a spaceship (something more)”. If you find this silly (I hope you find it so), this is how I find your “something more” in this context.
With this I’m not denying people have other things aside from assumptions. I did not denied it. Yes, they have spaceships and they have desires, values. I believed I didn’t have to argue about spaceships, not about values, without a good reason. I’ll argue only desires and values, but this is tiring, because there is no point here.
For “values” and “desires” to be that “something more” that explains intelligence beyond “determinism and randomness”, you’ll have to prove they are not contained in the “determinism” part. Is there something that makes you think determinism can not explain desires?
You see. Any organism with a tendency to explore new environments would survive a destruction of his habitat, so it’s a biological advantage. Living beings with this tendency (not in all individuals) will survive better. Deterministic evolutions seems plausible here. The same with desires. Evolution seem to fit this. You can not discard it without a reason.
But my point here is not that you haven’t shown why desires and values are not deterministic, instead calling them “something more” in our context that “something more” is that outside determinism explaining intelligence without any justification.
My point here is you’re just digressing. You just claim “values, something more!” or ask a question and behave as if you had made a point, you just assert I’m saying free assertions and you’re right, as if that justifies your assertions.
I can address all your points again. They’re all like this one. You never end your arguments, because you can’t. For you it’s better to say “values, something more” because that way you don’t have to justify you’re just asserting “values” are not deterministic. I can answer all you questions, those questions so important I’m afraid to answer because they will make a point, except when I answer them.
I’ll end it here, Tim. I’m tired.
John,
[sorry Mark, this is a repost, I accidentally put it under the wrong posting first; just trying to make sure it appears where John will see it.]
You say that I don’t conclude anything, which is silly because I’m continually giving you the conclusion: there is but one real i’dea, “I am”. That’s the peak, and the rest is just us playing on the mountain. If you should have wanted to go for a hike… but you didn’t. So, rather than telling me I don’t conclude, you can consider that I see it as you not being willing to start.
And, anyway, we have reached a solid point of agreement!: causation is not a matter of knowing, it is a matter of religion. You have yours, I have mine. You believe in some natural causation, which is incomprehensible to me, because “determinism” by itself is not a real i’dea. “determinism” is not self-explanatory. But you believe. And you are, seemingly, an ardent adherent of your religion. It seems I can’t even get you start to consider conversion.
I have a different religion. (personal) i’dealism. I believe that reality is i’dea. I don’t know what you personally would assert as the nature of your determinism, but, for instance, CausticDuality asserts materialism. (And shouldn’t it be somewhat suggestive of the benefit of my religion that I can really try to consider yours, while you can’t try to consider mine?)
So, have we not agreed that on the issue of causation, science is impotent to say? It is a matter of belief? You conveniently never responded to my post correcting you about your misunderstanding me regarding science’s impotence to say how things “work”. But the point, again, is that science merely comes up with static or time-resolved relationships. It doesn’t say “boo” about dynamics.
So, while you add in (qua “god of the gaps”) your believe that there is nothing more to causation, rather, that causation IS natural (phenomenal), that some as-of-yet-not-fully-specified “determinism” will wrap it all up, fill in all the gaps (remember before when you said, contradictorily here, you didn’t believe the gaps would be filled in!?)…
Anyway, for me, as I have been trying to paint to you, the picture gets turned inside out. This “determinism” that has you worshiping it is merely the derivative representation. It is a derivative representation of the fact that our decisions are real. The phenomenal is a derivative representation of the noumenal. mere information. Doesn’t it make sense that a real decision should appear so solid?
Tim
Tim, I am very pleased to end our conversation here, at the peak of your argumentation powers. Everyone can judge himself. Feel free to claim you win as many times as you need to. I’m happy with the results I obtained.
I don’t want to end without wishing you luck getting followers for your philosophy. They should be a multitude by now. I can foresee the end of science.
By the way, I pity poor Rubix. I hope he knows how to deal with fools better than me.
🙂
(Courage! Soon you’ve won your own entry in forums like this one.)
John,
Thanks. (for letting me off easy – you have a really long hike!)
By the way, let me know when you’ve learned how to observe something like, for instance, momentum. Seems to be mere faith based bean counting of the derivative image to me. (Kinda like buying one of those paint by numbers van gogh kits.) When the physicists tell you that causation doesn’t make sense without some greater complexity than the no-God you put into the gaps (when you are told what next to think), maybe have a look at Howison.
but, in general, I wish you all the best,
Tim
John,
one last thing. You had said “I can foresee the end of science.” Let me just make sure you know that it is just foolish to think that I have no respect for science, or that I am trying to end science. I am merely trying to show them that they have their pants on inside out, if you will. I’m trying to show that their looking at a derivative image. That the observations are to the cause as a movie is to the acting. The representing of reality, derivatively, is an inherently necessary aspect of the complex reality, but it is not ultimate reality itself. It is the phenomenon, but it is absurd to believe in a phenomenon without a noumenon. (much like the Kant quote from way back in the thread.) Rather, it is absurd to think the phenomenon produces itself (it is absurd to think the film comes from no-actorS – plural!).
Anyway, the goal of metaphysics (religion / reason) is merely to have scientists recognize that their pants are on backwards. If they still prefer to wear them backwards… but it is much easier to zip and unzip them if they are on “right”. Similarly with buttoning. BUt, whether one wears his pants inside out or outside out, one still puts on his pants pretty much the same. One still washes his pants pretty much the same. etc. You think my vision of reality is some crazy, pot-induced fantasy, I assure you it’s not. The mountain (science) becomes the mountain again. You just recognize that the idea is more real than the derivative image. (but, to be sure, the derivative image is the necessary phenomenal aspect of THE i’dea.)
have fun,
all the best,
thanks for letting me off easy,
and thanks for strengthening of my faith(e),
Tim
Langan: “That’s why they’re posting anonymously – they have no educational bona fides of the kind they’d like others to believe they have, and are afraid of being identified as pretentious know-nothings.”
Actually, that is completely and utterly wrong. It’s a matter of association and privacy. I have no insecurities in my credentials whatsoever.
Besides, you yourself do not really have any credentials in the first place (other than a few IQ tests) — nor have you proven any sort of deep understanding of science or mathematics. Nobody’s going to risk exposing their name and associating it with your reputation/theory if you’re not going to do them justice of an intellectually-honest response.
Link soup:
http://www.megasociety.org/noesis/154/response.html
http://onemansblog.com/2007/11/06/smartest-man-in-the-world-has-diarrhea-of-the-mouth/
http://anamericanatheist.org/2011/04/09/chris-langans-defense-to-his-ctmu-theory/
http://anamericanatheist.org/2011/02/07/2011/
http://anamericanatheist.org/2011/04/13/episode-42-sam-harris-ctmu-theory-atheism-employment/ (23:00 through 31:40 or so)
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe (this site, of course)
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
http://www.talkreason.org/forum.cfm?start_row=311
http://www.antievolution.org/aebb-archive/aebbarchive_banned_idists_at_arn_t114.html
A treasure trove of threads either started by Langan or heavily participated in by Langan:
Metaphysics and ID: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=190000&page=0&fpart=all&vc=1
Real ID Scientists: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=205062&page=135&fpart=all&vc=1
Chris, what’s your position on ID in biology?: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=205060&page=135&fpart=all&vc=1
“Hidden Variables” and ID’s Scientific Advantage: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=190012&page=0&fpart=all&vc=1
Can DE Really Pass as Science?: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=190027&page=0&fpart=all&vc=1
Does anyone really undertand CTMU?: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=190043&page=0&fpart=all&vc=1
Geometry = Logic? Not Exactly: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=190064&page=0&fpart=all&vc=1
Photosynthesis Analysis Shows Work of Ancient Genetic Engineering: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=234677&page=0&fpart=all&vc=1
Logical Theology: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=209614&page=0&fpart=all&vc=1
(personal?) question for Chris: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=12&Number=2380266
ID, Science, and the ID critics: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=190095&page=0&fpart=all&vc=1
A serious question about Humo(u)r: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=190090&page=0&fpart=all&vc=1
Just an FYI: I’ve saved these pages and emailed them to myself (proof for timestamping purposes) in the event that Chris is able to log in and edit any of his posts on that forum (which, according to talkreason.org, he does often). I think these posts pretty much confirm what everyone on this forum has been saying so far.
I mean seriously, Chris, I feel like you spend a great deal of time engaging in vitriol, even when we look back nearly a decade ago. You seem to enjoy arguing with people and insulting them, instead of addressing your actual CTMU and the criticisms brought up against it. You don’t get anywhere by making random assertions about telic causality and the supposed paradox of universal powersets and then call people incompetent and crazy. Please tell me where is Mark arguing anything “pseudomathematical”? He’s not the one arguing in favor of metaphysics and some new form of God-supporting logic.
Your CTMU, to me, comes across as a very verbose labyrinth of neologisms meant to prevent people from criticizing it without experiencing your barbed backlashes. You spent a great deal of time writing the CTMU and you’ve been supporting it for a decade, which is not a trivial thing. It’s very clear that you are sincere in your beliefs. But you don’t seem particularly interested in getting people to actually understand your theory. Your recent posts in this thread are dripping with psychological projection and it seems more likely that you just enjoy beating on people to take out some deep-seated anger. Perhaps you are the “pressurized vessel of anger and desperation.” It most certainly isn’t us.
People usually remain anonymous on forums for safety reasons. In this case, it’s also likely what CD stated: Association. It’s why Dawkins doesn’t debate creationists anymore. By agreeing to appear on a platform of debate with someone else, you set up a false dialectic that is implicitly granting the opponent status. You’re basically supporting that the debate exists in the first place. If a geologist agreed to appear on a debate platform against a flat-earther, or a reproductionist agreed to appear on a debate platform with an advocate of the Stork Theory, they’d look insane for wasting the time. Unfortunately, our society happens to be full of deluded creationists, and your case is much more interesting because of your claim to high IQ and your media exposure, and your “mathematical proofs.” Otherwise, it’s a problem of trying to invoke “Both Sides” ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGArqoF0TpQ ) of the debate when there is no serious debate to be had.
“I can assure everyone of that persuasion, including several of the above commentators, that the CTMU won’t be going away.”
I don’t think too many people support the CTMU, and the ones that do (like Anonymous, earlier in this thread) don’t understand your theory fully anyway. The only one really out there defending it is you. It’ll stay that way unless you stop browbeating people and rewrite your theory in a way that makes sense. There are some interesting points in the CTMU that I think deserve merit in a discussion, but overall, it’s just another dressed-up Intelligent Design theory, and any informed, rational mind today knows that creationism is a philosophy of ignorance.
Almost all serious ID proponents seem to operate in the same way: “I don’t know how things work,” “You can’t disprove design or God,” “It’s all so complex; it must be designed,” “Design is compatible with science,” “Science doesn’t know everything,” “I really want design to be true,” “If there’s no God, then my life is meaningless.” Someone who is willing to hold onto these beliefs at all costs and close their mind to criticism is simply beyond argument. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
And of course I fully expect that you won’t bother replying to this, but that’s okay. It speaks for itself. It requires no response to serve its purpose… much like how our universe requires no God to serve its purpose.
> “It’s very clear that you are sincere in your beliefs.”
I’m not so sure about this, as I have expressed previously. I don’t believe it’s so clear.
One needs no much thinking for understanding that religion moves a lot of money. A whole lot. You only need to look at Scientology, if you feel bad criticizing major religions.
We know Langan, in his semireclusion, is actually writing in forums and developing his foundation. I see it plausible that he is “using his intelligence” to build some kind of organization of this kind. There should be a whole lot of money out there waiting for those justifying Intelligent Design to the mass, as there are a lot of people wanting to believe.
So, while I can’t not assert he is just trying to make a life from this, I believe we can not discard it.
The CTMU is not a case of generating controversy over breaking new ground. It generates controversy because Langan commits so many well-understood fallacies in his arguments (assuming you can translate his neologisms and unlettered jargon), and yet he also claims to have a very high IQ.
Just because he says nobody has successfully discredited the CTMU doesn’t make it true. The reason Langan believes this is because the CTMU relies on Intelligent Design (ID) and creationism, which are technically unfalsifiable concepts. Of course, Langan claims creationism and ID are different, but they really aren’t. ID is just creationism encapsulated in scientific jargon that constantly moves the goalposts and invokes God of the Gaps. That’s why you never, ever see Langan admit to being wrong in any of those threads I linked. It’s because, according to his stance, he can’t ever *be* wrong.
Unfalsifiable theories are epistemologically useless, and there’s no good reason for us to believe in them, especially when they’re indistinguishable from nonexplanation in the first place. In other words, evolution works just fine by itself without ID. Tacking on ID doesn’t change what it can explain or predict, and is therefore a useless variable, which is why we chop it away with Occam’s Razor. Otherwise we can tack on an infinite number of possible, compatible explanations… but that doesn’t mean any of them are right or that any of them provide any deeper insights or predictions.
Anyhow, I don’t think Chris is in any position to quibble over qualifications of others when he himself lacks qualifications. Not only that, but the threads I’ve linked explicitly prove that Langan doesn’t even understand concepts like evolution fully (hence his burning desire to insert ID into the evolutionary process just because mutation is modeled as a “random” process even though it’s fully deterministic in its causality). Like I said earlier, people typically invoke ID as a way to leverage the God of the Gaps argument, which is just argument from ignorance. “I don’t know how X works or I think this is how X works, so it must be Y.” A lot of his attacks on evolution are strawman arguments that misrepresent what the evolutionary stance actually says. He’s basically using ID to describe things as being designed when natural explanations do the job just fine.
He also claims intelligence in humans can’t arise without invoking a logical extension from an intelligent, self-designing universe, hence his “intelligence is metaphysical” statement. Except we don’t need an intelligent universe to describe how something like human intelligence works.
At its core, the CTMU is based on unfalsifiable premises. It’s not scientific and is only a theory insofar as Dr. Pepper is a real doctor.
Rubix,
I just replied to John Fringe above, and my reply is super pertinent to your big error here, so I figured I’d clue you in too. You said:
“Unfalsifiable theories are epistemologically useless, and there’s no good reason for us to believe in them, especially when they’re indistinguishable from nonexplanation in the first place. In other words, evolution works just fine by itself without ID.”
There has yet to be a theory of causation! Yet there is an undeniable need for living beings to believe in some manner of causation! lol. Life really does seem to change. The problem is: how?
science remains mute here. it only gives relationships. It can, seemingly, predict the results of causation quite well. At least up to a point. But HOW the causation actually happens?: there is not explanation. No test is even designed as far as I know.
So everyone that lives ends up believing in something.
causation is more real than the relationships scientists come have come up with. Why choose to believe that you no fundamental part in that? To be sure, there is no theory of evolution anywhere near as developed as you suggest.
Tim
Dear Chris,
I really enjoyed reading over your last post. All of what you said artfully fits the description the way I have perceived it especially the part about Mark’s fanny (sorry Mark no ofence.) Also I couldn’t agree with you more about people lacking qualification. Actually I often feel smited by having observed the influx of so many that exhibit such reversed narcissism and the limitless self-entitlement which has been allowed to flourish because of it. Online hecklers usually have some kind of personal agenda to fulfill which adheres to internet social protocol. Considering the fact that the internet was originally invented by the D.O.D. to regulate and control the flow of information we can see how information perceived as a threat to the status quo gets leached out by such people. Hecklers of various persuasions are usually failed “bluestocking scholars” (even though they all happen to be men) that use archaic judgments in an attempt to snuff out a theory. Believing themselves to be acting in defense of esteemed authors and their established principles they end up making themselves into edible gizzards by not acting as individuals. As you would say, in the end they go to bed lamenting over these errors while reflecting on how to adapt a new critical device. Unwilling to swallow a modicum of their pile, in fear that it would reveal some weakness to the flock, they persist with their blind criticism to no end.
In spite of all these cold-blooded ‘incontinent’ judgments that have been smeared upon the CTMU and yourself you have shared your positions with positive aloofness. Following up on what you said before in your response to Igor and the wonderful comments he made there are some good points to annex for anyone concerned:
1. CausticDuality has inserted some relevant questions into the discussion, though in terms of academic study he probably wouldn’t know his chalk from his cheddar, he has challenged my vision of telic causation and allowed me to solve some of the problems it has when rubbing up against the anthropic principle
2. I agree with what Viicki has said about Einstein, though she has omitted a few important facts that deserve reconsideration. Einstein earned a very good reputation working as an examiner for the Swiss patent office, a job he did not apply for but was able to enter into because he had a friend whose father had connections. Such a staple position no doubt played a role in his academic career in gaining acceptance by the mainstream via publicists. He also had editors who took his rough preliminaries, which he had penned himself, and made them more accessible to general audiences. As well, he received his most important formulae from his dreams and intuitions. Working tediously he turned these raw ideas into legible equations and received assistance by other mathematicians in order to prove and give credibility to his intuitions. The CTMU has not been given any of these essential and proper treatments.
3. As a general rule all great theory must start out as “crackpottery”, or at least be able to produce some degree of controversy, otherwise it evidences no sign for breaking new ground. In addition, not all theories receive immediate proof (e.g,. Fermat had many books of theorems that took years to be proven by mathematicians, his last theorem took 400 years to prove and today he has been all the rage in grad math.) [The CTMU could have a similar fate.] Russel’s Principia Mathematica would have been confusing had there not been so many books published on him. The most brilliant philosophers and logicians didn’t usually give exact definitions for their terms, scholars had to figure out what those terms meant posthumously. I would ask anyone: Do you think Einstein’s theories of relativity made perfect sense to non-scholars when they first became available in bookstores? No. Because no original work ever has made perfect sense — their formulations and intended meanings often continue to be debated by historiographers and scholars up to the present.
4. In the past anyone who ever used the word “crackpot” were usually suspected of some form of degeneracy. This word has been brought back to life on the internet in the confined space of blogs by blog groupies (in fact I never heard it used before until I was accused of being one for posting my own mathematical equations on a physics forum.)
Those are some very good points? In support of what?
Ah, Einstein, always Einstein. Those very good points are content-independent. I could say the same about the theory that Langan’s work is nonsense. Yes, you may say it’s the work of a genius, but maybe after four hundred years it will be proven otherwise. See? And Einstein is cool for us, too. So no argument in that. Maybe you should defend Langan’s theory with Langan’s theory-related arguments, with content, not with generic ones.
Also, Einstein work was developed because it attracted researchers. You can no force people into developing a piece of work. This is more an argument on the contrary: Einstein work attracted immediate attention, despite some people criticizing it. Langan’s work has attracted no attention, beyond forums like this where people like to waste their time.
The thing is researchers are not interested in Langan’s work but were immediately interested in Einstein work, and not the opposite. To say Einstein work is interesting because researchers develop it and Langan’s is uninteresting because researchers have not developed it is taking the effect for the cause. You got it wrong.
And remember Einstein was the first to give supporting evidence for his theories, which made them interesting. He always stressed the importance of experiment, discarding theories without consequences. He always looked for evidence first. He inferred his theories from his intuition from experience, yes, but he always had to modify them to fit reality. So why is he always cited by the supporters of theories with no proposed connection with reality?
In any case, why all this content-free support? Content free arguments can support anything, including one thing and its opposite. Why no supporter here says anything about the theory itself, talking instead of how stupid critics are, how cool Einstein was, and how obvious the theory is? How about content?
Well I am a researcher and I am interested it his work. XD
Dear Chris,
There were two things in your 20/20 interview that stay burned in my memory. Near the end of the show the woman conducting the interview mentioned that you had been working on a unified theory, that which later became the CTMU. I also remember seeing your bookshelf and spotting one which I had seen before, a Dover editions paperback on polyhedra. I was quite delighted to see this.
When I first encountered your CTMU online I grasped it’s profundity (en toto) but I was thrown off by the abbreviated title. What threw me off the most was a single diagram which I viewed by very quickly scrolling through the document from the top down: “Unreal Definition of Reality” (with the arrows.) I had forgotten to consider that most of this work was being done at a time when it was very fashionable for us to render titles and descriptions this way. That style quickly went out of fashion so I suppose I was seeing a critical part of myself in it. I’m curious to know, when did you begin working concretely on the CTMU? and when did the the original realization start to become obvious to you?
Another interesting piece of intellectual history is I was directed to your site in 2003 by someone I met on superstringtheory.com. She went under the pseudonym C-Space. She was another gifted young person like yourself who lived in the UK. Her website showed very impressive paintings of unearthly planets and some entries she had submitted to a Complexity journal with another known theorist. She also said that she knew of you and had spoken to you. I tried searching for her online with no success. So I tried adding your name into the search criteria and that is how this hideous blog came up. You don’t have to reply this (or any of the other questions) but do you remember her?
(I’m looking at the forum now and my God look at all the pile of soup that has issued forth since the last posts…I really need to keep my day job.)
Ack, I posted my reply to this in the wrong spot. Please see http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-28871
Jeremy Jae said: “In spite of all these cold-blooded ‘incontinent’ judgments………”
XD John, it was a joke. I expected you to take it offensively, I really wanted to edit it out but the pun was too good to pass up . To my knowledge there were very few disagreances from physicists to Einstein’s model in the very beginning (notwithstanding Heinsenberg who did offer some deep criticism to his (1916) theory of general relativity when he was under the supervision of Oppenheimer during the Los Almos affair (i.e. it wasn’t Heisenberg’s personal criticism.) Neil’s Bohr and Einstein did disagree over quantum mechanics and it’s relation to Einstein’s (1906) theory of general relativity because of their physical inconsistency. But this criticism came as a later development after the uncertainty principle had been established. Neils Bohr’s disagreements with general relativity came with far greater criticism from Einstein towards quantum mechanics than the other way around. Like I said it was directed towards general relativity and not special relativity. The debate began long after the initial publication of Einstein’s original thesis. (P.S. I very much appreciate your friendlyness and kind recognition of my arguments.)
Just in case you are confused John
If I really had thought you to be a ‘cold-blooded’ creature I wouldn’t have used that description. Having been used in the context of a description it say’s nothing about your inherent being at all (my apologies.) But I must admit you are extrodinarily and excessively rude towards a lot of other people. Your state could be bettered with some meditation and a healthy diet. Demagoguery give’s other fellow atheists a bad name and you should retire from trying to axe down every philosophical tree in the silent forest when there is nothing there to menace you. Again I am merely depicting the essence you project outward and the quality fits the description of demagoguery as you yourself succinctly described. I would not make such statements if I did not have some faith in your potential to return to your true nature. Partisanism alone will not earn you any superficial respect from scientists or other honest atheists. I hope you can appreciate my true intentions.
Tim:
That is just pure crank-logic. The error is entirely on your end.
Science doesn’t take one stance or the other on causality as fact — which is why we’ve got fully deterministic models of QM on one side (Bohm, Many Worlds Interpretation, ‘t Hooft, time symmetry, etc), nondeterministic models on the other side (Copenhagen, Neumann, Stochastic, Transactional, Relational), and those that are completely neutral (Consistent Histories, Ensemble). It is, however, irrelevant — the point is in what they can predict and how they can draw relationships.
It doesn’t matter if “causality is proven or not” because we don’t need it to be 100% proven in order to show the relationships. For instance, on the QM level, a particle’s position is typically based on a distribution function of probabilities. It’s entirely possible that your body could materialize on the other side of the moon at any given instant (something we’d normally label as a random, acausal event), but the probability of this happening is too small to even bother pondering because it would require countless particles to, at the exact same time, also hit the jackpot of deciding to take on values countless standard deviations away from the norm. On the macroscopic level, these probability models don’t have much application because for all intents and purposes, causality is something that holds true with the utmost of statistical confidence that is virtually 100%.
We don’t have to “believe” in causality or know “how” it works for it to actually work. Same goes for QM. It’s not making any claims to “what reality is,” nor does it need to. When it comes to the relationships that actually govern chemical, molecular, and physical interactions, they are predictable and consistent.
It’s like throwing a die. We might call it “random.” But if we took into account the starting position of the die, the distance to the table, the air resistance and heat loss to friction, the chemical composition of the die and the table, any deformation that occurs, the speed/direction/force associated with the initial toss, the spin, the weight of the die, and a precise value of gravity, and so forth, we could more accurately predict what value the die will give us. “Random,” in this case, isn’t necessarily saying that it’s “fundamentally random” and acausal, but rather “something affected by many variables that we can’t reasonably keep track of to explain the variance sufficiently well.”
Regardless, we can still model the throwing of the die as a random process *as if it were fundamentally random* even though it’s still governed by deterministic processes in reality. It’s just that those deterministic processes are too difficult to keep track of, hence the need for a stochastic model. This is also why stock market movements are typically modeled under concepts of, say, Brownian motion. It doesn’t mean stock markets ARE intrinsically Brownian motion. They’re obviously not, but what matters is the predictive ability and application of the model we use.
Same goes for evolutionary mutation. We can describe the mutation itself as a random process like how we’d call throwing a dart “random” or throwing a die “random.” But evolution by natural selection is not random. Even though the individual mutations are random, comparing the relative effects of those mutations against each other is *not*, and that’s where we get evolution by natural selection. We’ve confirmed it with genetics and biology, we’ve confirmed it with the geological evidence, and we’ve confirmed it empirically in the lab. The evidence is overwhelming if you actually take the time to look at it. You don’t need to invoke ID to explain it at all whatsoever much like we don’t need to invoke invisible unicorns to explain why we get sleepy at night.
So, really, trying to frame this as a “it’s something you believe in” problem is just crazy talk.
Rubix,
[Rubix said]
That is just pure crank-logic. The error is entirely on your end.
[Tim]
This is funny, because from what I see just below, we are saying the same thing (in part)! Watch:
[Rubix]
Science doesn’t take one stance or the other on causality as fact
[Tim]
which was the main thing I too was pointing out! Crank! I had said:
“There has yet to be a theory of causation!”
and:
“science remains mute here.”
What is this, the game of: I can never agree with the metaphysician?
[Rubix]
It doesn’t matter if “causality is proven or not” because we don’t need it to be 100% proven in order to show the relationships.
[Tim]
now my point is stronger! All science does is show “relationships”! These relationships seem super reliable, but the act of predicting is still pure faith.
[Rubix]
It’s entirely possible that your body could materialize on the other side of the moon at any given instant
[Tim]
are you sure? You can’t be sure. What you should say is that your theories leave that possibility open. You don’t have a theory strong enough to say for certain its possible though.
[Rubix]
On the macroscopic level, these probability models don’t have much application because for all intents and purposes, causality is something that holds true with the utmost of statistical confidence that is virtually 100%.
[Tim]
if you only care about building bridges, lobbing mortar shells against your enemy, etc., your science helps you, sure, whatever; I’m interested in the deeper issues.
[Rubix]
We don’t have to “believe” in causality or know “how” it works for it to actually work.
[Tim]
“it”, what it? This is my point with John, he too believes in some transcendent “it” (truly a God of the gaps, in his case), though he denies it. I’m just trying to show ya’ll the nature if the “it” at the root.
[Rubix]
Same goes for QM. It’s not making any claims to “what reality is,” nor does it need to. When it comes to the relationships that actually govern chemical, molecular, and physical interactions, they are predictable and consistent.
[Tim]
fine. Almost “FINE!” even! Get rid of “relationships that actually govern” – which is your faith, and about which you have already admitted that science actually stands mute, and you will have “circumcised” yourself sufficiently (or did I miss something?)! You might say, rather, “when it comes to the relationships that seem always to reveal themselves in chemical, …”. But then we clearly see that it is just relationships. Seemingly predictable and consistent. Keyword being seemingly.
[Rubix]
It’s like throwing a die. [SNIP] we could more accurately predict what value the die will give us.
[Tim]
this is the faith of YOUR religion! But, like John likes to say, it is just your “free assertion” that the future should look like the past. (Think about what this says of your conception of “probability”!)
[Rubix]
Regardless, we can still model the throwing of the die as a random process *as if it were fundamentally random* even though it’s still governed by deterministic processes in reality.
[Tim]
again, when you start saying “governed” you are going beyond yourself. You don’t have warrant for such a God. Do you? And, again, on what grounds do you lump all that into an “it”?
[Rubix]
It’s just that those deterministic processes are too difficult to keep track of,
[Tim]
more of your faith in your God-determinsm. Free assertion. No proof. Adding stuff into science which isn’t hers. Then saying it is you who lover her, and not me.
[Rubix]
but what matters is the predictive ability and application of the model we use.
[Tim]
then don’t claim to know stuff like “govern” and “deterministic”. Is that too much to ask? And, to be sure, that’s what matters to you; I succeeded (made it to the top of the mountain) because I wanted to KNOW. (and because I cared about JUSTICE foremost, etc.)
[Rubix]
Same goes for evolutionary mutation. We can describe the mutation itself as…
[Tim]
you can, but I keep telling you that science is, properly, mute before verbs. You get relationships. No more. You can time resolve these relationships as best you can, but you can’t properly get DYNAMIC.
[Rubix]
and that’s where we get evolution by natural selection.
[Tim]
you are talking of a very “high grade” evolution. The questions about the very start are not answerable by this “evolution”; and the dynamics of the very moment are similarly not describable. Your evolution turns out to be a very broad brush!
[Rubix]
We’ve confirmed it with genetics and biology, we’ve confirmed it with the geological evidence, and we’ve confirmed it empirically in the lab. The evidence is overwhelming if you actually take the time to look at it. You don’t need to invoke ID to explain it at all whatsoever much like we don’t need to invoke invisible unicorns to explain why we get sleepy at night.
[Tim]
blah blah blah blah blah. Until you can tell me HOW anything actually changes you can’t tell me that your God is better than mine. That is, you can’t tell me that intelligent “I am” (ID) and not determinism is the unicorn. For instance, this die you keep talking about: say I throw it, okay? The instant after “it” has left my hand… then an instant later “it” appears a bit further… HOW did that happen? Until you can answer that, your mere ability to watch your predictions come true does not mean you have any valid predictive capacity. You just have a really deep-seated faith in your no-God. You can keep pursuing your RELATIONSHIPS, but why not a little humility with your claims to being a prophet of reality?
[Rubix]
So, really, trying to frame this as a “it’s something you believe in” problem is just crazy talk.
[Tim]
care to reconsider? Lol.
Thanks,
Tim
If you think science is so loose-weave, feel free to step off the top of a 30-story building. Surely you will be okay with this, since science is just “my religion and faith” and we can’t ever know anything for sure, right?
Rubix,
I never hinted anything like “science is so loose-weave”. I said that the phenomenal (of which science is the study) was a derivative representation. But it IS a derivative representation of the REAL (and it is an integral part of the making the real, real). But I’m saying that without the REASON that THE metaphysics adds to the picture, science itself provides no justification for believing that its “predictions” should come true. Metaphysics is the tool that is needed. And, Rubix, this should be no surprise! The reason why we remember Einstein for relativity – and not Lorentz – is because it was Einstein who showed the metaphysics, rather, pseudo-metaphysics, behind Lorentz’s transformations.
Further, I never said that “science [was] just ‘[your] religion and faith'”!!!! I love science and I wouldn’t do that to her!!! I said that you were adding your faith to science without warrant!! I want you to keep your dirty paws off her!
So, finally, I am not about to toss myself off any story building! That is a very real idea, and I don’t want to suffer the very real consequences. Furthermore, I won’t do this specifically because I KNOW that I would be the creator of those consequences!!
Rubix, I take it you didn’t follow my conversation with John (I don’t blame you), but knowing something for sure is no light task, but it is possible! The first step is to admit when you don’t know. John was good about saying that that was smart, but he wasn’t interested in doing what was required to get to a caveat free knowledge of anything.
I have said, many times, what exactly the conclusion / root / foundation is: “I am” is the only i’dea. It is complex (noumenal/spiritualphenomenal). It is quantized and pluralizable. Reality is a plural society of “I am”. This is of a teleological / evolutional order. Choices are made as self-limitations. Evolution progresses socially. Etc. and etc.
Tim
You’re not getting it. We don’t need to know any deeper, underlying truths in order to make factual assertions about our environment. Evolution is just as much a fact as the fact of you dying if you jumped off a building.
Rubix,
you can assert whatever you want, sure. Real nice! Understanding is a different thing altogether, though. Now, what “environment”? You can assert the existence of such a thing, but I’d recommend seriously considering whether or not that is a fool thing to do.
Again, what you’re not getting is your impotence to predict based on prior informatic observations. Science just cannot tell you that you’ll die if you jump off a building; it can’t assure you of its predictions. That’s something you add in. Your religion / reason.
Assert as you like, but if you ever want confidence, or if you ever want the ability to defend your assertions, you will have to look deeper.
To be sure, you are missing a great deal of the beauty of life by asserting (implicitly or explicitly) that it isn’t necessary. You are missing the i’deal reality which is appearance-transcending.
Tim
This is also why it’s important to make sure your model makes sense with respect to what you’re trying to explain. Langan himself says that reality should be the “biggest set of all” which means that an even-bigger powerset that contains “reality” within itself results in a paradox, and the obvious solution to this is to expand set theory to make it so “the largest set can be defined as containing its powerset while being contained by its powerset in the other” thereby “topologically including itself” repeatedly in a recursive fashion.
Of course, this is like climbing a ladder of infinites into a limiting abyss of nonsense. Langan here is making an error in his understanding of models. He makes that error when we talk about models of randomness in evolution by natural selection (as I’ve described above), and he makes that error here when we talk about modeling the universe with sets.
The powerset of S = {x, y, z} is simply P(S) = {{}, {x}, {y}, {z}, {xy}, {xz}, {yz}, {x,y,z}} which is easy enough. They are useful for, say, finding all factors of a number by using a powerset derived from a set consisting of primes. The reason why it’s useful is because we know any number can be broken down into prime factors, but we also know that all possible combinations will result in both prime and nonprime factors of the initial number. For instance, if we know that the number 12 can be broken down into a prime-factor set {2, 2, 3}, we know the powerset here is {{}, {2}, {2}, {3}, {2, 2}, {2, 3}, {2, 3}, {2, 3, 3}} and this helps us determine that the factors of 12 are 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12.
Do we say “the powerset exists”? In this case, it exists as a description of how to find factors. Does it exist in physical reality? It’s a bit of a nonsensical question, since numbers by themselves “don’t exist.” Numbers are used to describe things. Powersets have application when we’re trying to answer a question that depends on, ultimately, the combinations of the elements that help describe the initial entity (e.g. our number 12) in some way. So we can say the description exists, obviously.
But does this mean all descriptions exist? Obviously not. Not all models make physical sense. I could make a set that includes {my chair, my desk} but the powerset {{}, {my desk}, {my chair}, {my desk, my chair}} doesn’t really tell us anything other than the number of ways I can categorize my items (or what I can choose to bring with me when I move from one house to another). It’s like asking “What is the square root of a chicken cutlet?”, “At what temperature does hatred become paper?”, or “What is the meaning of cheese in relativity?” They’re meaningless, useless questions that are an appeal to nonsense. All Langan is doing here is taking a powerset of reality and concluding that there is a paradox because you can’t have a set bigger than the biggest set or a “largest set” that contains itself.
Langan claims the powerset of the universe “exists in SCSPL syntax, which itself exists by logical necessity,” but the problem is that this says nothing about how it applies to our actual universe. He doesn’t ever really bother to give an easy explanation for what he means by SCSPL or why it exists by logical necessity — I’ve never heard of SCSPL before. I Google it and find it’s something I only see in relation to the CTMU, so it appears to be something Langan has made up. Just because something exists in “SCSPL syntax” doesn’t mean SCSPL actually describes our universe effectively. I could make up a logic system that proves you can divide by 0 or that infinity is an actual number, but it doesn’t make it true. I fail to see how SCSPL can exist by logical necessity and yet justify a physical existence of something that is nonsensical in the physical realm to begin with.
That’s why Mark is claiming that Langan is committing similar fallacies to naive set theory. Naive set theory is invalid because it results in nonsensical eventualities that are inconsistent. Same goes for the sort of logic Langan is invoking here to describe reality. It just doesn’t make sense to say “the powerset of reality exists.” Set theory is a modeling tool. But the model has to actually make sense. I’m sure Langan can defend that he’s not talking about “naive set theory,” but what he’s talking about is most certainly nonsensical, invalid, and inconsistent.
Yeah, the “reality as a set” thing is only a small, small part of the CTMU, but it’s that kind of fallacious logic, abuse of modeling, and misunderstanding of theory (and science) that permeates the entire paper as well as Langan’s argumentation. In those old threads, Langan always said “You have to start with the logic first,” but this isn’t exactly true. The logic still has to make sense. You can’t create a logic system and then assume reality bends to its will. You create the logic around the nature of reality, not the other way around. Same goes for the uselessness of ID. You need to fit the theory to the evidence, not the other way around. Otherwise you risk invoking a lot of arbitrary nonexplanation that adds nothing to real understanding.
Rubix,
I’ll attack this post in reverse order.
[Rubix]
In those old threads, Langan always said “You have to start with the logic first,” but this isn’t exactly true. The logic still has to make sense. You can’t create a logic system and then assume reality bends to its will. You create the logic around the nature of reality, not the other way around. Same goes for the uselessness of ID. You need to fit the theory to the evidence, not the other way around. Otherwise you risk invoking a lot of arbitrary nonexplanation that adds nothing to real understanding.
[Tim]
I am with Langan, here (though not (quite) with the CTM(U) as a whole). Hopefully I can show you why. You say “You create the logic around the nature of reality, not the other way around.”, but you rally do have it backwards! How do you know what the “nature of reality” is to start with? This isn’t some inane or trivial point, it is my whole bit thing about science having its pants on – rather – outside in! You are seeing the appearance and assuming that that is reality. Metaphysics (religion / reason) is about getting past the veil of appearance. Science should properly remain mute, but, in practice, most tend to advocate the outside-in metaphysics.
Now, not every logic system will also be reasonable! But, if you start with reason, and if you should succeed, then logic / /physics / “reality” should fall out.
[Rubix]
It just doesn’t make sense to say “the powerset of reality exists.”
[Tim]
I haven’t gotten into the details of this because they never came up in my path to the peak. There may be some treasures in their for others, but…
Rubix, the nature of reality, which reality is now more than the mere phenomenal you are used to, is a plural society of noumenally equivalent I’deas, “I am”. These “I am” are complex (noumenal/spiritualphenomenal), but there is nothing more to reality than quanta of these. If I see this super-phenomenal society as the “set” of these N “I am”, then am I right to think of the powerset as the set of the relationships that MIGHT exist between these “I am”? But I’m not to sure what exactly that does for me at this point.
[Rubix]
Just because something exists in “SCSPL syntax” doesn’t mean SCSPL actually describes our universe effectively.
[Tim]
“universe” is part of your faith (and Langan’s), but not mine! As I understand it I am the solitary inhabitant of my own “universe”. My universe is my phenomenal body.
Now, since every “I am” is a quanta of the same type of I’dea, all noumenally equivalent, it is no wonder to me that our “universes” are quite similar, that they appear all to be right here, and that we can tell something about other “I am” by paying close attention to our own “universe”, etc. But, none-the-less, our own universe is proprietary to each us, and, thus, we are each kept real / distinct / inviolate. Reality is a N-harmonious pluralism of “I am”.
And, to be sure, SCSPL seems to be quite close to the physics of the spirit that is needed to make each “I am” actually a real I’dea. Actually living. The big problem I see is with Chris’ unbound Telesis. This manifests with his preference for universe v. pluralism. If he accounts for the fact that THE I’dea must be pluralizable / quantizable, then we might be “cooking with gas”.
[Rubix]
I could make a set that includes {my chair, my desk} but the powerset {{}, {my desk}, {my chair}, {my desk, my chair}} doesn’t really tell us anything other than the number of ways I can categorize my items (or what I can choose to bring with me when I move from one house to another).
[Tim]
you presume that the likes of chair and desk are real and meaningful ideas. I am convinced that they – by themselves – are not! More complexity is needed. The real idea (internal to I’dea), or concept, is: I sit on a chair, or I see my chair, or I have a chair in my house, etc. It is not for naught that you are THE observer! “I am” is an infinitely potent I’dea (though, as you point out, not all concepts are real concepts). The chair and desk are just information about the I’dea that is you.
[Rubix]
since numbers by themselves “don’t exist.”
[Tim]
bravo!
[Rubix]
Numbers are used to describe things.
[Tim]
and “things” are used to (begin to) describe “I am”!
Interestingly, with the mere phenomenal we are led to doubt the logic behind the “=” symbol. Noumenally, however, we see the justification behind the usefulness of raw numbers in explaining the relationships of phenomena!
In Closing,
About your assessment of Langan, and your thoughts on powerset, thanks for sharing. I’m not sure that I have anything (more) to offer directly on that (now). For my part, again, I have said that I think Langan still has his socks on inside out / outside in. That he recognized not only that science has its pants on outside in, but that he recognized also the NEED to have them outside out. But I think, suspect (?), that he still hasn’t quite succeeded. Wonderfully close though. Anyway, to the point, I think he lets materialism (v. a proper I’dealism) back in the back door (UBT). I think this manifests in his hope to describe a THE universe. I think this leads him to a pantheism where all potentials must be real. But with me, and a personal I’dealism, the real is specifically a self-limiting of potential! Not only can there be N “I am” (a seemingly arbitrary number), but each “I am” actualizes his potency by self-limitation from his own potential. One’s “no” is one’s real power. Anyway, I think this metaphysics would help constrain Chris’ theory, and a CTM (no “U”) would – then – prove very valuable, and probably generate a good deal of interest rather than the title of “Crank”.
Tim
This will be the last time I reply to you. You need to stop responding with huge walls of one-liners and needless spacings. It makes this comment board twice as hard to read and maneuver through. Paragraph responses are fine but there’s no reason to outline everything like we’re reading a play transcript, here.
You say “You are seeing the appearance and assuming that that is reality. Metaphysics (religion / reason) is about getting past the veil of appearance.” The problem is we don’t claim to know “what reality really is,” nor is that the goal of science. Science can’t make that kind of unfalsifiable claim. Metaphysics can’t claim to get past the veil either because we gather data through our perceptions, no matter how you slice it.
So when we talk about things past the veil, it’s anyone’s best guess. There are infinitely many possibly true metaphysical explanations. We build our logic systems and theories around what we can observe and perceive. Otherwise one arbitrary metaphysical logic system is just as valid as the next, all equally without proof, and all without good reason to believe in them. Contrived compatibility alone is insufficient. It needs to be able to make predictions in order for us to gauge its strength. If it adds no new information or insight, we cut it away with Occam’s Razor. Otherwise, again, it’s like saying fairies are essential to explain why water boils.
Rubix,.
you say, “Metaphysics can’t claim to get past the veil either because we gather data through our perceptions, no matter how you slice it.”, but this is a terrible under-estimate. (noumenal) MIND is a priori. If you deny this you implicitly must put something else in its place. You are probably not willing to look at this directly… But one cannot avoid metaphysics. You just end up taking a really novice position because you refuse to give it the consideration it deserves.
you say, “The problem is we don’t claim to know “what reality really is,” nor is that the goal of science. Science can’t make that kind of unfalsifiable claim.” Regarding the latter, this is where we agree. However, regarding the former, you delude yourself every moment: with every decision you make. A better metaphysics not only matters, but it is actually testable, and objective. You deny this by faith. But that doesn’t make your assertion real. To be sure, you do believe in a “reality”, so this will come out in time. And your belief in “reality” contradicts this statement of yours, “There are infinitely many possibly true metaphysical explanations.”
Lastly, you say, “It needs to be able to make predictions in order for us to gauge its strength.” If you saw the i’dea you would see that physics falls out. If all of physics isn’t a good enough prediction… hehe.
Tim
What do you think science is measuring, here? Unreal consequences? What you’re saying here is inconsistent. If you think science can’t assure you of the consequence, how can you then say you wouldn’t jump?
Rubix,
Science is the intellectual “system” of relating phenomenal observations to each other.
Where you get “Unreal consequences?” is beyond me. I started to go into all sorts of analysis, but I have cut it. If it is important to you, please show me how you got it from anything I said.
I’m not saying anything inconsistent. Or, why do you think that I am? I refuse to jump due to the KNOWLEDGE I have thanks to metaphysics. I have a great faith that my decision to jump would be fairly represented derivatively. I have a great faith that my decision to jump would be made real, and that you would be able to observe the reality of my so causing it in your universe, too. But if you were there to witness it, until the moment I splattered on the ground I would maintain that your science was impotent to predict that I would.
This difference may seem trivial to you?
Tim
Rubix,
when I had said, “But if you were there to witness it, until the moment I splattered on the ground I would maintain that your science was impotent to predict that I would.”, do you remember when you had suggested that I might rather appear on the moon?
Tim
Yes, that seems trivial to me. I think it’s pretty absurd to claim that science can’t predict if you’d die by jumping off a building. Obviously the chances of dying are practically 100%. The moon example was to show something that, according to quantum theory, would happen at a near-0 probability. The amount of time you’d have to wait for such an event to occur is too large to even bother worrying about it.
You can call it “faith” all you want, but the facts are pretty clear. You jump, you die. Or, if you prefer, you have a very, very, very high chance of death that you can “have faith” in.
Rubix,
you can wear you pants outside in and call that trivial, but thinking that all there is to reality is phenomenon is not trivial.
I’ll try to give you a stronger suggestion why that is momentarily, but we see it when you say, “I think it’s pretty absurd to claim that science can’t predict if you’d die by jumping off a building.” The point is that “science” is no live “I am” to predict. The prediction is always something that comes from a person. A person can use science to make predictions. But that person can only do so by faithe! If you don’t recognize this, then you can’t develop your capacity to faithe.
Now, this example of jumping off a building is also making the picture look particularly trivial. But start to take a good look at around. It’s not for naught that science is incapable of forecast! There must be a place for the free decisions of “I am”. You see, Rubix, the system of science relates observations of a derivative representation, which representation is itself a representation of the super-phenomenal reality! “I am” are free to make super-phenomenal decisions; and those decisions are to be real. Thus, the derivative representation must reveal “deterministic” enough order, showing that real decisions result in real effects, but there must also be room for free will and individuality. A proper reading of the system of science shows this.
With this in mind, ones faith in dealing with other “I am” takes on its proper dimension! In dealing with other “I am” you benefit a great deal from a developed capacity to faithe well. When individuals and society at large don’t value the tool that is most necessary to make decisions about how to interact with other “I am” before the always murky future…
Anyway, I don’t know how much thought you have put into JUSTICE, it doesn’t come up much in science, but it an objectively real metaphysical quality. It is a big deal! It is a big part of reality. And ignoring the evidence of metaphysics because you don’t think science needs it is – like I said – choosing a really immature metaphysics. You can’t escape religion. You need reason to make decisions. … Remember that dude from the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy who put a towel over his head because he thought that if he couldn’t see you you couldn’t see him?
Tim
Rubix,
correction on that hitchhiker’s character:
people brought a towel with them to put over their heads because the monster thought that if you couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see you.
but I like my mistake!
Tim
Twist it however you want — it’s crank logic, pure and simple. It’s not faith. It’s evidence.
Rubix,
you ended (?): “Twist it however you want — it’s crank logic, pure and simple. It’s not faith. It’s evidence.”
I have done no such twisting. It is not crank logic – by your own standards. It is faith/faithe, whether you like it or not. And evidence is only evidence.
Now, real quick here, I can offer you one more huge benefit to Metaphsics. Jesus’ admonition to love your neighbor is no spacy, feel-good, wishy-washy evidence based ethic. It is rock solid REAL! It is THE tried and true beating heart of communication! When reality is a plural society of ultimately super-phenomenal “I am”, loving your neighbor not only counts, but is “the way” of faithe. It is so easy that anyone can do “it” (didn’t you loose an “it” somewhere back there? 😉 ). And that everyone should know to do it. And you can get a hint (only a hint in this effed up world – it seems) of its power by looking to some of the great things that people who are probably neither successful metaphysicians nor accomplished physicists have done for them selves, by faithe. (Do you ask for a demonstration?)
Let me try to drive home my point in a way that I don’t like to do – though I do think about changing my mind and pursuing it earnestly every so often (it seems better just to let it fall out rather than forcing the issue – some thermodynamic law might even be lurking in this…). I am not bullshitting when I say see the form of physics pregnant within my metaphysics. Since I have not (yet) set out to crystallize the actual physics (and would be happy if anyone listening should preempt me 😉 ), I should urge caution about these. But let me give you a few pieces that I think will end up being born out by THE T.o.E.
Physics’ ability to say HOW on the question of DYNAMICS will never be a closed determinism. never! (there might even be a proof of the futility of that hope – before long). That gap is there because, metaphysically, WILL needs a “home”. It really is a super-phenomenal WILL that is the efficient cause of the phenomenal! Got it? Phenomena do not cause phenomena! There is another dimension to this dynamic!
Next, this whole microscopic QM “probability” business viz-a-viz macroscopic “solidity” is … as close as you’ll come to seeing me “twist” the matter, he he he. In order that each i’dea, each “I am”, should be made real it must, by the same means, be kept truly independent — that is, inviolate. This means that the derivative representation (phenomena), which – as as I have already pointed out – is a vital part of the mechanism for making the i’dea real, … it means that this mechanism must “distort” each i’dea before the other i’deas just so much that no i’dea can ever be located precisely. One can hold himself together. Untouchable. Thus the proprietary observer-measurement entanglement. (Real information qua information is quantum mechanical while high brow conceptions of phenomena are, technically, pure maya, pure illusion. Though they “work” great.)
Now, you might be able to see TIME in this. It really is a one way street. However, the derivative representation, since it is a “fair” (the dice aren’t loaded) representation of the real, should – at least in great part – appear to be unconcerned for that arrow of time. That is, both the arrow of time and the eternal nature of real i’deas should be derivatively represented in the order of the phenomenal, the system of science. Can you find them?
Now that I might have peaked your logical minded interest, let me try to offer something to show you that faithe really is more precious. A little while back I had offered a little “concert” in celebration of freedom (at least the hope for freedom). Let me reproduce it for ya’lls enjoyment (from my thread to my squad entitled “Happy 4th everyone!”):
A little celebration. In concert?
Asher Roth – G.R.I.N.D. (Get Ready It’s a New Day)
Linkin Park – Faint
Ke$ha – We R Who We R
Ben Folds, ft. Regina Spektor – You Don’t Know Me
Jessie J, ft. B.o.B. – Pricetag
$$$
Tim
Oh, I also found more link soup to add to my post here: http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-28852
ISCID Forums: Cosmogony, Holography and Causality: http://www.iscid.org/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=recent_user_posts;u=00000264
Pick a post at random and you’ll see more evidence of browbeating and lack of actual CTMU explanation with any real rigor.
Like Mark said, the worst math is no math at all.
Also addressing the nonsense of “The Resolution of Newcomb’s Paradox” at http://www.megasociety.org/noesis/44/newcomb.html more intimately:
Using a really, really basic example before applying it to Newcomb’s Paradox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fair#Posterior_probability_density_function
Ultimately we can show that based on the number of heads we get from flipping a coin, we can determine the underlying probability density for the probability of getting heads (r): f(r|H=h, T=t) = (N+1)!/(h!t!) * r^h * (1-r)^t where N is the number of flips and h and t represent the number of heads and tails observed.
So let’s say we want to look at the distribution for flipping 7 heads out of 10 total flips:
Mean of distribution: (h+1)/(h+t+2) = (7+1)/(7+3+2) = ~67%
Distribution graph: http://i.imgur.com/hhfKo.png
This is the sort of logic we’d want to apply to Newcomb’s Paradox. Instead of falling victim to the Gambler’s Fallacy, we’d basically look at how many times the Demon was correct in his predictions and from there devise a probability that he’s the real deal or not.
So say you and the Demon go through 10 trials and he’s right every single time as to which box/boxes you will take. Now we’re looking at:
Mean of distribution: (h+1)/(h+t+2) = (10+1)/(10+0+2) = ~92%
Distribution graph: http://i.imgur.com/7sNhm.png
And if he’s right 19 times and wrong once?
Mean of distribution: (h+1)/(h+t+2) = (19+1)/(19+1+2) = ~91%
Distribution graph: http://i.imgur.com/HdCFU.png
So based on what probability we assign to the Demon being the real deal (say 90% given the nature of the trials):
Choosing both boxes = .9*1000 + (1-.9)*501,000 = $51,000
Choosing clear box = .9*1000 + (1-.9)*1000 = $1000
Choosing black box = .9*1,000,000 + (1-.9)*500,000 = $950,000
So basically if we’re 90% sure that the Demon’s prediction ability is real, we stand a pretty good shot at the maximum amount of money if we go for the black box. There’s no “paradox” here. It’s like if I flipped a coin 1000 times and it came up heads each time. I wouldn’t try to rationalize Gambler’s Fallacy by saying “Wow, this is super unlucky, but theoretically I should be able to hit tails next throw with 50%.” The point here is that the coin is very likely to be weighted at that level of confidence, since it’s not as likely that such a coin is spitting out values consistent with what we’d expect from a distribution where r=.5 and such.
Gambler’s Fallacy only applies if we’re sure that something is fair. If I know that a coin is fair but I get heads 5 times in a row, it WOULD be Gambler’s Fallacy to assume that the next flip would be a head, too. But when I know nothing about the nature of the system, we can’t make assumptions, and must rationally derive thresholds for which we can say with a degree of certainty what the distribution looks like.
But ultimately it comes down to our utility profile and how much we’re willing to risk. There’s no one right answer to it.
I mean, let’s look at Langan’s conclusion to his Paradox solution:
“You can be modeled […] you take the black box only.” (you can see the full paragraph in the above link)
Attempting to decipher his neologisms and summarize his points: In other words, you either have free will or you’re deterministically-bound. Newcomb’s Demon is something that transcends yet interacts with physical reality and isn’t bound by the same rules you are necessarily. You can’t prove that this transcendental framework doesn’t exist because you can’t observe it by definition. Also, because (1/2)^3 = 1/8, it sure looks improbable that the Demon would be right three times in a row. He must be the real deal! All of this, together, implies that you should choose the black box.
In yet other words: Simply because Newcomb’s Demon is a possible entity, and he was right 3 times in a row, we should choose the black box.
But hey, at least we get some of Langan’s mathematical prowess in this piece with his 1/8 probability mention.
Caustic: “What *would* a universe look like that did not need a creator?”
Interesting ideas Caustic, I’m not sure such an enigmatic problem is likely to make sense but i’ll try
If what we understand by sentience to be human intelligence then there are some modal solutions that can give the question more sensibility. Sentience is not limited to having the requirement to evolve systematically from atoms upward to molecules, proteins and cells. Downward causation for instance would permit the opposite or mutual process of systematic evolving. It allows for a higher level property (say a set of molecules) to be be effected by a lower-level property (such as dual waves and particles.) Waves and particles with boundary conditions (i.e. energies and wavefunctions) are candidates for morphic fields with cause-effect boundaries.
The CTMU says; the mutual “grip” of matter on space and space on matter, translates to the field structure of waves or what we call morphic fields according to Sheldrake. The literal grip or embeddation of space into matter and matter into space is the grip of particles to their wavefunctions. Atomic energy levels are known for their combined properties so if everything material is energy then a field like the kind Sheldrake proposes could be responsible for it’s organizing principles for nonsystematic design.
The Ritz combination principle states that the energy level measurements of wavefunctions are the combined form of wavefunctions and energy. The harmonic frequencies from emitted particles and or the absorption rate of particles to their waves can be calculated as uniqueness properties represented as Hamiltonian energy-spectra. Downward causation preserves the transform of energy into matter through different levels of measurement (waves organizing molecules out of quantum chaos near the semi-classical region). For instance, suppose a property (molecule or atom) M has a particular level L of energy and this causes another property Mx at level L +1 then Mx emerges, or results, from a property M* at an energy level L(M*) therefore reaches the same energy level as M(a). Of course these are hypothetic objects M standing for morphic fields with up-down down-up causal duality. In otherwords energy levels are common to the measures of different properties like how molecules with different combined energy levels organizes into proteins.
The properties of the universe such as the ones you are talking about (atoms, waves and spatial field manifolds) have dual causal structure. Other universes like the ones David Lewis always talked about when he was proving Genuine Realism give us access to understanding the particle-wave duality in terms of dual causation i.e. telesis. Physically nonexistent objects exhibit no wave-particle duality when observed or measured so these universes physicists would be basically unable to measure or prove directly. However they are able to manifest to us in the form of emergent properties, that are invisible to us, and this is what we see happening as a responsive mechanism of dual causation in it’s downward-causal direction………
….cont
The Drake’s equation is limited to the number of approximated stars within the Milky Way galaxy so the sample size is limited. Based on my own previous analysis and criticism of the Drake’s equation I came to the conclusion that if intelligent life exists then it is less common than what the Drake’s equation usually proposes. We assume that the evolution of life from small molecules to single cells to multicelled organisms began with the appearance of proper conditions such as the ones I discussed before (atomospheric-temperate-solar equilibria.) However it’s an anthropic bias to assume these conditions are intrinsic or universal to all planets. Only some planets, maybe 50-million per galaxy, allow for the sustainability for DNA to enter into single cell phases. Technological civilizations would be limited to perhaps a handful at most of intelligent civilizations for each galaxy rather than the many millions that we think could exist under the Drake formulation. The reasons being limited contact of lifeforms, that is, fewer sightings of intelligent life of more than a single variety by humans on Earth. If there is a single variety at all visiting Earth than the human contact average should be much higher than a single variety. If Drake’s equation were true then there would be far more technological resemblances to ourself that we would know about from SETI deep space surveys. This much assuming that technological civilizations evolve through the same systematic procedure as our own and having invented radio-frequency technology. If not than other forms of nonphysical or quantum communication exist that might suggest also that they are part of the generality of modal possible worlds that don’t have physically measurable properties.
Planets and stars have their own morphic fields and these fields are different for every planet with or without having manifested life. Planets without manifested life exhibit hyperdimensional effects such as Jupiter’s anticyclic storm. Hyperdimensional physics requires an understanding of hypergeometric functions up to dimension 5 with some Gaussian surface effect over Maxwell’s equations. For an electromagnetic plasma or gas there correspond gravitational waves that shape phenomena such as Jupiter’s gas formations or stormy planets like Mercury. By morphic fields we mean that these phenomena pattern themselves out of the downward causal drip from fields down to waves and physical properties. As an indirect clue the presence of gravitational anomalies and waves indicate higher-dimensional localization of fields to large gravitational objects. Keep in mind that the strange worlds hypothesis permits the existence of quantum realms as a possible side-effect of quantum entanglement. (Everything has a field though at various scales their fields become entangled: planets, stars, galaxies, groups, clusters, superclusters, walls, filaments and dark matter voids.) Technological beings would aggregate towards the use of some planets fitting several necessary physical conditions. Planets are 3-dimensional global references for higher-dimensional fields. Other intelligences would occupy planets circumscribed by N-dimensional Gaussian spheres with hyperdimensional effects. They use planets instead of stars because planetary distances to stars produce N-body dynamics which are not effected by the large gravitational wave emissions and nuclear-hadron properties in the cores of stars (i.e. higher-dimensional life cannot live on stars.)
(P.S. ignore the lateness of this response, it was buried under a pile on junk from debates that had ensued following Mr. Langan’s last post. I hope this post doesn’t end up in the grinder as Rubix appears to be hemorrhaging Spam again)
The problem with the Drake equation is that it’s one equation in five unknowns.
OK, that’s progress: when Drake published it, it was one equation in seven unknowns.
Nonetheless, any answer is going to depend on your assumptions about the values of four of those unknowns: you can say things like “the likelihood of technological life within 1000 light-years depends on the average lifespan of a technological civilization,” but you can’t get a handle on what either of those numbers is.
Trying to reach conclusions about the likelihood of intelligent life based on SETI is worse: at that point it’s not just the lifespan of a technological civilization, it’s the average length of time during which they are broadcasting signals out to the universe at large. A lot of our broadcasts are already going by various forms of cable, not broadcast. SETI is an appealing project, but we have to recognize that the only answers it can provide are “Yes” (unambiguous intelligent signal), various forms of “maybe” (ambiguous signals), and “don’t know.” Aliens listening 100 light-years from Earth for the ten-thousand-year period ending in 1900 could have concluded “there’s nobody out there” and certainly wouldn’t have concluded that there was intelligent life on Earth.
The Drake Equation is like taking a cupful of water and concluding that there are no whales in the ocean. We simply haven’t penetrated the universe deeply enough at a sufficient level of detail to more accurately tune the variables of the Drake Equation. I suspect life is quite common in the universe, but the distances are just so great that one civilization likely never meets another, let alone exist at the same time in the cosmological timeline.
The big problem with Drake’s equation is similar to the fallacy of reasoning along Occam’s razor lines concerning the existence of God. Not only are almost all the variables unknown, it doesn’t really make sense to speak about probability when it comes to the existence of intelligent life in the Universe, or God. We only have experience of one single universe, and that experience is severely limited in time, space and depth. We are in no position to make statistical pronouncements on such things.
Likewise, it may be true that all of physics and creation could be explained without invoking a Creator, but that certainly doesn’t prove He doesn’t exist. It is entirely possible that He created everything, and even micromanages everything in a way that appears to follow the “Laws of physics”. I’m not saying this is the most straightforward explanation, but the thing is that given our peculiar situation, we really have no idea at all what kinds of universes and creations are reasonable or likely. We merely extrapolate our normal rules for doing science, and it is not necessarily possible to do so.
Furthermore, even if it did make sense to say that the God hypothesis is objectively farfetched, unprobable or unreasonable, it might still be true. Quantum physics seems absurd to most people, especially those with some deeper knowledge in it. Most people would agree that newtonian style mechanics is a much more “reasonable” explanation of how the universe behaves but we just have to accept that the explanation isn’t as neat as we had hoped.
Just because you can’t prove something doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it actually has any worth. If we can explain everything without the need for an intelligent designer, then why bother invoking the designer?
If we want to say he is “micromanaging” everything through the laws of physics, then why call it God? Why not simply call it the “laws of physics”? There seems to be this burning need for people to anthropomorphize God and assume he is an intelligent sort of sentience.
QM may not make sense to people and may come across as absurd, but the difference is that we actually have evidence for it, and it’s able to make staggeringly accurate predictions. Invoking a designer adds no predictive ability or deeper understanding. Again, why bother?
I am not saying YOU have to bother to postulate anything, I’m just saying that it’s a mistake to think that Occam’s razor type arguments actually PROVE that God doesn’t exist, or that Leprechauns are not involved when water boils.
Occam’s razor may be a good way to slim down theories to their essentials, but some tend to use it in this other way, which is incorrect.
As to calling God “the laws of physics”, I think you know the answer: 1. God is more than just the laws governing reality, that would only be one aspect of it all (in this hypothetical example). 2. It does make a difference, to some people, if the universe was created with an INTENTION or merely by accident. It may also matter that we are not alone, or that we are being watched over by God.
I think your final phrase illustrates it neatly: “Invoking a designer adds no predictive ability or deeper understanding.”
This ignores several important facts:
1. Predictive ability is not the only thing that matters to some people.
2. If universe was created by God, that surely adds a deeper understanding, perhaps not relevant to you, but you have to agree that it is at least potentially interesting.
3. Even if you can’t see, given your knowledge today, what it might add, it is still conceivable that given further knowledge, or a different perspective than yours, that this view would alter.
4. Even if it did not add anything, it could still be true, and some people may be unpragmatic enough to value truth for its own sake.
Regarding the 4th point, consider a wall with a coin slot and small door. Each time you insert a penny, a piece of chocolate emerges from the door. After trying this a hundred times, you might conclude that there is some kind of machinery that inside that is activated by your penny. From your perspective as a chocolate lover, that may be all the information you care about, and you may argue that “postulating a little man on the other side of the wall does not add predictive power”. Sure, but what if there WAS a little man behind that wall? By Occam’s razor, you could ignore him, and you would be correct in saying that your model does not gain from his inclusion, but it would still be true that he exists, and HE certainly wouldn’t agree with your assessment.
Also, I do know that QM can be “proven” in a sense that God can’t, but my argument does not rest on this, the point was merely that the truth can be absurd, whether we like it or not. We shouldn’t rule things out just because they seem outrageous.
It’s not a matter of ruling out the absurd. It’s a matter of not jumping to conclusions before the facts are in, or outright ignoring other facts altogether.
Great, then we agree.
“Sure, but what if there WAS a little man behind that wall? By Occam’s razor, you could ignore him, and you would be correct in saying that your model does not gain from his inclusion, but it would still be true that he exists, and HE certainly wouldn’t agree with your assessment.”
There could be a man behind the wall. Or a slide. Or a monkey. Or a pressure mechanism. Or a Chocolate God. Or a machine. Or a team of chocolatiers. Or a sugar unicorn. We just don’t know. One arbitrary explanation is just as good as the next when we just have no idea.
Nobody’s saying “the man behind the wall” is impossible, but it’s not supported by any evidence yet, much like the other possibilities are not supported. Occam’s Razor isn’t meant to eliminate something not proven and claim it’s impossible. It’s meant to keep explanation as simple as possible without tacking on frameworks that lend nothing.
CD
Great, then we agree. I just got the feeling that you and others used occam and arguments from superfluity a bit too liberally.
For those who want to ask any further questions my replies may come in very late.
The CTMU demands my full attention so I will be engrossed in giving it a more complete study as well as reviewing Mr. Langan’s e-book The Art of Knowing. When I have completed this study I will report back in due time with some more explicit proofings of the CTMU and the various issues it raises.
Regards.
Even more explicit than recommending us eating fiber? Wow, they’re going to be _really_ explicit! XD
XD XD XD XD XD XD XD XD XD XD XD
Look at this for a minute from Mr. Langan’s viewpoint.
He knows his theory is correct. He knows his theory, being correct, is extremely important, one of the most important single works of *all time*, given that it proves the existence of God, gives a new and correct model of the Universe, provides new insights into artificial intelligence, and solves all logical paradoxes. Thus he realizes that he must defend and explain his model. He puts the necessary information up on the Internet. He is greeted with a mixture of misunderstanding and frustration. This causes him to feel frustrated. At first he answers questions, but then he is appalled by the arguments in which he ends up. He feels that it is a waste of his time to continue arguing with people who don’t understand his theory given that all the information they need is already online and he has more important things to attend to (such as further work on the CTMU). Moreover, he is painfully aware of the moral shortcomings possessed by many in the world, and does not wish to deal with these. However, when he does encounter such shortcomings in individuals, he points out that they better shape up in these respects or the consequences may not be good for them. His CTMU, which I remind you is rationally derived, supports this idea. However, people who do not yet understand his CTMU misunderstand his actions as irrational threats, as if he is threatening that he will do something to people who dislike the CTMU. For related reasons apropos his moral understanding, Mr. Langan is aware of the imperfections of academia, and distrusts it to such an extent that he prefers not to enter it, not to publish his work in it, and instead to set up the Mega Foundation and use that for publicity. This is the state of affairs with respect to Mr. Langan. He is not a ‘pressurized vessel of anger and desparation’; he merely has given up on explaining the CTMU to people who don’t get any of it, and he feels he has better uses for his time.
I hope this clears up Mr. Langan’s actions in a way with which he can agree. While this post does not deal with the content of the CTMU itself, that content is out there, and it is neither my nor Mr. Langan’s responsibility to explain it anymore than it has been explained online in papers and the like. I also know that I am not as good a representative of the CTMU as Mr. Langan is, so I can’t help out much except on relatively trivial things. In other words, if you are unsatisfied with it, you will likely have to wait.
“better use for his time”?
So you suggest that a person that has come up with a proof of God’s existence may do better working as a bouncer or on his farm, than actually explaining his incredibly dense work to the world?
Even if this were remotely reasonable, it still doesn’t explain how Mr Langan can take the time to write angry replies and ad hominem attacks on people that don’t agree with or fail to understand his so-called theory, people that unlike himself have solid backgrounds in the related disciplines. He has time for that, but not for actually addresssing the mountains of reasonable criticism levelled against his work?
Well I have printed out the CTMU on my colour printer and bound it in a file. I must say it is a dense work and a challenge to give a comprehensive hermeneutic analysis. Having an extensive background in math, philosophy and science it is very clear what the CTMU proposes to be valid, is a valid theory, but as all original works go understanding and comprehension of the work takes time and a sober critique of the CTMU is long overdue. There is a lot of cross-referencing throughout the work as one would expect so many sections will be jotted down on separate notes. This will be a glossary/handbook of important CTMU terms and themes. Many of the interpretive variables in the CTMU will be engineered from scratch out of my own intuition as I know as well as Mr. Langan does that the CTMU is exactly what it claims itself to be. The separated discourses of academia have yet evolved to a point to catch up with this fact. (P.S. please do not respond to this post, I simply do not have the time to engage in any unnecessary squabbling over the CTMU or any related matters.)
Regards.
Anonymous: No, the problem is that Chris Langan is a crackpot/crank by definition. From the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_%28person%29#Common_characteristics_of_cranks
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics/msg/5312a801e0785e66?pli=1
I mean, God, this all describes Langan perfectly. No exaggeration. Every sentence can apply directly to Langan.
He holds his beliefs as truth despite the magnitude of contrary views (and despite the heaping reams of evidence against his claims), overstates/overestimates his understanding, thinks everyone else is an idiot, claims his CTMU is vitally important, refuses to admit to mistakes/errors no matter what, etc. The only people who will hop on board the crazy-train are non-experts who are just as ignorant or uneducated as he is.
Langan also exhibits the marks of a crank by bashing academia, exaggerating personal achievements (while demanding credentials from others), misunderstanding the opposing side (such as the evolution argument), supporting/working on his “theory” for over a decade to establish faux-credibility, comparing himself to Einstein and Newton (esp. when he speaks about the importance of the CTMU), claiming suppression via powerful business interests/government/mainstream academia, and by holding himself in overly high regard.
Furthermore, when he tries to contradict things as they are taught in mathematics/physics, he’ll reveal his ignorance and lack of ability, fail to use standard notation/terminology (while loading his arguments full of neologisms such as “conspansive duality,” “supertautological,” “unbound telesis,” “infocognition”, “intrinsic self-determinacy,” “hologic identity” and abuse commonly-understood terms), and ignore vital points that establish the contrary position.
The CTMU doesn’t qualify as a scientific theory because it doesn’t make any testable predictions — intelligent design is unfalsifiable garbage that we can hack away with Occam’s Razor. What’s especially true is that Langan “[presents his] ideas in such a confused manner that it is impossible to determine what [he is] actually claiming.”
And finally: “No argument or evidence can ever be sufficient to make a crank abandon his belief.”
It appears that the confusion persists.
This site purports to be about mathematics. Mathematical knowledge is stratified; there is a crucial distinction to be made between low-level mathematical learning and mathematical understanding. Mastery of mathematical details is one thing; understanding and integrating the details across many structures and formalisms is quite another. One cannot call oneself a mathematician, or criticize other mathematicians, until one understands and mentally bridges the distinction. (Of course, insofar as true mathematical knowledge incorporates both detail and comprehension, distinguishing levels of mathematical knowledge can be a bit misleading; the phrase “low-level mathematical knowledge” is a bit oxymoronic, actually denoting the mere rote memorization of mathematical boilerplate and cookie-cutter applications and procedures.)
Because the CTMU is profoundly disturbing to atheists, and because platitudes and low-level mathematical minutiae can be parroted without benefit of real mathematical understanding, the CTMU sometimes attracts critics who temporarily succeed in passing themselves off as “mathematicians”. They usually do this by regurgitating a disjointed assortment of mathematical details and generalisms which they perceive as undermining the CTMU and supporting their cases. After all, mathematical learning is easily simulated for a mathematically unsophisticated audience; one simply harvests a few weighty-sounding mathematical snippets and platitudes from the web and then anonymously parrots them for the rubes, winking, nodding, and smirking as they roll fluidly off the tongue.
But let’s get back to reality. To a competent reader – and in these parts, there are fewer of those than one might suppose – most CTMU critics resemble obnoxious schoolchildren on the rampage, popping off about this or that awful grownup in a way reminiscent of the movie series “Children of the Corn”, or perhaps the old Star Trek episode “Miri”, the sci-fi tale of a mirror-Earth in which most of society has been wiped out by a deadly plague. To make a short story shorter, Miri features ragtag death-squads of prepubescent rug rats who, unafraid of spankings and unwilling to toe the line for anyone displaying any degree of mental and emotional maturity, occupy themselves with tracking down and liquidating any grownups – derisively referred to as “grups” – of whom they get wind.
Now, I’m as fond of kids as anyone else. But Children of the Corn are quite another matter, and I eventually get bored with childish drivel. Such drivel becomes interesting only when one asks the right questions about it. For example, how deceptive and convincing can an evil little Corn-Child be when anonymously trying to convince the world that he/she is a real “mathematician”, and that he/she knows for a cold hard fact that the CTMU is “nonsense” and its author a “crank”? How stupid can most people be in gullibly swallowing the faux-authoritative critiques of such deceitful brats hook, line, and sinker? From a psychological or sociological standpoint, such questions can be intriguing.
In this very thread, we see several commentators about whom such questions might reasonably be asked. Behold their unmistakable tone of authority, the sweeping breadth of their pronouncements, the sheer boldness of their pretensions to mathematical understanding! Smell their oozing contempt for “cranks” and “crackpots”! Look at the clever way in which they rationalize the lopsided advantage of anonymity by cutting off the ring on anyone who might object, announcing that they’re hiding behind a pseudonym not because they’re craven little nerds, but for purposes of “safety”! (In fairness, this rationalization was offered by just one critic in this thread; suffice it to say that where an ordinary CTMU critic can be accurately described as “insufferable”, this link-happy little fellow can be described as “insufferable, cubed”.) Joseph Goebbels himself displayed no greater mastery of the bluff.
Too bad that at the end of the day, all of this masterful rhetoric merely gives rise to a very pointed question: why do all of these commentators seem to fear having their pants yanked down around their spindly ankles in front of the entire mathematical and/or philosophical world? Why doesn’t one of them screw up his courage, take a deep breath, and come clean about his impressive academic credentials, positions, and affiliations … something he should really want to get out of the way as soon as possible, inasmuch as until he does, he’s indistinguishable from a loud-talking two-bit grifter trying to pull a fast one? After all, Mark did it – why can’t they?
It’s a mystery.
Langan: Because *you don’t have any credentials* and you won’t even reply to people that *have* given credentials already such as CausticDuality. You are not a man of your word, and people aren’t going to fall for it.
Call it what you want, Langan, but you’ve been thoroughly debunked in this blog. I’d love to see your retort to the mathematical/utilitarian approach to the Newcomb’s Paradox that was outlined above. You claim mathematical mastery and yet you never actually leverage it in any of your explanations.
And the links I provided demonstrably prove you don’t even understand evolution fully.
The CTMU ruffles atheist feathers because it’s unfalsifiable intelligent-design nonsense wrapped up in unexplained neologisms and abused jargon.
Something like 3/4 of the population of the United States are theists, and most of those 3/4 are Christians. That’s a lot of Christians to be ignoring or rejecting your theory because they’re afraid it will undermine their alleged atheism.
You hit the mark.
Most people here is religious. Mark is Jew. Others (like me) have not expressed their beliefs because they’re irrelevant to the discussion. I particularly enjoy very much how people arbitrarily assign labels to others.
Langan knows he can not win an argument over the contents of his theory (like why does he reason over inconsistent axioms). That’s the reason he does not speak about the theory, but spends so much time resorting to insults, a field in which he seems to be quite hardened.
Now he is just trying to identify “atheist” with “their critics”, and “religious” with “people who agree with him”, simply because most people are religious. If the deception works, will favor the majority. It’s the oldest trick.
Of course, most people can see “being religious” or “being atheist” or “believing in Santa Claus” has nothing to do with “this particular proof of god is right”.
Anyway, what is the sense of so much discussion without addressing the contents of the theory?
> “If the deception works, will favor the majority.”
meant
“If the deception works, he will have the favor of the majority.”
Also, Chris, the reason why people aren’t going to go pouring over their credentials here can be summed up from a quote by Professor Robert May: “That would look great on your CV — not so good on mine!”
By getting people with credentials to admit in agreeing to appear on a platform opposing you, you’re artificially vying for status by riding off the merits of others while bringing none of your own to the table. This is especially a problem when it comes to Google caching.
Instead of taking ten seconds to give a rational response to a criticism, you instead insist that everyone be put through the ringer in order to be worthy of your time (but you sure don’t mind wasting time, considering that 98% of your responses are just attacks against other people instead of actually discussing math/science/etc). A sure sign of a crank.
I can tell you that I am a 2390 SAT-toting Wharton graduate with dual degrees in mathematics and economics, with further concentrations in finance, statistics, and operations and information management (and I currently work on Wall St), but I’m convinced you’ll just ignore all that because it’s somehow not up to snuff.
I’m not terribly concerned with your theory (I am already secure enough in my scientific and mathematical understanding to know that the CTMU is nonsense), but I don’t understand how someone can come up with such a theory and yet claim to be highly intelligent and educated. The only conclusion I can think of is that you’re severely overestimating your abilities. Trying to get a reasonable mathematical explanation out of you has proven to be impossible, but in my opinion it’s because you are simply not able to give one.
nils, Mr. Langan is still setting up the Media Center of his Mega Foundation. He is not merely doing hard labour of the farm variety day in and day out.
“Even if this were remotely reasonable, it still doesn’t explain how Mr Langan can take the time to write angry replies and ad hominem attacks on people that don’t agree with or fail to understand his so-called theory, people that unlike himself have solid backgrounds in the related disciplines.”
Mr. Langan is not launching ad hominem attacks; he is indeed making judgements about the character of some commenters, but he is not attacking their specific qualms like that. In fact, he is not attacking their qualms at all. He is too busy for this, as correcting their logical errors is indeed more time-consuming than writing replies explaining why he is unwilling to deal with their mistakes. He doesn’t want to deal with anonymous hecklers on any account, and if he deals with hecklers at all, they must show enough of an understanding of his theory to give him the impression that they’ve understood at least some of it or found at least some of it rational (the both of which may be equated in his view because he knows the CTMU to be true). (By the way, the CTMU is a theory regardless of its truth value. The phrase “so-called theory” does not apply.)
Rubix, let’s tackle John Baez’s crackpot index (as given at the Google post) apropos Mr. Langan.
“1 point for every statement that is widely regarded as false.”
Designations of truth and falsity should not be normative. There are a lot of beliefs regarded as true, so that assertions of their falsity are widely regarded as false, but which are in fact false. For example, the assertion that the lack of warmth leads immediately to nasopharyngitis is believed by many to be true. However, it is false, as you likely know. I am not demanding that Mr. Langan’s work not be judged rationally, but merely that it not be judged normatively.
“2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.”
Feel free to offer examples of supposed vacuous statements from one of Mr. Langan’s CTMU writings. It seems that this discussion has dealt more with what many of its members claim are outright incorrect statements.
“3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.”
I realize you believe that the CTMU is full of mistakes. However, as Mr. Langan sees it, no one has solidly pointed out logical errors in the CTMU.
“5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful
correction.”
Of course, this depends on the previous criterion.
“5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results
of a widely accepted real experiment.”
This does not apply.
“5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those
with defective keyboards).”
This does not apply.
“10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally
misguided (without good evidence).”
This does not apply.
“10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or
claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided
(without good evidence).”
A theory’s merit does not change based on how many times its author compares him- or herself to a historical figure. The rest does not apply.
“10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this
were evidence of sanity.”
This does not apply.
“10 points by beginning the description of your theory by saying
how long you’ve been working on it.”
This does not apply.
“10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don’t know
personally, but asking them not to tell anyone else about it, for
fear that your ideas will be stolen.”
This does not apply.
“20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel prize.”
Even if this were to apply, it would be irrelevant to the content of Mr. Langan’s theory.
“20 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Newton or
claim that classical mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without
evidence).”
A theory’s merit does not change based on how many times its author compares him- or herself to a historical figure. The rest does not apply.
“20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if
they were fact.”
This does not apply.
“20 points for defending oneself by bringing up (real or imagined)
ridicule accorded to ones past theories.”
This does not apply.
“30 points for each use of the phrase ‘hidebound reactionary’.”
This does not apply.
“30 points for each use of the phrase ‘self-appointed defender
of the orthodoxy’.”
This does not apply.
“30 points for suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved
in a theory which he or she publicly supported. (E.g., that Feynman
was a closet opponent of special relativity, as deduced by reading
between the lines in his freshman physics textbooks.)”
This does not apply.
“30 points for suggesting that Einstein, in his later years, was
groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate.”
This does not apply.
“30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an
extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence).”
This does not apply.
“40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to
Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts.”
This does not apply.
“40 points for claiming that the ‘scientific establishment’ is
engaged in a ‘conspiracy’ to prevent your work from gaining its
well-deserved fame, or suchlike.”
This does not apply.
“40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated,
present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is. (30 more
points for planning to hold show trials in which scientists who mocked
your theories will be forced to recant.)”
This does not apply.
“50 points for claiming your has a revolutionary theory but
giving no concrete testable predictions.”
The CTMU is a rationally derived theory, not an empirically defined one. This criterion only applies to empirically derived theories. Rationally derived theories must be tested in accordance with the principles of logic, not by the predictions they make, as those predictions are logical in nature.
“The CTMU ruffles atheist feathers because it’s unfalsifiable intelligent-design nonsense wrapped up in unexplained neologisms and abused jargon.”
The CTMU is rationally falsifiable and standard ID theory is not even a part of its main content. The whole “proof of God” thing can be derived from the CTMU, but this does not happen through typical empirical ID means. The neologisms are all explained, and the jargon is not abused (though you may feel free to give specific examples of where you suppose it is).
“By getting people with credentials to admit in agreeing to appear on a platform opposing you, you’re artificially vying for status by riding off the merits of others while bringing none of your own to the table. This is especially a problem when it comes to Google caching.”
I don’t think Mr. Langan minds the Google caching. This assumes that Mr. Langan’s work is incorrect or of no value.
“Instead of taking ten seconds to give a rational response to a criticism, you instead insist that everyone be put through the ringer in order to be worthy of your time (but you sure don’t mind wasting time, considering that 98% of your responses are just attacks against other people instead of actually discussing math/science/etc). A sure sign of a crank.”
It takes a *lot* more than ten seconds to address criticisms, especially because people tend to make more than one per post. Mr. Langan’s a busy guy, so he has to have a screening process to determine who is worthy of his time. He’s using as much time as he has to explain why people are not worthy of his responses, but he doesn’t have enough to respond to each and every criticism. Besides, he’s already tried responding before.
“I’m not terribly concerned with your theory (I am already secure enough in my scientific and mathematical understanding to know that the CTMU is nonsense), but I don’t understand how someone can come up with such a theory and yet claim to be highly intelligent and educated. The only conclusion I can think of is that you’re severely overestimating your abilities. Trying to get a reasonable mathematical explanation out of you has proven to be impossible, but in my opinion it’s because you are simply not able to give one.”
This is fine, and it suits both you and Mr. Langan. He doesn’t have to deal with your complaints and you can be satisfied that his theory is incorrect, regardless of its actual truth value.
John Fringe, Mr. Langan has already spent a great deal of time in past years debating and explaining his theory online. I can give you some links as evidence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Asmodeus/pseudosciencerfarb (if this was indeed him)
http://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Sources (‘link soup’)
http://web.archive.org/web/20030416141259/http://www.ctmu.org/SIG/CTMUforum.html
But let’s get back to reality. To a competent reader – and in these parts, there are fewer of those than one might suppose – most CTMU critics resemble obnoxious schoolchildren on the rampage, popping off about this or that awful grownup in a way reminiscent of the movie series “Children of the Corn”, or perhaps the old Star Trek episode “Miri”
It’s exactly like that Miri episode (one of my favorite episodes by-the-way): a lynching Enterprise crew by plagued schoolchildren. Everything they usher out of their desperate little babybird mouths, and their quickness to strike hollow criticism, is heavily loaded with invisible satire like a bad operetta. Sometimes I perceive them in the form of teenage punksters with spikey purple hair. Some of them (could) have degrees, with limited experience. However this limited experience doesn’t advance the human intellect far enough to be able to appreciate what the CTMU is illustrating about reality.
I was awake all night working on supplying notes for the CTMU and my comprehension of it is at the level now where I can see precisely what you were tapping into when you wrote it. I have four pages of jotted notes so-far that I have interwoven with additional elaborations of their meaning. Specifically, infocognition, that seems to confuse people the most who are yet to see how the physical universe is interpreted and processed through the cognitive medium. We seem to have tread the same metaphysical territory. In 2003 I started writing papers on model-theoretic computation (the metaphysical logic of the universe as a categorial computing system.) This immediately preceded the time-period when I began writing on forums and discovered the CTMU from our friend C. I still have some of these printed PDF’s on constructive models and game theory that Kislaya Prasad wrote back in 2002 so I think I will be using those as references.
You will be pleased to know that this work is very important to me; the model-theoretic philosophy was quite enlightening when I had worked on it in the past and now it is coming back into conscious fruition. The connectivity of pure cognition and the model-theoretic language should be undeniably obvious for anyone who understands metaphysics following a sober and steady reading of your paper. I hope the results should relieve some of the frustration you may have as nobody seems to understand what the CTMU is all about. The CTMU is more than just a humanly rendered simulacrum or ‘modeling’ of reality. Reality is the computational model of itself. So don’t worry you aren’t alone, i’m starting to catch up.
Browse through my photostream on flickr later on. This evening I will be uploading more files to it — a few of them are homemade book covers that were printed in 2003 when I was in my early twenties. I was living in a small cottage in those days and had very little contact with the outside world. These were small books on model theories that I never managed to complete but living in complete isolation tends to do that. I think you will like them.
Actually on second thought, it’s not likely many in this group would have any kind of credentials. Whenever Iv’e come across an online forum that included serious debates the participants usually used their full names. Plamen Gardinarov use to lecture his ideas in online public discussion forums. He is known to be a brilliant international scholar of integral Eastern-Occidental philosophy and noetic sciences. He and others I have seen allway’s went under their full names. Any PhD. of good repute would use their real names ostensibly to show their credentials and positions rather than hide them.
Anyone can understand where Langan is coming from when you look at the CTMU from an ID perspective. The problem is that ID is unfalsifiable, and it doesn’t actually explain or predict anything. That’s not a trivial point.
*We can explain things without ID*
It’s a vitally important notion you guys seem to overlook. You may retort that you can also explain things with ID, but the difference is that ID has no direct evidence in favor, but plenty in the opposition. Similarly, just because “the universe is interpreted and processed through the cognitive medium” doesn’t mean we need metaphysics. We can still explain that phenomenon through a materialistic framework that is *actually supported.*
Anyways, it almost feels like Langan is just trolling everyone. It’s painfully clear by now that he doesn’t actually want to talk about the CTMU because it *relies* on being a huge, incomprehensible clusterfsck (and intentionally so). If you don’t read it all the way through, he’ll say you can’t argue something you haven’t even read. If you do read it, he’ll claim you don’t get it. If you ask for elaboration, you won’t receive any. If you do happen to understand it, you’ll see that it’s trying to favor unfalsifiable nonsense. If you explain why this is so, Langan will ignore you. If you manage to get Langan to not ignore you, he’ll just insult you instead and waste ten paragraphs saying absolutely nothing.
Honestly, I mean can you imagine the prominent scientists of today acting that way? You’ll never see Neil deGrasse Tyson pull people through the ringer like that. Many scientists try to engage eager young minds as a way to better their understanding of the universe — not beat them over the head with claims of their incompetence and an unwillingness to explain anything.
Langan can ignore the evidence all he wants and stick his so-called six-sigma-sized noggin into the sand like an ostrich with encephalitis, but it doesn’t change the fact that he fits the definition of a crank perfectly.
A fine post, Jeremy … in fact, one of several. It always warms my heart to learn that someone has actually been listening.
Unfortunately, several others in this thread are not nearly as good at listening as you are. In fact, they’re quite bad at it. So as tiresome as this is getting to be, I’ll repeat myself to them yet again.
If you are a CTMU critic who wants to argue about the CTMU with me, then it will have to be official; otherwise, you’re just an undistinguished malcontent bent on wasting more of my time. Therefore, if a Q&A session is what you desire, you must forthrightly share with us your complete real name, your academic employer and/or other affiliations, and your various qualifications.
Anonymous, fish-scented claims that you (e.g.) “work on Wall Street” and attended some overpriced, philosophically irrelevant business academy (“I am a 2390 SAT-toting Wharton graduate with dual degrees in mathematics and economics … and I currently work on Wall St”) won’t do the trick. Only in conjunction with complete personal data can your information be checked and your comments permanently attached to your “expert” reputation, such as it may be.
Of course, you should have no problem with this. You’d be expected to provide your name on any scholarly paper you might publish, or for any speech or interview in which you might hold forth as an expert. Why not show that you have at least a scintilla of courage and honesty so that we can get to the important matter of establishing who the cranks and crackpots really are around here? After all, the CTMU critics in this thread are the ones who insist on using such epithets.
If you are on the faculty of a major college or university and thus the expert critic you pretend to be, the worst thing you have to fear on this blog is a standing ovation. If you turn out to be at all genuine, you’ll soon be swaggering about just like one of the big boys … as opposed, for example, to a wannabe big boy who got too big for his little britches, popped his suspenders, and traded in the swagger for a comical pants-around-the-ankles waddle in his ankle garters and his Wall Street boxers with the cowboys and the dollar signs.
Above all, don’t worry about anyone hitching a free ride on your precious CV. As far as I’m concerned, the negative commentators in this thread are a parasitic drain on my time, an unfortunate sidetrack I encountered in attempting to limit the damage done over the last three-plus years by Mark. Obviously, dropping the name of a CTMU critic, eminent or not, could score points only with somebody who dislikes the CTMU, and I clearly have nothing to gain by that. I don’t bother with CV’s, I seldom drop names, and no hurt intended, but I consider people who dislike the CTMU and its author to be anything but worthwhile associates.
Why miss this golden opportunity to put your Wall Street money where your gigantic mouth is, and reveal yourself to the world as the big shot you evidently think you are? If you’re as good as advertised, then your CV can only shine brighter at my expense, and more power to you. If, on the other hand, you turn out to be just a jealous little mediocrity, which I presently believe to be the case, then you’ll pay the price in humiliation and lost credibility, which is only fair when you habitually run your belligerent mouth at the expense of others.
Fair’s fair. Either come clean, or put a cork in it and obligingly crawl back under the rock that hides you.
Thanks for paying attention this time.
Langan: I don’t understand why you berate academia and then insist it’s a standard for debate?
“Obviously, dropping the name of a CTMU critic, eminent or not, could score points only with somebody who dislikes the CTMU, and I clearly have nothing to gain by that. I don’t bother with CV’s, I seldom drop names, and no hurt intended, but I consider people who dislike the CTMU and its author to be anything but worthwhile associates.”
Well, I can give you one counter-example to this: This is why Dawkins doesn’t debate Creationists anymore. Too many cranks were trying to quotemine him and freeride off his status/reputation as a way to gain credibility. So to say “I clearly have nothing to gain” is not entirely convincing.
“Why miss this golden opportunity to put your Wall Street money where your gigantic mouth is, and reveal yourself to the world as the big shot you evidently think you are?”
For one thing, I don’t need to reveal myself here in order to make it in the real world. But I wouldn’t even dare call myself a “big shot” to begin with, and that’s not my intent. I would consider myself smart, and I’d call myself a success story (I grew up with abuse and have since made it on my own), but nothing more.
However, when I see the way you argue with Mark (who HAS revealed his full name), I see that you don’t even do him the honor of an intellectually fair debate. All I see is a lot of ad hominem attacks and an unwillingness to acknowledge the counterarguments. I’m not going to risk reputation when you have not proven that you are capable of meeting me halfway.
People have no problems revealing their credentials when it comes to an honest debate.
Also, what is the point in calling my alma mater an “overpriced, philosophically irrelevant business academy”? For one thing, I was a dual-degree candidate (meaning I graduated from two schools within Penn, one being Wharton and the other being the College of Arts and Sciences). It’s a highly quantitative education that has also led me to become pretty well-versed in physics and computer science.
I remind you, again, that one of my majors was *mathematics.* This blog is, to again remind you, about mathematics. However, perhaps your point is that your CTMU is largely philosophical in nature, and NOT so much math or science.
If that’s the case, then surely you will see why Mark has been attacking you in the first place.
Also:
http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/1500/rubixwallst.jpg
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/9069/rubixwallst2.jpg
http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/4364/rubix3.png
Rubix: “I’m not going to risk reputation when you have not proven that you are capable of meeting me halfway.”
I’m terribly sorry, but you’re just not important enough to demand that anyone who actually knows what he’s talking about “meet you halfway”, much less someone who has been featured by several major periodicals and news networks.
Let me provide you with a hint. Before anybody but another nobody like you can “meet you halfway”, you must first get to the halfway point yourself. That is, you must show everyone that you’re not just another disgruntled, name-dropping (“Neil deGrasse Tyson”, “Richard Dawkins”) gadfly with an ax to grind.
This has been repeatedly and clearly explained to you, so that even someone like you can understand it.
“I remind you, again, that one of my majors was *mathematics.*”
Very well, then (although one would never know it from looking at the nonsense you post). Let’s have the information that will allow us to couple your complete real name with your “math degree” and other assorted qualifications and credentials.
“People have no problems revealing their credentials when it comes to an honest debate.”
Then put your money where your indefatigable mouth is already, and let’s see what kind of “Tyson” or “Dawkins” you really are.
Otherwise, you might as well stuff a sock in it.
(Remember to remove the ankle garter.)
Wow.
Forget your speech about “being humble” — apparently we’re all just “unimportant nobodies.” Being featured in Outliers or in a few news spots here-and-there (or ID publications) somehow grants you automatic superiority and importance? I can’t begin to describe how condescending that is, and it’s not going to fool anyone. I’ve been featured, myself, for my academic accomplishments, but I’m not going to say that it makes everyone else less important somehow.
If you assert that you know what you’re talking about, then how come you haven’t proved it, even in simple examples? I again bring up Newcomb’s Paradox. That problem is largely a utilitarian, statistical problem and doesn’t need a paradoxical framing (like most purported “mathematical paradoxes” don’t). And yet, your solution misses the correct utilitarian logic and lacks much of the statistical reasoning altogether. Is this also “proof you know what you’re talking about” when it comes to mathematics?
I’ll explain this again since you ignored it the first time: Mark has already met you halfway by revealing his name and credentials. Despite this, you have yet to engage in an intellectually honest debate against him regarding mathematics. Most of your responses to him in this thread are simply attacks against his name, character, competence, credentials, etc. Your actions are demonstrably more consistent with someone who simply wants to attack and belittle people. Forget defining what you really mean by universal power sets or why SCSPL exists “by logical necessity” — it’s much easier to just call people stupid who don’t instantly agree with you.
It’s a common theme in your rationale… not even just the CTMU: The world, the universe, and all the people in it need to bend to your will and meet you on your terms, or else they’re all rendered useless, unimportant, and flawed, and the fault must never lie with you or your understanding.
I mean, I grew up with a lot of abuse (physical, emotional, sexual, etc) and understand what it feels like to have a strong mind but obstacles in every direction. But you’re the one who chose to ignore class. You’re the one who chose to drop out of college. You’re the one who refused to do the due diligence necessary to retain your scholarships. You’re the one who chose a life of labor. You can either overcome obstacles and become a better person, or you can quit everything and muck around in bitterness and spew invective at others.
What I see is a bully. And the common trait of almost all bullies is a deep-seated insecurity and a desire for control. The more insecure you are, the harder you fight back. Once I mentioned my Wall Street and Ivy affiliations (and SAT score), you suddenly came out of the woodwork and began chomping at my ankles (almost literally, in three separate posts: “spindly ankles,” “pants-around-the-ankles waddle,” “remove the ankle garter,” etc).
If you want people to stop calling you a crank, then you need to stop fitting the definition. If you check back at that link I provided, you portray every single characteristic listed in that subsection: You overestimate your knowledge and importance, hold unshakable beliefs that are at odds with the mainstream, refuse to listen to opposition, never admit fault or error, misuse standard terminology/definitions, misunderstand the counterarguments, and obfuscate the arguments that you *do* provide.
So are you going to actually do us the honor of a fair debate, or are you just going to call us unimportant idiots some more while refusing to admit that some of the problem is from your end?
“So are you going to actually do us the honor of a fair debate, or are you just going to call us unimportant idiots?”
I’m afraid it’s got to be the latter, at least for you personally.
Of course, you could always come clean.
I’m beginning to think Jeremy and Chris are the same guy (either that, or all cranks sound alike).
Jeremy: Did you not see where I literally just snapped a picture of myself, clearly at Wall St? Although none of it even matters, since Chris *doesn’t even have any academic credentials of his own* to show for anything. Having your work shelled around in the Intelligent Design community and being featured on a couple news programs doesn’t mean you suddenly have the credentials that put you on an equal platform of expertise — especially compared to those like myself or Mark who are affiliated with credible, selective institutions and employers.
Same goes for you, btw — having degrees in philosophy and art doesn’t mean you’re suddenly an expert at discussing mathematics and physics. If the CTMU is largely philosophy, that’s one thing. But don’t try to pass it off as a mathematical/scientific concept and then act offended when people who’ve *specialized* in those fields call you out.
Also, lmfao, earning two completely separately degrees from a top Ivy League school “doesn’t count as graduation from an academic institution”? This is just absurd beyond words, haha. Penn is not Penn State (I clearly mentioned Wharton). Even if it *were* Penn State, I fail to see how earning degrees from two schools somehow makes you *less* academic than someone who typically only gets one degree from one school.
Chris: Thankfully, your response only serves to prove my point.
Sorry Chris, I can’t help myself here Rubix is too funny
He claims to have attended some technical colleges at some point in his career but he has no way of proving this (Wall St? I doubt that.) Dual-degrees from colleges however (in most cases including Penn state) don’t count as graduations from an academic institution. They are not creditable for much aside from biographical vitae and PR towards obtaining mid to high level positions (the kind of position that would allow one to give viable criticism of the CTMU.) Myself, I have very few credentials aside from two international B.A’s for philosophy and art from the Geneva B.A. program that I procured during the last two years of highscool. Having not passed highschool however I cannot attend a university in North America but if I wanted to I could attend a major university in other European countries as a second or third year student. As vitae and PR training having been received by members of the Intelligence community as a youth, and given my system-busting and problem solving skills, I have attracted the interests of various (not so benign) organizations and agencies often acting as an outside advisor to registered personnel. This all came to me due to my complicated ‘unclassifiable’ medical history.
Rubix seems to think that because he has some CV’s he is capable to exccersize his critical decorum to anybody no matter their position or level of competency. A (“Neil deGrasse Tyson”, “Richard Dawkins”) gadfly with an ax to grind accurately fits the bill. Have a look at those links he posted his credential is all blacked out like an MJ-12 document, what could possibly be so top secret about someones Facebook page? The internet really does produce some really odd creations.
Rubix: “I am a 2390 SAT-toting Wharton graduate with dual degrees in mathematics and economics … and I currently work on Wall St”
Rubix focus both eyes forward and follow the pendulum without moving your eyes. You do not work for Wall St……you do not work for Wall St…….
Something’s weird with my connection — apologies if this is a repost.
I’m beginning to think Jeremy and Chris are the same guy (either that, or all cranks sound alike).
Jeremy: Did you not see where I literally just snapped a picture of myself, clearly at Wall St? Although none of it even matters, since Chris *doesn’t even have any academic credentials of his own* to show for anything. Having your work shelled around in the Intelligent Design community and being featured on a couple news programs doesn’t mean you suddenly have the credentials that put you on an equal platform of expertise — especially compared to those like myself or Mark who are affiliated with credible, selective institutions and employers.
Same goes for you, btw — having degrees in philosophy and art doesn’t mean you’re suddenly an expert at discussing mathematics and physics. If the CTMU is largely philosophy, that’s one thing. But don’t try to pass it off as a mathematical/scientific concept and then act offended when people who’ve *specialized* in those fields call you out.
Also, lmfao, earning two completely separately degrees from a top Ivy League school “doesn’t count as graduation from an academic institution”? This is just absurd beyond words, haha. Penn is not Penn State (I clearly mentioned Wharton). Even if it *were* Penn State, I fail to see how earning degrees from two schools somehow makes you *less* academic than someone who typically only gets one degree from one school.
Chris: Thankfully, your response only serves to prove my point.
Rubix: “Jeremy: Did you not see where I literally just snapped a picture of myself, clearly at Wall St?”
Yes you and about 50-million other tourists or NY residents. Who on Earth doesn’t take their picture in front of Wall St. It’s what people commonly do when they’e on Wall St. I’m not doubting your networked or affiliated PR employers but I do have doubts about your level of expertise esp. considering passing off a Wall St. self-portrait as evidence of job description.
Your comments following the Wall St. prank do not need to be contrasted to mathematical proficiency for any lack of experience.
That’s as much as I can offer you without giving away identity (which I am not doing for reasons I’ve already stated). Doesn’t really matter to me if you believe me or not (although I’d love to see you procure a picture of yourself on Wall St within minutes of me asking you for one). I’d also love for you to be able to provide proof that the person in your Wall St picture is indeed you:
http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/9633/gmbmscreen.jpg
Good luck!
Still waiting to hear your defense to my responses about school.
Rubix, Chris wants you to put as much on the line as he has done. This is so that what you state can be easily tied to you. I think it pretty clear that Mr. Langan wants you to be absolutely forthright about your personal information, with no exceptions, and you are thus considered an “unimportant nobody” for all intents and purposes in his view until you do that. This is merely because you have not provided the information he requests and thus have no say in debate with him.
As for as Mr. Langan is concerned, you could still be posing as an individual you are not. You may complain that this is being picky, but it is much harder to tie an identity to a face than it is to tie an identity to a name.
Also, Jeremy and Chris seem to be different people, and I do not doubt that they are.
Rubix, you claimed that you work at Wall Street. Mr. Langan did not, so the onus was never on him to prove that. Also, Mr. Langan probably does not care about your academic information so that he can see how good your school was, but so that what you say can be easily traced back to you. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that Mr. Langan would have criticized any school you’d attended given his (rightful) disdain for academia.
By the way, you could just write, “I am Rubix,” on a piece of paper and take a picture of yourself while holding it. However, I’m not sure that would satisfy Mr. Langan as, again, it is tedious to trace what you say back to you from a picture.
Having noticed that you are viewing this web page in your latest picture, I think my suggestion is unnecessary.
I call a peace treaty. I have created an email account at which all of you can contact me to debate the CTMU if you wish. It is ctmu.debater @ gmail . com (without the spaces of course).
Based on the serialized img. numbering of the images suggest different times in which the photos could have been taken.
img849.imageshack.us/img849/ > Wall St. photo without you in it
came before your taking of
http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/ > You at your computer screen on gmbm
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233 > You on Wall St. taken ages before the picture that clearly showed the Wall St. sign
http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/4364/rubix3.png > your credential had to be a png file because it was edited ages before the first Wall St. photo was taken
img849 does not necessarily prove it was taken on Wall St. although it appears to be Wall St. with all fairness to reality
Although the img numbers could have been changed by you to appear to have been taken at convenient times the longer sets of numbers assigned to the img numbers are are not in order. I do not know imageshack so it is unclear how they serialize in their database.
Based on the serialized img. numbering of the images suggest different times in which the photos could have been taken.
img849.imageshack.us/img849/ > Wall St. photo without you in it
came before your taking of
img850.imageshack.us/img850/ > You at your computer screen on gmbm
img233.imageshack.us/img233 > You on Wall St. taken ages before the picture that clearly showed the Wall St. sign
img38.imageshack.us/img38/4364/rubix3.png > your credential had to be a png file because it was edited ages before the first Wall St. photo was taken
img849 does not necessarily prove it was taken on Wall St. although it appears to be Wall St. with all fairness to reality
Although the img numbers could have been changed by you to appear to have been taken at convenient times the longer sets of numbers assigned to the img numbers are are not in order. I do not know imageshack so it is unclear how they serialize in their database. (P.S. This post came in late due to moderator scrutinty.)
Jeremy: So now you’re going to make up stuff about how Imageshack works? Did you even bother to check it out for yourself? Also, the FB pic is a png because it’s an on-computer screenshot. The rest are taken with my phone, hence the jpg format.
Anonymous: I’m not asking Langan to “prove Wall St.” I was giving a challenge to Jeremy Jae who implied it would be easy to fake credentials. I made a claim, and I defended it. If you think it’s so easily falsifiable, then falsify it! Take a picture of yourself on Wall St, then prove it’s you. If you can’t do this, then you’re just going to have to let the proof speak for itself.
The onus is on the person making the claim — you’re right about that. But same goes for Langan. If he is going to claim that his mathematical understanding is so advanced, he needs to show proof of it. He has not done so. We do have, however, a very clear example of a mathematical/statistical problem (Newton’s Paradox) where he does not solve it using math at all (and the math he does use is wrong). All he’s done is claim a hyperbolic sense of self-importance as a way to excuse himself from meeting anyone halfway by his own arbitrary criteria.
You guys can ignore it all you want, but it’s a nontrivial point: Mark has *already revealed his name and credentials* and Langan was still unwilling to engage him with any degree of mathematical rigor. Go back and look at his posts earlier in this thread. It’s like 90% ad-hominem, 10% metalogic, and 0% mathematics. So pardon me if I am not buying this “come forward and I’ll engage you on an equal platform” deal. He’s put nothing on the line so far because, again I repeat myself, *he has no credentials or affiliated reputation to defend.* I’m not sure why you guys keep ignoring this.
Reputation and appeal to authority should not matter in an honest debate because good arguments don’t require authority. It comes down to the arguments themselves. Langan is pulling a coattails-of-Dawkins where his aim is to supplement his name with credential-laden opponents to gain a false sense of validity to his position, which he has yet to defend in any rigorously mathematical/physical manner. That’s why he’s absolutely refusing to get into an open discussion unless he has something to gain at someone else’s expense.
So, as I said, unless Langan is willing to actually defend himself with a bit of rigor, we have nothing to discuss.
There’s been a lot of discussion here about sets and so forth. Probably most of it could have been avoided just by looking at Langan’s “Q & A” page, where you find
here the following:
“Because empty space, as abstracted from its contents, cannot be observed and has no observable effect on anything, it is not “physical” in the usual sense. That which is immaterial is abstract, and abstraction is a mental process that “abstracts” or educes general relationships from observations. So from a philosophical viewpoint, saying that space is immaterial and therefore abstract amounts to saying that it is “mental”…that it is to some extent composed of mind rather than matter….like spacetime itself, continuity and its quantum-scale breakdown are essentially mental rather than material in character.”
Yes, that’s right — Langton is making almost exactly the same reasoning as in the classic joke proof that a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness:
“Nothing is better than eternal happiness. A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Therefore, a ham sandwich is better than nothing.”
The thing is, this is a JOKE proof. Surely nobody would seriously make this argument, yet this is what Langan writes!
Therefore, I think that Mark is wrong, and that Langan surely is aware that his CTMU is nonsense. This would also make sense of his behaviour: if he sincerely thought
that not only is his theory one of the most important works of all time, but that God will actually be angry at Mark for not being properly respectful of him, then wouldn’t
he do his best to clearly explain his work to everyone he possibly could? But, instead, he spends his time insulting people. He is upset that people think that the CTMU has
anything to do with set theory, but his introduction says explicitly that “Mathematicians view set theory as fundamental.” Naturally, people gather his theory has something to do with set theory! So, does Langton edit his introduction to remove this source of misunderstanding? No, he does not, but instead insults people. Apparently Langton hasn’t changed his intro in thirteen years! If God is going to be angry at Mark for not understanding CTMU, then how angrier will God be at Langton for being too lazy to make the CTMU understandable?
No, I think that Langton is perfectly aware that his theory is nonsense.
So nature abhors vacuum, after all!!! XD
I completely agree with you. We also saw examples of ridiculous logic in this thread, like
—
1) There is a biggest set
2) The powerset of any set of any set is bigger than the biggest set
3) The biggest set _is_ the universe
By 1) and 2), we have a contradiction. So 3) is false.
—
This is clearly stupid, and is objectively wrong, yet Langan uses this reasoning, and people has argued this is right it here! Of course, nobody addressed the criticism.
I also think that Langan knows how much nonsense his words are, but he is building a foundation and you can see he has his followers. It’s probably very profitable.
I’m very surprised to see how Langan’s words drag people. He says “my critics are atheist”, and people believe it. He says “I’m not speaking until you give me a target (identity)”, and people takes this seriously.
Does anybody really need a dialogue with Langan to understand the previous reasoning is wrong? If you have two axioms that are inconsistent and add a third one, will anything Langan can say change the fact that you can not infer the third axiom to be wrong?
So yes, I believe he knows the theory is nonsense, he is building a life from it, and he knows his strategy very well to defend his investment: he’s intelligent, critics are stupid, are atheist, anonymity is related to the quality of arguments, and to prove an argument is wrong you need Langan to intervene. And some people falls for this.
Fortunately, not much people. But I’m with you on this.
I only referenced him as an analogy — an example. Developing a false dialectic by demanding credential-laden opponents is a tactic frequently seen in the ID community. Dawkins was a prime example because he’s probably endured the worst of it (I see more Dawkins quote-mining than probably any other scientist I can think of).
You’ve wasted multiple posts over the past few days quibbling about credentials (which you don’t have yourself) when you could have been talking about mathematics or your theory. So it’s very clear that time-wasting isn’t what you’re guarding against.
The interesting question, for me, is whether or not you actually believe what you write. You have not proven that design is necessary to explain anything. You have not proven why we need a metaphysical explanation for the mind (whereas a physical explanation typically does just fine). You have not sufficiently explained why the “universal set” is necessarily a paradox and why it makes sense to frame it that way.
The only part of your CTMU that I think has merit is the notion of parallel consciousnesses, which is absolutely true, yet supported by materialism and requires no metaphysics whatsoever. It’s not clear what you think *demands* metaphysical explanation. In some other interview you claimed intelligence requires it, but this is demonstrably false.
“I also think that Langan knows how much nonsense his words are, but he is building a foundation and you can see he has his followers. It’s probably very profitable.”
Not exactly. But thanks for once again drawing our attention to the fact that when anonymous fools are running around tirelessly accusing one of self-promotion and profiteering no matter how tastefully one refrains, it really makes no sense not to go ahead and “take it to the limit”.
Fortunately, it’s not too let to put that engine in gear.
“Langan is pulling a coattails-of-Dawkins where his aim is to supplement his name with credential-laden opponents.”
Well that’s rich, isn’t it.
I come here to rebut somebody who was using my name and my work to provide his own blog with content (Mark), and some cheeky little ignoramus hiding behind a pseudonym rushes out yapping like an enraged rat terrier about my alleged desire for a transfusion of credentials from semi-retired professional atheist Richard Dawkins! (While Richard’s intellect apparently remains sharp enough, militant atheism is now such a central part of his shtick that he’s no longer of much value to any non-atheist as a scholarly associate.)
One can’t be sure, but it almost seems as though the rat terrier in question, between windy gusts of boasting (“Wall Street”, “Wharton”, “2390 SAT score”, etc.), is sneakily trying to associate himself with poor Professor Dawkins by endlessly repeating his name, pretending to speak on his behalf, and presuming to shield him from potential opponents who haven’t so much as mentioned him except to quote the loquacious little terrier himself.
In the name of decency, the rat terrier in question should stop his shameless name-dropping … especially since, in all likelihood, Richard Dawkins wants nothing to do with him. The probable truth of it is, Dawkins wouldn’t let some pushy little nonentity of that insufferable ilk scrub his toilet if he showed up on the doorstep dressed as a sexy little chambermaid with a plunger dangling from his neck and a brand new copy of “The God Delusion” lovingly clutched to his bosom.
Neither, for that matter, would I. As we all know from painful experience, such malcontents never stop talking, only get more annoying the longer they ramble, and are nearly impossible to get rid of without a jumbo can of pepper spray.
Professor Dawkins had best beware. This is not a pair of lips he wants glued to his instep.
I only referenced him as an analogy — an example. Developing a false dialectic by demanding credential-laden opponents is a tactic frequently seen in the ID community. Dawkins was a prime example because he’s probably endured the worst of it (I see more Dawkins quote-mining than probably any other scientist I can think of).
You’ve wasted multiple posts over the past few days quibbling about credentials (which you don’t have yourself) when you could have been talking about mathematics or your theory. So it’s very clear that time-wasting isn’t what you’re guarding against.
The interesting question, for me, is whether or not you actually believe what you write. You have not proven that design is necessary to explain anything. You have not proven why we need a metaphysical explanation for the mind (whereas a physical explanation typically does just fine). You have not sufficiently explained why the “universal set” is necessarily a paradox and why it makes sense to frame it that way.
The only part of your CTMU that I think has merit is the notion of parallel consciousnesses, which is absolutely true, yet supported by materialism and requires no metaphysics whatsoever. It’s not clear what you think *demands* metaphysical explanation. In some other interview you claimed intelligence requires it, but this is demonstrably false.
Hi Chris. I sent an email to ctmudebater this morning. There are few questions in it for you and other information. I’m still working on the notes and addenda for the CTMU.
ctmu.debater this thread was down all morning so I forgot the dot.
“Demanding credential-laden opponents is a tactic frequently seen in the ID community.”
But wasn’t it explicitly decided some time ago that big-name atheists, evolutionists, and ID critics should avoid “lending credence” to even the most prominent ID proponents by debating them in public?
Sure it was…it’s all over the web. Check it out for yourself.
“In some other interview you claimed intelligence requires it, but this is demonstrably false.”
That would no doubt be a very interesting “demonstration”. 😉
Yes, it was explicitly stated — not sure why you’re implying I said otherwise. We’re in agreement on that point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhmsDGanyes (the source of this argument as well as the quote I mentioned earlier)
At least prominent ID proponents are willing to debate prominent ID critics, even though the latter are unwilling to return the favor. So if either side should be accused of being afraid to debate the other (under their real names with their expert reputations duly at stake), it’s ID critics and not ID proponents.
Credit where credit is due, and blame where blame is deserved.
But of course ID proponents are going to be more willing than ID critics. One advocates an unfalsifiable concept, and one does not. The critics typically build arguments on the grounds of hard evidence — evidence that everyone must be forced to accept.
For a scientist to debate someone over something that isn’t scientific, it’s seen as a waste of time because it isn’t science, but the platform implies that it is. It’s the ID proponents — not the critics — that generally try to argue that ID is science. It’s not. And that’s why scientists try to avoid that public platform wherever possible to avoid perpetuating the misconception.
“…evidence that everyone must be forced to accept.”
“Forced”? An interesting choice of language.
But throughout the sciences, “accepting evidence” is not nearly as much of a problem as accepting what it is said to be evidence *of*.
Of course, one would have to know a little about the philosophy of science in order to make proper sense of that.
Rubix: “If you think it’s falsifiable then falsify it!” <Rubix said this in reference to his posted credential
Rubix "the problem with ID is it's unfalsifiable" <Rubix said this in another post that seems to have been removed
These statements resemble syllogistic irony at it's finest.
Uhhh… not exactly sure how you’re helping your own case there, heh. It doesn’t really matter to me if you buy it or not because I don’t agree that credentials are necessary in a well-formed debate anyway.
If we were to debate on any of these ID anti-ID issues you wouldn’t be able to understand them with or without having credentials. Your thinking at this point is well enough programmed being as it is limited to basic logical and scientific fundamentalism.
Chris: By “forced” I mean it’s evidence that is true for you, true for me, and true for everyone.
You imply that the same same of evidence can result in multiple interpretations, which is true. But typically we limit our explanations to what is sufficient and consistent, hence Occam’s Razor. If my explanation correctly explains/predicts things, it will win out over another explanation that adds superfluous frameworks that add no new information (especially in absence of evidence).
Again, it’s like arguing that a hot kettle of water boiling on a stove could be “evidence” that fairies are involved. We don’t have any reason to believe that, especially when we have other more consistent explanations that don’t require such things.
Same goes for Intelligent Design. We can explain evolution without it. We can explain complexity without it. You might point to QM as an example of “evidence with multiple interpretations,” but the difference is that they remain agnostic due to lack of deeper evidence and understanding, and they’re *falsifiable*, unlike ID.
What most people seem to miss is the important difference between honest atheists and fundamentalist atheists. The former are usually very successful academic contributors and most often the scientific and philosophical community who admit that bare atheism doesn’t work whereas the latter haven’t the level of education to support their convictions although they hurdle around brilliant writers like Richard Dawkins to who all in the end admit to the incompleteness of atheist logic and the scientific model. Honest atheists accept moral praxis as part of their atheism with respect to some sort of God constant between all logico-mathematical truisms.
An atheist would change his position and become a theist if there were evidence to prove it. A fundamentalist theist, for instance, may not change his mind no matter what. That’s what fundamentalism really is — an unwavering, strict adherence to a particular system.
I’m not sure why you think “incompleteness” is a knock *against* science. The whole point of science is unfalsifiability. Otherwise you risk holding something as true regardless of what evidence may contradict it. Science doesn’t claim absolute truth — it just claims to be the best, consistent, simplest explanation for how our universe works (to date).
Plenty of atheists do accept a moral praxis. They just don’t need a God to explain where morals come from. Morality emerges from societal optima (secular sources).
Sorry, typo, I meant to say “The whole point of science is falsifiability”
“Science doesn’t claim absolute truth — it just claims to be the best, consistent, simplest explanation for how our universe works (to date).”
See here you are being honest. Indeed the scientific model is the most elaborate explanation and therefore more likely to be valid (at least hitherto.) Contemporary intelligent design theory is still in it’s infancy (perhaps you are aware of this fact.)
“Plenty of atheists do accept a moral praxis. They just don’t need a God to explain where morals come from.”
Yes, this is true. It is not necessary to believe in a God to uphold moral praxis: morality is cultural. Ethics however is a different matter and humans have historically relied upon myths and mythically derived beliefs as a limit to consistency in ethical life.
Rubix, Jeremy Jae,
once more, when Rubix said, and Jeremy confirmed:
“Science doesn’t claim absolute truth — it just claims to be the best, consistent, simplest explanation for how our universe works (to date).”
science doesn’t claim an “explanation for how our universe works”! It is not even controversial that time has yet to be explained!!! Science offers a set of relationships; and scienTISTS make predictions based on them. But seeing one’s predictions repeatedly come true is not the same thing as knowing how they happen, or even that they should. There is no *explanation* in this. And to assert that metaphysics (or “something more” than materialism) is NOT required for that hoped-for explanation is something no decent scientist would back.
Again, how time (causation) works is an open question.
To the extent that science can say anything, she is good at saying what is definitely false (what is negatively true), but she is seemingly useless to say what is positively true. (Keep your dirty paws off her! 😉 )
Tim
Tim, I tend to agree with what you are saying here.
Science is not able to provide an explanation, it’s predictions rely upon mathematical calculations that are themselves reliant upon mathematical intuition. When science makes claims to accuracy it does so nominally by way of mathematics. Without mathematics nature herself would not make sense to scientists. Likewise without a priori (philosophical) insights mathematics would not make sense to mathematicians who provide the sciences with foundational epistemic reasons. The set of relationships between material objects occur as grammatical relationships for the subject who is observing natural phenomena.
Science that does not take into account the intuition of mathematical meanings cannot construct a picture of reality that is directly in accordance with a priori laws; in this sense science falls into physicalistic materialism and is not longer nominal with respect to it’s own epistemological claims. The repeatability of scientific experimental evidence as you say doesn’t get to the root of the cause or supply the category of knowledge to science about a set of objects or their inherent laws. Complexity however does attempt to do this with far more plausibility since it looks at systems as a whole and that’s why I like it!
I am running ctmu.debater@gmail.com and *I am not Chris Langan*.
I hasten to add that I am in no way affiliated with him and that some of the things I say may not even correspond to his views. However, I think that I am at least slightly better informed about the CTMU than many of its critics.
So what’s the general consensus on Chris Langan? Is he a crank? Or did he crush Mark like an overripe banana, and can he do the same to John Fringe and Rubix?
First, to Jeremy and Tim, then onto grilling Langan a bit. This will be long, so apologies in advance:
There are obviously going to be problems of induction. But that’s what science is all about. You test, you observe, you measure, you create frameworks, and you extrapolate to test predictions. Even when induction doesn’t work, any other predictions would have been arbitrary guesses. At least induction has evidence to back it up, and we have more reason to put stock in it when it’s able to provide consistent results from which we measure truth. It’s silly to imply that because X is incomplete, we therefore have a good, automatic reason to claim X is wrong or that Y is true, especially when X is far more supported by evidence than Y is.
Now, back to Langan. He asserts his CTMU *does* provide you with absolute truths about reality that circumvent induction problems. He approaches the problem from logic, claiming that existence itself is dependent on certain logical tautologies that *must* be true in order for reality to have any sort of meaningful interpretation.
The problem is that this sort of approach has long since been debunked. Logic and mathematics alone don’t equate to knowledge, let alone absolute knowledge. They are just tools, but like all tools, they can be misused. We base our logic and math off of premises/axioms, but the point is that the premises *are derived from truths we make about our natural world.* In other words, logic and math are only as strong as the framework for the world that underlies them. Aristotle is often seen as a juggernaut of logic, and yet he arrived at a staggering number of incorrect conclusions about our universe because he was operating under false premises due to scientific ignorance. Reality dictates how we define our logic, not necessarily the other way around. Quantum mechanics is an insanely obvious example of this.
Besides, building a theory of everything off logical tautologies is a bad idea because tautologies still require context. Consider the tautology of the law of excluded middles: P or not P. Given that P is either true or false, P or not P must always be true no matter what. Bertrand Russell had a famous counterexample of “The present King of France is bald” where France actually has no King in reality to begin with. So even if we want to rationalize that statement and come to the conclusion that it’s either true, false, or both true and false at the same time, the tautology isn’t helping us approach any degree of new understanding of truth because there’s no King of France! At that point, it’s a word game where tautologies are somehow made even more useless than they already are.
The CTMU, to me, just seems to be an attempt to sidestep big questions and claim victory by just making everything either self-causing or attached to itself. For instance, Langan invokes an “unbound telesis” which is a “medium of pure ontological possibility” or “pure randomness” that isn’t bound by any particular set of laws, where the possibilities that manifest into reality are only those that have sufficient structure to make existential sense (anything else is unreality). In other words, he asserts that our reality is an inevitable consequence of the UBT via telic recursion and that reality is not “made from nothing” or “made externally” but rather self-caused. This is what he means by “recursion.” It’s like asking where Locke’s compass from the TV show “LOST” came from if it’s only spending time being passed back and forth between Locke and Alpert across a span of 30-something years via time travel for all eternity. It didn’t “come” from anywhere — it’s just always been that way.
But then where did the self-causing loop structure/mechanism come from? Why must it be self-causing? Why does the UBT exist and why must it exist (why can’t nothing exist?)? All Langan has done here is reworded God/existence itself into an “unbound telesis.” He might argue that reality doesn’t “come” from UBT because it’s “self-causing,” but this is just a convenient sidestep. It’s like answering a question by writing down “The answer to this problem.” Just because you label something as self-causing recursion doesn’t mean you suddenly solve the “paradox” of creatio ex nihilo. It’s like when Langan “solved” Newcomb’s Paradox by basically answering “You solve this paradox by asserting it’s not a paradox and that Newcomb’s Demon is the real deal, because during the trial runs, he won three times in a row, which is convincing.” In other words, it’s as if he tries to simply find odd loopholes in paradoxical frameworks to justify unsound or invalid solutions.
I feel like the reason Langan defends his theory so vehemently is because he feels like when people attack the CTMU, he takes it as an attack on logic, where people are “dumb” because it doesn’t make sense to claim a tautology is false when it’s true by definition. The real issue here is that a logical system may make sense in its own framework, but it may also be a poor definition for reality and result in meaningless untruths. That’s what people are attacking, here. Invoking a UBT to act as a set of all possible realities is a lot like invoking naive set theory.
Of course, Langan has intentionally obfuscated his CTMU, so even though I might think I understand what he’s trying to say, he can use the obfuscation as an excuse to come back and just call me an idiot some more without bothering to elaborate or give easily-understood examples. Either way, the CTMU doesn’t prove ID to be true. Besides, we don’t need it to explain complexity. It’s unfalsifiable anyway and devoid of evidence. You can defend an unfalsifiable theory to the grave and correctly claim that nobody has ever proven you wrong, but that doesn’t mean you’re advocating something that actually added anything of worth to our understanding or was actually true.
Anonymous: “I hasten to add that I am in no way affiliated with him and that some of the things I say may not even correspond to his views. However, I think that I am at least slightly better informed about the CTMU than many of its critics.”
I agree on both counts – the above evaluation of my ideas and utterances using the Wikipedia Crankometer is pretty accurate in most respects (with a couple of question marks, both of which would seem to work in my favor).
Regarding “Rubix”, let’s back it up a little.
Rubix: “By ‘forced’, I mean it’s evidence that is true for you, true for me, and true for everyone.”
Replicated observation provides hard scientific evidence of perceptual content. But as soon as one calls it “evidence” of anything but its own existence, one is exceeding the bounds of observation alone. This is why one can *prove* absolutely nothing on an empirical (scientific) basis but the bare existence of one’s raw data; one inevitably runs into the problem of induction. All that one can do is probabilistically confirm a given (explanatory or predictive) theory within certain bounds to a certain depth.
The depth criterion is where materialists typically fall short; their applications of Occam’s razor implicitly exclude entire levels of explanation including ontology. Materialists often claim that ontology is scientifically irrelevant on the supposed grounds that for scientific purposes, matter and nature “just exist”. But as soon as one gives up on explanatory closure and stops short of explaining existence itself, that’s the end of one’s explanation, and to the extent that science is explanatory, the end of one’s scientific support. One is left standing not on science, but on bald assumptions, and this obviously limits the level of theorization for which one is equipped.
Unfortunately for materialists, they have no idea how to endow their scientific “explanations” with the necessary degrees of closure and thereby overcome this limitation. As only the CTMU can do that, it is a necessary ingredient of science. (So is everything that the CTMU logically implies, including you-know-Who.)
I need merely add that specific questions about how the CTMU pulls this off, assuming that they have not already been answered elsewhere, are to be asked only by honest, qualified, and highly credentialed people. That way, everything’s on the up and up, and I don’t have to worry about accidental misattribution.
Rubix: “You imply that the same same of evidence can result in multiple interpretations, which is true. But typically we limit our explanations to what is sufficient and consistent, hence Occam’s Razor. If my explanation correctly explains/predicts things, it will win out over another explanation that adds superfluous frameworks that add no new information (especially in absence of evidence). Again, it’s like arguing that a hot kettle of water boiling on a stove could be “evidence” that fairies are involved. We don’t have any reason to believe that, especially when we have other more consistent explanations that don’t require such things.”
I hate to have to break this to you, but rare, hidden, or nonexistent aspects of reality, e.g. “fairies”, are not necessarily either syntactically or semantically inconsistent, and cannot be conclusively ruled out except in specific bounded contexts. The most that one can say for sure is that fairies are unobserved and/or observationally unreplicated within a bounded set of data, and no mere application of Occam’s razor can resolve the issue. After all, Occam’s razor is merely a fallible rule of thumb.
One of the main technical problems with Occam’s razor is that it can’t be applied in a vacuum, but only within a supporting explanatory framework. If that framework is itself flawed or incomplete, then Occam’s razor can be worse than useless. This is a problem for materialism; the existence of matter itself can’t be explained within a purely materialistic framework, and this nullifies Occam’s razor as a rationale for materialism.
Uncertainty cannot be confined to the ontological level of explanation without simply assuming that ontology is unnecessary and severing it from reality. To improve on this assumption, one would need some kind of high-level mathematical proof. But of course, such a proof is well beyond the intellectual capacity of any materialist (which is why some materialists regard it as impossible).
Rubix: “Same goes for Intelligent Design. We can explain evolution without it. We can explain complexity without it. You might point to QM as an example of “evidence with multiple interpretations,” but the difference is that they remain agnostic due to lack of deeper evidence and understanding, and they’re *falsifiable*, unlike ID.”
Wrong again. Evolution and complexity cannot be falsified. Not only is natural selection equivalent to the logical and biological fact that organisms must conform to their natural environments – no possible observation statement can negate so inevitable an observation – but falsification and the human minds which employ it themselves reflect evolution and emergence. Thus, any instance of falsification affirms the mechanisms to be “falsified”. (Of course, one is free to claim that falsification, like reality itself, “just exists”. But not only does this imply a truncated ontology devolving to unjustified assumptions, it simultaneously implies a kind of mathematical Platonism which contradicts the truncation.) Falsification can be consistently accomplished only with respect to specific hypotheses.
Rubix is also wrong that interpretations of quantum mechanics can necessarily be falsified. That’s because QM may have multiple models permitting multiple consistent interpretations, at least down to a certain explanatory depth. To obtain the deepest possible interpretation of QM, one would need a comprehensive theory of deep reality on which to form its image … deeper and more general than QM itself, at least as QM is normally understood (as a set of mathematical concepts and procedures that predict the results of certain experiments involving microscopic phenomena without fully explaining them or being explained by them, particularly with regard to wave function collapse, entanglement, and nonlocality).
See? This is what I mean. Nearly every sentence that comes out of the mouth of a CTMU critic, or for that matter an ID critic, is either wrongheaded or simply wrong. Just as we established above with Mark, there aren’t enough hours in the day to keep up with their mistakes and misconceptions.
That’s why I insist on making them identify themselves and put their reputations on the line. Believe me, it’s the only way to make them think a little before hitting the send key, and get them to catch at least a few of their own mistakes so that I won’t have to spend eternity doing it for them.
Now enough.
Dear Chris
My procurements of the first major sections of the CTMU are near finished. This is a small sample that deals with the physical applicability of a few themes in the CTMU. I hope they are at least somewhat concurrent with what the CTMU intends to convey and that it helps to eliminate any fundamental misunderstandings that others may have. I will post more as time ripens.
1.) Tautologies and Supertautologies in Quantum UBT Fock Space
A Fock space is an extended version of a single-particle Hilbert space that summates all tensorial structure of the single-particle description to contain the potential for an infinite number of particles or particle states in a vacuum. One could describe the pre-formed energy inside a vacuum as unbounded free-forming clouds of probability. By including all single-particle Hilbert spaces the Fock space acts as a tautological device that equalizes the single-particle description of QFT. Quantum vacuum states are characterized as having infinite potential to manufacture elementary particles and their attached information ensembles. Fock space can contain an exponential number of isomorphic vectors for particles moving in unknown directions. It symmetrizes random-statistical disorder into a continuous, decomposable superstructure composed of multiple tautological entities (smaller Hilbert spaces). Matter is simultaneously created and annihilated in the vacuum because particles exist as raw information at lowest energies. The pairing of created and annihilated bits of matter together allow for a quantum information system as C(+) = 1, A(-) = 0 are computed as noncommutative dynamic relations (see quantum probability, quantum communication theory.) The quantum richness of Fock space symmetry is able to coherently contain itself supertautologically (i.e., a combining of all single-particle symmetries that model their equicontinuous, singular tautologies.) Symmetric Fock spaces that are mapped into each other produce a Fock space category with supertautological reflections of all single-particle C(creation)A(annihilation) operators. Just as binary logic in a simple computer operates computations by on/off switching circuits, the C(+) and A(-) operators attached to a Fock space category extends this logic towards a supertautological boundary. Having a boundary or limiting condition simplifies the exponentiality problem of the ordinary-singular Fock vacuum as it relates to the disordered, infinite particle sea of zero-constraint quantum ground states. Being an extension of logic, supertautological boundaries make way for a metaphysical interpretation of quantum field theory using Boolean-modelable logics. CTMU tautologism is more easily defensible if one regards the universe as information and axiomatic predicates as associated forms of information. General information theory would reduce all predicative information as being inherently tautological in nature: All information is equivalent on the syntactic level prior to any semantic interpretation. Meaning is established by perception (i.e., associative interpreting.) The algebraic or associative interpretation of information states that all information is equivalent vis-a-vis a natural connectionism within the interpreter. We selectively compartmentalize semiotic components into structures that we can understand by extensional inferences. Mathematical physics supplies an excellent example of tautology with it’s pervasive use of tensor multiplications: All variables of a tensor reproduce the same information by multiplication and maintain the equivalence of identity after transformations because tensor products are symmetric to their vectors and all their variables reflect (tautologically).
2.) UBT Coherent Vacuum States and Γ-grammar
Coherent states (focussed lasers, holograms, state of the vacuum) all admit an incompleteness criterion. To prove the incompleteness criterion for the coherent states currently under study one can make use of the theory of automorphic-endomorphic forms as they relate to the nonparallel discreteness of Γ-grammar. A polarized vacuum produces “intrinsic perturbations” [see CTMU pg. 45] that are identical with respect to UBT. Within the domain of distributed syntax the potential discreteness property of Γ-grammar, for which the fundamental nature of coherent vacuum states rely, has a finite region that can be mapped as automorphic-endomorphic closures if Γ/D = (it’s area of syntactic distribution.) Γ/D is not necessarily compact with respect to space-time and can compute both randomly and deterministically out of a Fock space category. An automorphic-endomorphic map or morphism between two different states generate an autonomous grammatical process in accordance with the rules of Γ-grammar. Globally speaking the automorphic-endomorphic generation of Fock computations (quantum communicating binary digits) can be described as superfunctions if all their corresponding Hilbert spaces contain symmetric holomorphic functions. This is enough to suggest the holological-coherent nature of syntactic information manufactured in a coherent vacuum (i.e., syntactic mediums [see CTMU pg. 24].) Also see Langan’s citation [49] references to David Bohm’s work.
UBT secures the possibility of generating computable (matter-wave) information and syntax given the condition that all final states return to their initial states by telic recursion. Primary and secondary telic recursions [see CTMU pg. 36] can be reproduced categorically in the form of monoidal transformations if all it’s objects are holomorphic functions with combined Hilbert space tensor products. For each holomorphic function there is a higher combined form of holonomic categories (i.e., symmetric UBT Fock categories.) Because of the inherent dual (tensorial) tautologies embedded in Fock space we see how telic recursion displaces some of the outward equivalencies of monoidal category transformations. Unbounded telesis permutes the nilpotent variables within the Fock vacuum producing the reflexive syntactic operators that commute at the quantum level making coherent all static information into infocognitional data. The vacuity of zero-constraint information is transformed Mutatis mutandis into holonic, coherent, infocognition [see CTMU pg. 35].
Langan:
We’re in agreement when it comes to induction. Scientists are well aware of the problem (it’s built into science itself via falsifiability), but that’s not to imply that we discard entire reams of evidence and certainty just because we can’t prove anything outside of the old “cogito ergo sum” interpretation of epistemological truth. You wouldn’t discard the effects of gravity and jump off a roof just because “gravity isn’t proven 100%.” You’d be able to predict your end state with a particular threshold of certainty, and so there’s something to be said for that when it comes to the standards of truth.
And yes, Occam’s Razor excludes an infinite number of levels, actually — but that’s a strength of the Razor, not a weakness. It keeps explanations to their bare minimum elements of certainty. Otherwise you invoke equally-arbitrary explanations that add no new knowledge. Can one of those arbitrary explanations turn out to be right? Almost certainly. But until we have a good reason to use the explanation, we must remain agnostic about it to avoid jumping to incorrect conclusions.
You say fairies aren’t “inconsistent,” and this is true. But compatibility alone is not a sufficient grounds for truth. I can invoke an infinite number of plausible, compatible, and consistent explanations. But the point is that they add nothing to our certainty, nothing to our predictions, and nothing to our senses (and in many cases people actually contradict science with their theories unknowingly due to ignorance). Such arbitrary theories like the existence of fairies are *indistinguishable* from those fairies existing at all.
It’s like your Newcomb’s Paradox solution. We can’t deny the Demon his framework for being the real deal, but we have no reason to believe it so — and winning three times in a row is hardly compelling evidence. The real way to resolve the paradox is through rational decision theory. The paradox only exists if we frame it in a paradoxical way. It’s like Zeno’s Paradox, which isn’t a real paradox but a framing of a problem that tries to circumvent calculus by invoking the same confusions about infinity that people experience in the 0.999… = 1 argument.
“Uncertainty cannot be confined to the ontological level of explanation without simply assuming that ontology is unnecessary and severing it from reality. To improve on this assumption, one would need some kind of high-level mathematical proof.”
Mathematics doesn’t provide you with that kind of knowledge, though. Again, it’s a tool we use process data and phenomena for which we’ve already observed.
“Evolution and complexity cannot be falsified.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa now. Evolution is definitely falsifiable. Finding fossils in the wrong areas (e.g. the famous Haldane quote, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!”) or a fossil record that shows no change over time, or finding that mutation doesn’t pass on genetic material properly or doesn’t operate in aggregate, or finding direct evidence of creation itself would falsify evolution. And yes, natural selection is equivalent to the “logical and biological fact that organisms must conform to their natural environments” — that is direct evidence in favor of it! If we ever saw an instance where selection did not depend on feedback from the environment, this would falsify it, too. The fact that we see environmental feedback in every scenario we look is staggering evidence in its favor. Just because something is highly supported (or practically inevitable, like gravity) doesn’t mean it’s unfalsifiable. Everything I’ve described is clearly falsifiable with respect to the hypothesis underlying the theory of evolution.
Now, what would falsify creationism or ID? Nothing. No amount of evidence can ever disprove it directly because the goalposts can always be moved outside of the evidence, unlike with evolution. If you think I am incorrect here, please give me an example of something that would falsify ID.
It could be argued that some models of QM may be unfalsifiable (e.g. the Many Worlds Interpretation), but nobody is lobbying in favor of any one given interpretation and labeling it as truth without the evidence to back it up. You could reject hidden variables or reject locality. You could favor nonlocal hidden variable theories like Bohmian mechanics, or go for local non-realistic interpretations such as MWI — but most people tend to skip the interpretation, stick with the orthodox interpretation, and just “shut up and calculate.” No one theory of QM makes any better predictions than another. They’re all cut away with Occam’s Razor until we have more proof.
At any rate, I haven’t said anything that’s incorrect, so I’m not sure why you claim the criticisms are wrongheaded or simply wrong. So far, the incorrect statements have come from your end (the “evolution isn’t falsifiable” has been done to death already).
I also noticed you didn’t address the point about UBT. Am I correct in my assumption that your statement of “reality is a set” is referring to the notion of UBT being a medium that is the “set” of all possible, existentially-sensible realities?
Darwinist Mark Chu-Carroll: All Scientific Theories Can be Reduced to Tautologies, Just Like Natural Selection!
Michael Egnor April 4, 2007
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/04/darwinist_all_scientific_theor003392.html
Natural selection isn’t an unfalsifiable tautology.
“Survival of the fittest” is a gross oversimplification meant to dismiss evolution as a mere notion of “survivors surviving.” Scientists don’t even like using that definition precisely because it’s an incomplete view.
You have to actually look at what is allowing certain survivors to survive over others. You must evaluate what constitutes fitness. Fit survivors do survive, but the whole driving point of the natural selection mechanism is that survivors pass on their heritable traits to the next generation — traits that have allowed the living entity to maintain its existence in the first place at the hands of the environment and other agents.
It’s still very funny how manipulative Langan is. Instead of speaking about his theory (of which he has not say a word), he is just attacking other well established theories with naive arguments and free assertions disguised as proofs.
You know something? Even is you prove Evolution is not a valid scientific theory (which you haven’t even remotely), there will be still no argument supporting your “theory”.
It’s pretty funny. Some people think you just need to claim “science does not know all” to prove any alternative pseudoexplanation they give is right.
Having said that, you can all continue your discussions about the Theory of Evolution, with so pretty convincing arguments (like “science requires CTMU”, or “only CTMU can explain what science has not”, and such intelligently designed arguments). This is probably the first time evolution is being judged. It’s in serious danger.
1.) Infocognition and the Universe
The inseparable dual aspect monism of the universe and it’s cognitive aspect is bound together by it’s informational glue: (UniverseCognition). This illustrates the parallelism of telic feedback comparable to Wheeler’s self-excited circuit model [See CTMU pg. 7]. Reality is a categorical-interpretational balancing of information in it’s pure state with the universe presenting itself as information to cognition. Information residing in a cognitive state is what we call infocognition. Between infocognition we are presented with the universe/cognition duality problem. Infocognition fixes this problem with it’s linguistic formulation of syntactic operators defined on spatial dimensions. The coming-into-being of matter from energy is a natural duality problem for physicists. On the one hand we have information as it arises from energy and on the other material information as it arises from particle interactions [See CTMU pg. 2]. To distinguish between both types of energy is the first step towards setting up the duality between the concept of energy in the physical world and the concepts of linguistic truth. Physical energy and language are duals in the same way as the universe and cognition are, when these duals window themselves in cognition they do so by a reflexive syntactic interpretation procedure instrumated by infocognition states. Infocognition transliterates the physical language of the universe into dual cognitive monopoles called unicogse. Material information (particles/energy) are invariant to the cognitive medium at the moment of bombardment this invariance results in an immaterial information transform or interpretation. Information is a meta-transform for physical data with the cognitive medium as the receiving end of this bombardment of matter and energy. We can use the famous example of the Wheeler diagram as a conceptual representation for transformational self-invariance — itself being an open endomorphic loop or strange loop [see Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop]. The brain and nervous system are the physical image of occurrence where physical data is self-transduced by the actualization of infocognitive self-reflection.
2.) SCSPL and Physical Languages
Self-configuration, as part of SCSPL, can be represented as an advanced stage of emergent intelligence which is able to compile itself, aggregating itself to increasingly more sophisticated free-agent intelligences. SCSPL in it’s self-processing aspect contains emergent intelligence with superconnectivity and associative memory between dynamic reality processors. A physical language (PL) is a mathematical model of a natural language and hence is most likely to transcend the limitations of formal machine languages. PL is a bridge between the physical-somatic necessities of natures languages (semiotic-visual-verbal linguistic expressions) and the mathematical necessities of a formal machine language (computational verbs). SCSPL fits all the criteria for a universal cognitive PL system given that telic causation allows for all temporal modes to act conjunctively from start to finish. Dual aspect monism represents an open rather than closed system with no scalable boundaries between the mechanics of the quantum and classical universes. It evidences itself in the observed phenomena of quantum chaos with such examples as basic wave induced Chaladni figures. Within an open system quantum experiments can lend themselves to different quasi-classical or openly chaotic behaviours.
3.) Universal Self-Modeling and Interpretation
Self-modeling is yet another abstract concept of the universe similar to Meixner’s theory of ontic modalities or ‘onto-modalics’. Self-modelling is an atemporal process of becoming towards being or ontic-modality. Unbounded information becomes physically recognizable beyond the unbounded cognitive medium. It achieves this by following the arrow of truth:
I –> [B,ψ] = Map
[B,ψ]: A1 x A0 –> T = Interpretation
T –> [I,ψ] = Infocognition
Where interpretation ( I ) is self-referenced on a set of Boolean objects [B,ψ] with cognitive aspect ψ. The topos of a binary operation A1 x A0 is a self-referring map with constant value True (i.e., truth as interpreted.) In accordance with this interpretation of truth, truth again becomes the object of a secondary interpretation [I,ψ] or infocognition. All three procedures taken together are computationally proper isomorphisms.
I’ve only discovered the CTMU recently, but it seems like its definitely on the right track. You must start from the logic and, through supertautology, derive a meaningful frame for the physics.
I have a few questions for Chris, though, that came to me as I read through the CTMU. Your theory would imply that renormalization, technically, introduces a supertautological structure in the quantum Hilbert space recursively. This could be explained by the superselection sectors arising for topologically inequivalent (i.e. zero-constraint) quantum ground states. How can one calculate the (finite) index of the spectral flow between these sectors in the framework of dimensional or zeta-function regularization? Does the Atiyah–Singer index theorem hold for this index? Does a fractional index indicate the necessity of Boolean logic, as the CTMU would imply?
I thank you very much for your time.
Andrew
Andrew Goldstein: “I have a few questions for Chris, though, that came to me as I read through the CTMU. Your theory would imply that renormalization, technically, introduces a supertautological structure in the quantum Hilbert space recursively.”
That’s not quite correct. Obviously, the supertautological (recursive) structure of the CTMU incorporates the Hilbert space structure of quantum mechanics. This follows from the inherent self-duality of the theory. However, speaking in terms of quantum ontology, you don’t want to put the cart before the horse.
Rather than saying that the CTMU “induces supertautological structure” on (preexisting) Hilbert space “recursively”, it is better to say that it recursively determines the structure of Hilbert space itself through its structural linkage to “classical” spacetime, i.e., via the inherent self-duality of the supertautology (I assume that this is what you mean by “renormalization”).
In other words, the relationship between classical and quantum mechanics, or macroscopic and microscopic reality, is what gets “induced” by the supertautology on itself, and the first-order theory of quantum mechanics, which of course includes the structure of Hilbert space, is a partial (and strictly bounded) image of that “process”. (The quotes are a reminder that the process in question is pre-mechanical or pre-physical; it occurs atemporally on the level of SCSPL self-organization, i.e., syntaxification.) In the CTMU, such ontological priority relationships are quite important, as implied by those CTMU papers you must have read.
Unfortunately, rendering your subsequent “explanation”, i.e., your questions about the CTMU even partially intelligible (assuming that this is strictly possible in a CTMU context, which I won’t bother to check) would require a detailed interpretation of quantum mechanics in the CTMU. With all due respect to your level of expertise in physics (whatever it may be), that would be a time-consuming affair requiring extensive background knowledge, and therefore inappropriate to any general interest forum.
But thanks for your interest.
And now, as long as I’ve responded to Andrew here, I suppose that I might as well slog through an explanation of why evolution is unfalsifiable, which is probably of more interest to, and certainly more easily understood by, most of those who visit this forum.
First, I’ll issue the usual pro forma reminder to Rubix and his fellow travelers that CTMU debates are for people who are both real and qualified. I’m the author of that theory, and those are my conditions. They are the very same rules that have been in place throughout the scholarly world from the very beginning of the intellectual enterprise. I see no reason why they should be changed for the CTMU, and I consider it dishonest of anyone to even suggest it.
That being reiterated, Rubix is again missing the point regarding evolution.
Regarding your examples of how evolution might be falsified – e.g., rabbit fossils embedded in the wrong geologic strata, etc. – falsification requires an observation (statement) expressing a direct counterexample to a theory specific enough to be *directly* counter-exemplified. If the observation statement merely presents some sort of “evidence” of a counterexample, then one must justify the choice of that particular interpretation of the evidence over all other possible (non-falsifying) interpretations, and one is back to the problem of induction.
The more one tries to limit the interpretation to make the evidence direct and incontrovertible, the more localized it becomes, until finally, evolution as a whole is seen to be quite immune to it. Instead of being accepted as a counterexample, the “evidence” is then dismissed as a local anomaly with its own localized explanation that supports, or at least does not contravene, the overall theory that it was supposed to have “falsified”. The evolutionary hypothesis is simply too broad to affected one way or the other by localized evidence tightly bound to context. A sea-change in the evidence would be required to turn the adherents of evolutionary theory away from it, and this isn’t going to happen. There’s already too high a pile of “confirming” evidence that isn’t going away.
You’ve proposed some falsificative scenarios. Here are those which actually have falsificative bearing (as creation in the generic sense does not preclude evolution, that scenario is omitted):
“[1] Finding fossils in the wrong areas (e.g. the famous Haldane quote, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!”) or [2] a fossil record that shows no change over time, or [3] finding that mutation doesn’t pass on genetic material properly or doesn’t operate in aggregate, …”
These are all virtual impossibilities. [3] is either a tautology (mutation in the course of replication is precisely the failure of proper replication), a malapropism (mutations are not what “pass on” genetic material, but merely what modify the genetic material that gets passed on), or a blatant counterfactual that violates the foundations of biology and is therefore not an option (mutations in reproductive DNA are indeed passed on by reproduction). In none of these cases can it falsify evolution.
[1] and [2], on the other hand, would require a metaphysical explanation; they would imply that something must have exempted certain living entities from the pressures and/or limitations of physical causation. Claiming that evolution is falsifiable on that basis is thus like claiming that the statement “physical objects have mass” is empirically falsifiable simply by finding a massless physical object. The problem is that a physical object must have mass (or equivalently, energy) in order for one to find it using a physical detector; thus, although it briefly passes as sensible to talk about finding a “massless physical object”, it is actually nonsense. Similarly, any “evolution-falsifying” fossil is clearly embedded in the physical environment, and absent spontaneous generation or a wormhole connecting different geologic eras (etc.), must by definition have adapted to that environment in order to proliferate and produce fossils.
Next, we have the problem that in the large, standard evolution can be regarded as something like a principle of indifference which is perfectly transparent to physical causation. For its specific causal explanations, it points to the “laws of nature”, especially the laws of physics as presently conceived (which is where it gets its putative affinity for materialism and randomism). This renders its causal dimension, summarized as “evolution is a natural process,” quite immune to falsification. Anything that it cannot specifically explain is simply attributed to the action of unspecified, even hitherto undiscovered, natural laws. This kind of open-ended naturalistic attribution is rife throughout the sciences, and can be justified only under an extended definition of “nature” accommodating the unknown.
But perhaps this isn’t convincing enough, so let’s take a closer look. Since evolution is a composite thesis, one must specify which part of it is up for falsification. These parts include the existence of selective environmental pressure, adaptation to selective pressure by individual organisms as a condition of survival, and reproductive heritability of the adaptive traits of those organisms. One thus assumes either that all adaptive traits are initially present in some line or combination of lines, up to and including the very source of “common descent”, or that they can arise “emergently” through random mutations within the genetic code.
The first two ingredients are clearly tautologically related. On both the individual and intergenerational scales, adaptation is defined as a viable response to selective pressure, and selective pressure is defined as that which requires adaptation for survival. Similarly, reproduction with heritability of traits is not only a well-observed empirical fact, but something without which neither we, nor any other species, would exist in a remotely stable form.
Let’s put it another way. Organisms either adapt to their environments, or their environments kill them and thereby obstruct their breeding and ultimately arrest the continuation of their lines (or in the language of the modern synthesis, the spread of their genes). It comes down to a very simple and incontrovertible fact: organisms, being physically embedded in their environments, are critically causally dependent on their environments, and when they change (evolve), they must do so in accommodation thereto. This means that the definitions of “selection” and “adaptation” are tautologically linked via the real, logically inevitable organism-environment relationships on which they are semantically based.
[Elsewhere, you write that “natural selection isn’t an unfalsifiable tautology. Survival of the fittest is a gross oversimplification meant to dismiss evolution as a mere notion of ‘survivors surviving.’ Scientists don’t even like using that definition precisely because it’s an incomplete view.” Nevertheless, specific definitions of “fitness” and “adaptation” are necessarily coupled with survival – otherwise, fitness is obviously out of the question – and the overall structure of the theory of evolution is invariant with respect to them. Specific instances wander hither and yon, and specific explanations wax and wane, but the theory of evolution rolls ever onward.]
What if we now add a fourth component to the evolutionary hypothesis, namely, the stipulation that one species can arise from another by mutation, or from some combination of others by hybridization or some other form of gene-mixing? Evolutionary speciation comes close to being an “independent axiom” of evolutionary theory akin to the parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry; it cannot be derived from natural selection, adaptation, and mutable reproduction alone. Suffice it to say that it comes to rest on the details of the genotype-phenotype mapping, which are still rather poorly understood. It would therefore be difficult if not impossible to falsify.
In case all of this still leaves you cold, all that you really need remember is the bottom line, which you have already (in effect) acknowledged: in logic, falsification is really just inverse verification, and because empirical verification is impossible for explanatory and predictive scientific theories, so is empirical falsification. Both are out of the question for anything exceeding the bare data, and are thus limited to purely descriptive theories. Definite (as opposed to statistical or inductive) falsification is primarily for descriptive empirical theories only, via which it can secondarily preclude explanatory or predictive empirical theories based on false or irrelevant data. Aside from that, only in the non-empirical, logico-mathematical realm can we employ the axiomatic method or metamathematical reasoning to effect falsification by disproof (derivation of the negation).
What does this mean? To falsify evolution under present circumstances, one would have to produce, in realtime, an organism that is able to survive independently of its environment, without any kind of adaptation whatsoever. But “an organism independent of its environment” is an oxymoron, because organisms are all physically embedded in their environments and therefore causally dependent on them. To deny this is to imply that physical embedment is somehow not what it seems, and that the “organism” in question is in such complete and intimate control of its environment that it need no longer go through the motions of behavioral adaptation, wasting no effort on eating, breathing, or eliminating. Such an organism, being so perfectly adapted to its environment that its survival is no longer dependent on the environment in any way, exists entirely on its own terms; its environment is a virtual extension of it and thus integral to it. In short, it is literally one with its world.
But of course, if we were ever to find such an “organism”, we would regard it as more than a mere organism, and rightly so. This, of course, would take it out of the biological realm as it is currently understood, in which case biological evolution could hardly be falsified by it. Such a being would also very likely be credited with having effected the most profound and transcendent evolutionary adaptation of all time: taking complete control of its own evolution, or as it were, its own stasis. In this, it would reflect the theological aspect of the CTMU.
That’s really the final word on the supposed falsifiability of evolution, at least as far as logic is concerned, and why I’ve been on record as accepting evolution from the start. I merely hold that for various reasons, evolution is an incomplete explanation of what it purports to explain, and that God and divine creativity must be added to it in order to complete the explanation (stock “theistic evolution” is not implied; I have my own unique, and uniquely correct, perspective). Therefore, those who claim that I reject any form of evolution are boldfaced liars, and any commentator who fails to understand this needs to wrap his mind around it as quickly as possible.
This, by the way, is how I know that whenever I’m attacked by militant evolutionists, I’m really dealing with atheists deceptively trying to package their godlessness in a tautological wrapper and hitch it to a scientific locomotive that is moving forward as inexorably as a juggernaut. Such people always yearn for a good “debate”, meaning something like a pack of ravenous velociraptors attacking, dismembering, and gobbling up anything that looks vaguely non-atheistic or non-materialistic in any way (their “natural prey”, to push the metaphor). It’s in their very bones! So they gravitate to any mention of the CTMU like flies to honey, hoping for a free chance to publicly insult the intelligence of its author with total impunity even though he would likely crush them like empty aluminum beer cans in any ideologically neutral non-pseudonymous confrontation.
But sad to say, their Great Leaders, fearing to lose their illustrious seat cushions in honest debate, have now in effect forbidden them to “lend credence” to anyone who appears to embrace something other than random materialism as an explanation for the natural world by honestly debating them out in the open. Thus, militant atheistic evolutionists are reduced to obediently parroting the party line under pseudonyms, so that they cannot be accused by their superiors of breaking ranks (or, perhaps more importantly, so that they can’t be pinned down by name when they lose). What a quandary, especially when they injudiciously fixate on a target who insists on the use of real identities!
But in the end, it’s your quandary and not mine. If you can’t come clean about who you really are, then maybe it’s time to roll out your hero Dawkins after all. At least he’s not afraid to attach his real identity to his opinions. And if the old warhorse is simply too busy or too important to be trotted out and put through his paces by so “uneducated” a horseman as I, or simply doesn’t want to “lend credence” to those who disagree with him, then at least he can be pilloried by name for refusing to engage well-known and verifiably intelligent people who just might hand him his rump on a platter. (Of course, you’re free to doubt such an outcome. But sadly for you, there’s only one way to know for sure whether you’re right, and your side clearly isn’t up to it.)
So much for your evolutionary (or atheistic-materialistic) nonsense. Now let’s move on to the rest of your nonsense.
First, Occam’s razor has nothing whatsoever to do with certainty. Your sentence
“It keeps explanations to their bare minimum elements of certainty”
is thus meaningless. On one hand you have certainty, which is limited to the bare data (no explanatory or predictive theorization allowed), while on the other, you have a rather dull tool (Occam’s razor) which simply minimizes the number of concepts and variables in theories.
In order to apply Occam’s razor with certainty, you’d have to apply it to the bare data, in which case it would merely tell you not to fabricate extra data or introduce irrelevant data without telling you the first thing about how to distinguish necessity from superfluity, relevance from irrelevance, or correct from incorrect explanation or prediction. It says nothing about explanatory or predictive sufficiency except that this alone, with no extra padding, is “all that you want” (but good luck finding it). Furthermore, it cannot anticipate anomalies, or future data, or help to identify any hidden variables that might render a theory more robust as the context expands and new kinds of data emerge. Its entire mathematical basis is simply that more concepts create more possibilities, and that absent any sort of “evidence” (no help there either), these additional possibilities are statistically more likely to be erroneous or irrelevant than correct.
Regarding Newcomb’s Paradox, you write
“The real way to resolve the paradox is through rational decision theory. The paradox only exists if we frame it in a paradoxical way. It’s like Zeno’s Paradox, which isn’t a real paradox but a framing of a problem that tries to circumvent calculus by invoking the same confusions about infinity that people experience in the 0.999… = 1 argument.”
The paradoxical formation of the Newcomb scenario, of which you seem to dispute the existence, is usually credited to Robert Nozick, then of Harvard University, and based on rational decision theory. Thus, when you deny that Newcomb’s paradox is actually a paradox, you’re disagreeing with the late Professor Nozick. Accordingly, I suggest that you track down Professor Nozick, PhD, R.I.P., at the cemetery where he’s buried, pseudonymously insult him as is your wont, and then count the number of responses you get from him.
But since you’ll almost certainly get zip from poor Nozick, and rightly so, I’ll go ahead and tell you what he would probably tell you if he were so-disposed (which he wouldn’t be, because reasoning with you is obviously a perfect impossibility).
First, you need to get straight with the following: the fact that a paradox is resolvable, or has apparently been resolved, doesn’t mean that it “wasn’t a real paradox”. A paradox is a formalistic notion that can be thought of as equivalent to “X = not-X”, and as a property of a formalism or its interpretation, it is a logical function of the formalism-interpretation pair. In fact, even when (incorrectly) extended into the universe of the formalism, it remains a paradox. Moreover, the paradox has not been definitely removed from its originating formalism through revision or extension until the revision or extension in question has been shown to minutely resolve all possible forms of it.
Obviously, calling something the “resolution” of a paradox is not meaningful if it contains paradoxes of its own, as this merely transforms one set of paradoxes into another. For example, standard analysis incorporates the so-called paradox of infinitesimals, which are somewhat oxymoronically defined as nonzero but sub-finite (absolutely indetectable) quantities. Some people hold that this paradox has been adequately resolved; others disagree. Various efforts have been made to resolve it, a couple of the more famous being the traditional Cauchy-Weierstrass epsilon-delta formalism and nonstandard analysis. To my knowledge, none has succeeded to everyone’s complete satisfaction; paradoxes or loose ends of one sort or another keep popping out. Thus, claiming that Zeno’s paradoxes were never “real paradoxes” because Newcomb and Leibniz discovered calculus a couple of millennia down the line doesn’t wash. Yes, the calculus definitely works, but the question of “why?” is still open to study.
As for “rational decision theory”, that was part of Robert Nozick’s original argument, and was explicitly included in both the original paper “The Resolution of Newcomb’s Paradox” [Langan 1989] and the essay on that topic which I included in “The Art of Knowing” a decade or so later. Nozick’s arguments were correct as far as they went, and he was also correct in noting the apparent existence of opposite but equally “rational” solutions to the central decision-theoretic problem. According to decision theory, it is “rational” neither to turn down money offered without risk nor to ignore objective data, and Nozick described how these aspects of rationality are placed in apparent conflict by the Newcomb scenario. In other words, Nozick showed that the scenario generates a decision-theoretic paradox within the standard causal framework applied throughout the sciences.
This was merely the starting point for my original 1989 paper, which extended the ordinary causal framework of the paradox in what was probably a new way. That is, it applied a novel technique in philosophy, situating a well-known philosophical problem (Newcomb’s paradox) in multiple levels of a stratified “hyper-automaton” running nested simulations. I called this the “nested simulation tableau” (NeST). If that was actually the first time this technique was used – and I suspect that it was – then it was a philosophical milestone. Although that paper was published in a low-circulation nonacademic journal, it may well have been the first example of the modern strain of cyberphilosophy called “Matrix philosophy”. (Matrix philosophy, dearly beloved of sophisticated geeks and transhumanists everywhere, was developed well after the movie “The Matrix”, which came out around a decade after my paper; the academics who now “own” the field not only didn’t invent it, but have since made quite a hash out of it.) The whole exercise was a specialized application of the CTMU, in which the paradox requires conceptual embedment. My later essay was incorporated in a string of essays in which it was partially integrated with modern research on the neuropsychology of volition.
But of course, all of this will be completely lost on you. Why? Because some people can’t tell their colon from a skunk burrow, and for the life of me, you often look like you might be one of them. Therefore, I dedicate the information contained in this response not to you, but to the brave contributors who continue to attempt to converse with you as though every word out of your mouth isn’t a veritable fertilizer bomb of errors waiting to explode in a chaotic blizzard of fizzling conceptual confetti. (As for me, I’ve about had it with you.)
Now please stop wasting my time. Like our host Mark Chu-Carroll, you generate errors faster than you write … maybe even faster than Mark. But unlike Mark, you lack the courage to share your real identity with those whom you attack, and as you surely know deep down inside, that makes you … well, I naturally hesitate to say “a contemptible, belly-crawling gutless wonder completely unworthy of respect or consideration of any kind, despite any phony rationale you may append to your intellectual cowardice”. So instead, I’ll leave it up to you and other readers to decide how well that shoe may fit.
But in any case, I hope I’ve made myself clear. God will be coming again soon to a theater near you, and no self-preserving child of the corn wants to get caught with his ankle garters and Wall Street boxers showing. Please consider yourself and your friends to have been warned, this time on a very logical, very precise basis on which not a single one of you will be getting over no matter how hard you try, full stop.
And now, having allowed this response to eat up half my morning – it’s a very rainy day here in the American Heartland – I must bid you all adieu.
Looks like Chris Langan has now crushed both Mark and Rubix, leaving them both intellectually demolished and destroyed. This leaves only John Fringe left for him do deal with. Do you guys doubt him now?
> You’ve proposed some falsificative scenarios:
> [3] finding that mutation doesn’t pass on genetic material properly or doesn’t operate in aggregate, …”
>
>These are all virtual impossibilities. [3] is either a tautology (mutation in the course of >replication is precisely the failure of proper replication), a malapropism (mutations are >not what “pass on” genetic material, but merely what modify the genetic material that >gets passed on), or a blatant counterfactual that violates the foundations of biology and >is therefore not an option (mutations in reproductive DNA are indeed passed on by >reproduction). In none of these cases can it falsify evolution.]”
Oh, man! You don’t even know what tautology or falsifiable means!!! This is getting funnily ridiculous XD XD XD
So evolution is not falsifiable because the facts known after the theory was proposed (like all the genetic stuff) are in agreement with the theory?
Good. If a theory does not fit observed facts, it’s falsified. And if it fits observed facts, it’s a tautology and unfalsifiable!
Man, you should certainly buy a dictionary. Look for “falsifiable” and “tautology”. You’ll be surprised.
Be careful, John! Langan has mathematically proved that God hates you and I! We’re doomed! DOOMED, I say!
I don’t need a mathematical proof to realize god hates me. Just look at the kind of people he makes me endure XD
Dear Chris, your last briefing was thoroughly precise in explaining some of your views on evolution dispelling many of the ideological myths about where ID proponents actually stand with regards to it. Central to understanding the CTMU is telic causation which does not preclude the evolutionary process but rather is inclusive of it in the omnitemporal nexus of all it’s recusions. With that in mind I will continue my dissertata on the CTMU with a few passages from the bulk of written notes I have prepared.
1.) Cognition / Noesis Dualism and the Meaning of Internal Languages
Cognition is differentiated from pure noesis by way of it’s self-contained processing aspects. It is not exclusively or inclusively attached to the traditional theistic notion of soul (psyche.) Although in truth this does limit it’s spiritual self-content. Pure (non-objective) cognition has it’s own constitution embodied in the Intelligent Spirit (IS). Defining cognition as self-operational intuition is conceivable in the direct sense of a cognition that self-processes by using operational syntaxes. (Operational syntax is originated internally {is internal to reality} which it uses through the transcendent, superlative formalism of a model-theoretic Internal Language.) Internal languages are translinguistic formal languages of formal linguistic sets. Pure unbounded cognitive energy (cognitive media) enters into infocognitive self-processing syntax by confining itself to primordial informatic movement or holomovement according to Bohm. Holomovement guarantees the preservation of state-changing information as it adheres to it’s embedded telic principle of recursivity. Information and nonlinear dynamic states localize as bounded infocognitive states paralleling the formal linguistic mappings of compactified binary units (1,0 – true,false [see section on Fock space categories and UBT]. A mapping of this variety we call ‘interpretations’ or (interpretational) models of operational syntax. SCSPL has within it a reflexive-intrinsic or internal language (IL) out of which all formal language can be modelled.
2.) Intelligent Design Models
ID equations are models of the formal languages that we use in mathematical astrophysics and cosmology. They are supremal dative (or data) structures given to cognition by the computational universe when it self-reflects through it’s own physical image. We could generalize this kind of reflection as an instance of spontaneous automorphism with an endomorphic projection mapping that correlates alongside telic events.
3.) Part-Whole Formal Ontology and Complex Causal Relations
A universe taken as a whole with all it’s disparate parts can be mereologically identified by the summability of all it’s parts considering all possible quantal permutations of locally connected parts (see constancy hypothesis, Gestalt contexture.) Complex systems obey a logic involving internal and external causal relations (downward-upward, part-whole relations) overlapping each other and allowing for the mutual effectuation within them to occur in a deterministic fashion. Moreover, when two wholes interact or combine, forming some universal structure, the wholes can act independently from the parts they contain. This strange interaction signifies the foundation of objective a-priority as well as the foundations of axiomatics. Universal foundation relations are the complex metalinguistic relations we speak of when talking about SCSPL. They self-contain and organize all essential permutation relations of (atomic) parts as well as imbibing their natural causal pathways with open and closed loop formations. Physical atoms (parts) bind together into larger molecules with varying degrees of binding strengths as a necessary factor of the binding qualities and spectra inside different atoms. According to the quantum worldview atomic energy gradients supplant the foundations for the larger Copenhagen interpretation of QM. The Rydberg hydrogen atom for instance when placed under a strong EM-field displays apparent classical chaotic behavior in it’s outgoing spectra as it approaches the semi-classical limit. Such instances of quantum chaos can be used to configure exemplary solutions to the problems of scaling in nonlocal information for discrete quantum events that could not otherwise be inferred from ordinary mechanistic models of QM.
4.) Γ-Grammar [Models and Metalinguistics, a Gurwitschean Interpretation Pt.1 ]
⩽−𝔽 is a classical first-order predicate logic read as ‘is a part of and is founded on’. It’s grammar uses standard Tarski-semantics. Logical identity is an optional feature of ⩽−𝔽. Identity is not required as part of the language if
∀x∀y〈(x=y)⊃−∃x{[(z⩽x)&(z⩽̸x)]∨[(z⩽y)&(z⩽̸x)]}〉
is treated as a non-logical axiom.
∀x∀y{(x<y)≡[(x≤y)&(x≠y)]}
reads: x is a proper part of y iff it is a part of but not equal to y.
∀x∀y{𝕆xy≡∃z[(z⩽x)&(z⩽y)]}
reads: x overlaps y iff x and y have some common part. Let ψ be a statement about an object which is dependent on a cognition (e.g., the statement “I see the green box” is cognized, with “the green box” depending on “I see”.) The green box is a classical object of an internal language (IL). Furthermore let Γ be a set of syntaxes that compose the grammatical statements in an IL. Allow □ψ and ◊ψ to be metalinguistic statements, read: □ψ is a metalinguistic consequence of Γ-grammar iff ◊ψ is a consequence (i.e., is satisfied in each model 𝕄 ) of Γ-grammar iff −ψ is not a consequence of a Γ-grammar. Note that if −ψ is not a consequence of Γ then Γ has a model 𝕄 in which −ψ is not satisfied. If □ψ is a mtalinguistic consequence of the grammar inherent in Γ, then since ψ is satisfied in each model 𝕄 of a Γ-grammar, −ψ is satisfied in no 𝕄 of Γ. Hence, if Γ(∀)𝕄⊃{∃−ψ(Γ⊂𝕄)} is a model then if ψ is a consequence of Γ-grammar, then −ψ is not a consequence. Let 𝕃=⩽−𝔽,Γ=Σ&ψ=(ℍ−𝕍ℬ):∃x∃y(−𝔻xy&𝔻x)).
If Σ is consistent, then since (ℍ−𝕍ℬ):∃x∃y(−𝔻xy&𝔻x)) is a theorem of Σ it is also a consequence of Σ because the inference rules and logical axioms of ⩽−𝔽 are correct −ψ is not a consequence of Σ while ◊ψ is a metalinguistic consequence of Σ. Since 𝕄 is a model of Σ then we say that Σ is consistent. Let 𝕄 contain a universe 𝕌 consisting of members α,β,χ
Jeremy, (Rubix, John; Chris mentioned,)
I didn’t thank you for your last response to me, thanks. I’m interested in what “complexity” means to you. But the rest of what you have been writing is pretty much greek to me.
Rubix,
I see Chris has berated you for your atheism. Probably warranted. (You have said that you are actually coming at this as an atheist, not agnostic or ignostic or anything, right?) But, I don’t doubt he’d sing a different tune real quick if you undid that. I don’t want to say don’t take it personally, because you should, but at the same time you should take it impersonally as well. The complex nature of “I am” permits this quite readily. Rubix, the value to a religious life is that – in it only – can you be a meaningful “substance” of reality. When you take questioning so far that you actually refuse to question the meaninglessness of materialistic life… What you’re observing is not “evidence” of THE meaninglessness of life, you’re seeing evidence of your own infinite person! This is the epitome of the distortion that takes place by phenomenally representing the super-phenomenal I’dea(s). The repercussion of this …
The main repercussion is that you are real. Your decisions matter. The “environment” is the environment of Our making. Howison shows that evolution: (at p.40:)
“Here we reach the demonstration that evolution not only is a fact, and a fact of cosmic, extent, but is a necessary law a priori over Nature.”!!!
And what that means: faithe.
I guess Chris seems to see this as … but I see it more like mature v. immature. I feel real “blessed”. I succeeded at metaphysics. (Yes, the word “successful” is meaningful, despite the (noumenal) fuzziness, (spiritual) subjectivity, and (phenomenal) experientiality.) I don’t know how to answer the questions of what to do if you give up on success? Or if you are aging and haven’t found success? But faithe counts. It is the currency of spirit. And your continued living is evidence of some faithe on your part! On my search, – I suppose I can say, – I think it makes sense to say that I faithed, not only the existence of TRUTH, but … my capacity to handle it if I should find it (something vital about justice might be said too). I didn’t have to know how it was about God, or even that it was about God. And, to be sure, lying (atheism, materialism, …) is a highly anti-helpful act of faith! Anyway, I think we’d really like to see a mature … to live amongst a mature society. Seems real fun. Real prosperity of experience. Not just stuff.
But God wants that too!, so if you can’t accept him…?
Howison dedicates his book “to all who feel a deep concern for the dignity of the soul”.
John, check out this SENTENCE (not paragraph 🙂 ) too, at p.39:
“The conception of evolution is founded at last and essentially in the conception of Progress: but this conception has no meaning at all except in the light of a goal; there can be no goal unless there is a Beyond for everything actual; and there can be no such Beyond except through a spontaneous ideal.”
Let me end by bringing the conversation back to the complex nature of each “I am”, at p.39:
“Throughout Nature, as distinguished from idealizing mind, there reigns, in fine, no causation but transmission. As every phenomenal cause is only a transmissive and therefore passive agent, so Nature itself, in its aggregate, is only a passive transmitter. But because of its origin in the Final Causation of intelligence, its whole must conform to the ideal that expresses the essential form of intelligent being, and all its parts must follow each other in a steadfast logical ascent toward that ideal as their goal. Thus Teleology, or the reign of Final Cause, the reign of ideality, is not only an element in the notion of evolution, but is the very vital cord in the notion.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=dg3wkAkfKQ4C&pg=PA420&dq=the+limits+of+evolution&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
Tim
“Unfortunately, rendering your subsequent “explanation”, i.e., your questions about the CTMU even partially intelligible (assuming that this is strictly possible in a CTMU context, which I won’t bother to check) would require a detailed interpretation of quantum mechanics in the CTMU. With all due respect to your level of expertise in physics (whatever it may be), that would be a time-consuming affair requiring extensive background knowledge, and therefore inappropriate to any general interest forum. ”
Are you saying my questions can’t be answered by the CTMU? I was really hoping you’d be able to shed some light on the matters, but I understand if you are not able to answer them. Thank you for your time, anyway.
This debate is honesting getting to be quite hilarious. I won’t even address how funny it is that Chris intentionally avoids answering Andrew’s questions because he doesn’t understand quantum mechanics, himself.
So, instead, let’s have some storytime.
Chris Langan goes to the beach one day and drops a ball. However, instead of that ball dropping straight down, it goes to the side and even arcs upwards a bit before dropping. This goes against his preconception of how gravity works. Gravity makes things go straight down, right? His eyes widen as he exclaims, “Holy crap, I’ve falsified gravity! God is required to explain this!” He repeats this experiment a few more times but the ball drops straight down. However, once in a while, the strange phenonenon repeats itself and the ball acts strangely, moving in unexpected directions. He repeats this experiment back home, but the ball, unfortunately, just drops straight down. He asks his friends to repeat it. Straight down. He travels the world and tries dropping the ball in different places. Straight down. He looks to the cosmos to find other instances of gravity failing. Nope, gravity still holds there, too. There are only a few select instances where the ball doesn’t drop straight down, but this usually occurs on certain beaches, mountains, etc. Chris is convinced that gravity must be incomplete based on this evidence.
One day, Rubix walks up to Chris and says, “You know, you didn’t falsify gravity. Odds are the ball moved strangely because a wind gust moved the ball at the same time you dropped it. This evidence is backed up by the fact that we know wind moves objects and applies force. Gravity is a force. The wind force can oppose the gravity force. Beaches are often windy. You also said you saw this phenomenon happen on windy mountains, right? It’s pretty clear that gravity isn’t wrong. You don’t need God to explain this to fill in the gaps.”
In the utmost defiance, Chris retorts back, “Hey, you better watch your mouth. I’m much smarter than you and lay claim to a 200-level IQ. You’ve just been caught with your boxers down around your ankles, you Wall Street slime! You say God is unfalsifiable, but so is your pathetic theory of gravity! Hypocrite! Gravity can’t explain why the ball moved strangely. We need a metaphysical explanation. All you ever do is try to explain away contradictory evidence in an attempt to cling to your puny, weak theories! Down with academia! Viva la revolucion!”
Sound ridiculous? So does your argument against evolution.
Even if we find a fossil in the wrong strata, explaining it away doesn’t mean we’re moving the goalposts in an attempt to keep evolution unfalsifiable. It means the theory is so strong and holds true elsewhere in its ability to explain and predict such that the anomaly we see is most likely an anomaly. Luckily, to date, we’ve been able to explain, with evidence, why the anomalies are typically anomalies much like in my beach analogy. Falsification occurs when contradiction occurs that we absolutely can’t explain with current theory. If I fly out to space and notice a spherical Earth, I’ve falsified the Flat-Earth theory, supported by direct geometric facts (moon shadows, horizons, shadow angles from the sun, time zones, etc). But in practice, we don’t find wrong fossils in the wrong stratas (which is evidence in *favor* of evolution).
Fossils, by the way, are complete bonuses. The case for evolution is watertight without them. Fossils are just supporting evidence. If we happened to find, for instance, modern-day animal fossils buried deep within the ground alongside trilobytes, that would probably render evolution extremely suspect, and we should be able to see why via the genetics. But it’s not what we see. The genetics show that everything falls within a perfect family tree, and the fossils are consistent with what we’d expect. Evolution is able to predict things without the need to invoke a God at all, whatsoever. We see evidence of variation, heritability, and selection — in spades. If the genetics did not support this, or if we saw true chimeras where organisms combined parts from several different/diverse lineages that can’t be explained by lateral gene transfer, or if we saw creation happen outright, or if the fossils were wildly at odds with what the theory predicts based on the genetics on a consistent basis — we’d be falsifying evolution.
Granted, the evidence in its favor is so strong that it’s really, really hard to falsify! You’d practically need God himself to appear and inform us that he’s just been screwing with everyone the whole time. But an ironclad theory does not make it unfalsifiable, lmfao. It just makes it friggin’ ironclad. This is different from Intelligent Design, where no amount of evidence could possibly falsify it (notice how you were not able to give me that example I asked for, nor were you able to give me an example of something evolution doesn’t explain properly). Any random crack in explanation is just an excuse to invoke God of the Gaps, which is exactly what you’re arguing: “Evolution can’t explain everything, so I invoke God and Design.” It’s an argument from ignorance no different from people who once thought God was needed to explain lightning.
And, by the way, claiming that falsification would require “an organism to act independently of its environment” is technically false. Organisms are indeed bound to their environments, by definition. But this is just a fact, and that fact may or may not contribute to the mechanism/theory of evolution itself. We don’t need to falsify that fact to falsify the theory. Your argument is akin to saying that Newton’s Laws are unfalsifiable because mass is a “tautological definition.” You don’t seem to understand the difference between a tautology and a definition.
We say that selection is part of the evolutionary theory that explains how this fact contributes to which genetic materials are allowed to propagate. That mechanism, in itself, is falsifiable. If penguins somehow made it to the desert and started dying, we’d be falsifying selection if penguins somehow kept propagating through the mutation mechanisms of other animals despite the fact that the genetic sources/variations were dwindling. This might be something Creationists would argue is possible, yet we don’t see it in practice because it’s frankly pretty retarded. The falsifications for selection would have to be radical, but that’s precisely because selection is so strong in its ability to explain.
Even if you accept evolution, I’m not attacking you for that. I’m attacking you for invoking ID and trying to use crackpot pseudo-math and cranky physics to justify it.
Your argument against Occam’s Razor is also offbase and I won’t spend much time on it. It’s not supposed to help you find hidden variables — but it’s not preventing you from looking for them. It’s meant to keep hidden variable explanations out of the realm of “truth” until we have evidence for said variables. Otherwise, by definition, you are jumping to conclusions that may turn out to be wrong once the evidence rolls in, and you may be tacking on frameworks that actually explain none of the variance inherent in the results. That’s all there is to it. Moving on.
Regarding Newcomb’s Paradox, yes, a paradox might be thought of as an X = not X type of logic. But Newcomb’s Paradox is only a “paradox” because it’s framed in an unsound way. We have a Demon who can supposedly predict your choices (which by definition means you do not have free will to combat against this), and yet you somehow still have free will to make decisions that will fall outside of his prediction. You have free will, and yet you don’t at the same time. Obviously you’re going to get a decision-theoretic paradox if we’re asserting that this paradoxical scenario holds in the first place, but my argument is that it’s a waste of time because the problem isn’t well-formed (“Do I choose both boxes because I have free will, or one box because I don’t? According to the problem, both of these scenarios are valid choices because I have free will and yet I don’t”).
In practice, if we were in this scenario, it’s either got to be one or the other to resolve the paradox in a meaningful way: The Demon can either predict, or he can’t. If he can, then the outcomes will always be consistent with your choices. If he can’t, then they won’t. No paradox.
Your paper also incorrectly states that expected utility theory and dominance principle are contradictory: “These two principles of rationality, which are supposed to be mutually consistent, are in this case telling you to do opposite things.” Those two theories can tell you to do different things even in scenarios that aren’t paradoxical by their formulation, simply because they appeal to different utility desires. It still doesn’t mean the theories contradict. They’re just different theories for different risk profiles. It’s like arguing that a love for chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream is a contradiction.
I should add that your comments on Zeno’s Paradox further shows your mathematical ignorance. We fully understand the “why” behind the answer. The reason the problem is a paradox is because it tries to get you to think in finite terms and finite steps. You’ll never approach the destination when you frame the problem in a way that prevents you from ever reaching that destination. In practice, the paradox is resolved by understanding that even though we can always subdivide a finite amount into infinitely many subcomponents, we’re still moving through infinitely many spots at any given moment by definition. The whole point of the dx term is to allow for any amount of differentiation with respect to your variable (infinitely many sums) — it’s not going to make sense if you’re trying to think of it as a finite amount, otherwise you’ll never move at all. Maybe you should consider taking a real-analysis class sometime, if you ever get over your distaste for academia.
Also, leave it to a crank philosopher to take credit for things unjustly. You’re aware that ideas for the Matrix philosophy have long predated you, right? Forget Nozick’s Experience Machine or Plato’s Allegory of the Cave or even the Buddhist Maya or Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream or Descartes’ Demon. Hell, forget Tron, which came out 7 years prior, or the Lawnmower Man (which began pre-production in 1988). Obviously your important paper which used the CTMU in 1989 was the first example of the Matrix philosophy. Give me a break, man.
To sum up: You don’t understand math, physics, science, tautologies, decision theory, logic, or the genesis-tracing of ideas. You also overemphasize your importance and influence and have a really odd fascination with boxers and ankles.
The crankometer is screaming.
Regarding these transitions in the fossil record; look up Philip Gosse he is the correct effigy of this whole disillusionment you seem to have about the CTMU as attempting to exploit religious dogma.
I’m not arguing that the CTMU is necessarily an attempt to exploit religious dogma. I’m arguing that it’s a blatant attack on math, physics, and logic (hence this blog). Whether or not Langan has a religious agenda, I do not know — and do not care. But I’ll defend against shoddy math and science any day.
On that note, Philip Gosse’s book is utter rubbish.
He basically says that the fossil record was placed there to deceive — that the fossil record just *looks* as if it were consistent with evolutionary theory, and really old fossils just *look* as if they were old.
It’s an untestable concept. A universe that is manipulated by a deceitful God that screws with all the evidence is indistinguishable from a world where no evidence was tampered with in the first place.
In other words you’d have to agree to something like this:
Rubix, all,
I’m just starting to read the new stuff, but I’m on my way out… I had to say something about this. Rubix said:
“… we know wind moves objects and applies force.”
ARRRGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Do you know that?! Are you sure?!
Because science doesn’t say that. You know that, right? Math says that there is perfectly inescapable relationship “relating” observations of wind, objects, and relative movement. That’s it. But what you’re doing with the excerpt is telling us what your god looks like. That’s it. We don’t have to worship your god. Force is just a character in a mathematical equation (usually “F” 🙂 ). “applies” is all your doing, Rubix. As is “moves”. If you have evidence to say otherwise, please lay it on me.
I’ll finish reading later,
Tim
Yes. Of course we know that. And of course science supports it. What on earth are you smoking?
Of course, denying that wind exists would easily place you in the “crazy nutcase” category. Feel free to indulge, though, and waste time quibbling over semantics — you can call it a “relationship,” but that’s what we are defining as real.
Rubix,
you’re crazy! Answering “yes” to my question is tantamount to saying you know all physics. This is emblematic of the problem you have with Chris. You simply refuse to recognize your own limitations. I’m sure before relativity there were people who would have said, “yes, I’m sure that length is an immutable static feature.”, but low and behold, in the extremes of near-c, it isn’t. Similarly with causation. That all your evidence conforms to certain mathematical relationships does not mean that the simple god you believe in is the right one. There can be more to the story than meets the eye. You have admitted this before, haven’t you? Occam’s razor doesn’t save you from my God unless you can actually explain causation. You can’t though! You simply have faith that your no-god will, one day, be proven sufficient. He won’t! You simply have faith that your observations of objects moving in the wind are observations of something inherently real, but you can’t explain where that inherently real matter would come from. And, to be sure, that means that you can’t explain how wind moves objects. Like Langan said earlier, the question is what is the evidence *of*. I say my God, you say your god. But then you go and assert that you are not asserting any god. you say you know when you should be smart enough to say “I don’t know.” Good scientists know that they don’t know why time moves forward. They know that they don’t know why, for example, all of existence shouldn’t just disappear the next moment.
This reminds me of a bible quote. Jude 1:10:
“But these people revile what they do not understand and are destroyed by what they know by nature like irrational animals.”
and at v.12:
“They are waterless clouds blown about by winds, fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead and uprooted.”
In case you care, the atheist-materialist is twice dead because he denies his truly potent spirit (“the life”) and is thus concomitantly dead phenomenally as well; and he is uprooted because he denies his noumenal aspect. A waterless cloud (a lifeless life), blown about (not in control of your own telic potency). Rubix, you misapprehend the evidence. Where you see causative materialistic determinism, I see definitely real decisions of “I am”.
Tim
P.S. elsewhere you have shown concern over existence v. nothing. Something must be because the alternative makes no sense. “Nothing” is not a real idea. Technically, “nothing” is meaningless. Not even a word. Something is, period. The question is, what? You are trying to answer that question from – only a part of – the inside! Like Zeno, you never will get there. The phenomenal is just a representation. just a representation. just a FAIR AND NECESSARY derivative representation.
P.P.S. Go Broncos!
Tim, yes, thanks for your reply. Most of what I wrote there is very cryptic. Describing the CTMU (which is also very cryptic) seems to demand the use of neologisms (to keep the work shorter) and attached phrases. A full length textbook on the CTMU might exceed 500 pages with many theoretical examples and elaborations of the original blueprint.
About complexity, I’m glad you asked, I have done a lot of deep thinking on complexity without ever writing any of it down so this will be a first.
Any definition of “complexity” is likely to be complex and I’m sure I am not the first one to have coined this phrase. I think complexity can be used interchangeably with the term “emergence”. Novelty that appears to evolve or emerge as something that spontaneously acquires meaning like invention, works of art, strokes of genius, complex jokes. Yet most people don’t understand what makes them work; the mechanism is unknown, the parts are not isolateable from the whole that they comprise. Some things take generations to figure out what the components are and how they relate and fit together.
In a large complex system the whole influences the parts and the larger wholes constituting an even larger universal whole could also be influencing the smaller wholes. An Aristotelian part-whole convention wouldn’t likely work for complex phenomena and one would have to resort to set theory or a more recent mereology. I think the parts of a complex system interact by nonlocal permutations encompassing the whole universal cosmos as the ultimate sum (so these permutations far exceed the number of possibilities of a Rubix Cube and would also be far more frustrating!)
Complex phenomena is exhibited by their emergent properties and these properties obey complexity laws that are hidden from their properties. (Emergent computation, emergent intelligence, emergent species.) Much of complexity theory goes outside the common domains it studies (logical paradoxes, computation, biology, thermodynamics, economics and sociology.) In fact there are signs of complexity in human culture, the cultural arts, metaphysical and surreal art and other advanced forms of human creative production (there is even evidence of psychological complexity in dreams :D.) Ultimately, and I think Chris would appreciate this, complex systems are sufficiently determined by the rules of very simple languages, in particular; Boolean logic. However complexity is metaphysical, wether we can “explain” complexity at all as a word or as a set of logical-mathematical principles those principles will always be applied to classifying something that remains unexplanatory, mysterious, and transcendental (i.e., contingent upon a -priori laws.) An a-priori usually means something beyond the immediate grasp of experience (or empirical verification;) so linear scientific methods will never be able to pin-down complexity.
Natural randomness is a product of complexity too, as we perceive it, in neo-Darwinian evolutionary terms. Gene selection pre-seeds the appearance of an emergent variety of life but this involves some form of telic feedback with environmental conditions to test extended survival traits. A simple example being oarangutangs who developed long stretchy arms to extend survival by dominating the higher ground of trees and branches. Obviously there are uncountable numbers of such examples througout the various phylogenetic trees where mechanisms of spontaneous macro level adaptation is evidenced. Teleology is important to consider since these survival traits are directed towards an outward goal that can not be localized internally to the aleatory functions of it’s DNA unless we interpret chance occurrence as ergodic (i.e., random shuffling eventually leeds to a recursion back to an original state.) But even an ergodic interpretation would imply (if not teleology) domains of telic recursion. Similar ecosystems support the emergence of homologous species that differ slightly but are geographically so distant that species migration is not a possible cause. The North American ruddy duck (Oxyura jamaicensis) and the Asian white-headed duck (Oxyura leucocephalus) though geographically isolated and possessing different plumages are of the same genera with the same mating habits, pointed tails and blue duck bills. The subtle difference between the two species is qualitative. Leucocephalus has a distinctively Oriental quality from the North American variety in the same way that many Australian animals are distinctively Austrolasian. Wether this is a token of the metaphysics of quality or intelligent design theory it certainly isn’t a result of blind nature but a nature with visual acuity, telesis, and eidetic variation.
Jeremy,
you said, “Describing the CTMU (which is also very cryptic) seems to demand the use of neologisms”, I just want to point out that I don’t think it is the neologisms that are the problem, per se – metaphysical thinking requires that kind of nimbleness. I think the big problem for our communicating is that you seem to be working up to a picture from evidence, whereas I gave up on that procedure some time ago, and am not very interested in it. Don’t get me wrong, there is fun to be had with it, and I don’t want to discourage you (it seems like you have a lot of interesting things to offer), but it would take a lot of motivating to get me to go through it with you.
Complexity. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Perhaps it is a good topic for me to show that I’m coming at knowledge from a theoretic (a-priori) side, rather than an experience-based side. I believe that there is only one real i’dea. (ideas – without the intervening ” ‘ ” are just concepts within the i’dea.) That i’dea is best described as “I am”. It is inherently complex. It must be complex to be a real i’dea. Complexity is needed for it to be self-sufficient, metaphysically speaking. It must be self-bounding (self-defining). The eternal or noumenal aspect bounds the temporal or sub-noumenal aspects, and vice versa. The phenomenal aspect is a derivative representation of the super-phenomenal, creative aspects. The spiritual aspect is the tie between these two; it is “the life” of Jesus’ metaphysics. It is both sub-noumenal (the noumenon is “the truth”) and super-phenomenal (the phenomenal is “the way”).
“I am” is the complex of these three aspects.
In case you are interested, I’ll just leave off by assuring you that this “world-view” does do a number on such concepts as “the universe”. The only real i’dea is “I am”.
Tim
Here is a video I made in 2003 about ‘eidetic evolution’, a theory of how mental images generate all form in reality.
Who the heck voiced that video? The Cave of Wonders?
TOUCH ONLY THE LAMP.
Anyways, what you’re saying is BS.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html
We have experimental verification that shows how complexity can arise from simplicity, biologically speaking. Complexity is not metaphysical. You guys have got to stop appealing to ignorance when the evidence is literally put right in front of your face.
Also, teleology is worthless. It implies that evolution has a particular goal. It doesn’t. Evolution is blind — essentially a game of “whatever happens, happens.” The only “feedback” loop is between the organism and the environment. Survival traits like stretchy orangutan arms aren’t encoded in the DNA as “outward goal” advantages. The orangutan just has traits. Full stop. If those traits aren’t up to snuff, that orangutan will die before it’s able to reproduce, whereas the orangutans with slightly better arms would be able to feed/maneuver itself better and propagate its genes better, and so on and so forth. You can trace this kind of feedback all the way back to the simplest of organisms. Complexity is the result of a very dynamic, adaptive process.
Rubix, you do know that God of the CTMU is not derived from standard ID theory, right?
Anonymous: Chris is invoking an intelligent God to explain design. I am saying we don’t need to invoke intelligent design to explain evolution, and therefore we don’t need to invoke God. If you’re going to try to explain the mechanism that dictates the structure of a seemingly-intelligent universe that *allows* for evolution to even take place, then it’s a currently unknowable concept that we simply don’t have evidence for yet. However, why call it God, at that point? There is more evidence lending credence to the notion that the universe is *not* intelligently designed as it is.
Otherwise, please explain how Chris is defining “design by an intelligent God” in the CTMU.
These are based on logical positivist and scientific positivist assumptions that go back to early Lamarckian-Darwinian debates. Darwin believed in survival of the fittest while his predecessor Lamarck, the grandfather of evolution, said that species make themselves fit. Darwinists held on to the overly generalized version of SOV theory long after all the major progress was made in archaeology and paleontology. If survival traits were trial-and-error tests with the best traits leading to survival and the less best ones leading to extinction then we would most definitely, by easily inferrable anthropic evidence, have dug up literally millions of failed orangutans with odd physical characteristics. To picture it as all random trial-and-error would be contrary to the laws of probability.
The environment can’t blindly impose information or traits on an organism of a certain degree of complexity, yes multicells and organisms with very small metabolic lifespans have a direct feed-forward feed-backward relationship to their environment via charge-transfer complexes in the genetics that alter their physical traits. But we are expanding these processes past their limits once we get out of the water, the dynamics are far too ramified to be ascribed to these blind principles. Organisms rely less on their environment the higher up in the food chain we go (i.e., they become more fit, independent, and in control of their environment.) Directly linked environmental causes giveway to internal motivations. They must take into account the whole ecological dynamo and we don’t know how this information is given, the ecological dynamos are so many layered that complexity is more likely to be the cause rather than reduced physical processes or a closed theory of matter existing obliviously.
Jeremy:
“If survival traits were trial-and-error tests with the best traits leading to survival and the less best ones leading to extinction then we would most definitely, by easily inferrable anthropic evidence, have dug up literally millions of failed orangutans with odd physical characteristics.”
Uhhhh. This *IS* what we get. However, you’re assuming the rate of evolution is faster than it is. It’s not like a particular species of animal will give birth to some animals with fins, others with fur, others with ten eyes, etc. This is, again, your own fallacy of invoking complexity out of nowhere. Evolution is a typically a slow, gradual process. We find plenty of intermediates that show different stages of complexity.
The environment doesn’t impose “information” or traits on an organism — it provides a framework for which traits are tested, and passing that test allows you to propagate a slightly modified version of your genetic codes and therefore your traits. All organisms ultimately rely on the environment regardless of your position on the food chain, so I have no idea why you’re saying this (well, I do — ignorance).
Good Lord Almighty.
Rubix: “I won’t even address how funny it is that Chris intentionally avoids answering Andrew’s questions because he doesn’t understand quantum mechanics, himself.”
For those who may be unaware of it, “understanding quantum mechanics” is a tall order which few if any can rightfully fill. (If Andrew could fill it, then he’d obviously be able to answer his own quantum-mechanical questions.) Even the people who discovered the field didn’t claim to understand it; to this day, nobody quite knows how its founders managed to discover it.
As long as we’re on the general topic, I may as well mention that quantum mechanics has no satisfactory or for that matter ontologically sound interpretation *outside* the CTMU, something that could not be said if SCSPL were “just a set”. But again, that’s involved enough to be well over the heads of most readers … and as I’ve already explained, this forum is anything but an appropriate venue for such an explanation.
Sadly, there will be no public discussion, by me at least, of certain technical details of the CTMU until I’ve located or provided what I consider to be the right venue. For what it’s worth, I don’t expect this to be at all easy, especially with so many atheistic, materialistic forum-maggots crawling around deceitfully spewing disinformation and defaming any person or idea which runs afoul of their idiotic mindset.
Thus, I’m afraid that the cognitively impecunious Rubix, a self-styled Wall Street hero who never seems to have any intellectual cash to put where his alligator mouth happens to be, will have to prove his own points for a change. It’s simply not enough to overheat his motor mouth about the ideas of others when his comprehension dips so far into the red.
Rubix: “Sound ridiculous? So does your argument against evolution.”
I’m sorry, but I really can’t make sense of anything Rubix has written on this subject, including his droll bedtime story (in which I find myself and my ideas impossible to recognize). Perhaps Rubix should try using some mathematics, or some physics, or maybe just some logic. (I know he likes to accuse others of knowing nothing about these subjects, but that’s a sure sign of envy and insecurity.)
Absent that, perhaps Rubix should go ahead and roll out his champion Richard Dawkins. Unlike Rubix, Dawkins is a prominent atheistic evolutionist to whom people actually pay a bit of attention. At least he wouldn’t make as many stupid mistakes, or cling to them like such a tick … that is, until he reached a level of reasoning above the ceiling of his exacting but theologically vacuous intellectual frame.
Rubix: “You don’t seem to understand the difference between a tautology and a definition.”
Maybe that’s because sometimes, there isn’t any such difference. After all, propositional tautologies and their symbolic ingredients have mathematical definitions, and from a metalogical perspective, might even be described in themselves as “primitive definitions” which, though cognitively inevitable, collectively define truth in terms of logic functors and vice versa (via truth tables). Other kinds of definition are linked in this way as well.
I’ll come back to this below.
Rubix: “Even if you accept evolution, I’m not attacking you for that. I’m attacking you for invoking ID and trying to use crackpot pseudo-math and cranky physics to justify it.”
I recall mentioning ID in connection with ID *critics* like Rubix, but so help me, I can’t remember having relied on it. I also can’t recall using any “crackpot math and physics” in justification of it. Sadly, this makes me wonder anew whether Rubix is a pathological liar, an hysterical fruitcake, or a cynical shill holding forth on behalf of someone or something else.
Rubix: “Your argument against Occam’s Razor is also offbase and I won’t spend much time on it. It’s not supposed to help you find hidden variables — but it’s not preventing you from looking for them. It’s meant to keep hidden variable explanations out of the realm of “truth” until we have evidence for said variables. Otherwise, by definition, you are jumping to conclusions that may turn out to be wrong once the evidence rolls in, and you may be tacking on frameworks that actually explain none of the variance inherent in the results. That’s all there is to it.”
Exactly as I said, at least in part. I can’t say I’m not pleased to see that there is at least one thing on which Rubix understands that he’s been cornered like an outhouse rat. (Unfortunately, the admission merely prompts him to claim that this is what he really meant all along. C’est la vie.)
Rubix: “Newcomb’s Paradox is only a ‘paradox’ because it’s framed in an unsound way.”
So it seems that Robert Nozick, PhD, an eminent academic philosopher late of Harvard University, along with Martin Gardner of Scientific American, were nothing but cranks and frauds who saw paradox where Rubix swears there was none. Too bad the great Rubix wasn’t there to clue them in!
Clearly, Rubix needs to quit his day job on “Wall Street”, get busy with something other than licensed thievery for a change, and enlighten the world about all of this as quickly as possible.
Rubix: “Also, leave it to a crank philosopher to take credit for things unjustly. You’re aware that ideas for the Matrix philosophy have long predated you, right? Forget Nozick’s Experience Machine or Plato’s Allegory of the Cave or even the Buddhist Maya or Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream or Descartes’ Demon. Hell, forget Tron, which came out 7 years prior, or the Lawnmower Man (which began pre-production in 1988). Obviously your important paper which used the CTMU in 1989 was the first example of the Matrix philosophy. Give me a break, man.”
I hate to belabor the obvious, especially to such a preeminent philosophical genius. But there’s a very clear difference between Platonic philosophy (the Allegory of the Cave), cyberphilosophy (e.g., the Turing test, human intelligence, and consciousness), and Matrix philosophy (so-named because it was inspired by the movie of that title). There’s a common element, but no competent intellect would so thoughtlessly mangle the distinctions … e.g., whether computers and computation are explicitly involved, how the problem is mapped into the computational realm, whether there’s a computational world-simulation (“Matrix philosophy”), and so on.
However, that’s almost beside the point, given that Rubix is evidently having a great deal of difficulty telling the difference between written philosophy and the fluffy, frothy Hollywood movies from which he actually seems to have gotten most of his mathematical and philosophical “knowledge”. (Does anyone else wonder if this might be saying something about the philosophical expertise of “Rubix of Wall Street”, celebrated latter-day nemesis of Zeno of Elea?)
Now, I certainly don’t want to give the wrong impression. There could very well be a prior paper out there which uses roughly the same technique as I used in “The Resolution of Newcomb’s Paradox” / 1989. It’s just that out here in the sticks, far away from the teeming intellectual bazaar overspreading the splendiferous ivory tower complex of Greater Academistan, I’ve never heard a whisper of it. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, Rubix can set the record straight by putting us onto this philosophical milestone.
But if not, then perhaps Rubix will soon be transferring credit for the Apollo space program from those self-aggrandizing goldbricks Eisenhower and Kennedy to the Tinsel Town scriptwriter who adapted Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” for the silver screen.
Rubix: “I should add that your comments on Zeno’s Paradox further shows your mathematical ignorance. We fully understand the ‘why’ behind the answer.”
Really! Then Rubix needs to either prove it once and for all, or refer us to the papers in which it is proven or the comprehensive anthologies in which it is decided. (By the way, who on earth is “we”? It is important, when one assumes an imperious tone of intellectual authority, to let everyone know for exactly whom one claims to be speaking.)
“Zeno’s paradox is not a real paradox,” indeed. What a rollicking barrel full of slap-happy tail-pulling Wall Street monkeys!
Rubix: “You also overemphasize your importance and influence … The crankometer is screaming.”
How typical. First, Rubix repeatedly swoops out of a muddy sky with unprovoked attacks on something he claims I wrote about Newcomb’s paradox, but which I don’t recognize. His remarks are characteristically disordered and weirdly off-topic, so I don’t respond. But as ever, he mindlessly persists, tossing off scrap after snippet of total nonsense which betrays his complete ignorance of the paradox and my analysis of it (I still don’t know what it is of mine that he actually read, if anything).
So finally, in a merciful attempt to correct his bizarre misconceptions, I write a few words about my first paper on the topic. And what’s the response? In sweet revenge for my brutal attempt to shoehorn a few hated and feared bits of real information into his empty skull, he sanctimoniously accuses me of “overemphasizing my importance and influence”!
It’s a bit like accusing someone who throws a lifeline to a drowning victim of “assault with a rope”, or someone who brushes away a biting fly of “extreme cruelty to animals”. In RubixWorld, this is what passes for constructive dialogue.
Yes, no doubt about it – the crankometer is screaming bloody murder. But in this case, it is screaming the pseudonyms of zonked-out atheist-materialist fanatics calling themselves by absurd nicknames like “Rubix” and “John Fringe” … who, unfortunately, can’t reason their way out of a wet paper bag together, but lack the self-control to tape their own sleeptalking mouths shut in order to avoid embarrassing themselves.
Speaking of “John Fringe”:
John Fringe: “So evolution is not falsifiable because the facts known after the theory was proposed (like all the genetic stuff) are in agreement with the theory?”
First, one doesn’t need “all the genetic stuff” in order to parse the theory of evolution into its general components. Darwin formulated the theory of evolution without modern genetics while knowing full well that traits are passed from parent to offspring. Plants, insects, fish, reptiles, birds, mammals, even bacteria … all have offspring that resemble the parents. That’s what “reproduction” means; it’s all about the inheritance of traits, in contexts from biology to copying machines. (For someone who believes in dictionaries, Fringe doesn’t seem to consult one very often. May I suggest that he try an *English* dictionary?)
More generally: the meaning of what I wrote about the unfalsifiability of Darwinian evolution, if Fringe actually bothered to read any of it before putting nimble monkey fingers to sweat-sodden keyboard, is that the basic relationship between the conceptual components of the theory of evolution could have been logically deduced by a sufficiently adept theorist.
With all due respect, it is possible that Darwin, while surely no stranger to genius, may not have been that adept a theorist, and this may be why he was compelled to board the H.M.S. Beagle, sail to the Galapagos Islands, and painstakingly record his observations. But then again, Darwin’s voyage of discovery was probably a good idea even if he already understood the tautological nature of his thesis. After all, presenting a theory along with an application or two, not to mention a bit of adventure, makes it easier for most people to understand and can ease its acceptance. It’s a matter of salesmanship.
But one way or the other, one of the more unfortunate consequences of Darwin’s approach – among its many strong points, of course – is that today, most biologists are under the erroneous impression that evolution as a whole is falsifiable when in fact, it is not. Specific applications of evolution are falsifiable; there’s no doubt about that. But the theory as a whole is unfalsifiable for exactly the reasons I gave, end of story.
Does this mean that the theory of evolution is “not science”? Of course not. In fact, the theory of evolution, being a tautology, is so broad that it spans science in its entirety, which is why we see applications of it popping up all over the place, from biology to computer science to cosmology. Tautologies apply to all kinds of science, not just those in which they were first employed.
What kind of tautology are we talking about? Again, it has to do with the physical embedment of an organism in its environment, on which its survival and reproduction thus critically depend. This is a “tautology” because there’s no way out of it; it is always true by the nature of the organism-environment relationship. While it is obviously not a propositional tautology of sentential logic, it is nevertheless a tautological formation of language, namely, a pair of terms – “organism” and “environment”, or “adaptation” and “selection”, or “evolution” and “nature”, pick any or all – which are recursively defined on each other, or equivalently, on the relationship between their definitions.
Of course, Fringe and Rubix will claim that this is not a tautology at all. But as long as Fringe believes so strongly in the use of dictionaries, why not have a look in the dictionary right now to see what it has to say about the word “tautology”? After all, if Fringe and Rubix were to consult the dictionary more often, perhaps they wouldn’t always leave everybody with the distinct impression that their thoughts are as jumbled and odiferous as the contents of a restaurant dumpster.
Remember how I referred Mark to the Wikipedia definition of “set”? Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about tautology: “Tautology may refer to: (1) Tautology (rhetoric), using different words to say the same thing even if the repetition does not provide clarity. [That’s a somewhat clumsy reference to generic linguistic redundancy which is not confined to rhetoric.] (2) Tautology also means a series of self-reinforcing statements that cannot be disproved because the statements depend on the assumption that they are already correct. [Pay close attention to this one, as it is the kind of tautology that describes the overall theory of evolution; “disproved” corresponds to “falsified”.] (3) Tautology (logic), a technical notion in formal logic, universal unconditioned truth, always valid.” [That’s propositional tautology, to which the other kinds are clearly related.]
(Incidentally, I recall seeing that Mark has a rant on tautology posted to this site. Why doesn’t Fringe see if The Great Man himself will argue his side of the case? As matters now stand, it couldn’t possibly hurt.)
This brings us to the place where petulant airheads like Fringe and Rubix so often go completely overboard: they simultaneously subscribe to a total break between science and the tautological basis of veracity, and an absolute linkage between science and falsifiability. But really now, how twisted around can something get? As verification and falsification (verification of a negative) are just flip sides of the same logical coin, this is totally asinine, even if occasionally taught in universities by highly credentialed logical illiterates.
Science can be understood only with full allowance for the nature of tautology and the limits of falsification, and Fringe and Rubix clearly understand neither. They believe that the content of science is never tautological, yet always falsifiable; they exclude the basis of truth from science, yet include the possibility of falsehood. This is consistent only insofar as once one foolishly purges science of any trace of universal truth (i.e., tautology), one had *better* allow falsification, as it’s all that one can possibly hope for! But when the light finally comes on, it turns out to be inconsistent with logic and the spirit of science, according to which truth is really what it’s all about.
Of course, to those steeped in the ongoing Internet pogrom against the enemies of militant evolutionism, this may all sound too facile. How could it possibly be so easy to get the better of all those highly educated biologists and other scientists out there … the ones who are always claiming that the theory of evolution as a whole can be falsified just like everything else in science?
It’s really very simple. First, it’s quite true that specific applications of evolution are often falsifiable even though this turns out not to extend to the overall theory of evolution. But despite the widespread belief that scientists alone should have the last word on evolution, there are surprisingly many amateurs out there who seem to have better comprehension of its overall structure than the average scientist. Most scientists can recite the scientific method from start to finish, but are woefully unequipped to analyze and logically reduce it, just as (e.g.) an expert auto mechanic is unequipped to design or repair a catalytic converter or an engine computer. (I hate to sound disrespectful, but when it comes to this topic, give me a scientist or an academic of any kind, and unless he knows more than he picked up in science class alone, I’ll hand you back his posterior seasoned with teriyaki and ginger.)
Last but not least – as I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere, “pseudonymous CTMU critic” is virtually synonymous with “abject brainless piss ant” (no offense to anyone, but that’s been my experience over the last couple of decades, and I strongly believe in heeding past experience). Yet the nickname “John Fringe”, assuming that’s what it is, plainly evokes a conflation of the TV show “Fringe” and the actor (John Noble) who plays its central character, a brilliant and courageous if mentally skewed scientist.
Except for the skewed mentation, such a nickname doesn’t seem a good fit for our own Mr. Fringe. So why doesn’t he choose a new one more befitting his image?
Or perhaps he could simply grow a pair, drag himself in from the cold, and come clean along with his undercover partner in crime, Rubix.
ATTENTION Mark CC: You really need to stand up and take a little responsibility for what goes on in your own forum. On the heels of our exchange regarding your CTMU critique, these participants are making a fool of you. My sincere advice: exercise a little damage control, and take charge of your own side of the discussion you started at the top of this page.
After all, it’s in your own best interests. When somebody owns a house, and he knowingly lets it be used as ground zero for thieves, robbers, con men, and other assorted criminals and ne’er-do-wells, he must take legal and moral responsibility for his role as their facilitator. He may not get caught in the early stages of the operation, but in the end, he finds it impossible to hide.
Intellectually speaking, your present situation is directly analogous. Since you’ll ultimately have to take responsibility for enabling the brain-dead but nonetheless despicable antics of these imbeciles on your behalf, why not take the bull by the horns right here and now, and start fighting your own battles? After all, this isn’t about some dispute that randomly arose in your comments section; this is a dispute that you started several years ago, right up there at the top of the page!
I’m just trying to be helpful. These people you’ve got arguing for you are a disgrace, and wasting time on such gremlins is not what passes for intellectual stimulation in my neck of the woods. You might think that they’re shielding you, but the shield is as soft and full of holes as a slice of Gruyere, and you may one day be forced to wear it like a moldy breastplate.
Wouldn’t you rather do yourself proud, and sally forth to cover your own side of the debate?
Wow, that’s a lot of text to say nothing, but very beautiful. Can you make it rhyme?
P.S.: Congratulations to the manufacturers of keyboards. This guy will pay your children’s studies.
P.S.2: I admit I was wrong. I recommended you to buy a dictionary. I shouldn’t: you don’t know how to use it.
P.S.3: I would love to argue with you why Rubix and I believe in evolution (and maybe that other guy, I can’t recall his name, but I swear there was another guy who thinks evolution is a good theory), but in all that writing you forgot to give an argument on why evolution is a tautology. I mean, I don’t take any of these as arguments:
– you not liking academia
– you not liking my name
– you asking for conditions no one is interested
– you listing definitions of tautology, none applicable to “evolution”
– you freely asserting otherwise (it is a tautology)
– you ranting on academia and amateurs
– you watching too much TV
– my monkey using my keyboard (and refuting you)
– you ranting about anonymity
– you ranting about Mark not removing my posts
– you spending vast amounts of time with your typing practices
– …
One thing is true: The legal threats may be more practical than those about god’s punishments.
But I think you’ll have a very difficult lawsuit after calling us “imbeciles” so many times. In my country, saying that evolution is not a tautology is still not illegal.
But good try, anyway.
Chris:
This shouldn’t be hard for someone with an awesome intellect like yours to comprehend. But I’ll go ahead and explain it to you anyway.
No one here is arguing for me. The people who continue to argue with you are arguing for themselves, because they find it interesting or entertaining. As long as they continue to find it worthwhile, they’re perfectly welcome to continue to do it.
No one is shielding me. If I felt the need to defend myself, I would.
Personally, I just think that you’re a waste of time. Why?
Most importantly, you’re an obvious, dreadful, boring crank. I lost interest in this discussion when your dodging on the definition of sets became so obvious. You’re playing such a shallow, foolish game. Your “theory” relies on a supposed contradiction. But that contradiction is a classic example of the self-inclusion paradoxes that plague naive set theory. The entire argument is nothing but rubbish – if you build on an inconsistent basis, you get an inconsistent result. Naive set theory is inconsistent, and you use it to get an inconsistent result. All of your weaseling verbiage is irrelevant – you refuse to address that key point, and I think it’s perfectly clear why.
In addition to that, I think that you’re a troll. You argue that you don’t have the time or interest to actually discuss your “theory” here – but you come back, time and time again, spending foolish amounts of time writing insulting diatribes about how the other commenters aren’t worth your time. That would make no sense unless you’re a troll. And you simultaneously argue that (a) the fact that you have absolutely no qualifications at all is irrelevant to any discussion of your “theory”; (b) that all academic and scientific credentialing is broken, stupid, and pointless; and (c) that you will not discuss your “theory” with anyone who lacks the credentials that you disdain.
I simply can’t take you seriously. Either you’re one of the most self-unaware nitwits that I’ve ever seen, or you’re an intelligent but malicious troll. Either way, I find you boring.
Chris Langan has a way with words that is unmatched since Rod Serling.
The best comment so far, IMHO XD XD XD
Chris:
You argued that evolution was unfalsifiable. I gave you clear examples of why this was false. You argued back saying “Well, any contradictory evidence you find will just get treated as a local anomaly or explained away as a way to keep evolution from being labeled as false.” So, to directly give an analogy, I gave you a story of something that involved a falsifiable concept (gravity) and some apparently-contradictory evidence (floating ball) and a logical explanation as to why it doesn’t necessarily mean we should falsify the theory based on that evidence (windy beaches, our knowledge of forces, etc).
There is a huge difference between an unfalsifiable theory and a theory that has evidence in support of it that is very hard to falsify in itself. Intelligent Design is unfalsifiable because any time you invoke the divine, you’re talking about something outside of science and empirical testing. When you do that, there’s no way we can verify if you’re right or wrong. Thus, it isn’t scientific or falsifiable.
As for tautologies, I am saying that you misattribute the tautologies to the falsification metric. All evidence and explanation can be reworded into a tautology. That doesn’t mean all theories are therefore tautological. You said “organisms are bound to the environment tautologically” without acknowledging that technically it isn’t the point of the theory! The theory explains the specific interactions between organism and environment that we call “selection” and how this selection contributes to what we see in terms of evolutionary output. That mechanism is a falsifiable process and I gave you an example of how it could be so.
You said, and I quote: “I merely hold that for various reasons, evolution is an incomplete explanation of what it purports to explain, and that God and divine creativity must be added to it in order to complete the explanation.” Call it ID, call it Creationism, call it divine inspiration — I don’t care. My point is that you’re invoking some sort of divine creativity/intelligence, as you stated, and this is what I am criticizing you for, to be clear. As for “crackpot math and physics” I refer to your CTMU at large (SCSPL, telic recursion, UBT, your interpretation of universal powersets, etc etc). It also seems like “supertautologies” don’t say anything that the Anthropic Principle doesn’t already imply. Correct me there if I am wrong.
You still haven’t answered my questions: What do you think divine inspiration is required for that evolution cannot explain? How do you define God and intelligence in the first place, and why do you call it as such?
Onto Newcomb’s Paradox again: Great, more fallacy by appeal to authority from your side, which I’ve already told you is bogus. I can point to the Monty Hall problem, where countless PhDs fumbled the ball. Nozick’s great, but that doesn’t mean this paradox is a good question. I’ve already explained to you why the paradox is an unsound problem due to the paradox of having free will yet not having free will at the same time. If you disagree and think the problem is sound, explain why we should bother.
As for the Matrix stuff… I’m saying the ideas behind the Matrix are everywhere and have been done before, from the epistemology to the cyberpunk elements to the fusion of the two. It’s a little presumptuous to imply that your paper was the first example of the philosophy when the underlying philosophies have existed for years and have spawned the exact same types of debates that the Matrix has. Not only that, but practically identical plots have appeared long before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality_in_fiction
Honestly, man, you seriously need to get off the high horse and pay attention to reality once in a while and actually look at the evidence before you just go spouting off claims with no substantiation or attention to facts at all whatsoever. Simply sticking your fingers in your ears and blindly asserting “No! That’s wrong!” when I can literally show you evidence is just insane.
I should also note that you don’t even need Matrix philosophy to resolve Newcomb’s Paradox because the problem is unsound to begin with. You can’t be able to predict yet NOT predict at the same time. No amount of mapping will work without that mapping being flawed in itself. But your solution seems to just state that we can’t deny the Demon his framework and therefore we should just choose the black box because his pre-trial runs were spot-on (meaning that we just skip the paradox problem altogether by just making a selection that results in a big payout). Not being able to deny a paradoxical framework doesn’t mean the framework actually makes sense. We could easily change the dollar figures of this problem to make the utilitarian interpretations a lot less obvious.
“Really! Then Rubix needs to either prove [Zeno’s Paradox] once and for all, or refer us to the papers in which it is proven or the comprehensive anthologies in which it is decided. (By the way, who on earth is “we”? It is important, when one assumes an imperious tone of intellectual authority, to let everyone know for exactly whom one claims to be speaking.) ”
By “we” I mean mathematicians. Competent mathematicians don’t have much of a beef with Zeno’s Paradox whatsoever because it’s so obviously resolved through the framework of calculus. Even physically, there’s no problem (you don’t need to invoke discrete spacetime to simply bypass the problem altogether). The only “controversy” that exists really only exists in the minds of those that want the problem to be more complicated than it really is.
Let me give you another example that is more obvious due to its nonconvergent nature. Thomson’s Lamp. I have a fixed time interval t. At time t/2, I switch the lamp from off to on. At 3t/4, I switch it from on to off. I continue flipping the lamp on and off whenever I have half the remaining time left. At t=1, is the lamp on or off?
This is a more intuitive example to understand why even Zeno’s Paradox is not really a paradox. It’s only a paradox if you frame the problem improperly. We’ve defined the problem in a way where we can’t ever reach the end, and yet we’re asked to think about it anyway. We could argue that the lamp is both on AND off at t=1 (if we want to say [S = 1 – 1 + 1 – 1 + … = 1 – S] or [S = 1/2]), but this doesn’t make sense and isn’t a valid solution because the mathematical limit of that particular series doesn’t technically exist. It’s easy, here, to see why this problem is an abuse of the infinitesimal for the sake of providing a solution that makes no physical sense.
So we again come back to Zeno’s Paradox, which is harder to intuit because we’re actually converging towards a particular number (in this case d=1). Eventually it will boil down to the question of whether or not we should be able to move at all. Obviously, any amount of movement can be thought of as a finite amount that can be infinitely subdivided. Paradox resolves itself right there, mathematically. It doesn’t make sense to think about an “infinitesimal” amount of movement because it isn’t a finite amount that means anything by itself, physically. In other words, we can move through an infinite number of points in a finite amount of time. Finite numbers can be rearranged in terms of infinite sums. Even though we may be talking about smaller and smaller distances, we’re also looking at smaller intervals of time. That’s why it’s silly to ask “if they’ll ever reach the destination.” Of course they will. But we will never reach it, personally, if we are forcing ourselves to look at fractions of the remaining distance. Those who cry “paradox!” usually make this illogical leap from “infinitely many sub-steps” to “never reaching the destination,” which is false.
A better question might be “Why is reality/experience continuous?” An even better question than that might be “Can you think of it being any other way?” Like I said before, math describes reality. It doesn’t always make sense to then flip it and expect reality to describe math.
“What kind of tautology are we talking about? Again, it has to do with the physical embedment of an organism in its environment, on which its survival and reproduction thus critically depend.”
Strength/consistency is not the same as unfalsifiability. Strength/consistency is not the same as unfalsifiability. Strength/consistency is not the same as unfalsifiability. What you’re describing here as a tautology is really just evidence in high agreement with a theory that can also predict. “Organisms depend on the environment” is not a tautology because we could easily envision a falsifying scenario where organisms were somehow completely independent entities that were unlinked from the same causal attributes (perhaps they don’t really need food — if we removed food, and organisms lived anyway, this would be an example). This isn’t what we see, though, so theory holds true. Similarly, it could be the case that somehow selection fails because dying organisms are still able to pass on their genetic materials even if they die at the hands of the environment or better organisms. Again, we don’t see this. What we see isn’t unfalsifiability, but theoretical strength and consistency.
I can concede that in practice, evolution probably isn’t falsifiable on a PRACTICAL level, but not because it’s guilty of the same problems that ID is, but because it has so much evidence in its favor that falsifying it would be damn near impossible since we’d probably always have a way to explain contradictory evidence. It’s why I wrote that story about gravity. It’s falsifiable, but you’re probably not going to find a serious falsification just because you encounter some strange anomalies you may not immediately understand. Falsification needs to be rigorous in itself, too.
On the other hand, what does ID offer? No predictions, no real explanations. It can’t be falsified, and not even just on a pragmatic level. It can’t be falsified, period — because it’s ultimately an appeal to concepts that go beyond our natural world. Any amount of explanation that is piled on in natural terms can always be shoved inside the bucket of “some external intelligence.”
*”That doesn’t mean all theories are therefore unfalsifiable,” sorry
“Science can be understood only with full allowance for the nature of tautology and the limits of falsification, and Fringe and Rubix clearly understand neither. They believe that the content of science is never tautological, yet always falsifiable; they exclude the basis of truth from science, yet include the possibility of falsehood. This is consistent only insofar as once one foolishly purges science of any trace of universal truth (i.e., tautology), one had *better* allow falsification, as it’s all that one can possibly hope for! But when the light finally comes on, it turns out to be inconsistent with logic and the spirit of science, according to which truth is really what it’s all about.”
No, tautologies are everywhere. But I think you are confusing high levels of theoretical agreement with unfalsifiability, and you are confusing tautologies with absolute scientific truths.
Again, to sum up, just because something is highly consistent and predictive doesn’t make it unfalsifiable. It means it’s a good theory well-backed by evidence, which is what we’d want in an ideal theory because it’s the best we can hope for. If you can’t think of any good way to falsify a theory because the evidence is so obviously in its favor, then that’s great!
Lastly, just because we have logical tautologies doesn’t mean we suddenly have absolute knowledge or universal truths. A tautology is not technically new knowledge, and it’s technically not always well-formed if your variables are nonsensical statements (such as the “Present King of France” example). Logic is, ultimately, a framework. That framework is entirely dependent on our natural world, which provides us with our axioms we take to be self-evident statements of truth. It doesn’t mean you suddenly have access to what “absolute reality really is” based on what you know of the natural world.
Yes, I think certain logical elements need to be in place in order for a reality to make sense, but I don’t think you can answer the question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” with logic alone. I don’t think it’s a question we *can* know with certainty. In my mind, the answer is simply “Existence can’t exist any other way” and at some point we have to just accept something as true. Call that mindset capitulatory and passive, but to quote Feynman, I’d rather live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. Some questions may just inherently ungraspable or unknowable.
You also aren’t going to answer these questions in a very satisfying way if you’re just going to invoke mediums of pure potential like UBT or loophole answers like telic-recursion or self-determinacy. None of these concepts really address the core questions that actually burn in everyone’s minds when we ask big questions about the universe. Your CTMU, to me, just proves that we’re all still ultimately bound by science, and we can’t really do any better than that where truth is concerned.
As a side note to The Matrix discussion. The Wachowski brothers drew their inspiration from many sources many of whom were contemporary writers that did not receive mention. Of the one’s that did receive mention, in the philosophical department, there was of course the elder of Matrix philosophy: French postmodern heavyweight and critical sociologist Jean Baudrillard.
Baudrillard was very popular among intellectuals in the 80’s and began his career as a student and translator of Roland Barthes who wrote about semiology and a book about Japanese culture called Empire of the Sign. Matrix philosophy officially goes back to 1974 when Baudrillard wrote Symbolic Exchange and Death in which he introduced the concept of cultural reproduction, the simulacrum attributing it to the industrial mode of economic production. His book Simulacra and Simulation appeared in French in 1981 and this book was a milestone for many of the early cyberpunk enthusiasts among the New York scene as well as the Simulationist movement in art. After the release of the first Matrix episode, the staff of the Wachowski brothers got in touch with Baudrillard hoping to get him involved in the making of the two sequels but he refused. Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland was also used a lot in the film; the white rabbit, the red and blue pills.
The Wachowski brothers were deeply rooted in a lot of the subcultural movements that were going on at the time. They also picked up on a few of these unmentioned contributors from “the underground” not only awareness of the early CTMU but also African American writers whose names I can no longer recall. The whole idea of a simulated version of 1999 having been taking place in the distant future inhabited by AI’s is familiar to futurists like Ray Kurzweil who wrote about the technological singularity (2001, 2010 and Terminator 2 were also precursors .) Not only this but telic causality has it’s position in the matrix as a future point or singularity of technological emergence (“….you believe it to be the year 1999 when in fact it’s closer to 2199”.) So yes, there was more “outside the mainstream” influence to the actual Matrix culture than the public is aware of and Langan’s work was an integral part of that cultural continuum. Any futurist, cybernaut or transhumanist worth their salt will tell you this. Another interesting observation, those who saw Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (that also starred Kianu Reaves) will remember the time machine was a phone booth. The Matrix writers reused this archetypal symbol again in The Matrix as the vehicle for transport out of the Matrix.
I link, again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_%28person%29#Common_characteristics_of_cranks
It’s sad that I can practically paste the entire thing and have it apply.
According to these authors, virtually universal characteristics of cranks include:
1. Cranks overestimate their own knowledge and ability, and underestimate that of acknowledged experts.
2. Cranks insist that their alleged discoveries are urgently important.
3. Cranks rarely, if ever, acknowledge any error, no matter how trivial.
4. Cranks love to talk about their own beliefs, often in inappropriate social situations, but they tend to be bad listeners, and often appear to be uninterested in anyone else’s experience or opinions.
Some cranks exhibit a lack of academic achievement, in which case they typically assert that academic training in the subject of their crank belief is not only unnecessary for discovering “the truth”, but actively harmful because they believe it “poisons” the minds by teaching falsehoods. Others greatly exaggerate their personal achievements, and may insist that some achievement (real or alleged) in some entirely unrelated area of human endeavor implies that their cranky opinion should be taken seriously.
Some cranks claim vast knowledge of any relevant literature, while others claim that familiarity with previous work is entirely unnecessary; regardless, cranks inevitably reveal that whether or not they believe themselves to be knowledgeable concerning relevant matters of fact, mainstream opinion, or previous work, they are not in fact well-informed concerning the topic of their belief.
In addition, many cranks:
1. Seriously misunderstand the mainstream opinion to which they believe that they are objecting,
2. Stress that they have been working out their ideas for many decades, and claim that this fact alone entails that their belief cannot be dismissed as resting upon some simple error,
3. Compare themselves with Galileo or Copernicus (or in a religious context, Noah), implying that the mere unpopularity of some belief is in itself evidence of plausibility,
4. Claim that their ideas are being suppressed, typically by secret intelligence organizations, mainstream science, powerful business interests, or other groups which, they allege, are terrified by the possibility of their revolutionary insights becoming widely known, appear to regard themselves as persons of unique historical importance.
Cranks who contradict some mainstream opinion in some highly technical field, such as mathematics or physics, almost always:
1. Exhibit a marked lack of technical ability,
2. Misunderstand or fail to use standard notation and terminology,
3. Ignore fine distinctions which are essential to correctly understand mainstream belief.
That is, cranks tend to ignore any previous insights which have been proven by experience to facilitate discussion and analysis of the topic of their cranky claims; indeed, they often assert that these innovations obscure rather than clarify the situation.
In addition, cranky scientific “theories” do not in fact qualify as theories as this term is commonly understood within science. For example, crank “theories” in physics typically fail to result in testable predictions, which makes them unfalsifiable and hence unscientific. Or the crank may present their ideas in such a confused manner that it is impossible to determine what they are actually claiming.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
It’s honestly hard to calculate Langan’s total here because there’s just too much evidence.
Let’s see what applies:
2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 14, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 33, 34, 35, 36, and most of all, 37.
That’s at least well over 300 points, plus extra points from multi-hitting categories like 2, 3, 4, 5, and 14. I think it’s safe to say that it’s not Langan’s IQ that’s off the charts, but his Crackpot Index.
By the way, I was careful in my selection of which attributes applied. Feel free to cry foul and I’ll point to direct evidence, anywhere you’d like. Unfortunately, this thread has gotten so long that almost nobody is going to read it. I just urge everyone reading this to do a simple Ctrl+F and search for “Chris Langan” so you can see his replies for yourself and how brilliantly they fit these categories of crankitude.
There’s no way to reason with someone who *seriously and honestly* believes that their ill-formed paper on Newcomb’s Paradox was the first example of Matrix philosophy.
http://www.megasociety.org/noesis/44/newcomb.html
Yeah, and I invented the iPod.
Oh, and I almost forgot:
“More generally: the meaning of what I wrote about the unfalsifiability of Darwinian evolution, if Fringe actually bothered to read any of it before putting nimble monkey fingers to sweat-sodden keyboard, is that the basic relationship between the conceptual components of the theory of evolution could have been logically deduced by a sufficiently adept theorist. ”
This is just outright false. Even if you reason out the concept of evolution from an armchair, you still need to test the genetic mechanisms and look at the evidence to make sure it’s actually true.
So when you say “one doesn’t need ‘all the genetic stuff’ in order to parse the theory of evolution into its general components,” you’re talking ignorance. The study of genetics is *essential* to explain the components of evolution. Like I said, even if we had no fossils, evolution would still be watertight. You can ignore it all you want, but it’s not going to make you right no matter how much you whine that evolution is unfalsifiable. It’s simply untrue, but you’re too unreasonable to admit that you screwed up and conflated unfalsifiable theories with very well-supported ones.
You could falsify evolution if the genetics didn’t explain what we see in the Earth, in the labs, and out in the field, or if we saw true chimeras, or if we had an obviously static fossil record, etc. But you’ll just continue to ignore these and continue hammering forth your mantra even though you’ve been shown outright that you’re incorrect.
Based on you calling Wall Street types “licensed thieves”, I can go ahead and guess what you think of most professions in finance, law, insurance, and with major, environmentally, socially, and economically destructive corporations. They’re obviously evil, and even people who engage in what are typically thought of as virtuous careers (engineers, doctors, scientists, whatever) who aid them either directly or indirectly should be ashamed as well.
My question is, how does someone go about living their life virtuously when it seems that almost all of the opportunities and options available to them seem corrupted to a (usually) large degree? This is obviously a very broad question and I have no clue how you’d go about answering, but I personally would like to see someone with as clear a head as yours offer this clarity to help the average person navigate a modern, corporate world that unnecessarily confuses their moral decision-making ability at every turn.
Also, if you’re going to write it, offer it for free.
Flaneur, Chris,
Flaneur, I’d like to offer something on your question / problem: “how does someone go about living their life virtuously when it seems that almost all of the opportunities and options available to them seem corrupted”. Chris said: “Thanks for the suggestion, flaneur. I do indeed have a global system of ethics that reconciles all levels of utility including the corporate level. Never fear, it’s in the pipeline.”, and that’s about as fearful a thing as I can imagine!
Flaneur, I suppose you haven’t read anything of me above? Just jumping in:
The thing about moral living is that it is objectively better. If it were worse, it wouldn’t work, and it wouldn’t be moral. But it can take a while for immoral orders to fail. That’s where we’re at. In this case, moral living may seem – at least if one has a short-sighted and/or provincial outlook – all risk and no reward.
Flaneur, it seems like this is a good place for encouragement, but I don’t know you. From this one post it seems as if you care, and maybe the best thing it just to say don’t give up on that. Don’t worry (this isn’t to say don’t think at all) about “global system”. Don’t kill your own conscience. Keep your spirit inclined to the objectively better moral order that would prevail if only…
Chris and I see this problem oppositely, I’m afraid. (But, who knows but Chris?) This isn’t about a “system”. In fact, Jesus reportedly said, “be not of this system.” The metaphysics I offer (Howison), has plural “I am” living (/working) harmoniously together because they are not complex enough to do otherwise. The phenomenal world (system) you “know” is a derivative representation of living, super-phenomenal I’deas, “I am”, all perfectly equivalent noumenally. Howison and I offer an I’dealism as opposed to a materialism. From this perspective the objective betterness of moral living is easy to confirm.
Now, the problem with the current world order is that it all-but precludes true moral living. It is not designed for free “I am”. Neither are mature “I am” permitted the freedom to follow their convictions, nor are immature “I am” encouraged to maturity. In fact, if you wanted to design an order that was less conducive to moral living, I don’t think you could do it! Things have to be pretty good for people to accept an immoral order; if they get much worse than that, people go ahead and suffer for their God again. But, on the other hand, a moral order in an unpopulous earth is real vulnerable; so the fact that the earth is now populous may justify some hope.
The solution, then: If justice is to be possible, people must be free to refrain from injustice.
This principle needs to be incorporated into society at large. Or, do you see any way around it? The reason why society is immoral is precisely the reason why you struggle to find a moral place: society is designed to preclude moral living! “If you want to live, pay your dues.” The solution is real old: make sure the poor are cared for. If the poor are cared for, everyone is cared for. If the poor aren’t cared for, and if they are forced to give up the path of morality to survive…
Guarantee everyone the savage necessities. Guarantee. Then there could be a sort of phase change. If moral living is truly better, it will happen spontaneously. No need for Chris’ global system monster. Chris, in you plans, make sure to leave some pressure release valve at the bottom so I can get out.
Tim
Thanks for the suggestion, flaneur. I do indeed have a global system of ethics that reconciles all levels of utility including the corporate level. Never fear, it’s in the pipeline.
And now, I regret that must once again put my feet on a hard place, and my shoulder to the Sisyphean rock that is “Good Math, Bad Math”.
Mark Chu-Carroll: “This shouldn’t be hard for someone with an awesome intellect like yours to comprehend. But I’ll go ahead and explain it to you anyway. No one here is arguing for me. The people who continue to argue with you are arguing for themselves, because they find it interesting or entertaining. As long as they continue to find it worthwhile, they’re perfectly welcome to continue to do it.”
So you say. But of course, when people rely on pseudonyms, they could be anyone … even you.
Mark Chu-Carroll: “No one is shielding me. If I felt the need to defend myself, I would.”
Trust me, you have a need to defend yourself. I’ve caught you in all kinds of mathematical errors, several of them quite serious. I could catch you in many more. If I wished to do so, I could fuel an entire blog with your errors. (Fortunately for you, I probably won’t.)
Mark Chu-Carroll: “Personally, I just think that you’re a waste of time. Why?”
That’s alright. You don’t have to tell me why. But something tells me that here it comes anyway.
Mark Chu-Carroll: “Most importantly, you’re an obvious, dreadful, boring crank.”
A “crank”? Whatever you do, Mark, don’t drop that mirror – it’s seven years of bad luck.
I’m terribly sorry that you find me boring. It’s just that every time you’ve opened your mouth, errors have leaked out … billowing, gas-giant errors that positively cry out for correction. I find it fascinating that someone intelligent enough to possess your (reputed) programming skill set (there’s that hated word again) is so deficient in metacognitive presence that he can’t catch a single one of them for the life of him.
Mark Chu-Carroll: “I lost interest in this discussion when your dodging on the definition of sets became so obvious. You’re playing such a shallow, foolish game. Your “theory” relies on a supposed contradiction. But that contradiction is a classic example of the self-inclusion paradoxes that plague naive set theory.”
That’s a very interesting thesis. The problem with it is that while my work has never relied on naïve set theory in any way, the only contradiction you claim to have found in it stems from … naïve set theory! More puzzling still, no matter how many times this is pointed out to you, you can’t seem to wrap your mind around it.
Once I’d examined your anti-CTMU, anti-Langan tirade and noticed your complete misunderstanding of certain basic terms that you were ironically accusing *me* of not understanding (“set”, “set theory”, “model”, “syntax”, etc.), I became very curious. How, I asked myself, could somebody like this graduate from college in a math-related discipline? How can he issue a critique this incoherent while managing to convince himself that he’s actually saying something intelligible?
I still don’t know for sure how to answer these questions, and to be honest, it nags at me. People who can’t see directly in front of their faces are a dangerous chronic malady of the human race.
Mark Chu-Carroll: “But that contradiction is a classic example of the self-inclusion paradoxes that plague naive set theory. The entire argument is nothing but rubbish – if you build on an inconsistent basis, you get an inconsistent result. Naive set theory is inconsistent, and you use it to get an inconsistent result. All of your weaseling verbiage is irrelevant – you refuse to address that key point, and I think it’s perfectly clear why.”
After the number of times I’ve told you that the CTMU has nothing whatsoever to do with naïve set theory, your refusal to come to grips with it is nothing short of pathological. You need professional help, Mark, and I’m not kidding about that. I happen to know a PhD neuropsychologist (topnotch degree, research background, hospital residency, the whole nine yards). Would you like me to have her explain to you how you can obtain treatment?
Mark Chu-Carroll: “In addition to that, I think that you’re a troll. You argue that you don’t have the time or interest to actually discuss your “theory” here – but you come back, time and time again, spending foolish amounts of time writing insulting diatribes about how the other commenters aren’t worth your time. That would make no sense unless you’re a troll.”
I beg to differ. There are two main reasons I’ve taken so much of my valuable time to respond to you and your friends.
First, I do it for the sake of those whom you’re misinforming about my work. When you tell lies about somebody and his ideas, as you’ve been doing here, you don’t have the luxury of complaining when he takes the time to set things straight. After all, busy people land on your site, glance at your self-promotional blurb (in which you almost make it appear that you know what you’re talking about), read the top of the page, and then glance at the most recent (usually uncomplimentary) comments at the bottom of the page. On the strength of what they see, some of them erroneously assume that your critique is some sort of expert consensus, as opposed to the aimless bloviation of just another opinionated part-time blogger whose “math expertise” is confined to writing boilerplate code, and who is weighted down by the bursting load of pseudonymous toadies in his pants. Many people get their information from the Internet these days, and the half-baked output of people like you can gather undeserved momentum.
Secondly, I do it because I have a hard time giving up on people. You know next to nothing about my ideas, yet have held forth on them very unkindly and very inexpertly. Unfortunately for you, there’s much more to them than you’re apparently capable of grasping, and I really do think that you may suffer for this somewhere down the line. Many people, including you, will probably at some point see you as a reprehensible character if not a complete idiot.
Remember, the average person wouldn’t dream of attacking somebody for no good reason the way you’ve attacked me and others in this blog. Even where the ideas you criticize are mistaken (as some may have been), well-meaning people simply don’t behave the way you do.
Mark Chu-Carroll: And you simultaneously argue that (a) the fact that you have absolutely no qualifications at all is irrelevant to any discussion of your “theory”; (b) that all academic and scientific credentialing is broken, stupid, and pointless; and (c) that you will not discuss your “theory” with anyone who lacks the credentials that you disdain.”
(a) I’m not entirely without qualifications. Like everyone else, I have my own particular combination of intelligence, intuition, talent, and knowledge. It’s just that I lack the qualifications written in fancy calligraphy on the very expensive tickets called “degrees”. (Some people assume that this is entirely my fault, but it’s not quite that simple.) In fact, I wouldn’t trade the qualifications I have for any number of doctorates in any number of academic fields from any number of universities. I can already squash most academics, if need be in their own fields; why trade that for being one of them?
(b) It’s hardly my fault that the academic credentialization process is broken. Nevertheless, it most certainly is. While academia would be anything but “pointless” if it were in good running order, it will indeed remain “broken” as long as it is not.
(c) Nobody but a fool, having been unfairly pigeonholed by someone like you as a “crank”, would be stupid enough to share his ideas with you in depth. Given possession of an original theory that he values, nobody but a fool would reveal it to pseudonymous vipers like the ones infesting your forum. Given that academia determines who get credit for intellectual productions, no rational person without academic credentials (or any dependent form of security) would be so foolish as to indiscriminately share his intellectual productions with credit-hungry, publish-or-perish academics for the mere privilege of being ignored, insulted, or perhaps even plagiarized by them.
In short, the reason I don’t discuss my work in depth with people like you is … you, and people like you. You’re the problem, and that’s something about which there can be no doubt in any rational mind.
Again, I’d never dream of attacking somebody out of the blue the way you did me. Decent people simply don’t do things that way … unless, of course, they’ve first been attacked by people like you, Rubix, Fringe, and so on. Even though anonymous critics and their ringleaders are a dime a dozen and notorious for spewing smelly mud like ruptured sewage lines, the bunch of you are simply beyond the pale. Obviously, any hostility associated with your squirting behavior falls on your heads alone.
Mark Chu-Carroll: “I simply can’t take you seriously. Either you’re one of the most self-unaware nitwits that I’ve ever seen, or you’re an intelligent but malicious troll. Either way, I find you boring.”
Let me explain something to you, Mark. When you attack somebody and his ideas on your blog like a rabid cur, venting your meanness and getting your jollies by using all kinds of ungentlemanly pejoratives, and the person you’ve attacked shows up to defend himself, you really shouldn’t call him a “troll” for doing so. If he then points out to you that your criticism is based on a theory (naïve set theory) that has nothing to do with the theory you’re attacking (the CTMU), you are morally obliged to amend your critique, retract your pejoratives, and apologize for your insults. If you refuse to shoulder your moral obligation in this regard, then *you* become the troll.
You, Mark Chu-Carroll, are definitely the primary troll here; the juvenile trolls only gathered because they smelled meat. You might as well live under a bridge, polish your scales, and gobble up unwary billygoats.
As for the kind of troll you are, that would be an ankle-biter, and as for your primary tactic, that would be “bite-and-run”. Think of a badger that sits at the mouth of its hole, waiting for a pair of ankles to appear. When a juicy ankle comes into view, you rush out with a terrible snarl and set to work with your sharp little fangs, biting the targeted ankle as hard as you can! But then, when the biting victim picks up a stick and raises it to swat you as you so richly deserve, you hotfoot it back into your burrow and disappear down the chute like yesterday’s dinner.
After all, it’s much less painful for your anonymous above-ground friends to take the beating in your stead; they’re not even real badgers using their real names, but just a gang of pseudonymous, waddling wraiths without a functioning synapse among them. They’re usually not even aware of being swatted, and when they are, the pain doesn’t last.
As I say, it’s all very cowardly and deceitful. You know, you very well could be right – perhaps you and your evil little hunchbacks really aren’t worth the bother after all. But unfortunately, there remains a bit of unfinished business involving your doltish partisan Rubix.
It has now become obvious that Rubix is using the old “shotgun technique” of semi-pseudonymous Internet debating: spray disjointed nonsense as indiscriminately as possible, and hope that by some insane, one-in-a-million freak of chance, something will stick (after all, the other fellow is using his real name). Or hope that your opponent, realizing that he’s addressing a pseudonymous pea brain, will give up and go away.
But again, Rubix has foolishly waded into one of the many areas in which he is plainly as blind as a newborn blue-footed booby in the Galapagos fog.
Rubix: “You argued that evolution was unfalsifiable. I gave you clear examples of why this was false. You argued back saying “Well, any contradictory evidence you find will just get treated as a local anomaly or explained away as a way to keep evolution from being labeled as false.” So, to directly give an analogy, I gave you a story of something that involved a falsifiable concept (gravity) and some apparently-contradictory evidence (floating ball) and a logical explanation as to why it doesn’t necessarily mean we should falsify the theory based on that evidence (windy beaches, our knowledge of forces, etc).”
Well glory be – now we’ve finally got some physics to sink our teeth into.
Gravity is a well-confirmed experimental fact. So is evolution. Can they be treated on the same footing?
Let’s have a brief look. As I explained, evolution is tautological because under analysis, it is seen to be a system of linked definitions captured by the relationship of physical embedment (of an organism) in its causal environment. Could something like this possibly apply to gravity? Could gravity follow from the embedment of physical objects in the physical environment and their consequent dependency on physical causation, as the overall theory of evolution?
Well, not according to classical mechanics. Back when gravity was seen as a force, i.e., the gradient of a potential, inhabiting an invariant medium as content (rather than as a variable property of the medium itself), matter was seen to obey the force. But unfortunately, nobody knew why the force should have arisen within the medium in the first place. Hence, matter could not be said to “obey the medium”, but only the force *within* the medium, wherever it may have come from. In other words, no tautology.
But then along came Riemann, Lorentz, Hilbert, Einstein, and so on, and the *force within* the medium of (absolute) space now became a *property of* the medium, reformulated as “spacetime”. The property in question is spacetime curvature. Suddenly, gravity took up residence in the physical embedment relationship as compactly described by Einstein’s field equations (which relate matter to spacetime through curvature), and a tautology was born!
Granted, Einstein followed Darwin in not calling his theory or its summary equation a “tautology”. But take a close look at it. What does it really say? World-class physicist John Wheeler, one of my favorite scientists of all time, put it like this:
“Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move.”
How are space and matter related in this quotation? Why, they’re *mutually defined*!
Def. 1: Space (the spacetime “environment”) is that which tells matter how to move.
Def. 2: Matter (physical objects, reducing to compact energy packets) is that which tells space how to curve.
Now, in what way is this not a pair of linked recursive definitions, each consisting of a definiendum of which the other is a definens? (Even if one wants to call them “descriptions” instead of “definitions”, they are primitive with respect to the General Theory of Relativity, which means they can’t be unwound without unwinding the entire theory.)
In fact, a pair of linked recursive definitions is exactly what we’re dealing with here, these being the definitions (or if one prefers, the GR descriptions) of matter and its overall physical environment, spacetime. That’s why, on the left side of Einstein’s equation, one sees a expression representing the metric of curved spacetime, and on the right side of the equation, an expression representing the distribution in spacetime of mass and energy.
In other words, Einstein’s gravitational field equation represents a relationship between content and medium, object and environment. But lo and behold, this is precisely what I pointed out to Rubix regarding the theory of evolution! Which of course raises the question: why on earth is goofy little Rubix trying to use a direct, well-structured example of what I pointed out to him as a rationale for rejecting what I pointed out to him?
No doubt about it, the prospects are growing dim for poor little Rubix of Wall Street. But being a compassionate man, I’m still trying to give him credit for at least a flyspeck of intelligence. So is there some way that floating experimental balls – of which the unregenerately pseudonymous Rubix has none of his own, sad to say – can falsify gravity without precipitating the tautological Theory of Relativity out the window, which no atheist-materialist debate hack can possibly afford to do?
I’m afraid not.
But just so Rubix doesn’t run away in tears of hurt and confusion before he has a chance to see the light – which he will no doubt do anyway, as that’s what he always does – let’s recap.
(1) Einstein, prompted by certain implications of Maxwell’s equations (including c-invariance), used recently discovered mathematical concepts, mainly a souped-up version of Riemannian geometry, to “remodel” essentially the same empirical data available to Galileo and Newton in such a way as to turn the half-baked physical embedment relationship of classical mechanics into the sophisticated recursive embedment relationship of the Special and General Theories of Relativity.
(2) This relationship, being susceptible to characterization as a linked pair of mutual recursive definitions (or primitive GR descriptions), has tautological structure. [See definitions 1 and 2 above.]
(3) From this tautological structure, gravity is reborn not as an empirical consequence of observation, but as a tautological consequence of the rational mechanics of the Special and General Theories of Relativity, and there is no way whatsoever to “falsify” gravity without dumping SR and GR like bad and shameful habits.
What does this mean? Well, for starters, it means that if Rubix insists on clinging to his lame attempt at a rebuttal, he finds himself in the difficult position of proclaiming himself an anti-relativity crank. And unfortunately, there’s just no way that one can be conclusively identified an anti-relativity crank and get any respect at all as a good footsoldier for the proud cause of Scientific Materialistic-Atheistic Reality Theory, or S.M.A.R.T. (I’ve chosen the acronym to go along with the Dawkinsian meme “Brights”, which for obvious reasons never really caught on like it was supposed to, and also because anyone who believes in S.M.A.R.T. is an “ass”, which on the heels of “S.M.A.R.T.” yields an accurate characterization of how such people are often perceived when they disparage superior intellects.)
But what about the original data shared by Galileo, Newton, and Einstein alike, all those falling pizzas and head-bonking apples and bending light rays and precessing planets and so on … can’t all of that still be observationally falsified?
Only if one is prepared to get horribly stuck trying to explain all of the data which confirm Newtonian gravity, Einsteinian gravity, and their intersection in flat spacetime. Given that Einstein was forced to resort to a tautological theoretical structure in order to address the deficiencies of Newtonian (non-tautological) gravity, there’s simply no good reason to suppose that it can be accomplished in any theory without tautological structure. (Relativity is what I call an “analytic tautology”; it has its roots in empirical data, but once the tautological structure of the data emerges, science is irreversibly committed to it.)
That gravity cannot be satisfactorily explained in any other way can be demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt. But those arguments are so far over the heads of vapid CTMU-deniers Rubix, Fringe, and MarkCC that they might as well give up on math, stock up on face putty, and head for the Borscht Belt to stage a Three Stooges revival for geriatric vacationers (right up the highway from Wall Street). In any case, it is now painfully clear that far from having threatened the CTMU in any way, the entire combined contents of their intellectual toolkits are not worth the ink in the period at the end of a sentence in any CTMU document or written description.
Mercifully for my schedule, nothing else that Rubix has written merits a response. “Falsification metrics”, “no competent mathematician believes in Zeno’s (or Newcomb’s) Paradox”, “science fiction = street/cyberpunk Matrix philosophy”, ad hominem “crank indices” … it’s all complete bafflegab, proving beyond any shadow of doubt that Rubix, not to mention his sidekick Fringe and their spiritual sugardaddy Mark, are as full of it as hog farm manure wagons.
Fortunately, I have my own farm to worry about. And so, having once again squashed these insignificant gadflies like the bugs they are, I’m afraid I must return to the fields.
[Next installment: Zombie bugs!]
There are a ton of shoddy concepts in your CTMU, but the stuff on sets is pretty easy to refute and it’s probably the only tangible piece of math you talk about. All we need to do is show that your premise is inconsistent in order to show that the rest of the theory that relies on it is, too, inconsistent.
You say reality is the biggest “set” there is. You also say that the powerset of reality, therefore, also includes reality and results in a paradox that requires a new framework of logic (SCSPL). This is precisely the type of problem you run into in naive set theory, and it’s why Mark attacked you for it. You don’t seem to understand why this is a problem. I again point to Newcomb’s Paradox as a prime example of your nutty logic. If you accept its premises as true, you’ve got an inconsistent problem on your hands because it makes no sense at all whatsoever to assert that the Demon is both 100% accurate and yet <100% accurate at the same time. Even if we change the problem by saying the Demon is right 99% of the time, at least it's no longer a paradox and we can still process it with decision theory and probability analysis (the former of which you botched up in your own analysis, and the latter of which you bypassed entirely).
Of course, you won't directly address that point because apparently it's a better use of time to insult me and draw appeals to authority ("Oh so you must be talking smack about Nozick, a PhD from Harvard"). Nevermind the fact that I personally got into Harvard myself, I'm getting really tired of your strategy of just taking the argument everywhere you possibly can BUT the meat of the argument itself. You do this every single time and it's wearily predictable. As long as you can avoid the big stingers, you can talk one's head off all day with your gargantuan walls of ad hominem fecalspatter — such as how you just completely ignored my explanation for Zeno's Paradox that showed why you have no idea what you're talking about.
A troll is someone who is intentionally logically inconsistent and inflammatory for the sake of causing unrest or emotional responses. Mark is right that you are pretty much acting like a troll, but the fact that you've been running around insulting people while defending your vacuous, inconsistent theory of circumloquacious bukakkespam for over 20 years leads me to believe that you seriously believe in what you're saying. I think you're either a supremely bored sociopath, or just insanely delusional. Either way, it's not normal, and the one needing professional help isn't Mark. He's not the crazy one for pointing out a painfully obvious example of naive set theory. You don't circumvent paradoxes by just ignoring the inconsistencies or invoking an inconsistent framework over it to cancel it all out.
"(Some people assume that [not having a degree] is entirely my fault, but it’s not quite that simple.) In fact, I wouldn’t trade the qualifications I have for any number of doctorates in any number of academic fields from any number of universities. I can already squash most academics, if need be in their own fields; why trade that for being one of them?"
Firstly, you don't have qualifications. Your statements here reek of sour grapes and cognitive dissonance. It's obvious that you would have wanted to be a part of academia (you certainly tried), but you weren't able to because you're too arrogant. Nobody forced you to skip classes, or get into fights, or drop out of college, or pursue a life of hard labor. Nobody kept you from doing the due diligence necessary to keep your scholarships. It's your attitude that kept you out.
As for your claim about being able to "squash most academics," you're not fooling anyone. I am reminded of an old comic:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/impostor.png
Moving on:
"As I explained, evolution is tautological because under analysis, it is seen to be a system of linked definitions captured by the relationship of physical embedment (of an organism) in its causal environment."
Alright, now you're just being idiotic.
Regarding your rather unlettered rant about gravity and space + matter being recursively defined: That still doesn't make it a tautological mechanism. I don't really care if you got peanut butter in my chocolate or if I got my chocolate in your peanut butter, or if the bowling ball is curving the sheet or if the sheet's curvature lets the ball move. You're completely ignoring the actual argument, here. We could easily invoke a new explanation for how objects move that doesn't rely on the models of, say, general relativity — if we were able to show that the equations and models didn't hold up to snuff with observed fact. If we tested that model and noticed that objects didn't move as the model predicted, *we would falsify it* and look elsewhere! You're basically arguing that a theory's definition can be reworded as a tautology and therefore it's unfalsifiable. This is beyond naive.
Evolution isn't a tautology. You're just avoiding the point with all this "physical embedment" bullshit without acknowledging that the genetics are vital to the success of the evolutionary theory. It doesn't matter if organisms are causally embedded in the environment by definition — *that's not what the theory of evolution is about*. Like I said, you could think up the concept of evolution from an armchair, but you need to test the genetics to see if there is indeed a mechanism that correctly explains how mutations and traits are propagated from one generation to the next in aggregate and how they are selected for. There are many possible explanations that could explain how complexity arises, or why we see the fossils that we do, or why we see reproduction result in the types of offspring we see, or how we get from one type of animal to something quite markedly different, or how some species go extinct over others, etc, but you need to test the theory and see how the evidence holds up. We did, and we got the current theory of evolution. I already gave you plenty of hypothetical examples that would falsify the theory, but you just ignore them because they crush your stance.
The fact that you so obviously misunderstand how to use logic (not only by itself, but in math and physics, too) is more than enough proof that your CTMU is nothing more than an Ouroboros of nitwitted lunacy.
BTW, I just found on another page that MarkCC also agrees that Zeno's Paradox isn't a paradox. Funny how mathematicians seem to largely agree on that.
“Nevermind the fact that I personally got into Harvard myself…”
Right on schedule: a zombie bug.
A bug that couldn’t get into a good daycare center if his mommy were holding him in one hand, and a twenty thousand dollar check in the other.
Doesn’t surprise me that you’d basically ignore the entire post. Again.
Besides, I had it much worse than you did growing up. But good luck trying the mommy-angle.
Dear all,
The fact that Mark calls the work of a person who has been spending a lot of his personal time and effort on constructing a theory, Crank etc.’, proves to me that the main goal of his blog is not to logically disprove what he calls falls theories, but simply to gain social status. Him being a software programmer fits with the way in which he trying to gain this status..(although ‘cyber socializing’ is of course common practice not only among programmers)
Now heads up; a person finding himself/herself in this kind of mental state has no possible way of understanding what Chris is implying with the CTMU. The reason for this is that what Chris advocates is partially akin to what some would call ‘spirituality’. Spirituality simply meaning the abstract or informational nature of physical reality and as a result the nature of perception. When not recognizing the abstract part of reality it is merely impossible to grasp that which he is pointing at with the CTMU.
Chris actually has the brainpower and knowledge to logically explain and understand that what Buddha, Jezus Christ (regardless of the metaphors that have been wrongly interpreted throughout history) , Benedict de Spinoza (Ethica), Eckart Tolle and many others conveyed. Namely that the universe is an infinitely interconnected, self-contained system that emerged from boundless potential that emerged from its own cause. The universe consists of multiple dimensions of which physical reality (that what cognition can perceive) is the one dimension that we can perceive (sensory) for evolutionary purposes. Underneath (not literally) this realm of psychical objects there is an abstract dimension giving meaning and object-specific instructions to all that is. Some like to call that ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, I just call it information. Unfortunately we cannot measure those parts of reality with the tools(scientific apparatus) we have today and do we need to somehow prove it through meta-physics. Chris has done this in the most complete and ‘up-to-date’ way so far I guess..
Mark has no idea what Chris is talking about, simply because his mind dominated state blocks him from understanding important parts of reality, parts that Chris successfully describes in logic terms. Mark’s view on the universe is the living proof of dualism being in effect, namely a material object (brain) ‘reading’ reality according to its evolutionary determined set of properties, thus recognizing only that what it is made off . But believe me brothers and sisters, there is infinitely (my use of this term probably pisses of a lot people here, lol) more to yourself and therefore to the universe than that what the brain can perceive. Realize this, and the CTMU becomes a lot more clear (despite the though language, which indeed should be revised simply to avoid situations like the above).
I am not going to blend myself in the battle on (false) terminology and internal (in)consistency as I do not find myself capable of doing so and let’s be honest, Chris ate Mark alive (pointless as his execution was)..
I realize that this all must sound shaky (gently expressed) in the ears of scientists, mathematicians and even others (especially those crowding this blog)
. I also think it will be quickly associated with religious or spiritual mumbling (I am far from religious)…but, try to broaden your horizon and find out more than only that what you have been thought in school. Find it in yourself, your environment and in others and their work. And if not, please try to explain ‘all aspects of reality’ with physics only (nothing against physics of course) and find unexplainable gaps unavoidably leading to a dead end.
And uhh..forgive me for my English, I’m Dutch.
Open your fucking hearts people! It’s about time..
Best regards,
Elliuso
That’s an interesting theory, but alas, it’s about as accurate and informative as the CTMU.
See, lots of people assume that as a math/science blogger, I must be some stereotypical atheist, who denies spirituality, who rejects any kind of metaphysics, who’s hopelessly shallow, who doesn’t have any understanding of anything “deep”. That stereotype, of course, is hopelessly inaccurate when applied to even the most militant fundamentalist atheists that I know.
But when it comes to me… I take rather a lot of flak from other science bloggers, because I’m a religious Jew. And I’m not just a religious Jew; I’m a religious Jew who’s a philosophical follower of Martin Buber, and who spends time studying Jewish mysticism.
Of course, Chris doesn’t claim to be doing abstract mysticism or spirituality. He claims to be doing science. But as science, it fails miserably, dreadfully, pathetically.
And because he insists on presenting it in dreadful pseudo-mathematical/scientific form, it fails as spiritual metaphysics.
To be clear about that – Chris constantly bitches about how I’ve been harping on the set-theory aspect. But it’s important, and it’s very demonstrative of the kind of problems that pervade his presentation of the CTMU.
The word “set” is vague. It describes a “thing” which can contain other “things”. But it doesn’t say what that thing is, or how that thing behaves. That’s where set theory comes in. Set theory isn’t something vague and detached from discussion of sets. It’s what *defines* what a set *means*. You can’t talk about sets without having set theory being involved; it’s the equivalent of writing a book with words that have no definitions. Here’s a sentence: “grib bloggent stor grim bo a fiz ge gribben de fabozing”. Is that statement true or false? There’s absolutely no way that you can answer that, because the words don’t mean anything. Talking about sets without any underlying set theory is the same thing: you’re using a word that you haven’t defined.
But Chris insists that “set” does have meaning. And to prove it, he points at a non-mathematical description which *sounds like* naive set theory. And then when he starts using sets, he creates sets that *don’t exist* in any consistent version of set theory. He creates a classic example of a self-inclusion paradox – which is the hallmark of naive set theory, and which does nothing but demonstrate that naive set theory is inconsistent.
Instead of naive set theory, he could use NBG set theory. But NBG doesn’t allow that kind of self-inclusion paradox, because that’s inconsistent. You can’t define sets that exhibit that kind of behavior in NBG. In fact, that kind of inconsistency is the fundamental reason why NBG set theory was created! Similarly, he could use ZFC set theory – but ZFC doesn’t allow those sets either – because ZFC is consistent.
Chris’s argument can only work in an inconsistent set theory. And so the entire argument is meaningless. When you work in an inconsistent system, you can prove any argument. In Chris’s logical system that he uses to argue for the CTMU, he can absolutely, conclusively prove that the CTMU is true. And he can also use that same logical system to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the CTMU is false. And both proofs will be equally valid. As proofs, they’ll be absolutely 100% correct. But neither proof will have any meaning – because they’ll both be built on an inconsistent system.
If you want to argue that Chris’s stuff is brilliant metaphysics, I’ll disagree with you, but I won’t argue the point. Metaphysics is, in my experience, something which has to be grasped subjectively, and what seems to make brilliant sense to me might be absolute rubbish to you. But you you want to claim that CTMU is brilliant math or brilliant science, you’re just wrong. And whether our hearts are open or not has nothing to do with it.
Mark “Chu” Carrol, I will refrain from posing argumentation against what you have said concerning the CTMU. You are a combination of my two favorite ethnic groups: Jewish and Chinese. XD
Why are you putting the “Chu” in quotes?
My last name is Chu-Carroll. Not “Chu” Carroll. Not Chu “Carroll”. Not “Carroll”. What’s so damned hard about that?
(Sorry, this is a serious pet peeve of mine. I’m sick to death of introducing myself, and then having some twit decide that the way I introduced myself can’t be right, and that they absolutely *need* to go and change it.)
I was emphasizing the Chinese part of your name so you would get the joke, but if you are part Chinese then that would take the humor out of it. I guess it would be a pet peeve. But Chinese and Jewish are my favorite, I’m part Ashkenazi myself. 🙂
I also associate spirituality to people throwing three insults per second, all the time. How spiritual and elevated. Not to programmers. That’s brainpower!
Ah, and great discourse there. Because jobs have a strong relation to our core ideas. Mark works as a “programmer”, so he is a brick for spirituality, seeing everything in blocks and loops. And being a programmer, he only knows what he learned in school. Clearly.
Of course, I have to see both sides. Chris worked as… as… as a bouncer, yes. And it’s clear reality bounces on his head. It tries to penetrate, but it bounces and never manages to enter.
Great argument, this one of professions. Not loose talk. No nonsense. ¬¬
Arrrgghhhh! Chris ate Mark! Cannibal murderer!
Arrrrrgggggghh! My heart is open and fucking! I’m dying!
XD XD XD
New section: Greatest commentaries:
> try to broaden your horizon and find out more than only that what you have been thought in school
Of course, because Langan’s critics only know what they were taught in school, stupid us. I had a subject called “criticize Langan”… err… wait, no. In fact, I had a subject called “religion”! Do’h!
> Find it in yourself, your environment and in others and their work. And if not, please try to explain ‘all aspects of reality’ with physics only (nothing against physics of course) and find unexplainable gaps unavoidably leading to a dead end.
Cool, a challenge! While I try to explain all and every aspect of reality with physics (it may take me some time), I too have a challenge for you. Try to explain anything you want, the most basic thing you can think of, with metaphysics.
Oh, no! Sorry, I forgot. You don’t even need to do that. You don’t need to say anything. You’re right by default. Sorry, I almost make you work!
> “The fact that Mark calls the work of a person who has been spending a lot of his personal time and effort on constructing a theory, Crank etc.’, proves to me that”
And the fact that Langan calls shit the work of every scientist and academic out there proves you, in all your objectivity, that they all also just want to gain social status.
I’ll stop here. I can die of laugh. It’s just too good to be true. It’s just too absurd!
XD XD XD XD XD
“but the fact that you’ve been running around insulting people while defending your vacuous, inconsistent theory of circumloquacious bukakkespam for over 20 years leads me to believe that you seriously believe in what you’re saying. I think you’re either a supremely bored sociopath, or just insanely delusional.”
Why discard the most obvious option? Trolling or delusional? There is another option.
Twenty years of trolling seems too much to be real. He could actually believe his nonsense, but his behavior makes me believe this is not the case. What is he actually doing:
1) He avoids speaking about any theory. He is not interested in any theory.
2) He only speaks very vague sentences, and when he says anything concrete (like the set nonsense or evolution being a tautology), he immediately change his discourse for a void one. Can he really unconsciously avoid saying anything concrete? Really?
3) He insist on people identifying themselves, to ridiculous points, even when he is just menacing people directly.
4) He uses any trick to deviate the discussion. He insults, speaks about evolution, rants about academia, asks for credentials, makes a lot of posts claiming conditions nobody is interested, rants about anonymity, and a lot of unrelated stuff.
5) He is most interested in presenting himself as an authority. He remembers us in every post about his alleged intelligence and his ability to squash experts, as if this was something one needs to say.
6) He has no interest in any theory, just in removing criticism. He menaces people to accomplish this.
7) As he can not remove criticism, he tries to hide it with any trick one can think of. He writes absurdly long posts in which he says nothing, except he is right and he has proven everyone else is wrong. He is clearly not speaking to us. He is speaking to the gullible. Most people will simply read the first and last sentences, “I’m right”, “I have proven you wrong”, “I squashed you again”, “I could squash any expert”. The most gullible will assume he is right.
8) He is building a foundation.
9) He just claim victory knowing he does not exists for science. Sometimes he just speaks as if every people (except a few insane people) agrees with him. Even when he has been doing this for twenty years.
Do you really believe he thinks anyone reading his posts seriously will think he is right? Seriously?
I don’t. I see a very well defined strategy. I don’t believe you can do all this, always avoiding saying anything concrete and just hiding any discussion unconsciously. He knows what he is doing. Just we are not his audience. His audience is the gullible people out there. They will read “I’m the most intelligent”, “I proved my critics wrong”, “I have the ultimate theory, but it’s too difficult”, and then they will read what they want to hear, “I proved god existence”, “I fixed science”. God existence? An explanation to dark matter? A moral code? Knowledge beyond science? A sense for life? A new interpretation for quantum mechanics? A cool argument for action movies? Everything you want!
We all know of groups which have made a lot of money with this very same strategies. Menacing, telling people what they want to hear, removing criticism even with lawsuits.
Only his execution is not very specially bright.
Chris, Tim, (others for whom it may concern)
There are a few ancillary statements I would like to touch on if I may before I continue my prolongated report of the CTMU:
1.) Look past the cute and often quirky appeal of the CTMU without misidentifying quirkiness for “crackpottery”. The quirky use of neologisms and such are meant to enhance the intellectual experience of the CTMU within ones own cognition as it reflects in-itself the universality of language to describe all domains of reality.
The convoluted literary expressions within the CTMU and it’s overall intellectual difficulty is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s work unfolds in the mind of the reader as a seemingly contradictory association of words and convoluted expressions but this eventually leeds him to the realization of an inner-science of the self inherent in the spirit that becomes itself as absolute knowledge. Within this vein of thinking the CTMU could be criticized (at first) as incarnating a form of philosophical absolutism. Many novel reality theories have been criticized as absolute or ‘overcomplete’ (but one must be able to have a finite grasp of the work before one can discard it as meaningless.)
2.) The CTMU was being written at a time in the author’s life when he had very little to go on in terms of finances and living conditions (i.e, there were no grants or assisted education.)
3.) Many writers of past were not systematic in their writing and theory; Ramanujan, Einstein, Wittgenstein, are good examples.
4.) I will not disclose all pertinent justifications of the CTMU for reasons of it’s intellectual property rights as future developments of the model demand that information be withheld in the event that this blog is read by anyone who would want to prematurely exploit such forthcoming developments.
5.) I am in the process on providing proof for several CTMU related conjectures that are tangential with cross-disciplinary research so this will interfere with the expedience of my replies to the growing number of problems related to Langan’s work including Newcomb’s paradox.
6.) The CTMU has an endless # of possible interpretations and applications. It is a template for a great number of things. I am not personally at liberty to discuss their specifics as they are, by definition, classified at present. CTMU research (and no I am *not* joking) is of a high level of importance to our understanding of reality. Common misunderstanding of the CTMU *could* be supported as a case of a malinformed reader but as Iv’e said to demonstrate the implications would contravene sensitive data (and no this is not an appeal to authority argument.)
Jeremy,
Again, I can’t touch most of what you write, but there is one really big thing. You said, “Within this vein of thinking the CTMU could be criticized (at first) as incarnating a form of philosophical absolutism.”, but, I ask, why do you suggest that this is only “at first”? There is a huge difference between an absolutist (pantheist) and a pluralist metaphysic. And I cannot but suspect that Chris is endorsing the former. Howison and I, by the way, are decidedly the latter. Howison dedicates the whole of his second essay (in the book I have been recommending) to this issue. While these positions may appear to the materialist-atheist to be very close together, they are worlds apart. See, for example, the note on p.63:
“The names of Plato and Aristotle, among the ancients, and of Spinoza, Fichte, and Hegel, among the moderns, are omitted from this list because the question of their pantheism is with many still in dispute. As to Plato and Aristotle, of course the dispute is well founded, their position being more or less ambiguous, presenting a struggle between pantheism and individualism; though my own conviction now is that the drift of both is unquestionably pantheistic. At the time of writing the essay (1885), I still held the opinion that an idealistic monism such as Hegel’s was compatible with moral freedom; the persuasion that theism involves such an immanence of God in souls, more or less pervades the paper in its original form. This explains still more pertinently why I then omitted the names of Spinoza and Fichte from the list. I regarded Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Fichte, and Hegel as forming a single growing but clear tradition of genuine rational theism. I hardly need add, that in getting convinced of the inconsistency of this whole tradition with moral freedom, I have changed my view both of theism and of the relation borne to it by these noted thinkers. I should now list all of the modern names among them as pantheists.”
Anyway, Jeremy, I think physics (whether it is a physics of matter, or when it becomes a physics of spirit) will always permit of either interpretation: a singular (absolute / pantheistic) efficient creator, or plural creators standing on the noumenal ground of real I’dea – and under the umbrella of final cause (see Howison). Faith/faithe won’t be done away with (God is a God of faith himself.) I suspect that Chris has not got this worked out; and this is one of the main reasons why he avoids concrete discussion. I think his system blends the super-phenomenal as one, not recognizing the *need* for the distinction between the noumenal and the spiritual aspect. What did he call it? The “MU” dual aspect thing? The way I see it, Chris is committing, more or less, the same error as Rubix! When Rubix says I know the wind causes the ball to move, it is little different than when Chris says “Syntax becomes state, and state becomes syntax.” It is my very strong suspicion that Chris is missing a necessary degree of complexity before the real I’dea. If he sees his error, he is in pole position to reach the solution; if not, the atheist-materialists will get there — eventually.
Whether I have done a decent job of making heads or tails out of Chris, Howison is quite clear. There must be room in physics for free and plural “I am”.
Tim
Jeremy, Chris,
as a concrete, Chris had said:
“How are space and matter related in this quotation? Why, they’re *mutually defined*!
Def. 1: Space (the spacetime “environment”) is that which tells matter how to move.
Def. 2: Matter (physical objects, reducing to compact energy packets) is that which tells space how to curve.
Now, in what way is this not a pair of linked recursive definitions, each consisting of a definiendum of which the other is a definens? (Even if one wants to call them “descriptions” instead of “definitions”, they are primitive with respect to the General Theory of Relativity, which means they can’t be unwound without unwinding the entire theory.)
In fact, a pair of linked recursive definitions is exactly what we’re dealing with here, these being the definitions (or if one prefers, the GR descriptions) of matter and its overall physical environment, spacetime.”
$$$
[Tim resumes]
well and good, but how is such a tautology itself made real?
you see what I’m saying, Jeremy? The evidence seems to confirm it, fine. But so what? Must it? Why? HOW?! Or, what’s missing from the above?
What’s missing is the observer!
See how it parallels Rubix’s “knowing” that wind moves the ball?
Tim
Tim, I like these observations youv’e made they are rather novel. I haven’t read any Howison but Iv’e heard of him. (Later I will refer back to this post and look him up.) Adding to your observations I find some parallels to Hegel-Kant and the pantheism-metaphysical difference in the CTMU. Most of this will sound somewhat pedagogic but I think it fits well to what you are saying.
“There is a huge difference between an absolutist (pantheist) and a pluralist metaphysic. And I cannot but suspect that Chris is endorsing the former.”
You may be right, philosophically the CTMU seems to manifest as endorsing a sort of logical pantheism. It would also derive from Chris’ monism and the mono interpretation of things — polytheism does not fit into the CTMU equation.
The problem with these distinctions is that Spinoza was an absolutist pantheist because he did not distinguish the individual (Self) aspect from the spiritual and material worlds. Hegel on the other hand built a system of pluralistic concepts that would leed the human intellect/mind into the domain of the (pantheistic) absolute simply by the act of reading his work. Spinoza was the doctrinaire-mystic Hegel was the mystical philosopher. Chris would appear to be somewhere between Kant and Hegel; however the outcome of Hegel’s system may not give one a distinguishable understanding of what is going on it dissolves the differences into experiential absolutes just by reading his Phenomenology. Unlike Hegel, Kant’s metaphysics we can understand with pure reason and the comprehension is more-or-less relative. What the CTMU does is it offers understanding and at the same time it gives off adumbrations of absoluteness that we can experience; (this is why it is a reality theory rather than a dualistic metaphysics proper.) One finds moments in the CTMU of grasping the absolute in the relative — almost as if you are looking at a text about reality that is it’s own read-out (like a cosmic computer print-out, an offering from the universal divine mind). If one were to see God, the soul and the spirit as embedded in a natural analog computer processor with it’s own holographic intelligence then this is a very unique sort of pantheism because it leaves the spiritual elements unchanged even after synthesis with something quasi-artificial.
“I think his system blends the super-phenomenal as one, not recognizing the *need* for the distinction between the noumenal and the spiritual aspect.”
There is certainly something Chris is trying to convey that is very much like Hegel. The CTMU is filled with a lot of “cool metaphysics” that I know all too well because I often write in a similar fashion. Taking Spirit and noumena as identical is pantheistic, it is imbuing a divine essence into the fixed realm of syntactic matter that being is something that transcends what we are capable of experiencing. Kant called this the-thing-in-itself, or the thing prior to any perceptual interpretation by an observer. Once it is observed or interpreted, the thing looses it’s in-itself and becomes a Hegelian “for-itself” possessing it’s own consciousness. Again there is a recursion back to the pantheistic wether we take the route of Hegel or Chris’ Kant. Recursions appear everywhere in the CTMU, it’s underlying structure, model, of reality is founded on the I’dea of recursivity. It’s probably one of, if not *the*, most essential ingredients in modeling the real universe.
Bohm’s explicate order, Wilber’s holons, Pribram’s biological memory, Suskind’s anti-de-Sitter metric — they all point to a holographic description of reality. Physical holograms are produced when a laser beam is deflected off a series of mirrors after being split into two or more separate pieces of itself. But the beam is coherent, it’s the same beam of light but in the experimental holographic set-up the hologram is able to be produced because the laser beam is in a constant state of (erGodic) recursion as the two beams return the information back to the unsplit, pre-deflected beam. This emphasis on recursivity is one of the CTMU’s strengths in providing an up-to-date picture of reality. I only wish I had discovered it sooner.
“When Rubix says I know the wind causes the ball to move, it is little different than when Chris says “Syntax becomes state, and state becomes syntax.”
It’s funny that you noticed that because I think I know where the errors are in them, perhaps you saw this too.
Linguistically they do appear to be on the same tautological plane, I see what you mean. Though I think the main error is in Chris’ wording — it aught to be in the reverse, with a causal connector like *when*: “state becomes syntax *when* syntax becomes state”. Likewise Rubix should have said “I know the ball moves be*cause* of the wind” (i.e., the subject (Rubix) is the observer so knowing this fact of the ball’s movement should come before any knowledge of what caused it to move (wind).” Rubix is assuming he knows the cause before he has made the observation by saying “I know the wind causes…”, this is a classic assertoric judgment with an epistemic claim thrown in. He should first make the physical observation of “the ball moves” before attributing a theoretical cause or at least make sure his first observation was indeed the correct one. Afterall it would be unscientific to use such grammar in a scientific judgment about the state of affairs he is trying to portray. One must first say how or why something is the case before making the assertion that they already know.
Jeremy,
This looks interesting! Lets see what we can do:
1) You’ve heard of Howison?! Great. I wonder how / where? I’m just glad that I ran into him! Again, here’s his book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=dg3wkAkfKQ4C&pg=PA420&dq=the+limits+of+evolution&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
You said: “Most of this will sound somewhat pedagogic …”. I’m a big fan of pedagogic writing, so have at it!
[Tim had said]
“There is a huge difference between an absolutist (pantheist) and a pluralist metaphysic. And I cannot but suspect that Chris is endorsing the former.”
[Jeremy replied]
You may be right, philosophically the CTMU seems to manifest as endorsing a sort of logical pantheism. It would also derive from Chris’ monism and the mono interpretation of things — polytheism does not fit into the CTMU equation.
[Tim now]
I think this is key, so I repeated it. I have been using the Pirsigian analogy of hiking in the mountains for exploring metaphysics, so I’ll stick to it. I haven’t hiked to many mountains actually, but there was one in particular (Mt. Democrat in Colorado) that had so many false-summits that I was amazed. You know that there must be *A* summit. It seems to me Chris has reached a technical section for which he doesn’t have the gear, and he is hollerin’ “the summit is right here”, but even if he gets the climbing shoes, he’s gonna find out that he’ll want his hiking boots back. That the summit is not other than God, does not mean that it is also not other than you, me, Chris, Rubix, John Fringe, Chris’ farm animals, this plant next to my computer, etc. And it does not mean that one must submit to polytheism! The summit is THEE I’dea: “I am”. We truly are created in God’s image. God is fundamentally idea; we are fundamentally idea: the same I’dea. But since the I’dea is inherently infinite (though definite) there can be a great deal of sub-noumenal differentiation. Pluralism works because THEE I’dea is not complex enough to prevent it from working!
Next, you talk of some metaphysicians. Thanks. For the lesson that is! You probably expect that I have at least read these guys, but alas, no. Sorry. I just found Howison this past … April I guess. Maybe I will read these guys for fun eventually, but for now, let me run through to show you how Howison stands before them.
You said “Chris would appear to be somewhere between Kant and Hegel”. I have said before that I thought Chris’ problem was underestimating the force behind Kant’s noumenon. Kant grabbed hold of a shadow, but the force behind it is necessary. Howison fixes it. Reality is non-dual. There is no chair-in-itself except the idea “chair” within the mind of the ideator. But, that being the case, “chair” is not an independent concept so as to be a real I’dea. What is real is that the idea of the mind, which envisions not just the chair, but also the sitter that makes it a chair. This can seem real strange, and throw sober minded people for a real loop. Taken to its extreme (or there abouts), we see Chris’ tautology of evolution, a “being” in its “environment”. The thing-in-itself from this picture is … well, I must say that it is the minimally complex I’dea “I am”. But the way to see that it is that which holds the tautology together – and makes it sing. The I’dea is that one can move around do stuff, purposefully; and that means that one must be able to separate part of his body from another part of his body! The “chair” isn’t an other thing-in-itself, but it is a part of your own phenomenal body! And what people are prone to call their body, while probably a fine ethical perspective, is just not a very powerful metaphysical one. What happens to pantheism is that the pantheist is justified for seeing something immanent everywhere he looks, but what he is seeing is his own nature, not God. (He has to be more discriminating to find God. (To the extent that that’s possible. (whatever that may be.)))
I have said before: reality is the making real of the I’dea “I am”, the plural society thereof.
It’s non-dual, too. But it leaves room for real and meaningful plural individuality. God included, (Though thinking that ideas are more real than the information that represents them takes some adjustment!)
Jeremy, you said,
“One finds moments in the CTMU of grasping the absolute in the relative — almost as if you are looking at a text about reality that is it’s own read-out (like a cosmic computer print-out, an offering from the universal divine mind). If one were to see God, the soul and the spirit as embedded in a natural analog computer processor with it’s own holographic intelligence then this is a very unique sort of pantheism because it leaves the spiritual elements unchanged even after synthesis with something quasi-artificial.”
I don’t like to talk concretely about the physics that should fall out of my metaphysics, but the hologram does seem to figure in. Now, my suspicion here is that everyone who has been working on this concept has been bedeviled by implicit materialism. That is, they are looking in the opposite direction. Thinking that there is reality *in* what they see; thinking that there is this “universe” right here: they think that that hologram should capture this. As an I’dealist, I see it the other way around! The only person that cares about the reality of the information I gather about the chair I’m sitting on is me; and I’m the only one that can gather it; and I’m the only one that can know it; etc. and etc. We each really are in our own “universe”, but, since we aren’t complex enough to shut out other real, living, I’deas, we can’t but harmonize. It seems to me that this is where the hologram is needed. At any point, we can only probe the tiniest part. We get the information we go looking for. And it is just a representation. I’ve seen people talking about recording 4-D information on a 3D surface, perhaps “the edge of the observable universe”, perhaps black holes. But I think that the real I’dea is more complex. I think our 4D universe(s) is more like unto the screen where a picture of reality can be projected. And that comes from beyond the tinyest scales.
I should shut my yap about physics before they start (rightfully) calling me crank though.
Jeremy said: “Taking Spirit and noumena as identical is pantheistic, it is imbuing a divine essence into the fixed realm of syntactic matter that being is something that transcends what we are capable of experiencing.”
This gets to my point about complexity. It is not composed of things that are fine on their own, qua simple. It is complex precisely because simple doesn’t make sense. Complexity is needed to hold simple concepts together; but that glue just cannot work in the casual way that Rubix or Chris seems to believe. The ability to hold those simple aspects together is the real I’dea (or thing-in-itself). Perhaps it is just too much to admit: I am. I can understand that! Trust me there!!! But from the top of the mountain, that’s all that made sense.
Jeremy said “Again there is a recursion back to the pantheistic wether we take the route of Hegel or Chris’ Kant. Recursions appear everywhere in the CTMU, it’s underlying structure, model, of reality is founded on the I’dea of recursivity. It’s probably one of, if not *the*, most essential ingredients in modeling the real universe.”
Jeremy, “I am” is the most recursive I’dea I can think of (and the only one I designate “i’dea” rather than idea 😉 ). Whatever happens, I always come back to “I am”. This is what is conserved. The recursivity of Nature, to the extent that nature is recursive, comes because it is a derivate representation of the super-phenomenal I’dea(s). The constraint on “real” (qua real I’dea) is not “whatever”. REAL is a hard and meaningful. If Chris berates Rubix for leaving out the spiritual aspect, I’m – if not berating – really pressing Chris for not recognizing the noumenal aspect. Chris says he has a proof fro God, but I don’t think his God is a person. And if there is only “I am”, then Chris’ god…
[Tim said]
“When Rubix says I know the wind causes the ball to move, it is little different than when Chris says “Syntax becomes state, and state becomes syntax.”
[Jeremy replied]
Linguistically they do appear to be on the same tautological plane, I see what you mean. Though I think the main error is in Chris’ wording — …
[Tim resumes]
Jeremy, I think the problem is “deeper” than your solution. For better and worse, I think it requires this huge revolution in world view that is I’dealism. “A little leaven…”
I look forward to your thoughts,
Tim
1.) Space-Time and the Mind (the Mentalism / Physicalism Problem)
Although we cannot directly prove space-time exists we know it exists indirectly event up to the present time (cosmological red-shifts, De-Sitter ST, gravitational lensing,) likewise we can’t directly prove the mind exists but we know it exists. Infocognition embodies both space-time and cognition in it’s processing capacity. Spatiotemporal events mapped in continuous time describes the universe as an expanding geometric continuum represented mathematically by classical points in a topological Euclidean or non-Euclidean framework. From Einstein this framework is expressed as n-dimensional curved geodesics and the variable of time is seen as an instance of the variable of space. This intuitive concept of a continuous space-time medium is challenged by the quantum mechanical view of reality ; randomness, many worlds hypothesis, Shchrodinger equations etc. Nonlinear dynamical models of space-time in a state space describe causal events as separate transitions using Lyapunov numbers. Space and time do not exist (res extensia) and matter is always in the process of undergoing infinitesimal causal change so time becomes physically falsifiable. It can only be measured at the incremental speed at which changing objects are observed. Transitions in space and time are (in actuality) what are called finite state transitions and can be represented as point mappings in a phase space.
2.) Refelxive and Transitive Relations in the Four Modes of Causalty
Reflexive relations correspond to conscious states whereas transitive relations correspond to cognitive states. The difference being that conscious states are self-determinant while cognitive states are intrinsically self-determinant. Both belong to the 3rd generation of determining aspects in Langan’s diagram [see CTMU pg. 5]. One can draw some less obvious correlations using 3(a) as an example of consciousness without an object. Having only it’s originary telic intension 3(a) is an endomorphism directed towards it’s own object (i.e., it is an empty intension directed towards itself; a self-mapping or reflexion.) The recursive nature of consciousness renders an intrinsic, objective, or transitive object by the inextricable acts of ‘telic completion’. That is to say, consciousness completes itself by directing itself reflexively upon it’s originary and teleological singularum. This spontaneously creates a transitive relation within consciousness and it’s point of self-focusing creates a cognition or mental act and the empty syntactic object become consciously apprehended as meaningfull semantic nosesis. Transitivity is a closed teleological point-set extension or endomorphic mapping inside which all other types of morphisms produce various classes of objects. The evolution from self-determinant objectivity to intrinsic self-determinant objectivity is a relator of circular symmetry to external determinacy (i.e., primal syntactic intentionality.) This symmetric relationship to material external syntax can be desribed by using the analogy of a higher operator. Universal cognition arises intrinsically from self-determinant conscious reflexive acts. The moment a conscious reflexive act occurs, or telically completes itself, then there is cognition. An act directed from consciousness towards it’s object is intentionality or circular/reflexive teleology. The teleology of consciousness proceeds from the inadequation between the seet of cognition and it’s own grasp of itself. The seet of cognition is the self-return map of original consciousness. Reflexivity produces a sameness of identity relation by local symmetry:
ED –> S(SD) I(SD)
Syn Con Cog
Reality is generated by the objective sense or ‘Sinn’ that we process cognitively. Objective sense or Sinn is consistent with the Fregean notion of sense and reference and is often considred to be synonnymous with syntax as well. In Husserlian phenomenology Sinn (syntax) is interpreted as a particular kind of intentional object called the noema. A noematic Sinn is the objective sense, meaning the ‘sense of somethings being objectively real and independant of consciousness’. Reality is Sinnoematic, the judgement “this is real” is in reference to the sense of realness that objects give to consciousness by projective syntaxing. In as much as syntax is information, when it is interpreted by consciousness it self-replicaes by endomorphism and this is when one can apply the word cognition to self-processing consciousness. Infocognition is the universal medium of mental processing through which universal grammar emerges in SCSPL. Primal language acquisition devices reflexively allow for the development of transofrmational grammar and language learning in the cognition of humans. Natural language in humans is a product of LAD reflexive self-modeling where pure cognition is attached to the natural space-computations of internal [reality] language.
Tim,
It’s funny, I remember reading something about Howison during a study of the Hegelian tradition as it is found in Derrida’s perennial philosophy. America has had it’s own history of new Hegelians in many different areas of discourse, Howison was one of the notables. He also founded his tradition at U.C. Berkeley so I assume he has some popularity among us Californians.
Howison’s personal idealism is built on a new language that expresses Hegel’s absolute idealism in a more ‘psychotheistic’ mileaux that is also much simpler. This radical democracy of the person’s relationship with his own theistic nature seems to be consistent with the spiritual and political ideals of Patocka (moral idealism of the soul) and Karl Popper (on the open democratic society). These are ideas I have always cherished. Chris mentioned ‘thetic identity’ in his interview with Errol Morris that seems to run parallel with Howison’s “…radically democratic notion of personal idealism that extends all the way to God”. That I’dea, and ultimately what we call God, is composed of a plurality of essences that, depending on the rarity of the essence we identify within us, have varying degrees of proximity to the heavenly continuum. Our “I Am”, as well, is something tautological, namely the “I Am that I Am”. It is a self-recursive and also self-replicating essence (hence all of us.)
Of course there are several tautologies of this universal concept; I Am, I’dea, eidos, eye, eidetic. Personal idealism, if it is what I think it is, would be a starting point or alternate road to transpersonality.
An anonymous poster from the other atheist room who was debating in favor of the CTMU said:
“A lack of memory is a lack of cohesion between cognitive states. All a lack of memory of the time before one’s birth shows is that one’s mentation was ‘essentially’ different at the time, which is not at all surprising.”
This is remarkable to me because nowhere else have I ever heard the exact theory posed except when I have tried explaining it to other people. Prenatal memory, or what Iv’e called transcendental memory, is the memory one has of an existence prior to the time of being born. We *can* remember it if we are lucky enough to have a continuous memory from birth through infancy and for which IQ may be a factor. However this kind of memory is essentially different from the biological memory we use here in this mode of existence. Transcendental memory (TM) is memory but it is a memory that stores (information?) in a different mode than the DNA of the submaterial dimension. This is why we do not ‘remember’ the things that came before entering this particular reality system. When we do recognize elements from pre-birth then we must be accessing these memories from the most developed regions of our personal ‘I Am’s’. Long-term and short-term memory reflect their contents differently than transcendental memory because the latter belong to a completely different mode of remembering (e.g., the essence of the memories feel different in the mind from ordinary ’empirical’ memories.) (We could describe this *mode* of remembering as submemory.) Some of these TM’s arise in pre-fractals, measure spaces, mathematical nets, and honeycombs, as worldly representations. I use the term transcendental memory to contrast it with eidetic memory. While both can be defined in terms confluent with experimental and developmental psychology the former most often ends up getting confused with traditional mysticism and so science won’t touch it.
[Jeremy resumes]
Tim: “The recursivity of Nature, to the extent that nature is recursive, comes because it is a derivate representation of the super-phenomenal I’dea(s).”
I’m not sure this sentence computes exactly with my current mode of thinking about reality but, as a committed idealist, I must say I like it. Reality and it’s principles represent themselves as derivations of the original levels of reality (i.e., the Matrix before it was a simulation.)
With regards to the repeating thematic errors in the CTMU: I suspect part of the reason Chris will not refute valid criticism has less to do with not having a valid synthesis to counter them but more to do with the practical representing of the CTMU as it has been up to the present. Knowing that the model has evolved and branched out since the 90’s when most of it was being written I would be interested in some of his more recent constructions. Chris is working on a new book (his many new ideas I presume.) As well, his continued efforts in his field and whatever else he has been producing in solitude.
[Pause..]
As an interesting aside; reading over the CTMU I was reminded of Alfred North Whitehead’s book ‘Process and Reality’ with reference to some of the interesting things he had to say about the reducibility of mathematics to language and came across this quote:
“Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.” – Alfred North Whitehead
So it is applicable to what Mark has subtitled this blog.
I think it doesn’t make sense to think of information/memory being stored before birth because the brain wasn’t formed yet. You may as well say that a waterfall was a waterfall even back when it was just water sitting in a static lake, or say that a tree was a tree even back when its heavier elements weren’t yet forged in the centers of high-mass stars.
Rubix first, (Jeremy,)
an idealist doesn’t think of the brain as an essential tool of mentation. Rather – at least for i’dealists – it is PART OF the derivative representation of mentation.
Actually, maybe Jeremy will know of this creature: I remember watching a PBS program a while back, but I don’t remember the secondary details very well. There was a segment on this ocean going creature. When it was young, it would move around, doing its thing. But when it got older, it latched onto a reef, and it’s brain went away! Perhaps I should try hard to find it on the internet. I tried not-so-hard a while back, but was unsuccessful. I ran into some research by someone that looked interesting, but didn’t follow up, so who knows. Something about plants producing chemicals that are psychoactive because they are serving sort-of mental functions in the plant!
perhaps I’ll follow up on this (Pirsigian platypus),
Tim
Jeremy,
ahhh, Cali… I am still technically a californian, though I haven’t been back there for some time. All the while I was there I never heard of Howison. I even lived in B-town. I even had some connection to Cal; even smokin’ herb right behind the philosophy building, along the creek. Never heard of Howison.
Jeremy said: “Howison’s personal idealism is built on a new language that expresses Hegel’s absolute idealism in a more ‘psychotheistic’ mileaux that is also much simpler.” I have already admitted that I haven’t studied Hegel, so I can’t say, but Howison would vehemently defend the position that his personal idealism was decidedly antipathetic to an “absolute” construction. In general, I am quite sure that I agree.
you said: “This radical democracy of the person’s relationship with his own theistic nature…” and “That I’dea, and ultimately what we call God, is composed of a plurality of essences that, depending on the rarity of the essence we identify within us, have varying degrees of proximity to the heavenly continuum.” Jeremy, this is good, but let me point out how there is a little more to unfurl here. I think you are mixing up internal complexity and social potential. Howison reached the decided position that God is a person. He has limitations before other “I am”. He doesn’t know the particulars of the future. He doesn’t have every little detail of his followers lives planned out. He is a person; very much like you or I are persons. Now, my interpretation of Howison is that this is all there is. A plural society of such persons. This is why it is radically democratic. Also, I must say, the essence of this i’dea “I am” is not some willy-nilly plurality of essences; the i’dea is infinite, though, and society opens up the potential, so maybe what you said was not as anathema as what I read?
The picture I cant help myself conjuring from time to time is that of a dude hanging out with us, wondering all the while why we keep choosing to be such beasts. Life is a really vibrant when people love each other to the best of their ability – as the pinnacle of selfishness even – … But people like killing and hating, having to live all defensive – and offensive, …
regarding “eidetic” and “transpersonality”. I still haven’t been able to get through your video; that voice, argghhhhh! Maybe I’ll try again today. (You don’t have a transcript, do you?) I don’t like the word transpersonality, but I might have a glimpse of why you do. I don’t know though. The thing for me is that when I see the world as an i’dealist, my phenomenal “vehicle” … if you are seeing your “personality” as closely tied to this phenomenal “vehicle”, then perhaps I can see why you are drawn to a “transpersonality”. But I like to refer to my “personality” as rooted in my super-phenomenal aspects, so “trans” seems only to muddy the waters.
Pre-birth memory… Do you have such memory? I don’t. At least I don’t think that I do 😉 I don’t like to think about pre-birth or post-“death”. Of course I do from time to time… This gets to the big problem I have with my metaphysics: I cannot account for a real DEATH. It seems real terrible to me to think that I might have to live forever just because my parents… Have you read Carlos Castaneda? Anyway, there is this indian guide who suggests living thinking that death is always right behind you. I prefer to put death right in front! I carry the idea of death as the most morally precious.
you said: “I’m not sure this sentence computes exactly with my current mode of thinking about reality but, as a committed idealist, I must say I like it. Reality and it’s principles represent themselves as derivations of the original levels of reality (i.e., the Matrix before it was a simulation.) “, but remember, according to my metaphysics, the only idea that is real qua i’dea is “I am”. So it’s not “Reality and it’s principles represent themselves”, but you are, and I am, and our super-phenomenal reality as real i’deas is derivatively represented phenomenally. (To be sure, this process of derivative representation is a necessary part of making real the real i’dea(s).)
A.N. Whitehead is big in the MoQ community, my reading list always grows. Karl Popper has been on there for 4 or so years now. Spinoza I was reading a couple years ago, liked, but still put it down. But I think I will look up this Patocka whom I have never heard of.
Tim
Anyways, long story short: If your framework is based on an inconsistent, illogical principle, the entire thing is thrown out the window.
You don’t get around the problems of naive set theory by just ignoring it. You need to be exacting if you want your framework to make some kind of sense when it comes to reality.
You also don’t arrive at absolute truths by just kicking away Occam’s Razor and relying on tautologies that say nothing new.
Tim, (Rubix.)
Tim, yes I do know of the sea creature you are talking about, they’re called tunicates or ‘sea squirts’. As a larvae the sea squirt has a brain and a vertebrate nervous system but once it attaches itself to a reef it’s stomach takes over and begins to devour it’s own brain and other organs. Because of this self-cannibalizing, self-transforming instinct, tunicates can be said to develop their morphological characteristics by ‘homeotelic evolution’ as they adapt themselves to their marine ecosystems. They take on a variety of forms in different ocean climates blending in with sea sponges and brain coral. Aside from their bizarre lifecycles they are also producers and carriers of the psychoactive DMT (dimethyltryptamine) molecule that is believed to be a source of their intelligence and mobility. You may have heard of Dr. Shulgin’ s work, he wrote a bit about them in his lengthly classifications of tryptamines that began in the 70’s. Presently there is still very little knowledge about tryptamine psychoactivity in marine life (at least as far as scientific research goes.) The human pineal gland also produces a class of endogenous DMT’s and our brains are equipped with DMT receptors but further research on this subject is still wanting. (Actually I have my own private recipes that work for stimulating the long-term release of endogenous DMT in the human brain which is very good for lucid dreaming and other related experiences 😉
Rubix said: “You may as well say that a waterfall was a waterfall even back when it was just water sitting in a static lake, or say that a tree was a tree even back when its heavier elements weren’t yet forged in the centers of high-mass stars.”
Rubix, did you know that in taoist alchemy of xiangsheng it is said that wood grows from water and that this is one of the primary stages of regenerating the celestial pneumas? Flowing water is the natural mandala at the heart of configuring one’s fung-shei or tao. To trigger the pneumas of transcendental memory one can start by setting up an interface made of a waterfall using natural wood as the surface structure. Gazing into the waterfall has been found to produce inner tao for centuries of immortals. It’s one of the main tools I use to induce TM. Another method is looking into the natural caustic patterns of sunlight on pools of moving water. They say the stars of the celestial design can be found in such basic elements reflected within our own hearts. Either you already knew this about waterfalls and celestial pneumas or it is a profound accidental of your own Zen. 😉
“Howison reached the decided position that God is a person…….He is a person; very much like you or I are persons.”
Indeed this is the impression I get from what iv’e read of Howison and why I used the neologism ‘psychotheistic’ to describe the human-psychological and theological dimensions as one.
“I think you are mixing up internal complexity and social potential.”
Internal complexity would be the psychological side of Howison’s theology but I think I misidentified social dimensionality for psychic dimensionality. Howison’s philosophy does not fit into an obvious category because I think he is looking at religion (social organization) as a spiritual monadology (i.e., the individual “I Am’s” are housed within the big “I Am” as exact reflections.) As an exegetical note “My Father’s house has many mansions. [Jn. 14]” could also be applied in that there are many monads, many people, collectively placed within the same existential manifold of reality as their architect would necessitate a plural consciousness and society. Our personified ideality is where the positive influence in society enters into the larger whole of human society that is not yet spiritually educated.
“Now, my interpretation of Howison is that this is all there is. A plural society of such persons. This is why it is radically democratic”
Probably very few contemporary Howison readers get his original message. One might say that personal idealism is not only radically democratic but radically normal to human social nature — as religiosity and social organicity without the need for a strictly theological or sociological interpretation of the human world. Personal idealism seems to have some philosophical undertones to Alfred Schutz’s ‘social world’ and ‘life-world’ concepts as they are the manners in which our consciousness approaches reality prior to any scientific knowledge or scientific presuppositions about how things should appear. We should all start off with a God-consciousness but the system is conditioned with limitations and false ways of educating intelligent beings.
“But I like to refer to my “personality” as rooted in my super-phenomenal aspects, so “trans” seems only to muddy the waters.”
I know what you mean about the “trans” thing it’s like “transfats” or something. Transpersonal is a word used by Charles Tart who wrote about the psychology of altered states of consciousness back in the 60’s.
“Pre-birth memory… Do you have such memory? I don’t. At least I don’t think that I do”
Since I was crib-bound I had a peculiar tendency to observe myself both cognitively and spiritually. Philosophical thoughts like “why do I fall asleep without being aware of it?” turned into conscious dreams and (visual) metaphysical ‘travel’. I would do this frequently so that eventually it became normal for me to ‘see into spaces’ when I was in the crib or roaming around the house. As to the things in these spaces there were ‘halls’ of golden yellow lights that look like cities at night and I would move through them like they were somewhere deep in outer space. All the while there was a sense of this place as being natural and part of an ‘inner-angelish presence’. I did not know about God yet or the Bible so angels is the best description I could give at the time about the ‘who’ or ‘what’. Sometimes there were multicolored squares of light that would blink really fast like on a computer and make beautiful sounds. At age three is when I began ‘remembering’ things. Being in certain places like on the highway or at a zoo would crystallize into a memory of a ‘place’ for which language is not a suitable medium for describing ‘where’ or ‘what’. The non-categorizable quality of these memories, to me, must mean they are not yet fully modified to be processed as physical states and hence as memories do not invoke the mechanism of ‘recall’. If they are memories of a ‘before’ then what is remembered ‘in this life’ would be a memory of a memory (or a memory of a memory ‘field’.) Iv’e found that transcendental memory is destroyed as soon as mundane thought occurs in one’s cognition and a strong connection to it demands certain focus. To remember them perfectly I have to apply a deep hypnosis (which Iv’e trained myself to do over many years.) Spiritual adepts and mystics call it different things, I always use to call it ‘other dimensions’ but now I want to add in a more concrete psychological-scientific explanation that may or may not involve different levels of physical information.
“Have you read Carlos Castaneda?”
A little bit, a Separate Reality and the one that has the big moth on the cover. I bought these two books mainly for their covers. The story of Don Juan appears in so much psychedelic literature one can’t go through one’s psychonautical adventures without stumbling upon the imaginary archetypes that he writes about.
“Life is a really vibrant when people love each other to the best of their ability”
This always seems to be absent from intellectual and academic practice. “Philosophy” literally ‘the love of knowledge’ was meant to be about sharing ideas and discoveries. Chris said he would like to see academia return to it’s previous state of grace, which is funny because I use to say to my teachers that the postmodern state of academic education had ‘fallen from grace’. Too many of the good universities have been bribed into serving moneyed interests and university directorates who are their administering ‘abbots’ and ‘bosses’. Granted the social relations of the bourgeois university esp., that there is a category of persons ‘students’ who will ‘work’ in the program, and a different category ‘those who will run the program’ (i.e., the faculty) who decide what the students will study. Post-1980’s Harvard is a perfect example of such a changed and damaged social institution that puts all it’s students, even graduates, into the position of outsiders and surfs not granted the privilege to think for themselves. As such it has all been transformed into a no-mans-land of rhetoric and intellectual politics. It is for this reason that many gifted students drop-out of big universities like Harvard or throw in the towel before getting into a particular field.
“regarding “eidetic” and “transpersonality”. I still haven’t been able to get through your video; that voice, argghhhhh! Maybe I’ll try again today. (You don’t have a transcript, do you?)”
Yes I do, I’ll have it up in just a bit. 😉
Jeremy,
I figured you’d a heard of the sea squirts – thanks!
also, thanks for the rest of your post too: I had typed up some more reply, but decided to delete it cause it wasn’t interesting.
Tim
Tim,
I’m glad you liked it. I typed out the transcript to the eidetic video from my memory last night and then my silly laptop fake-mouse thingy took control of the screen and I lost ALL of it so I will retype it up later on.
I’m also adding key terms and references for further study of subject.
Jeremy
Jeremy,
I’ll keep an eye out for the transcripts. I do hope you were able to recover your work.
yes, I enjoy what you write. Makes me realize how lazy I am and how little I know 😉 But I am real solid with Howison, I think. There was a fine point or two in what I deleted that might have been worth trying to salvage. For Howison, God isn’t a big “I am” to our little “I am”. I don’t feel right trying to speak positively for Howison as far as his relationship to / with God. The difference is merely degree of perfection though. Not of type. But for Howison and I, human “I am” and canine “I am”, for instance, are also not so much a difference in type! We are all noumenally equivalent, despite the great phenomenal gulf. And we have the same spiritual faculties, namely will and sensibility.
Take it easy,
Tim
“Post-1980’s Harvard is a perfect example of such a changed and damaged social institution that puts all it’s students, even graduates, into the position of outsiders and surfs not granted the privilege to think for themselves. As such it has all been transformed into a no-mans-land of rhetoric and intellectual politics. It is for this reason that many gifted students drop-out of big universities like Harvard or throw in the towel before getting into a particular field. ”
Oh please. Academia has its problems, but one thing it is not is closeminded. I’ve actually gone through the Ivy League deathgrinders and I can tell you that the sheer magnitudes of learning and idea exchange that go on is stupendous.
People who drop out of college typically do so because they’ve got some business idea and the necessary skills to see it through. This doesn’t mean you’ve suddenly got the logic to justify academia as being useless. It’s obviously of vital importance for many people, transforming strong, eager minds into great ones.
I should note, though, that there is a massive difference between thinking for yourself and thinking up shoddy ideas and holding opinions formed under an umbrella of ignorance.
So I guess I’m a little behind on the discussion, having only recently discovered this blog, but a major problem with seeing the universe as a set seems so far to have been undiscussed. One of the defining properties of a set, even in naive set theory, is that the order of elements does not matter: {0, 1} and {1, 0} are the same set. How can we define the universe by simply listing it contents (since I find it hard to imagine that the universe contains more than countably infinitely many objects)? We are missing key information, such as position, momentum, energy, temperature, etc. Moreover, the universe exists in a different state at every point in time, but the set containing everything in the universe is not really changing (AFAIK). It’s certainly not going to take into account to account for, as an example, the rotation of the Milky Way galaxy. In other words, the set {x | x is real} contains much less information than the actual universe, and {x | x is real} can at best define an unordered collection of objects (since fitting something resembling an order to a set requires far more machinery than even ZFC, let alone what Chris has defined).
As much as I think that Chris’s “theory” is a pile of ill-defined rubbish, I don’t think that that’s an entirely fair criticism.
His theory is ill-defined enough that it’s hard to be sure exactly what he even means by his set arguments. In it, he never really presents a full model of the universe as a set. He puts up just enough of a sketch to make it possible to knock down with a naive self-inclusion paradox.
But you could create a model of the universe as a set. In a model like that, you’d model the universe as a collection of stateful objects. Things like “position” would then become a part of the state of an object. That’s doable in set theory: the “state” of an object is just a collection of relations, which are easy to define. It’s certainly not simple, because the state of things changes over time – but that’s inevitable, because the universe itself changes over time.
But even if you go that far, that still points out a major problem in Chris’s “theory”. Because Chris tries to build his argument on the assumption that the universe is-a set. On that level, your criticism is perfectly valid. The universe is not a set; a set is one potential model to describe the universe. From his arguments here, I don’t think he really understands that distinction, but it is a crucial one. Things like the position and velocity of an object are intrinsic, inter-related properties of the object – not things that are defined by an external universal relation.
MarkCC: I think Langan is well aware that his concept of a universal set is a paradox (even if he might disagree that it’s “naive”). He even says so himself in his CTMU intro page on his site.
My point, though: Langan doesn’t seem to see why this is a problem.
It’s why I keep bringing up Newcomb’s Paradox. It’s an analogous example of an easily-understood problem that we can all discuss at the same level. By understanding how Langan thinks about paradoxes, we can better understand what he’s saying with the CTMU with all his self-inclusion/duality statements.
However, it’s a waste of time. It’s clear to any mathematician/physicist that Newcomb’s Paradox is an inconsistent problem. It simply *does not make sense* to have a predictor that is both 100% accurate yet less than 100% accurate at the same time. You can still try to solve the problem using whatever frameworks you want, but the answer is going to be inconsistent and nonsensical because the premise is also inconsistent and nonsensical.
Ultimately, his analysis of Newcomb’s Paradox is not very exacting at all. It’s basically “You can’t deny the Demon his framework of being paradoxical relative to your framework — but hey, he was right three times in a row in the trial runs. That’s 1/8th probability! He’s probably legit. Choose the black box.” I’m not even remotely exaggerating — that is his conclusion. No math, no utility theory, no statistical rigor — just armchair speculation. That same sort of logic carries over into his CTMU, and it shows.
Langan enjoys mental gymnastics and approximation but doesn’t bother to get into exacting details, which is a huge no-no where mathematics and physics are concerned.
While I agree with your basic answer, Mark, (object properties and temporal evolution can be modeled as elements of a set), I’m not so sure about this sentence:
> “But you could create a model of the universe as a set”
Of course you can model the Universe as a set, but I’m not sure you can build a comprehensive model, modeling every feature, which is a requisite to the model for the thing.
For example, how would you model quantum randomness as elements of a set? (without cheating, no “the universe is the set of one element: the real universe”, or “the universe is the set of these elements: the deterministic part and the non-deterministic part”). I’m not sure.
Of course quantum randomness may not be a property of the actual Universe, just a convenient feature of our current models. But to say it’s a set you have to explain why are you sure you can model randomness in a set or you have to prove there is actually no randomness in the Universe.
(In fact, to say the Universe is a set, I would even go as far as to say you don’t have to model randomness in the set, but the results of the apparent randomness we observe. But I don’t want to complicate things).
So, while Al examples where not right, his base argument is: there are things we observe that apparently do not fit in a set model. Randomness is just an example. There are a lot others. So you can not simply assert the Universe is a set, and you can not say you can model (comprehensibly) the Universe as a set, until you prove a lot of things. It’s far from obvious.
(Of course, that’s not the main problem, just one of many. We need not to embark ourselves in abstract discussions, like if the concept of a biggest set has any sense, or what does “real” means that makes the Universe the set of “real” things, being itself real, and making its powerset real, or any of this nonsense. Just seeing two of his hypotheses:
– there is a largest set
– for any set, there is a largest set
makes one clearly see he is reasoning from inconsistent assumptions. You simply can not assume a largest set without arriving at a contradiction, and of course you can not advance your reasoning and then arriving at this contradiction and declare anything you want the cause).
“which is a requisite to the model for the thing.”
should be
“which is a requisite to confuse the model for the thing.”
“For example, how would you model quantum randomness as elements of a set?”
I briefly touched upon this at the start of this topic, you can see a function from A to B as a subset of the product set A x B (its graph.) So you could see the probability density function of all particles in the universe as a set. It will work for finitely many particles, probably for countably many. In this way you have the particles, their position and velocities, and the quantum randomness.
Of course, why you would want to model this as a set instead of a function is beyond me. (Viewing functions as sets is used in the proofs of some theorems in functional analysis if I remember correctly, for ‘practical’ applications such as this its not so useful though.)
Furthermore, I can’t imagine that the powerset of this graph, while mathematically well-defined, has any physical meaning/usefulness (and it certainly is not an element of the original set!)
I have to object to your comment.
First, one should not assume the universe is representable by a wavefunction just because it’s components are (for several reasons, like http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.5261). Of course, this is not the problem, you can take the set of wavefunctions of every particle. But, it’s also not completely clear that the number of particles (of wavefunctions, if you like) is the same for every observer, so maybe you have to take the set of wavefunctions for every particle for every possible observer, I don’t know. I don’t see as obvious that all these is valid for a non-countable number of particles or observers, neither.
But, well, let’s suppose there is no problem on this. It may be the case, I don’t know.
The problem is I don’t believe you have modeled the Universe with this. Look it this way: wavefunctions collapse from time to time, and we don’t understand the dynamics of these collapses. They may be unpredictable (by our famous “quantum randomness”), or they may be predictable. But, as we don’t know, while someone justifies they are one or another, we can not assume any of them. Currently we can not predict the outcome of a single electron, even if we exactly knew its wavefunction.
So, how do you represent a wavefunction that collapses as a set? What you are saying is: before and after the collapse, the wavefunction is a set, so it’s a set. But the reasoning is poisoned, from my point of view.
Let’s take the electron case as an example, and let’s assume the collapses are random. It has a wavefunction. Let take all “points” of it’s wavefunction before a current instant. Do you know anything of the future? No, because maybe it’s wavefunction collapses the next instant, maybe not. So, no information (don’t take this too strictly: there is actually a lot of information, but not deterministic) about the future of the electron in the points of the wavefunction we’ve got.
To know what will happen to the particular electron, you have to know the points of the wavefunction corresponding to its future. But those points you can not know until they happen, under our assumption of random collapses.
So, how can you model the Universe as a set? All you can model as a set is the known Universe, the events that actually happened and you observed (or inferred). But the model has no predictive power, and in fact it does not describe the future. It has no (deterministic) information about the future. As the future is part of the universe and any model you can do as a set does not include that information, I would say you can not model the Universe as a set.
All this reasoning assumes the collapses are random. Of course, you can say: maybe they are not random. OK, I accept that. Maybe not. But we don’t know. You have to prove the collapses are not random, or you can’t say the Universe can be modeled as a set.
Even if wavefunctions can be representable as sets.
I hope you can see the difference. All you’re modeling are the known facts as a set, but maybe the unknown has components (randomness) that can not be modeled as a set. You can not simply assume it’s a set.
One can say “the Universe is a set despite one not being able to model it as a set”. I hope we don’t need to address this.
Again, all this is just unnecessary talk, because the problems with Langan’s theory are a lot simpler and a lot more evident.
(Mnn, such a long post to say so little. I should learn to express myself.)
Of course, we can solve my objection to “you can not model the universe as a set if the model has no information about the future, it’s not a model for the universe, I can not call a complete model something without a lot of information”. We just have to apply the Langan’s procedure* once more:
“Even if any model of the Universe as a set has no information about the future (part of the Universe) so it’s not a comprehensible, it would still be valid. Rather, it would occasion an extended redefinition of “comprehensive model” accomodating higher levels of nonmodeled information.”
*Langan’s procedure: Remember,
“Error 2: Even if the CTMU were called “science” instead of “metascience” (or metaphysics), it would still be valid, hence no “failure”. Rather, it would occasion an extended redefinition of “science” accommodating higher levels of description and analysis.”
Now its been years since I did any QM, and that was as a 2nd year student, so yes my QM is quite sketchy. I hadn’t, for example, even realized the different observers would muddle the issue.
Now I know the wavefunction collapses to one of the the eigenfunctions of the operator thats being observed. When I was taught this it was never clear to me whether the proces of how this happens is understood or not (is there some dynamical system through which the wavefunction evolves for which the eigenfunctions of this operator are attracting fixed points?)
In any case, the point I was trying to make is that functions (and so also time, or spacetime, dependent wave functions) can be modelled as sets, and hence pretty much everything can be modelled as sets. The question is whether its useful. (And whether the powerset has any physical relevance in the model your using.)
Depends on what you understand by “being understood”. The process is statistically well understood, in the sense that we can predict the eigenfunction they will collapse to and when, but only statistically. There seems to be no way to predict it in a case by case basis.
In fact, some experiments try to decide about the randomness (is it true, or just a lack of information?), like the Bell’s theorems, and experiments seems to favor randomness over hidden variables (there are a lot of technicalities, and not everybody agrees).
In any case, the point was that, in the random case, that could be actually how the Universe works, you’ll never be able to build a comprehensive model of how the Universe exactly work. Not because there is not enough information, or because it’s impractical, but by principle: the Universe would have a random component you can not model a priori. If this is true, you’re guaranteed to never be able to build an exact model for the Universe.
I see the situation similar to position with respect quantum mechanics. If you’re guaranteed by the uncertainty (within the theory) that you can’t measure the position of a particle along time, what’s the point of talking about classical paths?
If randomness is true, what’s the point of saying the universe can be modeled as a set, if you actually can’t and never will? It’s not a question of usability.
In any case, I’m not trying to prove here that the Universe can not be modeled as a set. I’m only saying the question is not obvious at all, and we’re only speaking here in a very relaxed way. Just imagine if you had to actually research the subject, with actual math, and I don’t want to even think about relativistic QM XD
To me, what you’re saying is that a set can be a correct template to describe the past Universe as we are knowing it, but it can’t be a model of the future. Because maybe there is no way to model future events comprehensively.
I understand your point, but, can we speak about the path of a quantum particle?
All that said, I agree with you in the basics.
I was thinking more of the path that the probability density of a quantum particle takes as it moves through some function space. (Of course, we cannot measure this, so it is probably rather difficult to model.)
Tim,
Here is the transcript for the eidetic video. It is a bit difficult to read as I made several recordings of it very quickly in a state of mind where I was using auto-speak (glossolallia) or ‘speaking in tongues’ which is a process that pays little respect to formal sentence structure. So it is best read as if it were a prepared speech. It was eight years ago so a lot of the wording like “transcends the personal dimension” and my general philosophical views were still ripening. Things like “human consciousness” and “language” are reduced to a generalized notion of evolution and proccess that are more readily understood in the context of Whitehead, Foucault, Steven Gould, Sheldrake, and the pedagogic natural historians of the 1960’s. Anyways I hope you find it to be of interest. Enjoy!
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF EIDETIC EVOLUTION
Section I (Eidetic Biology and Anthropology)
In reference to natural history and the evolutionary biology of life on Earth, this question of the eidetic seems to arise after the reduction of natural selection to formative causation and formative causation alluding to the process of morphic resonance; there is this ‘hazy region’ where are very tool-based language breaks down when trying to explain the origins of formative typologies in the macroevolutionary process of generic and species variation. Now, we have to understand that our limitations in representing a seamless causality is a direct result of the formative limitations of our linguistic faculty at this level of reductionism. Again, we have been using a tool-based system of grammar to represent all of this natural phenomena. So essentially we are using a ‘vehicle’ which is survivalist in nature; grammatical language is not self-reflective or self-expressive instrument of our own biological awareness. It is a socio-communicational tool that is a product of natural selection itself, and we can’t hope to attain the original meaning and cause for biological evolution using languages that evolved as products of that system in order to aid in the survival of our species. We can render the original meaning through description using grammatical language but it requires knowledge of the original maps that produced that language and everything else in nature. Those maps are based on the language of eidetics; a language that has existed for billions of years, it laid dormant in the collective unconscious of most species until the evolution of self-reflective consciousness in the early centuries of primitive humans. This period of eidetic awareness lasted for over a million years from the late pleistocene era and reached it’s peak around 25,000 to 90,000 years ago. Before that time the eidetics remained in an unobservable state, essentially, in the form of storage and genetic memory which kept everything else in the system (from crystals to single celled organisms to insects and mammals) in a state of progressive genetic variability. This was achieved by a pictorial induction of the survivalist mechanism within the racial memory of species. But it was merely storing and processing itself it was not conscious or fully self-ingressed in any species until the evolution of the tool-bearing protohumans who had consciously mastered the eidetic image to constructing spatial representations in tools, symbols and art. In answering the question “what are eidetics?” you have to be able to single-out a particular spectrum of visual impressions: eidetics aren’t the visual images we see outside, neither are they the linguistic representations of experiences but rather the residues of visual impressions in the form of somatic representations. In other words they aren’t arranged like empirical structures directed towards the outside, and they don’t represent themselves through grammatical languages. The eidetics obey their own architecture and representation from the biology of the somatic organism. But they gain their sustenance and photogenic content from the outside world. Now, this process of sustained impressionism, which eidetics acquire through the perceptual experience, is only exhibited in it’s conscious manifestation — but they existed as spatial archetypes of variation long before the evolution of psychic humans, before the evolution of color vision, before photoreceptors and before photosynthesis. Photosynthesis represents the first major step in the complexification of eidetic evolution towards an interiorized and noncorporeal system because before it was expressing itself in the geometry of crystals and the chromatography of minerals. This was the time when eidetics had reached their most ordered form and expressed their most basic function of eidetic variation: the crystallization of (complex) inorganic chemistry.
Section II (The Monolith and the Future of Eidetics)
Chemosynthesis had basically reached a point of ramification that was so advanced that it couldn’t be compared to the same eidetic process that had dominated for the first five billion years which was the chemistry of stellar evolution: crystals are the most ordered and variable chemical systems in the eidetics of prebiotic organization. Photosynthesis represents the internalization of the evolutionary vector emerging out of the darkness of cavers and volcanic geology to the use of light as a stereochemical catalyst upon crystalline structures which recognized sunlight, producing this photorefractive effect — leading from chemosynthetic eidetics to photosynthetic eidetics. From that time onward the eidetic dimension began the ascent from very dense corporeal constructions towards a more ‘fluid’ membrane-based expression that could house it’s own light source. The natural historical laws of eidetic variation became interiorized and fully transcendental in the structures of human consciousness: the protention and retention of time, the representation of thing and space, the human imagination and the intentionality of noetic and noematic objects. These structures reflect the universal cosmogony of the eidetic mind with it’s need to ‘make itself known to itself’, and to allow for a much faster and more efficient means of varying it’s evolution of contents. These other dimensions now express themselves in the impressionism of the human eidetic psychology. For the first million years it was of course more conscious, and it still is; if only in the infantile stages of human development. It would appear, then, that nature is now regressing itself like it did during the archean period of geological time: going back into the cave of unconsciousness and darkness so that it may exude more variation. This was the requirement for mineralogical life; crystals are very ordered systems, and they are the most ideal structures in the universe — but they do not have self-awareness and they do not require light. So, this is what we see happening now: the development of a new architecture, human regression into unconsciousness and the building of an interface or a new consciousness. We are now at the very minimalistic stage of this development; the structural base is being created, and, so, like early inorganic chemistry, we aren’t seeing any of the gemstones or more vibrant eidetic variations. That will come into fruition within the next 300 years. What we can expect to see in the future will be completely polished concrescence of what we have seen as of very recent times when it was first being drafted in art, architecture and product design from the early 1900’s into around the 1970’s. A window had opened up during that short time, and that is always prerequisite for any new evolutionary program. We are yet to see the full-spectrum because civilization has only existed for 5000 years and the human eidetic psychology had been hibernating for at least a million years before the evolution of language. With the logical structures of human consciousness, in the noetic and noematic domain, the eidetic has properly formatted the psychic realm ‘in it’s own image’ so-to-speak. And so this archetype of the monolith, we have realized, is the original eidetic modulus (the ideal representation for the ingression of the eidetic object into protohuman creatures as they evolved into fully eidetic humans.) It is the original attractor archetype and the typification of minimalism — the phenomenological epoche (or reduction) from a very coarse topology of survivalism to one that is simplified because it processes information holonomicaly (i.e., it is less particularized; it can process large wholes and understand phenomena without going through the step-by-step process of deconstruction.) It communicates through minimalized pictures that are encoded with feelings, and so it’s overall mode of perception is like a hologram: it does not perceive things — it remembers them.
Section III (Eidetic Psychology and Natural Language)
The human natural eidetic psychology, as it relates to early projectionism in the first five years of human life, is based on an encoded manifold of retinal images that form what we would call ‘primary language’ or Chomskian deep structure that is in harmony with the cellular biology. The very fact that the phenomena emerges as a retinal response reveals a signal that comes forth out of transmitters in conjunction with receptors that decompile images from the outside. These images are then minimalized into very basic pictures that reflect the way in which the mind and body communicate in their unperturbed state (i.e., in the state when they are unified.) The eidetic image itself is perceived in the mind’s eyes at a moment when the mind and body have joined in a concrete union (a psychosomatic potential.) That is what the spirit requires in the beginning in order to project meaning into objects. Once the meaning is established and projectionism is functional then semantic and syntactical processing plays the role while relying upon the previous eidetic language in the deeper strata of the subconscious. The subconscious becomes more and more collectively archetypal as life progresses, loosing much of it’s ability to recall eidetic memory but still drawing upon the eidetic substance of that memory to sustain the surface structure of the subconscious. The depth psychological areas of the subconscious are generally attributed to the collective unconscious and it’s cultural symbols and the outer most areas are based more on recent experiences as it relates to the individuals life, friendships, relationships and homestead. However beyond the depths of the archetypal subconscious is a realm of eidetic images, symbols, feelings, memories and impressions that originate from the most remote areas of the mind. They extend back in time to the infant years, to fetal memory (embryologicaly compressed memory) gestation, and to the origins of the self that transcend the personal dimension.
Key terminology: Archean (var. Archeazoic), Archetype, Collective Unconscious, Concrescence, Deconstruction, Deep Structure (var. Primary Language), Depth Psychology (var. Analytical Psychology), Eidetic Biology (Zdenek Neubauer), Eidetic Image (Erich Jaensch), Eidetic Memory (var. Photographic Memory), Eidetic Psychology (Ahkter Ahsen), Eidetic Variation (E. Husserl), Fetal Memory, Formative Causation, Holonomic (var. Holonic), Minimalism, Morphic Resonance (var. Morphogenesis), Noematic, Noetic, Phenomenological Epoche (var. Phenomenological Reduction), Pleistocene, Prebiotic, Projectionism, Psychosomatic Racial Memory (Genetic Memory), Self-Ingressed (A.N Whitehead), Self-Reflection, Stereochemistry, Strange Attractor (var. Lorentz Attractor)
Jeremy Jae, mid-August 2003
Jeremy,
thanks! Much better! And I did enjoy it. So much to it! A lot of it very interesting. But this is also the kind of stuff I find scary. How trustworthy do you find it, in whole?
For instance, this is probably the most obvious … well, does this statement of your require a warning?: “So, this is what we see happening now: the development of a new architecture, human regression into unconsciousness and the building of an interface or a new consciousness.”
If the phenomenal is a derivative representation, I don’t see the *need* for periods of “regression” in an evolutionary scheme. Do you say that God regresses? Perhaps this is an easily explained/repaired fine point, but I still have a problem with going after the picture from inside, and it seems this perspective dominated your description – at least back then. Real interesting picture you paint though!
Maybe you could tell me how your perspective has changed in the past 8 years? What you think the weakest points are?
But thanks again!
I have to let it sink in some,
Tim
Tim,
Thanks, I appreciate that you have taken the time to study this work as it is the prototype for what I will be working on in the near future. 🙂 I’m glad you’ve taken an interest in it while acknowledging the fact that it is indeed a very peculiar and deep concept. I would like to give Howison a read so I will look around for a copy of that book you suggested. If you have any extra time you may want to give Zdenek Neubauer a quick glance. His books “Life as it’s Own Designer” and “Readers of the Book of Life” are quite nice. Neubauer focuses on evolution in Darwin and the theistic account of creation from a hermeneutic point of view. Looking at evolution from his third-way of objective-idealism, his creationism would probably suite Langan’s ID models. Eidetic biology is one of the terms he coined. Now to some of these questions.
“If the phenomenal is a derivative representation, I don’t see the *need* for periods of “regression” in an evolutionary scheme.”
I don’t think it needs to go through regressions either, actually I never thought this way. Neither nature nor God can regress themselves and this is the thing: if it was regressing itself than we would not have telic recursion, instead we would have regressive recursion as an arrow of time receding only in the feed-back direction. Telic recursion figures space-time and energy as evolving as conjunctive feed-back *and* feed-forward directional nexie’. The “human regression into unconsciousness” is restating what we see as social mechanization of consciousness or the negentropic effect of mass technological-social progress. I attribute this unconsciousness with parrotic mimicry, social robotism, and the blindsighted repression of novelty by popular society. Unconsciousness in man is a symptom of materialism in all it’s gross manifestations: (corporatism, social and economic classism, the loss of national identity, and pervasive disphoric awareness.)
“It would appear, then, that nature is now regressing itself like it did during the archean period of geological time: going back into the cave of unconsciousness and darkness so that it may exude more variation.”
I just sort of came up with this comparative. Plato’s analogy of the cave, which I’m sure your familiar with, depicts the illusory quality of our shared belief in an external world when the truth is all we are perceiving here is the outward projection of Ideas given to us from the realm of form (or the morphic field.) This sentence is naturalizing the postmodern problem as a necessary result of selective evolution because it is foreseeing our own extinction as part of a larger proccess. Although it’s not too difficult to detect my cynicism here — allways having been weary of posthumanistic (wishful-)thinking. I laughed when I watched the whole video again (the Vader voice and some of the pictures are funny.)
“Do you say that God regresses?”
No because God, as absolute Idea, is formless and unchanging. As teleologically self-completed Being it cannot regress itself but the constituents of nature, of a sufficient degree of complexity, can regress to a previous state of less complexity. To say that nature is regressing itself is only to naturalize the problem of mechanization that we see happening today. God is the space inbetween computations in a Turing drum, it is the denumerable Aleph of Cantor (the transfinite number that is so large it can not be defined on a finite or infinite set.) As positivist science and logic tries to eliminate these unknowns by the attachment of more physical extensions to the phenomena that it seeks to reduce down to a physical explanation it produces deeper and more complex theoretical entanglements that, in order to prevent embarrassment, it must impose more firm structuralism between the scientific disciplines. Scientific disciplines, when they combine to form subdisciplines, unfurrow a different view of reality in which the glass is half full instead of half empty.
“Maybe you could tell me how your perspective has changed in the past 8 years? What you think the weakest points are?”
(1a.) One of the main problems is it presents itself as an evolutionary cosmic creation story. The creation stories of late Old Testament exegesis are reflected in the theory as an apologue of natural history and this is something I have never seen done before. Today’s science is not the least bit interested in what this offers. Given that it’s expectations are geared towards solving ideological problems dealing with specific issues like gaps in the fossil record, paleoanthropologic discoveries, abiogenesis, extraplanetary life etc.
(Post-contemporary science continues to approach it’s subject matter positivistically because it lacks it’s own education i.e., that the threshold of post-contemporary scientific progress has been at odds with the official state of our institutions both social and political.) However I am not against sciences methods given that the methods are conducted by honest researchers in departmental cooperation with eachother.
(1b.) Here post-contemporary has a tailored meaning that diverges from the common postmodern usage. Post-contemporary is the stage that comes after the postmodern era. Meaning we (the generation who have arrived here at the end of the millennium) are no longer contemporaries of the postmoderns (those groups who founded the philosophical, artistic, architectural, scientific and political movements of the postmodern period: ~1950-2001.) Post-contemporaries have very little access to what it all meant to the moderns and postmoderns because the tradition is not carrying them into a new period which is why the intelligentsia has diagnosed post-contemporary academia as a recessional regress back to medieval scholasticism. This crisis is due mostly to neo-capitalism as it is explained in Ernest Mandel’s critique of Angloamerican capitalism in the (post-1940’s) global economy.
(2a.) If this were simply a philosophical model or metaphysic it wouldn’t raise such issues because metaphysics rarely deals with specific facts of physical science esp., the causal connections of biology with soft science, metapsychology, philosophy of consciousness and mysticism. From this theoretical complexity eidetic evolution opens up a can of Ideas that dually opens up a can of worms; raising issues that aren’t easily solved within the mentalism / physicalism dual approach. Eidetic biology can only make sense by starting with subjective idealism and then synthesizing objective realism with the language of science. Though, as you perceived, the philosophy is inwardly directed science (phenomenology) plus natural science (natural history, biology.) Kant and Husserl’s transcendental idealism is the starting point of a comparative interpretation of eidetic perception i.e., eidetic perception inwardly grasps phenomena with the inner-eye by grabbing at photonic nouemena (Kant) or it’s equivalent (hyletic data) in Husserl’s phenomenology. This has its locus of emergence in biosemiotic space thus overlapping the biological space by psychic-retinal relations.
(2b.) The theory is dialectical: it’s first principle begins with the paradox of language as it is reducible to immediate experience or philosophical immanence. Visual perception, if it has primacy over the other modes of perception for a species survival, is the first mode to represent perception by acquiring grammar in primitive symbolic syntax. Language in man is made communicable only after being synthesized verbally from symbolic syntax following the discovery of clay writing (again a dialectical-historical process). Mathematics reduces to different grammars and paradoxically is the main tool for making scientific predictions that secure natural science and thus evolutionary theory.
(3a.) Eidetic evolutionary theory is built on a foundation of metapsychology rather than metaphysics or ontotheology. God is a psychical being — we are here therefore the universe must have predisposed self-aware properties.
(3b.) Eidetic evolutionary theory realizes itself as metaphysics / ontotheology after it has resolved the paradox of linguistic reducibility as a special case of biosemiosis. It takes the Idea / eidetic form as it’s point of departure from general metaphysics and formal ontology. As metapsychology describes the laws of the psyche in terms of pure logic rather than empiricism or psychologism. Thus in the end it becomes metaphysics vis-a-via a Hegelian dialectic.
(4a.) The eidetic mind of nature that governs it’s morphological transformations is (basically) the organizing mind responsible for choosing what will be created and so is (basically) the essence of God. It has ‘personalistic’ self presence as well as Otherness. Physical laws can only be known as information and matter as the physical interpretation of information so there is natural holonomy between the two states of information.
(4b.) Eidetic biology is (basically) creationism with the modus operande: life creates itself. Sheldrake’s model of morphogenesis limits itself to formative causation whereas the eidetic theory Platonizes morphogenesis. In personal correspondeces I have had with Sheldrake he expressed his divergence from the Platonic interpretation when I asked him to consider natures selective Platonism suggesting that there was evidence of Platonic organization using the example of the Australasian Papuan frogmouth bird that has a similar intraoral body-plan as a frog’s. His response was that this was not evidence of Platonic morphosis, that nature instead prefers morphic resonance. Each of these interpretations have their own virtues that still need to be worked out.
(5a.) The end result of the dialectic arrives at a radical transpersonal psychology of the personal eidetic God (or a Howisonian God of individual I’dea.) Both the personal and the transpesonal fulcrums are integrated to the point of having a mirror-like unity (i.e., self-mirroring of God through the medium of I’dea from within the ‘psycheye’ of individual subjectivity.) .
(5b.) Strange new terminologies are integrated into the theory without the convenience of a proper lexicon. Historical references are not given and so the contexts move about. Metaphysics is usually systematic and there was no attempt to systematize the theory as it was channeled all in a shot. Most of the statements are prosaic having manifested as the spoken word that communicates to us through inner dialogue.
(6.) When the revelation had become complete I was not fully aware of how telesis manages information. Presently I am thinking more in terms of a causal nexus with initial state and final state as co-producers of manifested form. However given the space required and the degree of complexity the new model of reality that I would like to formulate is too vast to be able to give even a brief description. The basic idea is that our universe is an intelligently designed simulation, that the finished products of a species or phylum (could), in theory, be materialized from thin-air without adjusting it’s DNA, and that the system of this creative evolution is fundamentally reducible to programs operating on a natural dynamic processor that will soon map the universe and co-produce it in the future using a new experimental technology made by humans.
Thanks again,
Jeremy.
Jeremy,
Thanks for the analysis. Not quite what I was expecting. I’m tempted to start asking a bunch of questions, but… Maybe I should wait for you to read Howison. I want to see how you think he compares with your aspirations, in fine. For instance, your conception of God is something he would reject. You said, “No because God, as absolute Idea, is formless and unchanging.”, but for Howison, God is decidedly a person. Form and change are not foreign to “idea”.
Jeremy, the difference I had suggested last time about your coming at it from the inside, I meant it in a more robust way than perhaps you gathered. Or maybe you gathered right but just aren’t bothered by what bothers me. I was so excited about Howison because here is the guy who finally got the fundament nailed down right! I was so excited to have found Howison because he knew how important it was to get the fundament right, and to get it before trying to build. But having the fundament, I don’t know why I would build somewhere else. What can I build from here? (Though I am only moderately interested in actually going after the answers at this point?) The things you have presented are quite interesting, but do you find them trustworthy? For instance, about the meaning of crystals, or photosynthesis in evolution, etc.. The point of inside v. outside for me isn’t something little. It isn’t a tool for occasional use. It isn’t just a check. It is a revolution in perspective that is either utter, or it just isn’t THEE revolutionary perspective, I’dealism. And the point of the revolution is precisely to get you outside. I am. You are the I’dea. But the I’dea is living, continuously creative. This is the nature of real I’dea. Living. Not absolute. The greatness of THEE I’dea is that you always know that you aren’t confined but by the limits of real, re I’dea. Coupling that with the fact that there then is the distinction between necessary and optional within the possible, and the fact that the phenomenal is just a derivative representation, and I just don’t see why I should put my *trust* in anything I might build inside.
I wonder what the big picture of your program is? What’s motivating you? What questions you are after? What you think success would mean?
But let me let you read Howison,
Tim
Will you guys please quit plugging up the thread with huge spamwalls of text and keep to the topic at hand? Share that stuff over email or something.
No matter how thoroughly Mark is ignored, he keeps coming back for more.
Mark: “But when it comes to me… I take rather a lot of flak from other science bloggers, because I’m a religious Jew. And I’m not just a religious Jew; I’m a religious Jew who’s a philosophical follower of Martin Buber, and who spends time studying Jewish mysticism.”
Then Mark should know better than to falsely objectify me and my work under his own baseless assumptions, casting us as the embodiment of all that he so passionately hates.
Mark: “Of course, Chris doesn’t claim to be doing abstract mysticism or spirituality. He claims to be doing science. But as science, it fails miserably, dreadfully, pathetically.”
Error 1: Actually, I claim to be doing metaphysics, which means that I’m doing something relevant to both science and spirituality. This has been clearly stated from the outset.
Error 2: Even if the CTMU were called “science” instead of “metascience” (or metaphysics), it would still be valid, hence no “failure”. Rather, it would occasion an extended redefinition of “science” accommodating higher levels of description and analysis.
Mark: “And because he insists on presenting it in dreadful pseudo-mathematical/scientific form, it fails as spiritual metaphysics.”
Error: Every CTMU description ever published contains logically consistent and nontrivial mathematical expressions and/or mathematical concepts. However, perhaps because Mark is an instrumentalist to whom understanding alone is worthless, he cannot fully comprehend basic mathematical concepts and terminology. It seems that if something can’t help Mark write code, time his oil changes, or count his lunch money, he doesn’t recognize it as “math”.
As an unabashed instrumentalist, Mark has no business pontificating on spirituality or for that matter metaphysics, of which we may now safely surmise that he understands precisely nothing at all. In fact, his understanding appears to run so far into the red that for spiritual purposes, he is at the total mercy of the demons of confusion and ignorance populating his mind.
Mark: “To be clear about that – Chris constantly bitches about how I’ve been harping on the set-theory aspect. But it’s important, and it’s very demonstrative of the kind of problems that pervade his presentation of the CTMU.”
Error: Mark’s interminable bellyaching about sets is indeed demonstrative, and it is indeed demonstrative of problems. But the problems thereby demonstrated are Mark’s various learning disabilities, cognitive lacunae, and sheer pigheadedness.
Mark: “The word “set” is vague. It describes a “thing” which can contain other “things”. But it doesn’t say what that thing is, or how that thing behaves. That’s where set theory comes in. Set theory isn’t something vague and detached from discussion of sets. It’s what *defines* what a set *means*.”
Error 1: Cantor clearly, not “vaguely”, defined the word “set” as the product (or composition) of a perceptual operation, “discerning”, and a conceptual operation, “gathering together”.
Cantor did *not* define a set as “a product of the above operations plus the operation ‘including itself (or its power set) as an element’, which is perhaps why this dastardly operation is not considered in naive set theory, and why poor, maligned Cantor neglected to drive a wooden stake through its heart and stuff its mouth with garlic … i.e., neglected to add what Mark considers the crucial (no pun intended) operation of “draculization”, i.e., “adding all kinds of rules and qualifications, a consistent version of set theory as it were, so that I, MarkCC, don’t get buried under the dreadful, bloodsucking paradoxes I’ve unwittingly generated by including that last operation there, namely, ‘including itself or its power set as an element'”.
[Note: Most mathematicians think that a proscriptive axiom (as in ZF) or redefinition and reclassification (as in NBG) must be introduced to standard set theory in order to preclude the self-inclusion operation “after the fact” of Boolean algebra, which would superficially seem to permit it. But in fact, there is another way that Mark has simply failed to consider – it flies right over his head – and it is explicitly locked into the core structure of the CTMU.]
Sadly, Mark fails to realize any of this. Instead, like a pseudomathematical Van Helsing, he leaps into the very same grave-hole that his predecessors dug by introducing the operation of self-inclusion. That is, Mark insists on defining “set” as follows:
“A set is the product of four (not just two) perceptual and conceptual operations: (1) discerning; (2) gathering together (so far so good); (3) ‘including itself or its power set as an element’ (not so good); and (4) draculization, i.e., beefing up the definition of ‘set’ so that set theorists are not permanently buried under the weighty load of set-theoretic paradoxes they have unwisely generated by explicitly including operation #3.”
Of course, Cantor was a much more profound thinker than Mark, and his neglect of the self-inclusion and draculization operations was just fine, for as it turns out, the CTMU foundational language does not treat the universe as a mere self-including set. This, of course, was my point in mentioning such a construct in my essay; I was simply pointing out to Mark and other querulous Van Helsings that the CTMU does not rely on set-theoretic self-inclusion to effect explanatory closure (as it would have to do if the universe were merely “the largest set”).
Error 2: The word “set”, as defined by Cantor, does indeed say what a set is and how a set behaves. What it is: a gathering together of discernable elements. How it behaves: it takes form when elements are discerned and gathered together in any quantity. This may not be enough information for Mark, but more is not required for a general description of the CTMU. Why not? Because in the CTMU, the universe is not treated as a mere “set” as defined by either Mark or (more generally) Cantor.
Error 3: No axiomatic version of set theory is included in Cantor’s definition of “set”; the definition is meaningful without it. Rather, the definition of “set” is itself a “minimal set theory” which can be viewed as a general subtheory in which multiple set theories intersect; it differs from standard set theory mainly in omitting the self-inclusion operation, and the further operation of compensating for that operation.
Whereas a set is a gathering together of discernable objects or elements, set theory is a framework for interpreting and ramifying this definition in any context with a model in that framework. However, the CTMU has no model in that framework. As I’ve previously observed, while it is possible to model consistent versions of set theory in SCSPL, SCSPL cannot be fully modeled in any standard version of set theory. This implies that no standard version of set theory is capable of expressing the full meaning of “set” in SCSPL. Only SCSPL itself, which supersedes standard axiomatic set theory, has that capability.
I’ll ignore the remainder of Mark’s first post, as responding to it in detail would merely occasion the further repetition of something that Mark cannot understand to save his life: that the CTMU does not treat the universe as a mere set, but as a more fundamental and expressively capacious entity immune to set-theoretic paradoxes.
Mark: “As much as I think that Chris’s “theory” is a pile of ill-defined rubbish, I don’t think that that’s an entirely fair criticism. His theory is ill-defined enough that it’s hard to be sure exactly what he even means by his set arguments. In it, he never really presents a full model of the universe as a set. He puts up just enough of a sketch to make it possible to knock down with a naive self-inclusion paradox.”
Error 1: Even though I haven’t yet explicated the CTMU in full and excruciating detail, the CTMU is not “ill-defined”. It is merely “ill-understood by Mark and others like Mark,” many of whom have not even bothered to read the available material on it. In other words, it has nucleated a confusion-born pile of rubbish in the minds of Mark and his friends. Those piles of rubbish, being entirely subjective, are not my problem, except when people like Mark confuse them with objective properties of the CTMU (and even then, I have more important problems on my plate).
Error 2: The CTMU contains no “set arguments”; sets are invoked merely as a point of conceptual orientation and departure. To the extent that CTMU structure incorporates the “set” concept, Cantor’s definition of “set” is both meaningful and adequate.
Error 3: If Mark were given a thousand years, he couldn’t “knock down [the CTMU] with a naive self-inclusion paradox.” Attempting to interpret such paradoxes in the CTMU automatically invokes their resolutions as an interpretative requirement.
Mark: “But you could create a model of the universe as a set. In a model like that, you’d model the universe as a collection of stateful objects. Things like “position” would then become a part of the state of an object. That’s doable in set theory: the “state” of an object is just a collection of relations, which are easy to define. It’s certainly not simple, because the state of things changes over time – but that’s inevitable, because the universe itself changes over time.”
So far, so good, and what a pleasant surprise! But alas, the pleasure is only temporary.
Mark: “But even if you go that far, that still points out a major problem in Chris’s “theory”. Because Chris tries to build his argument on the assumption that the universe is-a set.”
Error: In the CTMU, while the universe is indeed a set to the precise extent that it is discernable and amenable to conceptual aggregation, a set is not *all* that it is. This generates a paradox for poor Mark, who evidently thinks that if the universe is *in any way* a set – i.e., that if the universe contains discernable elements (objects, states, events, relations, operations, and/or so on) which can be conceptually aggregated under the heading “universe” – then (1) it must be *nothing but* a set as he obstinately insists on defining it (including operations #3 and #4 above), and (2) set theory must be its foundational language.
Unfortunately for Mark, the CTMU does not treat the universe as nothing but a set, and as a happy correlate of this fact, its foundational language is not a standard version of set theory, but SCSPL.
Mark: “Things like the position and velocity of an object are intrinsic, inter-related properties of the object – not things that are defined by an external universal relation.”
If Mark actually understood the full implications of his statement, his CTMU comprehension problems might go away. But of course, if pigs had wings and jet engines, they could fly to Paris for champagne and canapés.
And so, at the end of Mark’s long and unrewarding day, the only valid complaint that he can formulate about set theory and the CTMU is that I haven’t fully explained the CTMU / SCSPL interpretation of “set” in a way that tells Mark, who desperately resists any attempt to enlighten him, how to resolve set-theoretic paradoxes. (I could do that in just a few paragraphs, but this is not the right venue, and such an explanation would be a favor to Mark, who has not behaved in such a way toward me that I owe him any favors.)
In any case, I never promised to personally walk Mark through any particular aspect of the CTMU, and the validity of the CTMU can be established independently of any particular standard version of set theory. But if it makes him feel any better, this dialogue has at least made me aware of possible sources of incomprehension which bear extra clarification.
Rest assured, I’ll be doing something about that.
Now good day to all.
Rubix (on a comment below), you got it wrong.
By “Rest assured, I’ll be doing something about that”, I would say Langan means he’s going to voidify even more the theory. He is not going to explain you
– where is the paradox, or
– why does he think if you stop calling naive set theory “naive set theory” (or if you don’t know you’re using naive set theory) the problems will disappear, or
– why does he implicitly use inconsistent definitions for “real” like “real is anything I can name” (you need this to say the powerset of the set “universe” is real, because it’s not even a well-defined definition), and
– how can you mix incompatible assumptions like “real is any element of the set universe, this is, anything existing in the universe” with the previous one, or
– why do you need so much writing to infer “God exists” once you accept anything you can name (like the “powerset of the universe”) exists as an axiom; or
– what does he understand by “real”, or in what sense “the powerset of the universe is real”. If I say an inexistent chair in front of me is real just because I can name it (like the powerset), there is no difference between an existent chair being real and an imaginary chair being real? Because if he is just calling real to any vaguely imaginable concept, the of course god is real… as a concept. But, again, that’s a very long text to prove that.
No, he is not going to explain any of that. He is just going to make his assertions a bit more vague. “I’ll be doing something about that”.
I believe here we have show so much problems with the “theory” he is just going to change the writing so the new theory has even less concrete assertions.
And now, I shouldn’t be writing this again, but it’s just too funny. At least for me.
So, content free “Best comments section”!:
No matter how thoroughly Mark is ignored, he keeps coming back for more.
XD XD XD XD XD XD
This is the most stupid comment ever!!!! Especially in a post where he is “answering” Mark, almost line by line. Especially in Mark’s blog. And especially when you say “he keeps coming back for more”, implying every time he writes, you answer him. “Ignoring”. XD XD XD XD XD
“He keeps coming back”. Yes, to his own blog XD XD XD
“Error: Every CTMU description ever published contains logically consistent and nontrivial mathematical expressions and/or mathematical concepts.”
You see. You just have to say “it’s good”, and this is a proof you’re right. You just have to say “my theory is right”, despite you starting with an inconsistent set of axioms. Langan has faith in his words. Too much XD
And, once you have just asserted you’re right, ignoring the obvious facts (that you’re using an inconsistent set of axioms: there are a largest set, and for any set you can build a bigger set), you can now freely assert things like
“we may now safely surmise that he understands precisely nothing at all.”
Because, hey, Mark is a “programmer”, so he has no saying in mathematics. Langan is a… a… a… well, it doesn’t matter in the case of Langan. But for Mark to win money programming… how can he…
Of course, all the theory is rubish, because the axioms are incorrect and the reasoning arbitrary. But, hey, if it doesn’t qualify as science, we can always redefine it!
Error 2: Even if the CTMU were called “science” instead of “metascience” (or metaphysics), it would still be valid, hence no “failure”. Rather, it would occasion an extended redefinition of “science” accommodating higher levels of description and analysis.
Of course, the problem is not that Langan’s theory is not science. It’s that it has no connection with reality. But, no problem! Just apply a “Langan’s procedure” once more time!
Error 2: Even if the CTMU were in no way related to reality, it would occasion an extended redefinition of “reality” accommodating higher levels of nonsense.
See? Jut a couple of changes, and we can say anything we want. And even assigning an error number to the nonsense.
I’ll stop. Just enough offense for people without a sense of humor.
Langan:
It’s obvious that you’re doing metaphysics, but you can’t claim absolute truths through a metaphysical framework and then extrapolate that to science. You run the risk of holding a notion as true that may be riddled with errors. Again, a valid conclusion is not enough — and there’s good reason to suggest your approach is not even necessarily valid. You don’t seem to understand that consistency is *not* enough to declare something as true. It needs to be both consistent *and* predictive in some capacity. Otherwise, all consistent theories are true.
What we’re arguing here is that a set has to be properly defined in order for it to make sense. Logic alone does not suffice. X = X may be a tautology, but X still needs to fit certain conditions. Primarily, it must be a boolean variable. If it’s not, then the tautology doesn’t make sense.
Similarly, a set must also make sense. If you start running rampant with claims like “the powerset of reality results in a paradox because it doesn’t make sense to have a set bigger than the biggest set and therefore we need a new system of logic to describe this concept,” you are practicing naive set theory.
Again, consider the set {desk, chair}. The powerset here would be something like {{},{desk},{chair},{desk, chair}}. A powerset is just a mathematical tool that can be used for operations where all permutations of the internal elements are useful for something. It doesn’t make sense to say that the powerset “exists” in a greater capacity than the underlying set does. The powerset may “exist” in terms of its ability to simply describe all possible combinations of elements, but it doesn’t exist in some larger, physical way, and it doesn’t result in any paradox with the underlying set.
So why do you think that describing reality as “discernible objects, states, events, relations, operations, and/or so on,” results in a paradox with respect to the powerset?
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=73854
Here’s another example of what happens when you try to pull stupid crap like “resolving” paradoxes (Cantor’s, Russell’s, Newcomb’s, etc) by invoking a lot of imprecise handwaving and trying to create a new logic. You get inconsistent nonsense, which is exactly what the CTMU relies on. It’s naive set theory. In an inconsistent logical framework, anything is provably true. It can also be provably false.
From http://www.superscholar.org/interviews/christopher-michael-langan/
The paragraph: “To a typical academic snob […] substantially correct.”
More dishonest crankery. Status as a working man doesn’t mean one’s work will not be able to withstand expert analysis. Works speak for themselves and can come from anywhere, regardless of background. The CTMU is nonsense, and it’s why it’s never gotten into a credible journal or withstood peer review. It wouldn’t last an hour. Plenty of credible individuals find fault with it and move on because it’s obvious bunk. What the CTMU is advocating is inconsistent, scientifically unfalsifiable/untestable, and without evidence. That’s the worst possible combination for anything that claims truth with respect to our reality.
When someone credible does attack its flaws (which is not hard to do at all), Langan falls back into his standard response algorithm: Sardonic verbal attacking, appealing to authority, strawman-arguing, and fact skewing/ignoring, and all with a minimum of 15 paragraphs. He’s not terribly interested in delivering an honest rebuttal. Despite his self-proclaimed importance and his “precious time,” he wastes a lot of it scouring the net for any blog where his name is mentioned. In those blogs, you’ll consistently find Langan himself popping up, if only to lash out at people and pull the same shit we’ve seen here in this thread. And he’s been doing this for *years and years*. Langan can say what he wants, but the proof speaks for itself.
The only reason he demands credentials is because he wants something to leverage in order to malign your background. He’s done nothing but attack my background, Mark’s background, etc — browbeating academia/business instead of delivering an intellectually honest debate about science, logic, and mathematics.
I mean, come on, if we’re going to be honest about backgrounds, here — Langan took an unsupervised, untimed magazine IQ test (twice, using two different names) and used a shakily-extrapolated (and arguably invalid) IQ score (and even then he exaggerated it in his interview) to justify his “mastery.” Can we say “media exploitation”? Some of the problems on the Mega Test are tough, but not impossible. For instance, I was able to correctly solve the three-cube problem with nothing but paper and pencil in about an hour’s worth of solving time. For most problems, I’ve found that having access to outside resources makes the test very easy. In other words, Chris has an above-average intelligence, but he’s no genius, and he’s certainly in no position to tell qualified, educated people that they don’t know what they’re talking about. He’s just an amalgamation of every douchebag Philosophy 101 student you ran into back in college — only Chris didn’t have the sense to move on.
I should also note that the psychologist who had Langan “tested” is not credible, himself. If you look his history up (which I was able to find stretching back to 1995), you’ll find incompetence charges, along with required supervisions and interviews, probations, fines, and a mandatory post-grad neuropsych course (to reteach neuropsychological/psychological evaluations, evaluations of data, report writing, diagnostic determination, and ethics) which he failed to complete in time.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Langan lied about his SAT score, too. We have no proof of it other than his word.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_%28person%29
Anyways, come to your own conclusions — but I think it’s clear that Chris Langan is a dreadfully predictable, boring crackpot with an overblown ego and no provable credentials.
“He’s done nothing but attack my background, Mark’s background, etc.”
It’s really quite scandalous that Rubix of Wall Street, pseudonymous champion and guardian of Mark Chu-Carroll, is such a lying, character-assassinating little blabbermouth, if only because it reflects so poorly on Mark.
Rubix, by the way, doesn’t have a “background”. Backgrounds belong to people who operate under real identities, as I do. Rubix is too frightened to do that. Why is he frightened? It’s hard to say, but we might as well begin with the fact that his last post, so full of venom and vitriol, fails to contain a single true statement. (Maybe there’s one buried in there somewhere, but I seriously doubt it, and I’m not about to waste my time looking.)
Lord knows, I’ve been hounded by more than my fair share of anonymous dirtbags over the years; it goes with the territory. One almost gets used to it. But I must say, little Rubix here pretty much takes the cake.
Now enough, already. Is Mark such a pathetic intellectual weakling that he can’t even fight his own battles … the ones he starts, like he started this one over three years ago?
What a shameful embarrassment for poor Mark!
Rube’ like “lives” here or something, one must assume Wall St. has suddenly ceased to be the most demand-intensive profession on the planet. How could a Wall St. broker, for instance, manage to take his eyes off the stock charts on his desktop for five seconds without loosing a stock. If Wall St crashes we will know who to blame.
Oh, several people write in this blog! What a shameful embarrassment for poor Mark! And some people do things not related to their jobs!
Now Chris’ theory is clearly right!!!
I’m leaving this comment only to say that, despite the sheer intimidating length of the comment thread, this sort of thing is like porn. The messy kind that may leave you feeling slightly dirty at the end an in need of a bath with sold scrubbing, but thoroughly enjoyable throughout the actual act of perusal.
Glorious metaphysics porn.
“http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=73854
Here’s another example of what happens when you try to pull stupid crap like “resolving” paradoxes (Cantor’s, Russell’s, Newcomb’s, etc) by invoking a lot of imprecise handwaving and trying to create a new logic. You get inconsistent nonsense, which is exactly what the CTMU relies on. It’s naive set theory. In an inconsistent logical framework, anything is provably true. It can also be provably false.”
Bringing up a separate discussion that doesn’t involve the CTMU and claiming that the CTMU is incorrect simply because it tackles the same paradoxes as the separate discussion is a logical error.
“From http://www.superscholar.org/interviews/christopher-michael-langan/
The paragraph: “To a typical academic snob […] substantially correct.”
More dishonest crankery. Status as a working man doesn’t mean one’s work will not be able to withstand expert analysis. Works speak for themselves and can come from anywhere, regardless of background.”
Of course. It’s not as if Mr. Langan was calling each and every academic incompetent.
“The CTMU is nonsense, and it’s why it’s never gotten into a credible journal or withstood peer review. It wouldn’t last an hour. Plenty of credible individuals find fault with it and move on because it’s obvious bunk.”
You need to provide a suitable definition of “credibility”.
“What the CTMU is advocating is inconsistent, scientifically unfalsifiable/untestable, and without evidence. That’s the worst possible combination for anything that claims truth with respect to our reality.”
Provide examples of where it is inconsistent. All logical tautologies are scientifically unfalsifiable, though not untestable, and this applies also to the CTMU. Arguably all of reality backs up the CTMU given that it is completely tautological.
“When someone credible does attack its flaws (which is not hard to do at all), Langan falls back into his standard response algorithm: Sardonic verbal attacking, appealing to authority, strawman-arguing, and fact skewing/ignoring, and all with a minimum of 15 paragraphs.”
That’s not actually true. Mr. Langan has certainly chided others in this discussion, but he never argued improperly and he never used these chides as excuses for disregarding qualms about his CTMU. There were several reasons he ignored some qualms. First of all, it is time-consuming to debate qualms with people who don’t understand them. This is because it typically takes more than one explanation to get them to understand if they didn’t the first time. Second of all, he has had bad experiences with anonymous Internet users, and the comments here only back up that claim. Rubix, you have to admit that not everything you said has been directly relevant to the CTMU and that the first person in this entire debate to go off-topic was not Mr. Langan. An ideal criticism of the CTMU would have presented its points without even mentioning anything else and without resorting to provocative terms such as “crank” or “crackpot”. Third of all, it is not Mr. Langan’s concern to prove himself to you. As he sees it, the necessary information is online and all that others need to do is exert a bit of effort to comprehend it. If they fail in this respect, they will likely need extremely long explanations to be convinced otherwise, and if these are to be made at all they may as well be made available to everyone at once through a venue more obvious to the general public.
“He’s not terribly interested in delivering an honest rebuttal.”
He hasn’t been dishonest though. What has he lied about?
“Despite his self-proclaimed importance and his ‘precious time,’ he wastes a lot of it scouring the net for any blog where his name is mentioned.”
It doesn’t take a whole lot of time to search for critiques. In any account, keep in mind that Mr. Langan was *told* about Mark’s original critique and did not find it by searching for it himself.
“In those blogs, you’ll consistently find Langan himself popping up, if only to lash out at people and pull the same shit we’ve seen here in this thread. And he’s been doing this for *years and years*. Langan can say what he wants, but the proof speaks for itself.”
Consider that, if this theory is truly as valuable as Mr. Langan claims, and if he really does want to avoid misunderstandings if it as long as the task does not waste too much of his time, this is an entirely reasonable thing to do.
“The only reason he demands credentials is because he wants something to leverage in order to malign your background. He’s done nothing but attack my background, Mark’s background, etc — browbeating academia/business instead of delivering an intellectually honest debate about science, logic, and mathematics.”
Mr. Langan has already responded to this.
“I mean, come on, if we’re going to be honest about backgrounds, here — Langan took an unsupervised, untimed magazine IQ test (twice, using two different names) and used a shakily-extrapolated (and arguably invalid) IQ score (and even then he exaggerated it in his interview) to justify his ‘mastery.'”
Not quite. Mr. Langan has never used his scores to justify his work, but he has stated that it is exceptionally high. He originally took the test for amusement and out of interest. He later took it to see how he would do with more time. He was never dishonest about using two different names. Ron Hoeflin was aware that Mr. Langan had taken it twice. Mr. Langan later stated multiple things. He stated that he is aware of the flaws in the test. He also stated the following, which should be included here if we are to be honest.
” But just so nobody can accuse me of not being helpful and modest, I’ll gladly admit to having an IQ of 80, maybe even less[…].”
Mr. Langan has in fact stated on multiple occasions that he does not believe intellectual ability should be valued on the basis of the Mega Test but on the basis of actual intellectual accomplishments. His test results have been brought up repeatedly, but only because it is his claim to fame and the media tends to obsess over it. By the way, it is entirely legitimate to suggest a score of between 195 and 210 when one has done extremely well on several psychometric tests that, while all valid, do not correlate exceptionally well with each other. But again, I think Mr. Langan would not care for this to even be mentioned in the discussion, as it is completely irrelevant to what we are all here to discuss, namely the CTMU.
“Can we say ‘media exploitation’?”
And Mr. Langan represents the media?
“Some of the problems on the Mega Test are tough, but not impossible. For instance, I was able to correctly solve the three-cube problem with nothing but paper and pencil in about an hour’s worth of solving time.”
Perhaps, but how are we to trust you on this? Moreover, you’d be hard-pressed to provide a proof that your solution is in fact the correct one.
“For most problems, I’ve found that having access to outside resources makes the test very easy.”
Again, you can say what you want about it, but you have to prove your claims.
“In other words, Chris has an above-average intelligence, but he’s no genius, and he’s certainly in no position to tell qualified, educated people that they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
If you are wrong about all this, you are probably in no position to state what “genius” entails. Moreover, “qualified” and “educated” are relative terms, and anyone with a rational argument that “qualified” and “educated” people misunderstand apparently is in a position to tell them that they don’t know what they’re talking about. However, this is all beside the point once more. There should be discussion of the CTMU occurring, not discussion concerning Mr. Langan’s results on psychometric tests and intellectual ability.
“He’s just an amalgamation of every douchebag Philosophy 101 student you ran into back in college — only Chris didn’t have the sense to move on.”
If you say so.
“I should also note that the psychologist who had Langan ‘tested’ is not credible, himself. If you look his history up (which I was able to find stretching back to 1995), you’ll find incompetence charges, along with required supervisions and interviews, probations, fines, and a mandatory post-grad neuropsych course (to reteach neuropsychological/psychological evaluations, evaluations of data, report writing, diagnostic determination, and ethics) which he failed to complete in time.”
Again, this is irrelevant. I think Mr. Langan would agree.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Langan lied about his SAT score, too. We have no proof of it other than his word.”
I think you mean most people have no proof of it, including yourself. Nevertheless, if you were really desperate enough, you could likely find the necessary records and check this out yourself. However pervasive it may be, the Internet doesn’t have all the information in the world.
“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_%28person%29
Anyways, come to your own conclusions — but I think it’s clear that Chris Langan is a dreadfully predictable, boring crackpot with an overblown ego and no provable credentials.”
If he’s so predictable, why are you bothering to continue this discussion? Whatever perceived credentials Mr. Langan has, he is no pseudonymous Internet user critiquing the work of those who are not anonymous while disguised.
Chris:
Again, I’d rather not have my name associated with crackpots, and I’d rather not give status to egobloated, sociopathic narcissists. It’s not “fear.” It’s that I’m not going to grant you that kind of boost, and you’re not going to trick me into doing so no matter how many times you yammer on about it.
I came here because the debate was entertaining and I was curious to dig a bit deeper into the whole high-IQ + ID mystery. Unfortunately, I didn’t have to dig very far to hit the bottom of this now-anthalian gauntlet of monotony, as the answers were predictable from the very beginning: You don’t have an exorbitantly high IQ, you lack education, and you’re stubborn/closeminded/bigoted as hell. You’re not much different from any other ignorant ID advocate I know. You just happen to gasconade more than most.
Anyways, I’m done posting here.
“Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.”
—Scott D. Weitzenhoffer
“Error 2: The word “set”, as defined by Cantor, does indeed say what a set is and how a set behaves. What it is: a gathering together of discernable elements. How it behaves: it takes form when elements are discerned and gathered together in any quantity. This may not be enough information for Mark, but more is not required for a general description of the CTMU. Why not? Because in the CTMU, the universe is not treated as a mere “set” as defined by either Mark or (more generally) Cantor. ”
It doesn’t matter whether or not you are saying the universe is “just” a set. You have repeatedly stated that you define a “set” to be “a collection of objects” (with no further qulaifiers). With this definition, it is posisble to prove anything. Anything at all. Thus, anything you show using this assumption is meaningless.
“Error 3: No axiomatic version of set theory is included in Cantor’s definition of “set”; the definition is meaningful without it. Rather, the definition of “set” is itself a “minimal set theory” which can be viewed as a general subtheory in which multiple set theories intersect; it differs from standard set theory mainly in omitting the self-inclusion operation, and the further operation of compensating for that operation.”
You can call it whatever you want, but the fact the fact of the matter is that you need a stricter definition before you can proceed. Which, apparently, you have…
“Whereas a set is a gathering together of discernable objects or elements, set theory is a framework for interpreting and ramifying this definition in any context with a model in that framework. However, the CTMU has no model in that framework. As I’ve previously observed, while it is possible to model consistent versions of set theory in SCSPL, SCSPL cannot be fully modeled in any standard version of set theory. This implies that no standard version of set theory is capable of expressing the full meaning of “set” in SCSPL. Only SCSPL itself, which supersedes standard axiomatic set theory, has that capability.”
So I did a little research and found the paper you published in 2002. And in your SCSPL section, you… fail to really define it. You do the same frustrating, annoying bullshit that Marx does in that you claim your construct has these various properties but it is impossible for anyone else to actually figure out if your conlcusions make any sense because you have not made your assumptions or definitions clear. So, while it may be the case that your theory is consistent, there is no point in trying to convince the world of its truth until you fix basic writing problems that wouldn’t fly in a decent high school.
Not quite, Al. Mr. Langan has stated that the universe has the structure of a Cantorian set, but that it also has much more structure than that, and that it is this extra structure that prevents the paradoxes of naive set theory. That’s exactly whence the duality arises. Moreover, the set “assumption” (a) isn’t an assumption and (b) isn’t even vital to the CTMU. It’s a consequence of the main principles of the CTMU, but one can derive the CTMU without it.
The idea behind the SCSPL concept is that reality is a *Self-Configuring Self-Processing (formal) Language* – hence the name. The first two properties follow from reality’s being self-contained. Were there anything outside of reality able to process and/or configure reality, it would be inside reality. Thus, reality is “self-configuring” and “self-processing”. It also conforms to the definition of a formal language because it contains
“(1) representations of (object-like) individuals, (space-like) relations and attributes, and (time-like) functions and operations;
(2) a set of “expressions” or perceptual states; and
(3) a syntax consisting of (a) logical and geometric rules of structure, and (b) an inductive- deductive generative grammar identifiable with the laws of state transition,”
as stated in the paper. An alternative proof of this is given in the paper as well.
“Second, because perception and cognition are languages, and reality is cognitive and perceptual in nature, reality is a language as well.”
Therefore, it’s not the case that SCSPL hasn’t been adequately defined. From the beginning, it is a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language, and it is possible to show that reality conforms to that definition. More properties of it and its grammar are derived later, and by equally correct methods, so voice your specific complaints when you get there.
Again, please try to refrain from discussing that which is outside of and irrelevant to the theory. This entire discussion would be a lot easier if everyone presented only the facts. Your previous could have largely been reduced to, “Langan says that the universe is a collection of objects, which leads to paradoxes, and he doesn’t define SCSPL well-enough.”
Your previous post can be largely reduced to “Langan’s theory is correct and can be proved correct by correct methods, despite I giving no facts supporting this. And the rest of people, please, present only facts.”
I presented arguments, Mr. Fringe.
By the way, even if I hadn’t presented facts, that’s no reason you shouldn’t.
Mr. Anonymous, I’m stating the obvious: saying
“and it is possible to show that reality conforms to that definition”
or
“More properties of it and its grammar are derived later, and by equally correct methods”
or things like that is not presenting arguments. Saying “the theory is right” is not an argument for a theory being right. I though this was obvious.
“Not quite, Al. Mr. Langan has stated that the universe has the structure of a Cantorian set, but that it also has much more structure than that, and that it is this extra structure that prevents the paradoxes of naive set theory. That’s exactly whence the duality arises. Moreover, the set “assumption” (a) isn’t an assumption and (b) isn’t even vital to the CTMU. It’s a consequence of the main principles of the CTMU, but one can derive the CTMU without it.”
Once again, the point is NOT that the universe being a set is what leads to the contradiction (though this does have problems of its own). I realize the set of the Universe has different structure in CTMU, but unless your definition of “set” is stricter than Cantor’s, you are reasoning from a contradiction. This part has nothing to do with the universe at all.
And if the universe being a set both is unnecessary and takes time to prove, why is it even in the CTMU? Not that I think you can prove it, since you would have to come up with a better definition of “set” first.
“The idea behind the SCSPL concept is that reality is a *Self-Configuring Self-Processing (formal) Language* – hence the name”
Yes, I realize that. One problem that immediately jumps out is that there are multiple models of computation and definitions of the various linguistic terms that Chris uses, but he doesn’t address this. Another is the apparent determinism of the theory. And while these would not be crippling if Chris were using language as a MODEL for reality, he is saying reality IS a language. That’s a problem, as Mark pointed out long ago.
“Once again, the point is NOT that the universe being a set is what leads to the contradiction (though this does have problems of its own). I realize the set of the Universe has different structure in CTMU, but unless your definition of ‘set’ is stricter than Cantor’s, you are reasoning from a contradiction. This part has nothing to do with the universe at all.”
Actually, in the CTMU the definition of containment for sets is modified, not the set concept itself.
“And if the universe being a set both is unnecessary and takes time to prove, why is it even in the CTMU? Not that I think you can prove it, since you would have to come up with a better definition of ‘set’ first.”
It’s mentioned in the Introduction because many people consider the Universe as a mere bunch of things with no additional structure. Note that this is also whence materialism comes. “The universe is the set of all matter,” would be its tenet.
“Yes, I realize that. One problem that immediately jumps out is that there are multiple models of computation and definitions of the various linguistic terms that Chris uses, but he doesn’t address this.”
Please give me the specific terms so that I can respond.
“Another is the apparent determinism of the theory.”
To be more explicit, it states that reality necessarily determines its own behaviour because there is nothing outside of reality that can determine reality’s behaviour. What’s wrong with that?
“And while these would not be crippling if Chris were using language as a MODEL for reality, he is saying reality IS a language. That’s a problem, as Mark pointed out long ago.”
It conforms to the definition Mr. Langan provides.
Mr. Fringe, I had already explained why my statement, “From the beginning, it is a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language, and it is possible to show that reality conforms to that definition,” is the case. I will copy and paste the entire passage below to clarify.
“The idea behind the SCSPL concept is that reality is a *Self-Configuring Self-Processing (formal) Language* – hence the name. The first two properties follow from reality’s being self-contained. Were there anything outside of reality able to process and/or configure reality, it would be inside reality. Thus, reality is ‘self-configuring’ and ‘self-processing’. It also conforms to the definition of a formal language because it contains
‘(1) representations of (object-like) individuals, (space-like) relations and attributes, and (time-like) functions and operations;
(2) a set of “expressions” or perceptual states; and
(3) a syntax consisting of (a) logical and geometric rules of structure, and (b) an inductive- deductive generative grammar identifiable with the laws of state transition,’
as stated in the paper. An alternative proof of this is given in the paper as well.
‘Second, because perception and cognition are languages, and reality is cognitive and perceptual in nature, reality is a language as well.'”
As for the second quotation you provided, you cut off half of the sentence. Here it is again.
“More properties of it and its grammar are derived later, and by equally correct methods, so voice your specific complaints when you get there.”
My point was that you should read up on the other properties, the more specific ones, and then bring up any qualms you have regarding them. I did not go into the details of the more specific properties yet because (a) Al’s original post referred to SCSPL generally, and (b) there is no point of going into excessive detail when replying to a post that doesn’t. (It merely suffices to prove what the poster claimed is not the case.)
Mr. Anonymous, you’re arguing under a failed logic. I mean, this paragraph, for example:
“The idea behind the SCSPL concept is that reality is a *Self-Configuring Self-Processing (formal) Language* – hence the name. The first two properties follow from reality’s being self-contained. Were there anything outside of reality able to process and/or configure reality, it would be inside reality. Thus, reality is ‘self-configuring’ and ‘self-processing’. It also conforms to the definition of a formal language because it contains”
is completely wrong. It’s just a play of words. You say a simple thing in a complex way, and you get confused by words.
I’m too tired to start again, but believe me, by showing that your calling “universe” to everything, you’re not proving “everything” contains itself, or it’s self-contain.
Let’s assume, as an example, that all that exists is a glass of water, and nothing more. Yes, this is silly, but it illustrated very well the kind of reasoning you’re making. You’re basically saying “there is nothing outside this glass of water” (in your case because reality you assume is all, and in my case because of my assumption), “so the glass should be self-contained”.
That simple. You can look and you’ll not find a glass contained in your glass.
The fact that you’re calling reality to everything in existence does not imply reality contains itself, nor it’s a subset of itself. No. It means (if you model reality as a set, and this is an additional assumption) you’ll never find anything B whose intersection with reality is not equal to B. Simply that.
The fact that for every B, the intersection between A and B is B does not mean that A is self-contained.
So here you got. This are the facts. You speak too quickly and ask us to present facts, but you’re using failed logic.
I will not address the rest, but if you inspect it closely you’ll discover it’s based on the same kind of confused word plays.
“Actually, in the CTMU the definition of containment for sets is modified, not the set concept itself.”
If you’re modifying the concept of containment so that things can contain things they are contained in, then you are really not using anything that resembles the word containment that everyone else who speaks english is using, let alone anything resembling the terminology of typical mathematics, and using already-defined terminology in radically different ways is bad writing.
“It’s mentioned in the Introduction because many people consider the Universe as a mere bunch of things with no additional structure. Note that this is also whence materialism comes. “The universe is the set of all matter,” would be its tenet.”
I’m not really sure how anyone can say the universe doesn’t have structure; I know of no rational person who would say that in the universe, position is irrelevant to physical objects (as an example). On the other hand, simply defining the universe as a set doesn’t really add structure, since you have to have some way to make your set definition consistent. It’s starting to seem to me that CTMU has no reason whatsoever to even use the word “set” except colloquially.
“It conforms to the definition Mr. Langan provides.”
The universe doesn’t have representations of things, it has things. This is what we mean when we say that you are confusing models with things they model. I could find an example of a formal system on wikipedia, giving its symbols, syntax, etc; I could copy all that onto a piece of paper, I could program a computer to tell me if what happens to certain inputs using that language. But despite the fact that these objects could be said to “contain” (for certain definitions of contain) the representations, syntax, etc. none of these ARE the language. That is because a language is a concept, not an object. More relevantly, if the language describes some pre-existing physical object or system, that object is ALSO not the language, for the same reasons.
“To be more explicit, it states that reality necessarily determines its own behaviour because there is nothing outside of reality that can determine reality’s behaviour. What’s wrong with that?”
Now perhaps I’m erring due to misunderstanding or colloquial language, but I thought this was the pointed made earlier,that we’re not sure if *anything* *determines* certain particle behavior (it is effectively random).
“If you’re modifying the concept of containment so that things can contain things they are contained in, then you are really not using anything that resembles the word containment that everyone else who speaks english is using, let alone anything resembling the terminology of typical mathematics, and using already-defined terminology in radically different ways is bad writing.”
Actually, one use of containment is taken straight from traditional set theory and topology, while the other is taken from formal linguistics and refers to containment by predication. They’re both used in legitimate mathematics.
“I’m not really sure how anyone can say the universe doesn’t have structure; I know of no rational person who would say that in the universe, position is irrelevant to physical objects (as an example).”
Structured sets are still sets. Even spaces and objects can be considered as sets.
“On the other hand, simply defining the universe as a set doesn’t really add structure, since you have to have some way to make your set definition consistent. It’s starting to seem to me that CTMU has no reason whatsoever to even use the word ‘set’ except colloquially.”
Show that the definition is inconsistent when coupled with the aforementioned containment principles.
“The universe doesn’t have representations of things, it has things. This is what we mean when we say that you are confusing models with things they model. I could find an example of a formal system on wikipedia, giving its symbols, syntax, etc; I could copy all that onto a piece of paper, I could program a computer to tell me if what happens to certain inputs using that language. But despite the fact that these objects could be said to “contain” (for certain definitions of contain) the representations, syntax, etc. none of these ARE the language. That is because a language is a concept, not an object. More relevantly, if the language describes some pre-existing physical object or system, that object is ALSO not the language, for the same reasons.”
To preclude representations of things is to preclude the things themselves. Were we to not have mental representations of things, there would be no common ground between our perception and that which is perceived, and reality as we know it would fall apart at the seams.
“Now perhaps I’m erring due to misunderstanding or colloquial language, but I thought this was the pointed made earlier,that we’re not sure if *anything* *determines* certain particle behavior (it is effectively random).”
First of all, causal ignorance does not amount to randomness. Second of all, something definitely determines particle behaviour. Why? Suppose that there is no causal connection between one state of a particle and the next. Then consider the absolute difference relation that expresses the difference between the two states of the particle. As all relations have syntaxes, this relation does, and this means that there exists a common syntax in terms of which both particles are expressed. (If they share no common syntax, they do not even participate in the same reality, and this precludes their comparison absolutely.) This syntax gives way to a law in terms of which both states are expressible, providing a causal connection between those states.
First, let me congratulate several of the above participants for the fine job they’re doing arguing on the CTMU side of things … that is, on the *right* side of things. It’s a pleasure to behold.
But even though it almost appears that I could safely turn my back on this discussion, I’ll go ahead and add my two cents just for the sake of thoroughness.
AI: “It doesn’t matter whether or not you are saying the universe is “just” a set. You have repeatedly stated that you define a “set” to be “a collection of objects” (with no further qulaifiers). With this definition, it is posisble to prove anything. Anything at all. Thus, anything you show using this assumption is meaningless.”
Not exactly. You first have to construct a paradox around that definition (which you seem to have relaxed in a way I don’t recall having authorized), using a language that supports the construction and thus renders itself inconsistent (until you slap a few convenient semantic, aka set-theoretic, constraints and definitions on it as an afterthought).
When Cantor’s definition is mapped into SCSPL by the CTMU, such a construction is not supported. If you don’t understand what that means without “further qualifiers”, that is to say, without yet another perfectly transparent description of the language and the mapping in question, I can only say that I’m aware of the confusion and plan to address it…by my own means, on my own schedule. Meanwhile, as far as concerns Mark, I need merely keep him penned up in the little box of errors he unwisely insisted on building for himself. Given his pigheaded refusal to recant, this will require no mental effort at all.
AI: “You can call it whatever you want, but the fact the fact of the matter is that you need a stricter definition before you can proceed. Which, apparently, you have … So I did a little research and found the paper you published in 2002. And in your SCSPL section, you… fail to really define it. You do the same frustrating, annoying bullshit that Marx does in that you claim your construct has these various properties but it is impossible for anyone else to actually figure out if your conlcusions make any sense because you have not made your assumptions or definitions clear.”
I see where you’re coming from. But even that terse little description I gave in the 2002 paper you read, let alone its cumulative reinforcement by other things I’ve written, was enough to characterize SCSPL; one need merely understand the context of that characterization. If you don’t understand the context, then either you have your homework cut out for you, or you can simply wait until I get around to doing some more explaining. All I ask is that I not be slurred, defamed, and called names like “crank” and “crackpot” while I’m trying to work.
Remember, I don’t enjoy academic perks and protections, I don’t have an uncle in the business of publishing scholarly nonfiction, and partially as a consequence of that, I’m often occupied with other matters. Academia has done a sterling job of freezing people like me completely out of the loop, even including “non-academic” publishers, and this is obviously something for which reasonable allowances are required of me…especially given what’s at stake regarding this particular theory.
AI: “So, while it may be the case that your theory is consistent, there is no point in trying to convince the world of its truth until you fix basic writing problems that wouldn’t fly in a decent high school.”
So juvenile delinquent Rubix skedaddles back to Wall Street High just in time for dance class, and now I’m talking to another high school kid with a bone to pick? I guess that here at “Good Math, Bad Math”, it just gets better and better all the time. (Seriously, I’d hope you’re at least a cut or two above that.)
AI: “Once again, the point is NOT that the universe being a set is what leads to the contradiction (though this does have problems of its own). I realize the set of the Universe has different structure in CTMU, but unless your definition of “set” is stricter than Cantor’s, you are reasoning from a contradiction. This part has nothing to do with the universe at all.”
Again, that’s not quite right. It’s the *CTMU interpretation* of Cantor’s definition, which the CTMU faithfully preserves, that obviates standard set-theoretic paradoxes.
AI: “And if the universe being a set both is unnecessary and takes time to prove, why is it even in the CTMU?”
As I said, set-theoretic paradox is invoked as a point of orientation and departure. When constructing a new theory, one has no choice but to use available concepts as best one can, and it is at least partially up to the reader to allow for this necessity.
AI: “Not that I think you can prove it, since you would have to come up with a better definition of “set” first.”
…or a better *interpretation* of “set”, in a better *language* than standard set theory.
AI: “One problem that immediately jumps out is that there are multiple models of computation and definitions of the various linguistic terms that Chris uses, but he doesn’t address this.”
To some extent, I do address it. Beyond that extent, it need not be addressed, because the context is limited by the structure of the theory, which automatically suppresses irrelevant constructions.
AI: “Another is the apparent determinism of the theory.”
Determinism is a problem only where it is exclusive (every theory is to some extent deterministic). The CTMU explicitly accommodates the uncertainty, indeterminacy, and undecidability of reality.
AI: “And while these would not be crippling if Chris were using language as a MODEL for reality, he is saying reality IS a language.”
Yes…but let’s not forget what kind of language I’m talking about. It is a language that is also a model, and in addition, a universe unto itself. This is why it is called “trialistic” in that 2002 paper, and that’s why the very title of my theory conforms to this attribute.
AI: “That’s a problem, as Mark pointed out long ago.”
And as I pointed out long ago, the real problem is Mark, his incomprehension, his uncontrollable resentment, his rabid atheistic fan club, and his/their decidedly unscholarly habits of self-expression.
You know, I think there may be still a certain amount of misunderstanding about me, my situation, and what I’m trying to do. At one time, I too would have thought that somebody in the academic system would have made a minor exception or two for me in view of my extraordinary circumstances – offered a little encouragement, opened a door or two – but unfortunately, academics as a breed don’t have it in them. When all is said and done, the vast majority are self-interested creatures of their own impenetrable labyrinthine bureaucracy. Sadly, this renders them susceptible to coercive orthodoxy and mass ideological stagnation.
Some academic apologists, determined to show that academia welcomes the occasional outsider, are fond of citing the example of Ramanujan, an almost preternaturally brilliant mathematician who was taken under the wing of an academic despite his lack of formal education. Unfortunately, that was an utter fluke, a function of that academic’s uncommon compassion, integrity, and improbable ability to recognize very advanced work for what it was.
In deciding how to deal with academia, I prefer to consider the whole story. This naturally includes my own personal experience, which has conclusively demonstrated to me that academia is little more than a glorified trade union … one which long ago announced its unkind intentions toward me by serially turning me away, thus in effect sentencing me to life without parole at hard labor. Given my experience, I have little choice but to regard it as something like an institutional equivalent of Judge Roy Bean with a perpetual hangover, minus the death penalty and fit to be tied. Obviously, trust becomes difficult.
In other words, here’s the bad news regarding CTMU clarification: by an accident (or not) of fate or bureaucracy, I’m in complete charge of the scheduling. The good news: this means that it will happen exactly when and how I think best….which is only fair, since it’s my theory, and I’m the one who’s been putting up with nasty, hideously confused anti-CTMU gadflies for all of these years. I don’t work for academia, I don’t work for the banks who might have robbed me blind for a university education, I have no peers or colleagues who call me “brother” in their mobbed-up intellectual trade union, I’m not a darling of the rich “genius” foundations, and in consequence, I owe nothing to any of them.
In a way, that’s a very good thing. In fact, that’s probably how it had to be. You see, the most profound insight belongs to no mere pusillanimous hack who buys his future at the cost of his soul. It’s not just a myth: truth serves no master but God Himself, and holds in contempt those whom lesser masters have bought . After all, for the purposes of most earthbound masters, truth is a mere inconvenience.
I hope this helps explain why I haven’t been doing certain things the way others do them. In any case, the worst assumption one can make about me is that credentials and intellectual achievements always closely correspond to knowledge and ability. Make that ridiculous assumption with me, and you might as well call it a day, a year, and perhaps even a life.
Just another word to the wise.
Why do you include a rant about academia in every post?
Is there anyone here who thinks someone can not be right if he is not in academia? [Waiting…]
No? Does Mark Belong to academia? [Waiting…]
No? Is anyone here who still does not know Langan’s opinion on academia? [Waiting…]
No? Is there any relation to the quality of Langan’s “work” and his or our opinion on academia? [Waiting…]
No? Then, can we save future rants on academia, please? If you want, for any new post you write, we can go to a previous post and read an older rant. You can save a lot of keying.
Call me a hypocrite but I couldn’t help but check this page again (apparently I am a masochist):
Chris, if you don’t want to be called a crank and crackpot, then you have to be clearer in what you’re trying to argue and give concrete examples instead of merely asserting things as true and insulting anyone who you think is confused or disagrees.
Academia isn’t holding you back. Academia just requires a bit more rigor and transparency than what you’re putting forth (I am heavily involved in academia, so I’d know this better than most).
People aren’t going to open doors for you and leverage their networks/connections in your favor if you’re just going to give them hell when they ask questions and try to poke holes. That’s the entire point of the peer review process — it’s all about upholding the strongest of standards, improving quality, and maintaining credibility. But you become *extremely* hostile when anyone tries to question your theory. If you’re going to act that way, then absolutely, yes, “academia will forever keep you out.” You need to clearly show why your ideas are true. Simply asserting that you’re right and that all the experts are drooling, blithering idiots is not going to get you anywhere.
You should start out simple and then once people agree/disagree with certain premises, you can build up from there and people can better assess what you’re saying with a critical mind.
“Why do you include a rant about academia in every post?”
I don’t. (Maybe you’d better scroll up and do some counting.)
Face it – if I or my work came with an academic imprimatur, certain commentators here would keep their patronizing advice to themselves, or at least feign a little respect when parting with it.
In view of the fact that I’m very tired of wasting my time on such people, whose bad attitudes appear in comments like “there is no point in trying to convince the world of its truth until you fix basic writing problems that wouldn’t fly in a decent high school,” an occasional reminder is more than appropriate.
If such reminders offend anyone’s academic sensibilities, that’s a tragedy. But if you want to complain about it, I can only suggest that you dig out your graduation robe and mortarboard cap with the perky little tassel, and take it up with your bedroom mirror.
No, I don’t believe they offend anyone. I don’t believe CTMU would have been treated differently if it were the work of an academic, neither. And maybe not of every post, but of almost every one. I’m just asking people not to repeat themselves where there is no disagreement. This way you would waste less time with such people, saying only new things.
Just to be clear, I would remind that this blog has a long tradition of criticism to theories whose authors claim to be academics as an appealing to authority.
Langan: I can tell you with the utmost certainty that if your work came with an academic imprimatur, it should still come under the same degree of fire, if not certainly more.
You always tell people to handle their criticisms by “looking in the mirror” or that they should just “get down and not bother to get up/go home,” always putting the problem on the other parties instead of accepting responsibility for things you may be at fault for.
Communication is not a one-sided street. The point AI made about your writing is harsh but not entirely unwarranted. Your writing style is arguably verbose and you do not explain things in a way that is clear and as simple. Difficult subjects can still be explained in simple terms that everyone can understand as long as everything is properly defined and consistent with plenty of examples to illustrate what is being done.
Instead, it’s all very approximating and vague, whereas people are asking you for something rigorously exact and transparent. While your ideas may make sense in your mind, they do not make sense to others — even those who are well-versed in the areas you claim to be talking about. But your response, instead, is to assume that something must be wrong with everybody else.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for you to provide concrete, simple examples of what you’re arguing.
” If you don’t understand what that means without “further qualifiers”, that is to say, without yet another perfectly transparent description of the language and the mapping in question, I can only say that I’m aware of the confusion and plan to address it…by my own means, on my own schedule.”
That’s fine… but until then, don’t act like its other people’s fault for not understanding. My comment about high school in no way implies I am stil in high school (I’m not), but it was supposed to make a point about the fundamental nature of your writing style flaws.
Another note: if Anonymous is correct here:
“Actually, one use of containment is taken straight from traditional set theory and topology, while the other is taken from formal linguistics and refers to containment by predication. They’re both used in legitimate mathematics.”
Then that is a serious problem. You can’t use one word that is key to your entire theory, in two fundamentally different ways, without being clear about the distinction every time. I would recommend coming up with a new word to replace one of the usages in order to avoid falling into semantic pitfalls.
One last note on writing:
“Yes…but let’s not forget what kind of language I’m talking about. It is a language that is also a model, and in addition, a universe unto itself. This is why it is called “trialistic” in that 2002 paper, and that’s why the very title of my theory conforms to this attribute.”
If you’re going to invoke standard definitions (which you do), don’t diverge from the standard usage. You try to apply the regular definition of, say, formal language to things (like the universe) which in no way conform to the standard or concept of langauge. It’s like saying that because some real numbers have infinite digits, we can talk about the cardinality of, say, pi.
Note that I’ve spent lots of time on similar problems (and still do). I got back plenty of papers from teachers with poor marks that I thought were great, only to have someone point out that nothing I said made sense without more clarification. You blame academia, but perhaps you should look at your own style first. This does not represent a bad attitude, but sincere advice. The only reason I’m actually putting any effort into this at all is because I think you might have something worthwhile, just expressed poorly.
Now I’m going to hold off on further commentary on the theory itself, since doing so well would require me to work my way through hundreds of pages of disparate papers, edits, supplementary material, and probably additional background from both philosophy and math, and also the mess of contradictions, off-hand comments, and bullshit above.
“Another note: if Anonymous is correct here:
‘Actually, one use of containment is taken straight from traditional set theory and topology, while the other is taken from formal linguistics and refers to containment by predication. They’re both used in legitimate mathematics.’
Then that is a serious problem. You can’t use one word that is key to your entire theory, in two fundamentally different ways, without being clear about the distinction every time. I would recommend coming up with a new word to replace one of the usages in order to avoid falling into semantic pitfalls.”
One is referred to as “descriptive containment” and the other is referred to as “topological containment”. Never are the two confused.
“If you’re going to invoke standard definitions (which you do), don’t diverge from the standard usage. You try to apply the regular definition of, say, formal language to things (like the universe) which in no way conform to the standard or concept of langauge. It’s like saying that because some real numbers have infinite digits, we can talk about the cardinality of, say, pi.”
If they fit the definition, they conform to the concept of a language.
Forgot to touch on something:
Granted, academia is far from being the ne plus ultra of human knowledge and understanding. Plenty of people with real talent may never get the chance to actualize their gifts because they don’t have an opportunity to get an education or become part of a network that allows them to share their ideas. Becoming a part of that, for me, took an enormous amount of work because I grew up in a neglectful, abusive household for many years where education was not a priority (and was in fact discouraged).
There aren’t very many effective ways of changing the system without corrupting it entirely. At some point, the best way to improve the system is by making the means of high-quality education more widely accessible and easily taught.
At the very least, academia and scientific establishments rigorously uphold the values of truth, and that counts for something hugely important. The system works, and it works well. It could certainly be better, but there’s a difference between “making it better by allowing people to do more radical things” and “making it better by degrading the values of truth by allowing crackpottery.” Radical things are done all the time.
Academia is not some glorified trade union that has sentenced you to hard labor — you *chose* to go into hard labor when you had already made it to college and had the chance to receive a formal education. You intentionally *chose* to reject that opportunity — an opportunity that many don’t ever get the chance to partake in.
To be fair, I know how incredibly hard it is to put yourself through college. I worked full-time in addition to taking a full courseload across two colleges within the same university while paying my way through 100% and handling all the bureaucratic paperwork involved in the finances. It’s *insanely* difficult. But I’m not going to take my personal difficulties and unfairly paint academia as a worthless entity where truth is concerned.
Academic communities will certainly turn you away if what you’re trying to contribute is verbose crankery that flies in the face of rigorously-established methodologies for upholding the truth value in things, especially if you’re misusing terminology and introducing loosely-defined neologisms and jargon. It’s important to have standards and common means of communication, especially where mathematics/physics are concerned.
Again, if you don’t want to be labeled a crackpot/crank, you’re going to have to prove it by using terms as they’re typically used, and giving clear examples that people can understand. If you aren’t willing to do this, I promise you that the cycle will just continue ad infinitum with nothing to show for it.
I personally don’t think you can do it anyway because you claim to be doing metaphysics, not science. Metaphysics is largely unfalsifiable and doesn’t offer any deeper understanding or explanation for things. Being compatible with science is insufficient grounds for truth. There may also be some things about our universe that we can never know for sure, but that’s just tough. You don’t bypass limits by pretending they don’t exist.
Chris Langan: “Aside from Mark, I doubt that any of the hostile or derisive commentators here have any credentials to speak of. That’s why they’re posting anonymously – they have no educational bona fides of the kind they’d like others to believe they have, and are afraid of being identified as pretentious know-nothings. That’s also why nothing they say makes the least bit of sense.” – August 16, 2011 at 11:04 am
Again I repeat:
“That’s also why nothing they say makes the least bit of sense.” [偷笑] <—image search it.
That’s interesting, Jeremy. People with credentials are just silly academics, and people without them know nothing because of it. Veeeeeery interesting comment.
“That’s interesting, Jeremy. People with credentials are just silly academics, and people without them know nothing because of it. Veeeeeery interesting comment.”
[疑问]
Where’s the doubt?
(Langan)”… any of the hostile or derisive commentators here have any credentials… That’s also why nothing they say makes the least bit of sense.”
+
(Langan)academics only say nonsense
=
everyone is a fool
Did I miss something? Weren’t you implying this?
AI: “That’s fine… but until then, don’t act like its other people’s fault for not understanding. My comment about high school in no way implies I am stil in high school (I’m not), but it was supposed to make a point about the fundamental nature of your writing style flaws.”
I see your point – you don’t want to take the blame for not understanding certain material that you find difficult. But human nature being what it is, people sometimes blame others for their own incomprehension even when it *is* their own fault. From where I sit, it’s not entirely clear that this is not what you’re doing, at least in part.
As far as my writing style is concerned, I’ll be sure to let you know if and when I need your advice. Until then, I think that the main problem with my writing is that it tends to overshoot the reading comprehension of some readers … sometimes even those with whom I’m trying to communicate. As I say, I plan to compensate for that, and enough said.
AI: “Then [using containment in two senses] is a serious problem. You can’t use one word that is key to your entire theory, in two fundamentally different ways, without being clear about the distinction every time. I would recommend coming up with a new word to replace one of the usages in order to avoid falling into semantic pitfalls.”
Again, we seem to have a reading comprehension problem here. My dual usage of containment was spelled out quite plainly. The same goes for other words and concepts about which my critics sometimes complain.
While I plan to make certain points clearer for those who find them confusing, this doesn’t mean that I agree to take all of the heat for everyone’s else’s confusion. Metaphysics is a very abstract field, and those who can’t take the heat for their own confusion should consider staying out of the kitchen.
AI: “If you’re going to invoke standard definitions (which you do), don’t diverge from the standard usage. You try to apply the regular definition of, say, formal language to things (like the universe) which in no way conform to the standard or concept of langauge.”
Definitions have underlying models. In describing novel ideas, one must sometimes break away from the standard underlying models of certain terms or start over with new terms entirely. Unfortunately, I’ve found that when I do either one of these things, I’m immediately accused of having failed to properly do the other. Under no circumstances does the accuser ever take any personal responsibility for the cobwebs festooning his own cranial vault.
Accordingly, if you really want to understand my writing, I can offer you just two choices: you can wait for future installments, or you can concentrate a little harder and stop blaming others for what you don’t understand. Either accept my schedule and stop complaining about the explanations already given, or take at least partial responsibility for your own incomprehension.
AI: “You blame academia, but perhaps you should look at your own style first. This does not represent a bad attitude, but sincere advice. The only reason I’m actually putting any effort into this at all is because I think you might have something worthwhile, just expressed poorly.”
I don’t think it’s quite fair of you to accuse me of “blaming” academia for anything. That would be futile, as academia is unable to experience remorse or concertedly reform itself in any way. For better or for worse, it is what it is.
My point was merely that, being what it is, and relating to me as it does, academia has unavoidably impacted my explanatory schedule and the amount of CTMU material currently available. Aside from that, it bears no further discussion … unless, of course, someone *wants* to further discuss it, in which case there’s really no point in complaining about the topic.
Thanks for giving my theory the benefit of your doubt. Hopefully, we’ll get some real communication going at some point, and you may actually start to feel good about it.
“Definitions have underlying models. In describing novel ideas, one must sometimes break away from the standard underlying models of certain terms or start over with new terms entirely. Unfortunately, I’ve found that when I do either one of these things, I’m immediately accused of having failed to properly do the other. ”
Yeah, except when people use pre-existing jargon in new ways or introduce neologisms, everything is properly defined in a clear manner. You don’t do this.
Seriously, it’s bad writing. It’s vague writing. Being vague and inexact doesn’t mean everyone else has a reading comprehension problem. Then again, if your ego is as big as yours, it doesn’t matter. You’re faultless and the problem is always with everyone else.
Honestly, how stupid are you?
“I see your point – you don’t want to take the blame for not understanding certain material that you find difficult. But human nature being what it is, people sometimes blame others for their own incomprehension even when it *is* their own fault. From where I sit, it’s not entirely clear that this is not what you’re doing, at least in part.”
I could basically say the same thing to you, replacing understanding with communicating.
Look, you’ve claimed that a great number of people have been unable to understand your work. I doubt they are all stupid; a great many have probably written up, described, defended, read, understood, and critiqued very complex ideas. Perhaps the explanation is not with their understanding ability, but with your writing.
“Again, we seem to have a reading comprehension problem here. My dual usage of containment was spelled out quite plainly. The same goes for other words and concepts about which my critics sometimes complain. ”
Sorry, I should have been more clear about the focus of that satement. The point was that you have to note that difference with every usage, and it appears you do not do that. Now, maybe it becomes clearer with context if you can work your way through the rest of the muddle, but right now it’s incredibly confusing.
“Definitions have underlying models. In describing novel ideas, one must sometimes break away from the standard underlying models of certain terms or start over with new terms entirely. Unfortunately, I’ve found that when I do either one of these things, I’m immediately accused of having failed to properly do the other. Under no circumstances does the accuser ever take any personal responsibility for the cobwebs festooning his own cranial vault. ”
That’s because it comes across as trying to do BOTH. The language examples works here: you invoke the formal definition of language as used elsewhere, but use “language” in very new ways. Coming up with entirely new models is fine, but don’t try to claim the success of accepted models.
“Accordingly, if you really want to understand my writing, I can offer you just two choices: you can wait for future installments, or you can concentrate a little harder and stop blaming others for what you don’t understand. Either accept my schedule and stop complaining about the explanations already given, or take at least partial responsibility for your own incomprehension.”
You can take as long as you want, write on your own schedule, fine. But if you’re going to publish theories with significant problems in writing and understandability, and have to publish revisions over an extended period of time, don’t complain when other people point those flaws out (that is one of the major reasons for publishing), and don’t blame your mistakes on them. It’s fine to make mistakes, and it’s even fine to publish them. Blaming them on other people, not so much.
“My point was merely that, being what it is, and relating to me as it does, academia has unavoidably impacted my explanatory schedule and the amount of CTMU material currently available. Aside from that, it bears no further discussion … unless, of course, someone *wants* to further discuss it, in which case there’s really no point in complaining about the topic.”
You’re the one who keeps bringing it up, despite it being irrelevant.
“If they fit the definition, they conform to the concept of a language.”
Are you going to try to understand the point or just repeat theis ad nauseum?
Mr. Langan makes his definition explicit. The definition of “language” he uses is something that incorporates,
“(1) representations of (object-like) individuals, (space-like) relations and attributes, and (time-like) functions and operations;
(2) a set of ‘expressions’ or perceptual states; and
(3) a syntax consisting of (a) logical and geometric rules of structure, and (b) an inductive- deductive generative grammar identifiable with the laws of state transition.”
All three of these properties apply to reality. I challenge you to point out one that doesn’t. Resorting to analogies is unnecessary. You should merely pick one or more of these points and tell me why it doesn’t (or they don’t) apply to reality.
If reality has an ultimate non-determinist component (like QM proposes), what would be the laws of state transition? There will be actually no concrete rules that can describe the ‘next state’. In QM, anything not forbidden can happen, only you can not know if it will actually happen.
So, I’m not sure (3) can be applied, even in this vague language context.
Do you believe you can say there are laws of state transition in a world where you can not predict state transitions? Then, is there anything you would not call “a language”, with this vague definition? Or can you prove the World has no non-deterministic component?
If you still believe you can apply (3) despite being no actual rules to know what the next state is, I have a question:
What do you infer from reality being such a “language”? I mean, almost everything would be such a “language”.
Do we gain anything by inventing a definition of “language” which we can apply to almost everything? Can you say something which is not such a “language”? What conclusion do you get by saying reality is a “language”?
Please, say one. I would apply it to any other thing which I can call “language” by that definition, to see the usefulness.
I can go even further.
In (3) you’re assuming there is a set of laws of state transition. How do you know that laws really exists in reality?
If you’re thinking, for example, in physics, you should know the laws are just models, and not nature. Laws in physics are just models, we never know if we will see an infringement of such laws. The idea of physical laws is practical, but just a model.
Outside the model, we don’t know if there are actually laws governing the Universe.
So, why do you say there are actually such laws?
If you have no justification, then you’re just postulating there are such laws. That is, you’re postulating nature fits the definition of “language”, and then you’re saying nature clearly fits the definition.
So, basically, I’m saying that the assertion (reality fits the definition) hides the assumption that reality fits the definition.
It’s not a definition, but a model. You’re just disguising it as absolute truth.
In any case, remember that appealing to a lack of imagination is not a proof.
So, let’s do it the other way. Why do you say reality incorporates laws of state transition? Have you find any of them? An indirect proof, maybe?
“I can go even further.
In (3) you’re assuming there is a set of laws of state transition. How do you know that laws really exists in reality?
If you’re thinking, for example, in physics, you should know the laws are just models, and not nature. Laws in physics are just models, we never know if we will see an infringement of such laws. The idea of physical laws is practical, but just a model.
Outside the model, we don’t know if there are actually laws governing the Universe.
So, why do you say there are actually such laws?
If you have no justification, then you’re just postulating there are such laws. That is, you’re postulating nature fits the definition of “language”, and then you’re saying nature clearly fits the definition.”
The laws have a real effect on reality regardless, and the unreal cannot affect the real, so the laws are necessarily real.
“If you still believe you can apply (3) despite being no actual rules to know what the next state is, I have a question:
What do you infer from reality being such a “language”? I mean, almost everything would be such a “language”.
Do we gain anything by inventing a definition of “language” which we can apply to almost everything? Can you say something which is not such a “language”? What conclusion do you get by saying reality is a “language”?
Please, say one. I would apply it to any other thing which I can call “language” by that definition, to see the usefulness.”
I’m glad you asked! One needs the fact of reality’s being a language to find that reality is an SCSPL. There is a section in Mr. Langan’s 2002 paper in which he draws parallels between the CTMU and John A. Wheeler’s vision of the future of reality theory, so I’ll copy and paste the entire passage here. I expect that this passage will draw a *lot* of questions, and I warn you that I may not have the time to answer them all, but I will show up from time to time. I am also prepared to be accused of “avoiding the question(s)” on that basis, but again, if there are a lot of them I really will not have the time to answer them all. I paste this here in the hope that you will glean something of importance from it in any account. By the way, the numbers located throughout the passage link to footnotes in the paper.
“We are now in a position to draw a few parallels between Wheeler’s vision of reality theory and the CTMU.
The Self-Excited Circuit, the informational logic loop through which physics engenders observer participation, which engenders information, which engenders physics, is a tight characterization of SCSPL…so tight that it would be difficult if not impossible to replace SCSPL with anything else and neither violate nor fall short of Wheeler’s description. SCSPL is logical in construction, has a loop-like dynamic, and creates information and syntax, including the laws of physics, through telic recursion generated by agent-level syntactic operators whose acts of observer-participation are essential to the self-configuration of the Participatory Universe. These acts are linked by telic recursion to the generalized cognitive-perceptual interactions of quantum-level syntactic operators, the minimal events comprising the fabric of spacetime.
Through telic feedback, state and syntax are cross-refined from unbound telesis or UBT, a zero- information domain of ontological potential, under the guidance of a higher-order law called the Telic Principle…a protean “law without law” through which order is extracted from disorder as laws are configured according to the generalized utility of state-syntax relationships for agent- level operators or observer-participants. The binary yes-or-no indications prescribed by It from Bit are demanded by infocognitive monism and the fundamental status of two-valued sentential logic in SCSPL syntax. The world is not merely a cybernetic monstrosity, a “giant machine ruled by preestablished law”, but a metacybernetic system with logical priority over machines and the laws they obey.
How come existence? is answered by the fact that the universe is a global SCSPL operator amounting to one vast, self-selective, self-expressive act of reflexive observer-participation, while how come the quantum? is answered by the hological self-replication of the universe in each one of its microscopic syntactic operators and agent-level telors. Many observer-participants yield one coherent world because, through MU, the universe relates to its contents as a homogeneous distributed syntax that syndiffeonically supports and expresses their distinctions even as they help it evolve through observer-participation and telic recursion. Individual solipsism becomes distributed solipsism through the mutual absorption of SCSPL syntactic operators, made possible by a combination of distributed SCSPL syntax and shared teleology.
The Reality Principle, along with MAP, M=R and other logical guarantors of cosmic self- containment, shows that the syntactic stability of reality rules out any infinite reptilian regress of turtle on turtle, while the familiar continuum of classical physics corresponds to a syntactic (LMS) interpolation of the conspansive manifold generated by discrete SCSPL grammatical operations. Where space and time correspond to information and generalized cognition respectively, and where information and cognition are logically entwined in infocognitive SCSPL syntactic operators intersecting in states and state-transition events, space and time are entwined in a conspansive event-lattice connected by syntax and evolving through mutual absorption
47
events among syntactic operators, symmetric instances of generalized observation influenced by telic recursion. Thus, time is not “fed into” the explanation of existence, but is a function of conspansive, telic-recursive SCSPL grammar.
The ultimate “boundary of the boundary” of the universe is UBT, a realm of zero constraint and infinite possibility where neither boundary nor content exists. The supertautologically-closed universe buys internal diffeonesis only at the price of global synesis, purchasing its informational distinctions only at the price of coherence. No question, no answer reflects the fact that reality consists not of mere information, but infocognition, and that information on state is crucially linked to and dependent on syntax…the syntax of the “questions” asked of itself by the self-configuring universe. Due to the self-configurative freedom inherited by reality from UBT, the dynamically self-configuring universe displays uncertainty and complementarity and thus cannot be locked into locally-determinate answers for all possible questions at once, while the extended self- connectivity of conspansive spacetime unavoidably implicates the environment in the Q&A.
The Super-Copernican Principle reflects the distribution of the creation event over every point of spacetime according to the Extended Superposition Principle, which describes the way consequent states and events are atemporally superposed in their antecedent states and events. Generalized consciousness, the unitary reflexivity of the universe, is a fair description of the self-configuration and self-processing capacity of SCSPL as captured by the Telic and M=R Principles, while conspansive spacetime links spatially and temporally distant objects in a web of contact and communication exceeding even the neural connectivity of a human brain. And the CTMU describes the universe as just the sort of complex, teleologically self-variegating, self- synthesized information system prescribed by more is different, telic-recursively explicating multiplicity and diffeonesis from the unity and synesis of distributed SCSPL syntax, the (unique) CTMU counterpart of what has sometimes been called “the Implicate Order”.49”
“If reality has an ultimate non-determinist component (like QM proposes), what would be the laws of state transition? There will be actually no concrete rules that can describe the ‘next state’. In QM, anything not forbidden can happen, only you can not know if it will actually happen.
So, I’m not sure (3) can be applied, even in this vague language context.
Do you believe you can say there are laws of state transition in a world where you can not predict state transitions? Then, is there anything you would not call “a language”, with this vague definition? Or can you prove the World has no non-deterministic component?”
Your view, namely that quantum mechanics states that some things do not have laws of state transition, actually depends on one’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. What you have stated resembles the Copenhagen interpretation. I’ve already discussed the consequences of true randomness above. I will copy and paste what I had typed as it is relevant. You will have to debate the argument below to justify your view.
“First of all, causal ignorance does not amount to randomness. Second of all, something definitely determines particle behaviour. Why? Suppose that there is no causal connection between one state of a particle and the next. Then consider the absolute difference relation that expresses the difference between the two states of the particle. As all relations have syntaxes, this relation does, and this means that there exists a common syntax in terms of which both particles are expressed. (If they share no common syntax, they do not even participate in the same reality, and this precludes their comparison absolutely.) This syntax gives way to a law in terms of which both states are expressible, providing a causal connection between those states.”
“The laws have a real effect on reality regardless, and the unreal cannot affect the real, so the laws are necessarily real.”
Is this seriously your argument? Asserting that laws exists? To prove they exists?
> “I will copy and paste what I had typed as it is relevant. You will have to debate the argument below to justify your view.”
> “First of all, causal ignorance does not amount to randomness”.
And? That casual ignorance does not amount to randomness does not mean that randomness is not a possibility. It means there could be casual ignorance we take for randomness. But it can also be true randomness. This proves nothing.
The rest of your argument rest on this sentence:
“As all relations have syntaxes…”
So you’re proving that reality has a syntax by asserting reality has a syntax.
I’m superman. Want a proof? I’m clearly superman, so if I were not superman I would be superman and I would be not superman. Contradiction. So I’m superman. Nothing more to add.
You’re reasoning is not getting any better. Anyone takes this seriously?
“Is this seriously your argument? Asserting that laws exists? To prove they exists?”
Nope. What you are quoting is my argument that if reality has laws of state transition, then these laws necessarily apply to reality. This may sound trivial when phrased that way, but I’m replying to your comment, “If you’re thinking, for example, in physics, you should know the laws are just models, and not nature. Laws in physics are just models, we never know if we will see an infringement of such laws. The idea of physical laws is practical, but just a model.”
My argument for the existence of these laws comes later. It is as follows.
“First of all, causal ignorance does not amount to randomness. Second of all, something definitely determines particle behaviour. Why? Suppose that there is no causal connection between one state of a particle and the next. Then consider the absolute difference relation that expresses the difference between the two states of the particle. As all relations have syntaxes, this relation does, and this means that there exists a common syntax in terms of which both particles are expressed. (If they share no common syntax, they do not even participate in the same reality, and this precludes their comparison absolutely.) This syntax gives way to a law in terms of which both states are expressible, providing a causal connection between those states.”
You claimed that it rests on the sentence, “As all relations have syntaxes, this relation does, and this means that there exists a common syntax in terms of which both particles are expressed.” You claimed that this is the case because, “[You’re] proving that reality has a syntax by asserting reality has a syntax.” This is not what I’m doing. I’m asserting that all relations have syntaxes, and that thus the difference relation expressing the difference in two states of any particle at any time does too.
Apply your argument to two ideal dice. Both dice rolls are random, but we can talk about the difference between the two rolls. This in no way means the two dice rolls are correlated, let alone that there is a causal connection between the first and the second.
I disagree. My argument would be applied as follows.
There exists a difference relation expressing the difference between the resultant states effected by the two dice rolls. The existence of this relation entails a syntax in terms of which these states are defined. This provides a common syntax between the two results. This syntax gives way to a defining law in terms of which both states are expressible. Thus there is a law that determines both states.
What is the flaw in this?
The non sequitur. That’s the flaw. And that’s quite a flaw.
I’m not sure what you mean by syntax, the way I understand is as the structure or grammar of a (formal) language. Perhaps you have defined it differently earlier in this thread, but I dont have the time or interest to read all of the nonsense that has been posted here in detail.
As such:
and 
is a digit from 1 to 6.
between two dice rolls is a digit from 0 to 5 possibly preceded by a minus sign.
The syntax of a dice roll
The syntax of the difference
Now to look at your argument step by step,
“There exists a difference relation expressing the difference between the resultant states effected by the two dice rolls.”
This is called subtraction.
“The existence of this relation entails a syntax in terms of which these states are defined. ”
Here you start getting vague, but I guess you mean that if you add the difference
to state 
you get state 
.
“This syntax gives way to a defining law in terms of which both states are expressible.”
Even more vague, the only thing I can make of it is
,
.
As you may notice it gives no real information.
“Thus there is a law that determines both states.”
No, knowing the difference does not tell you the values of
and 
.
Hmmm, apparently the LaTeX parser doesn’t work as I expected… The four boxes should be:
a – b,
a – b,
a = b + (a – b),
b = a – (a – b).
So you proved that reality has a syntax by asserting that reality has relations, and every relation has a syntax.
Errrr… and of course relations have syntax because they have properties, which have syntax. And properties have syntax because they have state, which have a syntax. And state have a syntax because they’ve got values, which have syntax. And values have syntax because…
Excuse me if I don’t continue this conversation with you. If anyone have something with sense to say about this, I will be very glad to continue the conversation with him.
“So you proved that reality has a syntax by asserting that reality has relations, and every relation has a syntax.”
I was not proving that, “Reality has a syntax.” I was proving that true randomness cannot exist.
“Errrr… and of course relations have syntax because they have properties, which have syntax. And properties have syntax because they have state, which have a syntax. And state have a syntax because they’ve got values, which have syntax. And values have syntax because…”
Not quite. Relations have syntaxes because all relations take forms. This is the case because all relations that do not take a form are not interpretable; remember that symbols and even interpretations are syntactic entities. Lacking interpretability, a relation would not be cognitively accessible, and that which is not cognitively accessible (even in theory) may be severed from reality. You may object to this last point, but anything that can not, even theoretically, be cognitively processed does not have any effect on reality, and that which does not have any effect on reality is decidedly unreal.
“Excuse me if I don’t continue this conversation with you. If anyone have something with sense to say about this, I will be very glad to continue the conversation with him.”
You may stop this discussion at your heart’s content.
That was a proof that true randomness can not exist?
Man, you’ve got a serious problem.
Here I’m going to prove that Anonymous deserve a Nobel prize, Anonymous’ style:
————————————-
There is a relation between the Nobel prize and Anonymous. If it doesn’t exist, then it would be not cognitively processable, so that relation would not be real. And this is a proof that it is real. (Because, for some reason, I asserted that it exist, and if it doesn’t exist then it would not be real, so I anonymously infer that it exists. No, I don’t understand the reasoning, neither).
Apart from this, the effects of Anonymous receiving the Nobel prize are real (are they?, well, why not?), and the unreal can not have an effect over the real. So we conclude that the prize is real.
Of course, you would argue that there is no Nobel for creative (but dubious) inference. No problem, I can show you there is. The Nobel prize has a syntax (this is a free assertion that makes me inference easier). It doesn’t have a syntax because it has a property that has a syntax. Not quite. That would be absolutely stupid. It has a syntax because it has a form that has a syntax.
Now, this is my argument. Until any of you provide an argument contradicting this, you all automatically agree that this is so, being so well established, and so the Nobel committee has no other option but to refute this and the circular logic I will provide to creatively prove it again, or to concede the prize to Anonymous.
Now, if anybody thinks this is offensive, please stop, because that’s would not be gentlemanly. I believe we could have a logical discussion, and you’ll be not presenting facts.
And the time cube has four corners and the day has three actions.
I said.
“Suppose that there is no causal connection between one state of a particle and the next.”
I don’t think this is the negation of the satatement you are trying to prove. It could be that we can’t predict EXACTLY where particles will be, but we can describe probabilities (this is what orbitals are) or perhaps give some locations they can or cannot be (for example, particles cannot move at superliminal speed, which given a certain accuracy of location at one point in time limits the locations in space that particle could occupy at further points in time). Thus true randomness (impossibility of more precise prediction than some constant) could still coexist with some causal connection.
Robert, that’s not quite correct.
“Syntax”, as it is used in this scenario, refers to “the rules of state and transformation characterizing the medium”. I am quoting Mr. Langan’s 2002 paper.
Say you idealistically roll one die and get 1. Then you idealistically roll the other and get 3. Now let’s look at my argument.
“There exists a difference relation expressing the difference between the resultant states effected by the two dice rolls.”
This is not necessarily as simple as subtraction. But let’s suppose it is subtraction.
“The existence of this relation entails a syntax in terms of which these states are defined.”
This applies even when we use subtraction. The fact that we can subtract one number from the other shows that these numbers are similar enough on some level that they can be compared with the relation of subtraction. This is the “syntax” that they have in common and to which I was referring.
“This syntax gives way to a defining law in terms of which both states are expressible.”
The defining law is the syntax.
“Thus there is a law that determines both states.”
This follows from my last.
Al, in the case of probabilities, if there is no way we can predict the final outcome with certainty, it is not a case of a partial causal connection, but of no causal connection at all. The probabilistic example is just a narrowing down of the generic example in which any result is possible. The randomness is merely localized in the probabilistic example. Instead of getting any result, one gets one of several results, but in an aleatory manner. Thus, when the argument is applied to the resultant states, one gets the same result. This is what I tackled with the dice.
John, here’s a dissection of your argument.
“There is a relation between the Nobel prize and Anonymous. If it doesn’t exist, then it would be not cognitively processable, so that relation would not be real. And this is a proof that it is real. (Because, for some reason, I asserted that it exist, and if it doesn’t exist then it would not be real, so I anonymously infer that it exists. No, I don’t understand the reasoning, neither).”
Yes, there is a difference relation between me and the Nobel Prize. It exists because there is a difference between me and the Nobel Prize.
“Apart from this, the effects of Anonymous receiving the Nobel prize are real (are they?, well, why not?), and the unreal can not have an effect over the real. So we conclude that the prize is real.”
Do the effects of my receiving the Nobel Prize have an effect on reality? No, because they haven’t been actualized. Your argument has broken down.
“Of course, you would argue that there is no Nobel for creative (but dubious) inference. No problem, I can show you there is. The Nobel prize has a syntax (this is a free assertion that makes me inference easier). It doesn’t have a syntax because it has a property that has a syntax. Not quite. That would be absolutely stupid. It has a syntax because it has a form that has a syntax.”
The Nobel Prize does have a defining syntax for a number of reasons, such as the fact of its definability and its participation in some medium. (The example of the medium actualized by the existence of a difference relation between me and the Nobel Prize might be a good one.)
> “Do the effects of my receiving the Nobel Prize have an effect on reality? No, because they haven’t been actualized. Your argument has broken down.”
Yes, they have been actualized, because the effects of the actualization are real, and the form of the actualization is real, and the unreal can not have an effect on the real. So the actualization is real.
Also, you have not taken into account that the milk flows from the cow, and the logical reason of a leg lamb flying to Hong Kong three times after tomorrow. So you actually have a Nobel prize.
To maintain your view you must now refute these strong arguments.
(Hey, this is easy. I could get used to this!)
“Yes, they have been actualized, because the effects of the actualization are real, and the form of the actualization is real, and the unreal can not have an effect on the real. So the actualization is real.”
The effects of the actualization are not real because they have not occurred. Your argument has broken down again.
An effect that has not occurred is not interpretable. Lacking interpretability, the effect which has not occurred would not be cognitively accessible, and that which is not cognitively accessible (even in theory) may be severed from reality. You may object to this last point, but anything that can not, even theoretically, be cognitively processed does not have any effect on reality, and that which does not have any effect on reality is decidedly unreal.
So the effect which has not occurred is unreal. The effect can not be unreal and have an effect on reality. As the effect has an effect on reality, it is real. So you have a Nobel prize.
If you want another argument, your Nobel prize is golden. A thing cannot be golden and be unreal. So your Nobel prize is real. You have a Nobel prize.
As a third argument, which you have not discussed, the milk flows from the cow, and the logical reason of a leg lamb flying to Hong Kong three times after tomorrow. So you actually have a Nobel prize.
Remember until you refute this last argument, you can not maintain your point of view.
I only expect from you to have an intelligent argumentation.
“An effect that has not occurred is not interpretable.”
This is not necessarily true. It’s possible for us to conceive of that which has not actually occurred; it exists as an abstract entity, but not a concrete one.
“If you want another argument, your Nobel prize is golden. A thing cannot be golden and be unreal. So your Nobel prize is real. You have a Nobel prize.”
This presupposes that I have a Nobel Prize.
“As a third argument, which you have not discussed, the milk flows from the cow, and the logical reason of a leg lamb flying to Hong Kong three times after tomorrow. So you actually have a Nobel prize.”
Yes, milk tends to flow from cows. However “and the logical reason of a leg lamb flying to Hong Kong three times after tomorrow” does not conform to the syntax of the English language, and is thus senseless.
It may not be syntactically correct in English, until you take into account that I redefined certain words. This way, it is correct. So my argument holds.
If there is a rule of state and transformation characterizing dice, aren’t you assuming the dice are not random a priori? Sounds like a circular argument.
Aside from that,
The states of the dice are similar, in the sense that they are both integers between 1 and 6. Being numbers, they can be compared. How does this comparison give way to a defining law, and what is this law?
The reason why I chose, in my thought experiment, a universe consisting of a single dice is so that this situation is simple enough that we can avoid vague statements such as “there exists a syntax” or “there exists a law” and can explicitly formulate these. Or can at least show a procedure for explicitly formulating these even though the actual calculations might be too cumbersome to fit in a blog comment.
If you cannot show how to construct it for a simple example, how do you know it exists for ‘the universe’? At the moment this is an assertion without proof.
It’s not circular because the existence of the syntax follows from the existence of the relation, which follows in turn from the existence of the dice. I do not simply assert that the syntax exists, I conclude it based on that and that and that. In fact, that’s the essential point of the argument. I proved that the medium exists. I proved that it necessarily has a set of rules and transformations by dint of which it’s categorized. When we extend this to causal mediums, we get a result in which embedding in a causal medium necessitates non-randomness. Note that this is an implicit, not explicit, result. It does not state the rules outright, but it proves that they exist.
But I’ll try another method. Perhaps this time it will convince you (in the plural).
As Chris pointed out in his 2002 paper, “randomness” means either “acausality” or “informational incompressibility with respect to any distributed causal template or ingredient of causal syntax”. The former is not scientific and not closed with respect to explanation; the latter requires that higher orders of causation be taken into account, which invocations of “randomness” cannot do.
> “I conclude it based on that and that and that. In fact, that’s the essential point of the argument.”
See, Robert? An irrefutable argument. He actually deserves that Nobel.
“It’s not circular because the existence of the syntax follows from the existence of the relation, which follows in turn from the existence of the dice. I do not simply assert that the syntax exists, I conclude it based on that and that and that.”
By “that and that and that” I was echoing the structure of the passage “because the existence of the syntax follows from the existence of the relation, which follows in turn from the existence of the dice”.
Me too.
I still do not see how the relation, in this case the operation of subtraction to compare two dice rolls, implies the existence of a syntax, a “rule of state and transformation” for the dice.
I ask again, a universe consisting of dice isn’t too hard, please write down what this syntax is and how it leads to a defining law. Please write down the syntax and the law, or give an explicit method of constructing them.
Choose a different simple example if that suits you better, but I’d like to get this discussion out of the realm of “there exists a” and “it is possible to” to some concrete examples. I suspect thats the only way to really make clear what you’re talking about here.
This is a maths blog, don’t be afraid to get technical, being vague or imprecise is a deadly sin though.
Noncommutative posets, logical geometry, and anticipatory systems seem related to certain concepts in the CTMU.
From Simple to Complex and Ultra-complex Systems: A Paradigm Shift Towards Non-Abelian Systems Dynamics
“the development of system theory has been remarkably uneven: phases of tumultuous development arousing vivid expectations have been followed by periods of stagnation if not utter regression. Moreover, within the different sciences, the theory of systems is customarily seen and presented in rather different ways. The differences are often so remarkable that one may ask whether there is in fact anything like “the” theory of systems. The ontological/existential reading claims that the systems under observation are essentially independent from the observer, which eventually discover, or observe, them. Most confusions can be dealt with by distinguishing two aspects of the interactions between observing and observed systems. The thesis that knowing a system, as required e.g. by any scientific development, implies appropriate interactions between an observing and an observed system, does not mean that existence or the nature of the observed system depends on the observing system, notwithstanding the significant perturbations introduced by measurements on microscopic, observed quantum systems. Furthermore, the ontological interpretation helps us better understand that some systems essentially depend on other systems in either a constructive (Baianu and Marinescu, 1973) or an intrinsic, sense (Baianu et al, 2006). Higher-order systems require first-order systems as their constitutive elements, the basic idea being that higher-order systems result from the couplings among other, lower-order, systems. In this sense, melodies require notes, groups require agents and traffic jams involve cars. This paper is divided in two main parts. The first part (sections 2-4) serves as an introduction to system theory. Our aim is to present the evolution of system theory from a categorical viewpoint; subsequently we shall study systems from the standpoint of a ‘universal’ Topos, logico-mathematical, construction that covers both commutative and non-commutative frameworks. In so doing, we shall distinguish three major phases in the development of the theory (two already completed and one in front of us). The three phases will be respectively called “The Age of Equilibrium”, “The Age of Complexity” and “The Age of Super-complexity”. The paradigm shift from simple to ‘complex’, and then again to extremely complex or super-complex classes of systems. Furthermore, each subsequent phase generalized the previous one, thus addressing previously neglected, major problems and aspects, as well as involving new paradigms. The second part (sections 5-?) deals with the deeper problems of providing a flexible enough mathematical framework that might be suitable for various classes of systems ranging from simple to super-complex. As we shall see, this is something still in wait as mathematics itself is undergoing development from ‘symmetric’ (commutative, or ‘natural’) categories to dynamic ‘asymmetry’, non-Abelian constructs and theories that are more general and less restrictive than any static modelling.”
http://www.robertopoli.it/Papers/Baianu%20Poli.pdf
“It may not be syntactically correct in English, until you take into account that I redefined certain words. This way, it is correct. So my argument holds.”
Redefining certain words doesn’t change the structure of English grammar.
The fact that redefining words does not change the structure of English grammar does not affect my argument.
As my argument can be interpreted, it has a meaning. You can doubt this, but then it would be random, so it would not exists. But the argument exists. So if we assume your assertion (that it has no sense), we will get a contradiction, from which we infer I’m right, and you are wrong. And that is intelligible, so you have a Nobel prize.
If you want further proof of the intelligibility of the sentence, I can add this. If the argument is not meaningful, then it would be “informational incompressible”, and that would require that higher orders of causation be taken into account.
You can not maintain your opinions until you argue this very strong argument.
(Once you give up semantics, one can be doing this for years. It’s very funny to be a genius).
Robert, Mr. Langan’s proof is decidedly non-constructive.I can only use it to prove that true randomness is never the case, but it does not actually tell me anything about the states and the precise laws leading to them. It’s sort of like the classic proof that there exist irrational numbers a and b such that a^b (a raised to the power of b) is rational. The proof is as follows.
sqrt(2) is irrational and 2 is rational. Consider x = sqrt(2)^sqrt(2). x is either rational or irrational. If x is rational, then the theorem is true. Suppose x is irrational. Consider x^sqrt(2). x^sqrt(2) = (sqrt(2)^sqrt(2))^sqrt(2) = sqrt(2)^(sqrt(2) x sqrt(2)) = sqrt(2)^(sqrt(2)^2) = sqrt(2)^2 = 2. Thus, if x is irrational, the theorem is also true. QED.
Note that it is not made clear whether x or x^sqrt(2) is rational. However, the theorem is proven. But on to Mr. Langan’s work.
If “randomness” means “acausality”, then allegations of “randomness” are completely unscientific and not closed with respect to explanation.
If “randomness” means “informational incompressibility with respect to any distributed causal template or ingredient of causal syntax”, then it implies “the existence of a ’cause’ exceeding the representative capacity of distributed laws of causality” (Langan 2002). This implies that higher levels of causation are involved, which requires a framework for those levels, and a simple invocation of “randomness” does not suffice as this framework.
As for John….
“As my argument can be interpreted, it has a meaning.”
Actually, as it’s not syntactically consistent, it’s not interpretable, and is thus devoid of meaning.
“You can doubt this, but then it would be random, so it would not exists.”
Doubting something does not make that thing “random”.
“So if we assume your assertion (that it has no sense), we will get a contradiction, from which we infer I’m right, and you are wrong. And that is intelligible, so you have a Nobel prize.”
This does not follow given the aforementioned problems with the first two steps of your latest argument.
“If you want further proof of the intelligibility of the sentence, I can add this. If the argument is not meaningful, then it would be ‘informational incompressible’, and that would require that higher orders of causation be taken into account.”
That’s not what “informational incompressibility” means.
> “Actually, as it’s not syntactically consistent, it’s not interpretable, and is thus devoid of meaning.”
Are you saying my comment is not part of reality? As it is written, it exists, so it is part of reality. So it has a syntax, by which it’s consistent.
If you doubt it has a syntax, just consider its difference with respect to another argument. That difference imply the existence of a relation between the two arguments, and that relation sure has a syntax, by its mere existence. This relation having a syntax implies the argument itself having a syntax.
This very intelligent argument proves without doubt that the argument has a syntax.
If the argument doesn’t have a syntax, it could not be part of reality, because reality has a syntax. But we now it’s part of reality, because we are talking about it.
So you can not continue saying it doesn’t have a syntax, or it’s not syntactically consistent. You’re just incapable of understanding its syntax, but that’s just your problem.
So until you refute this clear arguments, you’re accepting your Nobel prize, and the committee needs necessarily is going to give it to you, as I proved.
Here you are again your own precept. If the argument is not interpretable, it can not be part of reality!
again -> against
I’m specially surprised with you negating your own proofs:
“Not quite. Relations have syntaxes because all relations take forms. This is the case because all relations that do not take a form are not interpretable; remember that symbols and even interpretations are syntactic entities. Lacking interpretability, a relation would not be cognitively accessible, and that which is not cognitively accessible (even in theory) may be severed from reality. You may object to this last point, but anything that can not, even theoretically, be cognitively processed does not have any effect on reality, and that which does not have any effect on reality is decidedly unreal.”
Anyone seeing this would think you doubt the validity of your own proof.
Here, you proved without doubt, beyond any possible refutation, that all relations has a syntax just because they take forms. My argument has form. My argument is composed of symbols, which are syntactic entities.
If my argument lacks interpretability, it would be not cognitively accessible, and it would be severed from reality. As we know this is not the case, this is, the argument exists, then it is interpretable, so it has a syntax by which it’s consistent.
If you doubt if the argument exists at all, you are attributing properties to it, like not being interpretable. As you can not attribute a property to anything not existing, it exists.
You provide further evidence against your own assertion that my argument is syntactically inconsistent. Remember your own argument to prove any element has a consistent syntax. “The existence of the syntax follows from the existence of the relation, which follows in turn from the existence of the dice.” You can not refute that assertion: dice implies a relation, and a relation implies a syntax.
In the same way, my argument implies a relation (with other arguments, with your refutations of it, for example), and that relation implies a syntax.
You say “the argument is syntactically inconsistent, and it’s not interpretable”. But you provided vast amounts of very irrefutable and intelligent proofs showing in fact it’s syntactically consistent and it’s interpretable.
Thus my argument holds, you are saying false things you yourself refuted, and you actually have a Nobel prize. These very elegant and meaningful arguments prove it. You are of my opinion until you prove otherwise.
P.S.: Please, don’t be stingy and send a photo of your Nobel prize! I proved you have one!
(This part is not for you, Anonymous. As a side note for the rest of people here, can anyone here tell me why “the logical reason of a leg lamb flying to Hong Kong three times after tomorrow” is syntactically inconsistent in English? Anonymous just asserted it, which is as much proof as he need, but while having a questionable semantics, I see it as a perfectly syntactically valid syntagm in English. Isn’t it?).
I think it’s a syntax/semantics confusion. Prepositions are governed by idiom/custom, and “*reason of” isn’t usual English, but I’m not sure that’s a syntax problem. Similarly, idiomatic English wouldn’t say “*a leg lamb,” but “a leg of lamb,” if that phrase means what I think it’s supposed to.
On the other hand, I can envision someone coming up with a new device or product that would change that: when I was a child, the sentence “The walk man broke” would have been considered ungrammatical and/or nonsensical. Hand me a capital letter and remove a space, and it now refers to an ordinary if now out-of-date consumer product.
That phrase isn’t a syntactic error in the sense that “*The three women was here” is a syntactic error, being a plural noun with a singular verb. (It isn’t a complete sentence, lacking a predicate, but that’s a separate matter: “my tea mug” isn’t a sentence either, but it’s hardly ungrammatical.)
Disclaimer: I am not a linguist, despite having used the * notation for sentences that a native speaker would find problematic.
Thanks. That was what I thought. I just wanted to confirm that those people who happily assert “a dice implies a syntax” and have profound thinking about the universe and its syntax don’t even know informally what syntax means.
Yep, pretty much. “Syntax” is one of those words that Langan misuses constantly.
“If “randomness” means “acausality”, then allegations of “randomness” are completely unscientific and not closed with respect to explanation.”
Someone sure is ignorant of QM, where you can model individual particles as random but under a deterministic wavefunction.
As for the dice argument, the problem is you aren’t actually saying anything new. Okay, we have some dice. We can talk about them by their attributes. Okay, and?
As the CTMU points out, current formulations of quantum theory are at best a combination of Markovian laws of physics and laws of probability. This is apparent from quantum theories’ use of “mixed states”, which had (prior to the CTMU) not been analyzed in any global causal model. In the CTMU, there is a new interpretation called “sum over futures”, which involves the notions of telic recursion and generalized utility. Of course, you would have to spend the very marginal amount of time and effort required to simply look through the paper to realize this.
Many seem to have a misunderstanding of the linguistic philosophy underlying the CTMU. You are talking about natural languages. The terms language and syntax are used much more generally in the CTMU, referring to any kind of explanatory/descriptive (theoretical) language (e.g. the language of science, the language of mathematics, the language of logic). Likewise, the CTMU is not using the term syntax in terms of natural language, but in a very different sense.
I’m not talking about natural languages. I presented you an argument. You said it is not interpretable. But according to your own arguments, it is. It rigorously follow your hypothesis, so, if your arguments are correct, we have to conclude the same thing: it is interpretable, and it has meaning. Anyone here is speaking about natural languages but you.
(I only did in my question to others, which was not addressed to you. And this is so because the rest of the World seems to work with a different logic, one in which your “proofs” are not right, silly them.)
Don’t consider my argument a natural language. I’m pretty sure that your proofs, which include things as x^sqrt(2) = (sqrt(2)^sqrt(2))^sqrt(2) = sqrt(2)^(sqrt(2) x sqrt(2)) = sqrt(2)^(sqrt(2)^2) = sqrt(2)^2 = 2 are not sintactically valid in English, and are not expressed in a natural language.
So I remember you you have still not refuted my argument, so it still holds, and you can not maintain your point of view until you address it.
Anyway, you’re adopting a pretty ridiculous position here.
> “Actually, as it’s not syntactically consistent, it’s not interpretable, and is thus devoid of meaning.”
We have seen that my argument is not syntactically inconsistent in the linguistic sense. Are you saying then that when you asserted this you where using the Langan’s meaning? Who is mixing meanings then? Who has no idea of what he is talking about?
(Remember you still have an unrefuted argument pending)
The idea of generalized utility is similar to top-down mechanistically mediated constraints with bottom-up causes lead to a notion of local-global incentive compatibility.
A theory of an intelligently guided invisible hand wins the Nobel prize
…
Mechanism-design theory aims to give the invisible hand a helping hand, in particular by focusing on how to minimise the economic cost of “asymmetric information”—the problem of dealing with someone who knows more than you do. Trading efficiently under asymmetric information is hard, for how do you decide what price to offer someone for something—a product, say, or their labour—if you do not know at what price they would sell it? On the one hand, you may not offer enough to get them to deliver the product or work, or at least do so adequately; on the other, you may overpay, wasting resources that might have been better used elsewhere.
http://www.economist.com/node/9988840
“We give a definition of categorical model for the multiplicative fragment of non-commutative logic. We call such structures entropic categories. We demonstrate the soundness and completeness of our axiomatization with respect to cut-elimination. We then focus on several methods of building entropic categories. Our first models are constructed via the notion of a partial bimonoid acting on a cocomplete category. We also explore an entropic version of the Chu construction, and apply it in this setting. It has recently been demonstrated that Hopf algebras provide an excellent framework for modeling a number of variants of multiplicative linear logic, such as commutative, braided and cyclic. We extend these ideas to the entropic setting by developing a new type of Hopf algebra, which we call entropic Hopf algebras. We show that the category of modules over an entropic Hopf algebra is an entropic category, (possibly after application of the Chu construction). Several examples are discussed, based first on the notion of a bigroup. Finally the Tannaka-Krein reconstruction theorem is extended to the entropic setting.”
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.144.1931
Top-down causation without top-down causes:
http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/pschurchland/classes/cs200/topdown.pdf
This has nothing to do with natural languages. It doesn’t matter if he’s using the definitions of “language” and “syntax” in a different sense — he’s using the terms improperly.
Chris Langan abuses jargon intentionally, though. That’s the whole point. The moment he uses rigorous definitions correctly, he’s playing by someone else’s rules and exposing himself as an easy target for falsification. His CTMU *relies* on being a labyrinth of imprecise, inexact, approximating, nonsensical word-vomit. It’s his way of guarding himself against criticism and rational argument. And if you haven’t bothered to read all 56 pages and actually parse the gibberish, he can just claim you don’t understand it.
I can *guarantee* you, with 100% certainty, that Chris will never clarify anything in his CTMU with sufficient rigor. People have asked him to do this for years and he’s stubbornly refused every single time. There’s a reason for this.
The CTMU is a recipe for a theory you can’t directly dismantle, which should instantly set off the crackpottery alarms.
How do you do it?
1. Claim to be doing metaphysics (so you can’t be nailed by science).
2. Argue in favor of something unfalsifiable (like intelligent design).
3. Explain things in an intentionally-obfuscated way using unnecessarily big words, ill-defined neologisms, and unusual interpretations of existing words (so you *always* have an exit when criticism is brought forth).
4. Combine modern-day difficult-to-understand, mysterious concepts together like quantum theory and the mind (to create something even more mysterious and vague and harder to attack).
5. Demand academic credentials (to establish a false dialectic of validity to bolster reputation).
6. Refer to past media exposure. Appeal to authority frequently (to imply that your theory holds water).
7. Ignore vital counterpoints at all costs (as there is no point wasting time debating something that you literally can’t make an argument for).
8. If you must give a response, respond with elaborate strawmen or verbal attacks (in hopes that you divert attention to something else or come across as having correctly won the argument).
9. Get a few puppets to support you (like Anonymous, who can also be found on other blogs where the CTMU is attacked like anamericanatheist.org).
10. And the most important one: *Never, ever, ever admit you are wrong*. This way, most critics will get tired and peace out (leaving the illusion that the theory has never been defeated).
You can’t really attack such a theory when it’s purposely built around its ability to move the goalposts as many times as it needs to, ensuring that it lives long enough to occasionally ensnare ignorant people who happen to have the means to open doors and grant publicity like Malcolm Gladwell.
It’s a massive troll-joke; Poe’s Law rears its head here so violently. But, sadly, some people will fall for it. It’s like email spam. Most people will recognize the spam for what it is, and throw it in the trash as obvious garbage. Nevertheless, it’s the select few who buy into it that make the entire thing worth defending.
That, Chris gets a kick out of browbeating people.
But my point is that any discussion on the CTMU itself is a massive waste of time, and this is what MarkCC was alluding to earlier. Chris Langan is just a predictable crank who weaves and dodges his way out of answering questions, ten paragraphs of unlettered logorrhea at a time.
Glorious way to end this thread (for me).
How utterly disreputable!
Having stared at these groaty, ad hominem tarballs of wisdom for the last minute or two, I can’t say that they resemble anything but the sour grapes of two whining losers who haven’t won a point despite using every dirty rhetorical trick in the grubby, dog-eared atheist-materialist playbook several times in succession.
Fringe is right. Perhaps now would be a good time for him and his badly whipped comrade-in-arms to go home and lick their suppurating wounds.
As it is, poor Mark will need a mop and a bucket to clean up after them.
You mean the playbook that rigorously upholds the concepts of evidence and truth, preventing crackpottery from gaining momentum? Absolutely.
We are calling you a crank because your arguments are rubbish. That is not an ad hominem.
On the other hand, dismissing or ignoring our arguments because we post anonymously / work on wall street / lack credentials / whatever, IS an ad hominem.
Yeah, the suppurating wounds. It stings me a lot to deal with cranks. I think it’s allergy.
Ah, you’re right. Your arguments are pretty lame, but now that I’m tired of this, your theory is suddenly right and everybody is embracing it. Sure. It has sense now.
If you’re not completely sure, you can repeat you’re right a hundred more times, if you want to be completely sure. You never know.
In any case, your method of demonstration has been studied and classified. It’s number 58 here:
http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/GodProof.htm
58. ARGUMENT FROM ARGUMENTATION
(1) God exists.
(2) [Atheist’s counterargument]
(3) Yes he does.
(4) [Atheist’s counterargument]
(5) Yes he does!
(6) [Atheist’s counterargument]
(7) YES HE DOES!!!
(8) [Atheist gives up and goes home.]
(9) Therefore, God exists.
(Of course, as we’ve already clearly established, little Rubix here wouldn’t know science or mathematics from “crackpottery” if it leaped up and bit him in his mud-stained nose.)
You can attack me verbally all you want — the evidence speaks for itself.
You can’t claim to really understand mathematics when you don’t even understand Zeno’s or Newcomb’s Paradox — well-understood problems that are only disputed by people who have no idea what they’re talking about and get into word games.
As for science, your understanding of things like evolution are transparently laughable. Claiming “it isn’t falsifiable” is proof you don’t exactly understand how science works or what evolution is arguing.
Oh, and you glazed over a rather hilarious bait-and-catch of mine earlier as a way to show how predictable you are:
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29023
If you were as well-versed in QM as you claimed, you should have been able to *instantly* call this post out as nonsense. Instead, you addressed half of it seriously and disregarded the rest because you were not skilled enough to rightfully call it out.
It would be like if I asked you what your theory had to say about Pythagorean binaries and the effect of the Fahrenheit index on the roots of polynomial recursive logarithms. It’s obvious nonsense to anyone who’s not completely ignorant.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I suppose I should point out that the self-professed mistakes of a Sokal-happy piss ant are its very own.
When a deceitful piss ant lies about its name, excretes in a manner vaguely suggestive of quantum mechanics, and draws a polite dismissal from somebody on the kind presumption that it is sincere even if possibly confused, that’s it. The piss ant has no option to come back later and claim that its respondent was remiss for not nailing all six of its feet to the floor before it could stuff them in its mouth and chew them to stubs. Piss ants generate errors faster than they write, so when they write fast, they defy external correction.
While this can easily be illustrated using the graphs of generic functions, the math can be simplified even more: one piss ant excreting nonsense through one bunghole requires one cork. Even a piss ant can count that high (and of course, it works great for sock puppets too).
“Nowadays it is becoming more and more difficult to make sense of what people speak,. Telling lies, people are unhappy; that cliches, old friends are happy; because they tell the truth, this makes the boss happy. The result is more and more people, in reality, are not telling the truth, in the network, not use their names. Ever since, the boss said cliches, experts say a pack of lies, pinnacle of that nonsense, Internet users say angry words, often deviate from the truth.”
Whine all you want — my point stands. The questions put forth to you were obvious nonsense and you weren’t skilled enough to point it out, even from a QM perspective.
Actually, my little finger knows more about quantum mechanics than can be found in the entire empty head of a gutless, insignificant gadfly like Rubix here.
But I suppose that little Rubix has no choice other than to persist in his nonsense , and will surprise no one by doing so until everyone is puking at the mere sound of him.
What a joke is slimy little Rubix of Wall Street!
If you say so, Chris.
It’s surprising to me that your responses are almost identical across the board. Attack random facet of background + assert they know nothing + assert you know everything.
Look, I can do it, too:
Actually, my little finger knows more about quantum mechanics than can be found in the entire empty head of a gutless, insignificant gadfly like Chris Langan here.
You can spout off untruths all you want, but the proof is in the pudding: You have no clue what you’re talking about, and any time your feet are put to the fire, you spout off nonsense.
I’ve been trying not to feed the trolls, but I can’t resist this response to Chris’s latest:
In other words, Chris, your response is “Since I can’t actually point out anything that Rubix got wrong in his comment, I’ll just fling pointless insults at him”.
It’s absolutely typical of you – content free ad-hominem, in a pathetic attempt to cover up your own dreadful ignorance.
MarkCC: It’s all Chris knows how to do. Whenever he’s been shown to be taking a bullshit stance, he’ll just lash out instead of conceding the point. His responses lately are mostly just invective against academia and Wall St. I’d say he’s trolling, but again, he’s been doing this for nearly two decades, if not longer. After a certain point, I think you lose the right to fall back on the “lol I’m just trolling” excuse. It seems clear that he’s just a bully of a Creationist who enjoys making his stance hard to interpret, yet easily accepted by ignorant people who aren’t equipped to tear through the verbosity that some people incorrectly associate with expertise.
Mark C. Chu-Carroll: “I’ve been trying not to feed the trolls…”
It’s good to hear that – autophagy looks bad on a Wall Street CV. But you should also try not to *be* the trolls.
Mark C. Chu-Carroll: “In other words, Chris, your response is ‘Since I can’t actually point out anything that Rubix got wrong in his comment, I’ll just fling pointless insults at him’.”
Rubix got *everything* wrong in his comment, Mark. Just like you, every time one of you opens your mouth.
Mark C. Chu-Carroll: “It’s absolutely typical of you – content free ad-hominem, in a pathetic attempt to cover up your own dreadful ignorance.”
Mark, you’ve already been caught red-handed parading around with grade-school misconceptions regarding sets, models, set theory, and model theory. In fact, you’ve been caught pawning them off as “mathematical expertise”. Sheer ignorance, “dreadful” ignorance, is your trademark.
But if you don’t understand by now how badly you and Rubix have been thrashed here on fundamental points of mathematical comprehension, you’re even farther gone than I already think you are.
In fact, that’s the only plausible explanation for your strange refusal to stop biting my ankle, retire to your hole, and cut your mounting losses.
LOL, my point literally proven seconds later after I post it. Are you incapable of making a response without resorting to baseless, hollow attacks against Wall St, which is totally irrelevant to this topic?
All you ever do is say “you’re getting it all wrong” or “you don’t understand” without ever showing why. You don’t win an argument by just asserting that you win.
Mark hasn’t been caught red-handed with misconceptions about sets. Almost every serious mathematician will tell you that in order to not fall victim to naive set theory, you need to be specific in what is allowed to be in a set in order for it to make logical sense. MarkCC has argued this repeatedly, as have I. There’s absolutely nothing incorrect there, nor are there any misconceptions.
You can bitch and whine and moan all you want, but at the end of the day, there have been numerous examples brought up where you create problems where no problems exist, misinterpret paradoxes, and commit the same fallacies found in naive set theory with your references to self-inclusion.
You’re the one who lacks understanding — not everyone else. We have evidence and examples to show for it. You don’t.
By the way, Chris, since I know you’re here right now, here’s a chance to prove that you’re not 100% full of it. I’ll even hit you with really piss-easy concepts that shouldn’t take you more than two sentences each, max — questions that any college student studying QM should be able to answer, let alone someone who claims mastery.
1. Tell me what this is: u sub-p of x = 1/(2*pi*h)^.5 * e^(ipx/h)
2. Tell me what this is: integral in R^3 d^3 vectorx|psi(t,vectorx)|^2 = 1
3. What is the fundamental reason why we can’t measure position and momentum of a particle at the same instant in time via HUP?
Really, *really* easy questions. I know you’re online right now so I’ll be expecting answers shortly. Certainly no problem for a man of 200+ IQ.
You going to give an answer, Chris, or just make up some excuse that you suddenly had to peace out the moment I gave you my questions so you could go tend to some farmland? It’s been almost an hour, now.
Rubix, in your list you forgot his main method of demonstration, aside from letting his pseudon… I mean, his puppet… I mean, other people to “argue” (in a loose sense) for him.
Suppose you have proposition A, and you want to prove it because it’s convenient for you. You them write:
as we’ve clearly established, A is true
and it’s automatically proven! For example, imagine you want to prove A=”Mark is wrong”. Just write
as we’ve clearly established, Mark is wrong
Good! One thing less! Imagine now you have a critic, let call him Rubicious. As he says things you don’t like other people to believe, you would love to prove him false. But that’s easy! A=”Rubicious knows nothing”. Let’s make our research to see if its true:
as we’ve clearly established, Rubicious knows nothing
That is the way! Cool! Now suppose you wrote various nonsense poorly disguised as a theory, for example, the Cognitive Recursive Abstract Pattern (of Reality), or CRAP, to fool people into thinking you’re the next Einstein (the only scientist you know). And now you desire with all your heart that the theory you made up is meaningful and true, because with time you’re developing a potential superiority complex. So you say:
as we’ve clearly established, the CRAP is true
Then some bored people will present you counter arguments, but you can just say
as we’ve clearly established, critics are stupid
Now, some of you will doubt this is an argument at all, and much less a proof. But it’s easy to prove the method is right:
as we’ve clearly established, saying “as we’ve clearly established, A” proves A
It’s a cognitive recursive telic proof.
It’s quite appropriate to have introduced the CTMU through Newcomb’s paradox, it address the issue of the bidirectionally of time and the implications for free will.
The Resolution of Newcomb’s Paradox (Langan):
http://www.megasociety.org/noesis/44/newcomb.html
“To understand how genuine choice could be mechanical–to reconcile choice with determinism, or even with approximate determinism–we must confront the compelling fatalist intuition that it is futile to act for the sake of that which our action cannot alter–the intuition that inalterability implies futility. Contemplating the operation of a simple choice machine demonstrates that choice is a particular mechanical process which, like any other such process, is no less real for having been predetermined. Contemplating the choice of a distant-past state (e.g. in the hand-raising example) shows that, once inalterability is no longer deemed a prohibitive obstacle, we can be seen to have a choice about some aspects of the world over which we lack any causal influence. Newcomb’s Problem simply harnesses our ability to choose some such aspects of the world, using an acausally chosen state as a sub-goal to the goal of the eventual reward (the latter step via a merely causal path). Similarly with the non-iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Newcomb’s Problem distills the challenge posed by deterministic choice. If inalterability does not imply futility, then being unable to alter the box’s content does not necessarily undermine the desirability of acting for the sake of its content being one way or another. The transparent-boxes version goes one crucial step further. If an outcome is already determined anyway, then already knowing (or even literally seeing) what the outcome will be does not further undermine the efficacy of an action with respect to that outcome. If it can make sense to act for the sake of the unknown, inalterable box content, the same holds even if instead that inalterable content is already known. The transparent box makes the conflict between choice and determinism more blatant, without changing its essential character. If the conflict is not resolved in its most blatant form, then it is not resolved, but rather just partly concealed.
Whereas much of the literature construes arguments against evidential means-end relations as supporting exclusively causal means-end relations and vice versa, I propose here an intermediate approach. I construct a subjunctive sense of means-end relations–a choice-supporting sense of what would be the case if this or that action were taken–broad enough to include some acausal evidential relations, but narrow enough to exclude others. The machinery I sketch for recognizing means-end relations uses schemas that express actual correlations among specified conditions. A default presumption of conditional independence from other conditions can be (unremarkably) superseded by an empirical-override provision. An explanatory-deferral provision can defeat the default presumption that a schema’s evidential relation is also a means-end relation, that its conditional probability is also a subjunctive probability. And finally, self-revocation can defeat the same presumption with regard to a schema whose context depends subjunctively on the action itself.
I attempt to justify the proposed means-end recognizing machinery by appeal to mundane situations (e.g. the street-crossing scenario) that help to isolate and examine the relevant principles–the sort of situations that our cognitive machinery must have evolved to deal with. Thus grounded, the means-end machinery can then be applied to esoteric or controversial scenarios, such as Newcomb’s Problem or the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The details of the means-end machinery here are proposed tentatively; I do not expect to find that they are complete and correct. But I am hopeful as to the merit of the general approach that those details illustrate–the methodology of using thought experiments that presume determinism and zero-probability idealizations, and the attempt to derive candidate means-end links from contrasts among actual situations, then winnow them in part by the deference of some candidate links to more-general explanatory links, and in part by deference of a link whose context depends (in the appropriate subjunctive sense) on the very action under consideration.
The nature of the means-end relation speaks to the perennial question of whether and how we can derive what ought to be from what is. Even with respect to pursuing purely self-centered goals, deciding what action one ought to take for those goals requires, as a starting point, some built-in kernel of means-end recognition–a way to derive what would be from what is. But the reduction of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to Newcomb’s Problem (especially with transparent boxes) argues that a deliberative choice machine–even with just self-centered goals and with just the built-in means-end-recognizing principles that the machine needs to pursue those goals in mundane situations–could in principle–without any further, specifically altruistic presupposition or inclination–derive ought from is in a way that prescribes cooperation with others, even when cooperation causes no personal benefit.”
http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/lcc03/Drescher_synthese.rtf
Chris, I hope to touch base with you soon. Tim I have been browsing around for Howison material and read the table of contents of “The Conception of God” and it all seems pertinent.
I have been busy working on securing business contracts in Shanghai and catching up on my Mandarin so I have not been able to frequent the blog as often. Nonetheless I can see that desperate shrewdness and rigid despotism continues to prevail. I cannot make heads or tails of all these mundane polemics against the CTMU, it is like counting the odds of recurrence in a Bernoulli shift map. However I can say that most of the paradoxes that are being debated (e.g., Zeno’s paradox) have already been resolved by less-fundamental means. Concomitantly this is why they aren’t brought up much anymore in serious mathematical parlance aside from excerpts or footnotes for purposes of effigy. Rather than get involved in the arguments, which I have neither the interest in nor time to do, I will quote a few of the more worthwhile arguments from the mess!
“Many seem to have a misunderstanding of the linguistic philosophy underlying the CTMU. You are talking about natural languages. The terms language and syntax are used much more generally in the CTMU, referring to any kind of explanatory/descriptive (theoretical) language (e.g. the language of science, the language of mathematics, the language of logic).”
Anonymous has hit the nail on the head with this. See, when you submerse yourself in enough discourse you will eventually find that all discursive meaning is cross-correlating and the definitions given by the learned imply different theoretical purposes for words, that important words like “syntax” absolve from the formal restrictions that you learn from procedural textbook education. Essayists do not have permission to do this, for them, they must stick to the orthodox university textbook. PhD’s working at the departmental level, wether they be philosophers or scientists, can diverge from these conventions as it is required to do so. Genius is forced to do this out of necessity.
Chris, I understand where you are coming from. You have been there, done that! Being an autodidact I myself use words the same way: categorically. “Syntax” has many roots and many outgrowths. To represent the word responsibly you have to apply it globally i.e., as a universal category. Words carry several connotations and if you are smart enough or have lot’s of experience you will be able to home-in on the context it is located within that section of the document because you know how to read the document correctly. Linguistics has so many theories about itself that, beyond universal grammar, all extraneous developments of linguistic theory must lead to a theory of linguistic categories and models to append the many-theory issue.
“Syntax”, as it is used in this scenario, refers to “the rules of state and transformation characterizing the medium”. I am quoting Mr. Langan’s 2002 paper.
Say you idealistically roll one die and get 1. Then you idealistically roll the other and get
3. Now let’s look at my argument.
“There exists a difference relation expressing the difference between the resultant states effected by the two dice rolls.”
This is not necessarily as simple as subtraction. But let’s suppose it is subtraction.
“The existence of this relation entails a syntax in terms of which these states are defined.”
This applies even when we use subtraction. The fact that we can subtract one number from the other shows that these numbers are similar enough on some level that they can be compared with the relation of subtraction. This is the “syntax” that they have in common and to which I was referring.
“This syntax gives way to a defining law in terms of which both states are expressible.”
The defining law is the syntax.
“Thus there is a law that determines both states.”
Thank you, Anonymous, for explaining this. This should have ended the argument!
There is a relation between the two states, discrete bits of information, are related by the syntactic threshold of the number of dice rolls divided by the number of possible states (1 to 6 for each die). Every dice roll represents a maximal input (3) and a minimum output (1). This is what we get from the subtraction; a finite state machine with the recursive property that we can apply the same rules of the dice over and over until we get the same set of numbers (3 – 1). The state ’emerges’ from the syntax and the syntax emerges from the state. Entropy is an illusion of the semantics involved by interpretation because given the emergent recurrence of a 3 and 1 result we can circumscribe probabilistic rules. In other words the probabilistic rules become distinguishable from the random appearance and this is how all languages emerge, by trial and error esp., in natural language where a child learns over time by trial and error. Quantum mechanics; similar story using Monte Carlo methods.
Why they don’t get the CTMU:
Genuine intellectuals with a disposition for advanced knowledge would take an interest in the CTMU even if just out of curiosity. The knowledge it imparts will only be appealing to bright and mature thinkers, and people with both wisdom and intelligence. If you aren’t going to invest the intellectual rigour and mental deliberation necessary to understand the CTMU then you will only generate negative symptomology from it. It’s another way of saying, it’s a “guy” thing. If your mind has been all across the board studywise, you will “get it”. One really needs to have a pentagonal education to absorb this kind of stuff and not be restricted to the conventionalisms of social/academic programming and other forms of commercial licensure. The CTMU is meant for such an audience; people with backgrounds in philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, logic and physics. It is a long tradition of Renaissance men to reach the same conclusions about the nature of reality. (Wittgenstein — the philosopher, logician, architect, linguist and mystic.) — Everything is language. Most linguists would agree with this statement, that’s why we call them linguists and not neo-grammarians (i.e., those who believe in falsifiability by scientific method.)
“The three phases will be respectively called “The Age of Equilibrium”, “The Age of Complexity” and “The Age of Super-complexity”. The paradigm shift from simple to ‘complex’, and then again to extremely complex or super-complex classes of systems.” <This deserves more attention.
I wanted to write some things about ultra-high IQ verses the IQ test parameter for intelligence as measured against intrinsic infant memory and incarnated personality in people who score high on some of these tests but I have been too caught up with work.
In scrolling through the recent posts I saw someone mentioned something about Hopf bifurcations that was very interesting but I don't have time to locate it I have to run. I will close with this passage from Mandarin that was relayed to me through one of my new associates (it just happened to come up):
"Nowadays it is becoming more and more difficult to make sense of what people speak,. Telling lies, people are unhappy; that cliches, old friends are happy; because they tell the truth, this makes the boss happy. The result is more and more people, in reality, are not telling the truth, in the network, not use their names. Ever since, the boss said cliches, experts say a pack of lies, pinnacle of that nonsense, Internet users say angry words, often deviate from the truth."
Jeremy,
you said, “Tim I have been browsing around for Howison material and read the table of contents of “The Conception of God” and it all seems pertinent. ”
yes. there is precious little to be found on Howison though. But “The Conception of God” is actually how I found Howison. A friend had recommended Royce. I had read his “the problem of christianity”, where he handles “interpretation” – which is inherently complex – beautifully. Beautifully! I was browsing material for him, and when I read Howison’s refutation of Royce in his section of “the conception of God”, … :-0 !!!
Tim
Jeremy: “Chris, I understand where you are coming from. You have been there, done that! Being an autodidact I myself use words the same way: categorically. “Syntax” has many roots and many outgrowths. To represent the word responsibly you have to apply it globally i.e., as a universal category.”
Very good, Jeremy. Given the (low) quality of criticism that my work often receives, I must say that I’m quite impressed with the comprehension displayed by you and at least one or two others contributing here.
As one might imagine, I could write pages on the meaning of “syntax” in the CTMU, and will at some point be doing so publicly. Fortunately, however, I don’t have to do so here: as I’ve already explained, the metaphysically contextualized functional definition of that term is sufficient for a general description of CTMU structure and dynamics.
I agree that touching base at some point might be a good idea. Remember that the Mega Foundation is a point of contact, and we’ll be gearing up some time soon. (It’s the tail end of haying season right now; antique farm equipment being what it is, I’m about hundred acres behind … and of course, there’s an upcoming book to finish.)
Meanwhile, keep up the fine work.
I’ll pull stuff directly from the CTMU paper itself to explicitly show why it’s all nonsense. Prepare for a long one.
________________
Okay, so right in the first intro paragraph, Chris brings up “informational reductionism” (an “emergent trend” of Complexity Theory), which says the base of reality is not matter or energy/mass, but information itself. Claiming that it’s “just as problematic” as physical reductionism (without explaining why PR is problematic), Langan quotes “mathematician” David Berlinski (another anti-evolution Discovery Institute crank) who says “DNA is just a material macromolecule and yet it supposedly explains everything — this isn’t realistic!” What Berlinski is actually saying here is that he doesn’t think DNA (a critical component to evolutionary theory) is enough to explain what it says it does and thinks something more is needed to “balance the equation,” aka argument from personal incredulity/ignorance. Chris somehow takes this quote to mean that the information in a DNA string is meaningless without something material to read it, and therefore information is meaningless without physical interaction of some sort.
Chris then goes on to say that separating matter and information is like separating the mind from matter, resulting in a problematic duality because you’ve got matter competing with abstract information abstractly representing matter “for primary status.” This all somehow means that we need a better framework that explicitly links mind, matter, cognition, and information. It must not only combine mind and matter, but also explain the resulting “gap.”
Lumbering over to the third paragraph, Chris brings up the concepts of irreducible and specified complexity. Irreducible complexity is the argument that something is too complex and couldn’t have evolved from simpler predecessors. Specified complexity is pretty much the same thing, but is a more general way of saying that a particular complex function is too specific and couldn’t have come about by chance. Chris states that the mathematics of probability need to be causally interpreted to be scientifically meaningful, and so assigning probabilities to something where you can’t reduce its complexity into causal pathways is therefore a problem. Chris then brings up a concept of “absolute improbability” which he doesn’t really define and muddles up by assuming it requires an absolute model that bridges matter, information, mind, and reality — and must describe the universe as an intelligently self-designed, self-organizing system.
Lastly, Chris argues this is all solvable through language. No, he doesn’t mean you should use language to simply analyze reality itself. He’s arguing that language needs to be some sort of mathematically self-descriptive entity onto itself. All theories of science and mathematics are therefore languages, but so is anything that can be described, defined, or described — language defines the structure of information.
This language must therefore be the tool used to answer where the laws of physics came from, why they’re consistent, and where in reality the laws reside. Science can’t answer these questions, so something more is required, according to Chris.
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I mean, jesus, it’s pure bullshit that gets worse and worse as you read on. It’s not that we’re too dumb to understand it. It’s because Chris overestimates himself and doesn’t seem to understand why his arguments consist of ignorant rubbish that is founded on ridiculous premises.
Chris keeps bringing up problems that don’t exist. For one thing, Chris refers to a form of reductionism that isn’t accepted by anyone other than cranks (informational reductionism). “Information” by itself is meaningless without a physical framework behind it to give it context (“There are 5 apples” is information that only makes sense when we know what apples are or what it means for there to be 5 of something). Chris agrees with this, but he’s attacking a strawman that almost nobody is seriously defending, and it’s even funnier because he misreads Berlinski’s quote to support his conclusion. At the same time, he fails to define what’s “problematic” about physical reductionism (a blind assertion).
So Chris uses all this to say “Look, ID/Complexity Theory has brought rise to this problematic form of reductionism. Separating information from matter is like invoking a mind/matter duality, which is a problem! It needs a bridge!” All Chris has said so far is that we need a new system to fix a nonexistent problem because he’s implicitly assumed ID/Complexity Theory to be valid.
He then calls attention to the typical ID arguments of irreducible/specified complexity (IC/SC), which is just more argument from ignorance and incredulity. They are, again, not real problems. Evolution is just fine for explaining how complexity arises, and it’s hardly irreducible. Chris’ argument can be boiled down to “Here’s something that is complex that I don’t think we can reduce. Because we can’t reduce it, it doesn’t make sense to talk about it in terms of probability, which requires causal underpinnings. Something more is needed like an absolute improbability!” You don’t call IC/SC “mathematical” because you’ve butchered how probability works. We can assign probabilities to things like genetic mutations just fine, and they’re all explainable in terms of physical, deterministic processes. No need for straw.
The language bit is also a bit weird. Chris says if something can be defined or described, it therefore qualifies as a language, and that because science cannot answer the questions of where the laws of physics come from, you therefore need to use language to get around science. For one thing, it’s bunk. Language has a specific definition and it’s being abused here. Science, for instance, is not strictly a language. It involves processes and concepts that can be described WITH language, but this is similar to the same fallacy we’ve seen Chris commit before where he conflates models with the things they model. He goes from “We need language to describe everything we know about reality via our perception” to “Now we can use that language to talk about things science can’t answer.” The logical inconsistency here is ridiculous. Whatever language you use to describe reality — you’re only able to do so within the confines of what science can tell you. You don’t then get *around* science by using a framework you developed from *within* science and mathematics itself. We get by just fine through the language of mathematics, and we don’t need undefined crap like SCSPL to drag ID into things.
Chris’ arguments so far have largely been calling attention to problems that don’t exist or may not have meaningful answers — and then insisting we need to shoehorn in new frameworks to solve them that call for Intelligent Design.
________________
I won’t bother touching on his “self-determinacy” concept which is the “third option” to determinacy/indeterminacy — where something isn’t caused or uncaused, but rather something self-caused. As if this somehow solves anything any better than the frameworks of causality/acausality do, lol. “Magic” indeed. Chris seems to think that the best way to get around something that has no explanation is to make it “explain itself.” It’s just moving the goalposts without saying anything new, reminiscent of the same, tired type of logic we’ve seen before: “Creatio ex nihilo makes no sense. The universe had a cause, and that cause was God, but God didn’t come from nothing nor was God created by something else.” Self-determinacy is just an attempt to avoid the issue and claim victory.
________________
Eventually Chris talks about John Wheeler and brings up problems that “call for a new strain of reality theory, a unified conceptual model for our thoughts and observations.” “How many of the models currently being held forth respond to this call? The answer, of course, is ‘almost none.'”
What kind of super-unique problems does he bring up?
Stuff like “No Tower of Turtles”: Widely known as the “infinite regress.” Chris later claims that this problem is resolved with “conspansion,” where you say that the universe isn’t “expanding” but rather it just looks that way because matter is actually shrinking. Apparently Chris thinks the contrary is to believe the universe is expanding “into” something, which is a classically ignorant scientific strawman. Whether or not space is expanding or matter is shrinking is irrelevant — it’s the same model, just defined in different terms that are arguably a lot more confusing. Again, Chris throws in a faux-solution to a nonexistent problem.
We’ve also got “no continuum” where the number continuum apparently doesn’t exist in a physical way. According to Chris, the square root of 2 can’t be precisely computed and therefore it doesn’t correspond to any physical meaningful location on a number line or physical trajectory and has an abstract existence only.
Uhhh… all numbers are abstract representations. That doesn’t mean they don’t have physical representations. That doesn’t mean irrational numbers don’t exist on a continuum. Draw a 45-45-90 triangle. Bam! You’re looking at a physical, exact manifestation of root-2 in the hypotenuse. If you have no problem with 1 or 2, you should have no problem with 1/3 or 4/9. If you have no problem with those, you should have no problem with root-2 and pi. Seriously, Chris, take a real analysis class. Please.
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Honestly, at this point, I’ve had enough. There’s just too much bullshit, ignorance, and fact-skewing, and you can see it no matter which page you jump to. The entire thing is rubbish and you don’t need to hammer out all 56 pages to see this.
Chris has an allergic reaction to simplicity, it would appear. Zeno’s Paradox *must* be a paradox no matter how many times people tell him that it’s not a real paradox. Newcomb’s Paradox *must* be a problem we can talk about meaningfully even though the premises are fundamentally inconsistent with each other. The universe *must* be a set that is at odds with its powerset of reality even though this relationship is not meaningful. Our universe *must* be contracting instead of expanding, but only look like it’s expanding because matter is actually shrinking via conspansion. Informational reduction is flawed so we *must* invoke a new system to solve information/matter dualities. Things like evolution can’t be fully explained because of the nature of probability so we *must* use something “absolute.” Chris seems to enjoy taking simple concepts, putting forth an ignorant or incorrect premise, and then making everything complicated for no reason. Nothing actually gets solved this way — it just pushes the problem elsewhere, and all without evidence.
Like I’ve been saying this entire thread, the CTMU is nonsense and is full of intentional obfuscation. Not only does it portray a profound ignorance of modern mathematics, logic, and science, but it fails to even acknowledge key problems with ID and outright ignores them. Explanations are omitted where they’re needed, and explanations that are given are poorly written and vague. He uses words incorrectly when he could use a perfectly viable alternative, and many of the new words he creates he fails to adequate define in any rigorous manner.
________________
Of course, Chris will claim I’m completely misunderstanding his paper even though I’ve pulled things directly out of the source and given basic counter-examples. There’s pretty much no mathematics in the CTMU at all. Just broad-stroke generalizing and handwaving. It’s profoundly unscientific, and even as a paper on metaphysics, it’s low-quality BS that feels the need to jump from topic to topic without any sort of binding narrative or cohesion. It’s a mess.
My ultimate point is this: There has been more than enough demonstrable proof in this thread to show that Chris doesn’t even understand *basic* mathematics or science well enough to answer simple questions, let alone craft a Theory of Everything that claims to be a pinnacle of absolute truth, putting the likes of Ed Whitten and Terrence Tao to shame.
MarkCC calling Chris out on set theory is a good example. Chris pointed to a “problem” in his web-intro opening (universal powersets and self-containment) that isn’t really a problem but rather an example of something you see in naive set theory. Instead of addressing the points directly or simply admitting that the problem he refers to is inherently meaningless, he drags the argument over to things like SCSPL as soon as possible. He does this because he knows Mark can’t attack it without admitting he has no idea what SCSPL is (since Chris made it up and intentionally fails to define it). In doing so, Chris (incorrectly) claims victory and blindly asserts that nobody has won a point, even though all he’s done is “create” a nonexistent system of logic to “resolve” a nonexistent problem and insult people for not immediately agreeing with his nonmathematical handwaving.
It’s like playing Rock Paper Scissors with that kid on the playground who yanks out the Rocket Launcher when he doesn’t feel like playing by the rules.
Rubix,
Running through
————–
you said, “(without explaining why PR is problematic)”, but, 1) one need not explain one’s conclusions everywhere one states one’s conclusions, 2), Physical Reduction is problematic – as is reduction to informal information – because it is to root oneself in a solution which is to simple to account for the complexity inherent in THE real I’dea!, 3) as a raw observation: fine, to the extent that it’s fine.
You said, “aka argument from personal incredulity/ignorance”, I like you Rubix, but shame. You aren’t flawless here, and the fact that Langan has not satisfied you is not something you should run too far or too fast with!
You said, “and therefore information is meaningless without physical interaction of some sort.”, Rubix, information is too simple an idea. It is not capable of standing alone like this. Now, I can’t claim to have made sense of everything that has been said about “syntax” here; and, as such, I certainly don’t stand behind anyone else; and, I’d rather point you to “interpretation” (as presented by, for instance, Josiah Royce in his “the problem of Christianity”): but I think this all goes together. Information implies “interaction”. And interaction is complex. (the question is, to what extent can we make sense of the real complexity with only the {complex} capacity to information?!)
You said, “Irreducible complexity is the argument that something is too complex and couldn’t have evolved from simpler predecessors.”, the more competent metaphysiciancs equate “irreducible complexity” to self-existent, properly eternally (that is, super-temporally – in the Howisonian sense). Then, “Specified complexity is pretty much the same thing, but is a more general way of saying that a particular complex function is too specific and couldn’t have come about by chance.”, rather, “specified complexity” is a particularly chosen reality of the range of possible, for the irreducibly complex, living, I’dea: “I am”.
You said, “and must describe the universe as an intelligently self-designed, self-organizing system.”, to be sure, I maintain that the unity is a super-phenomenal one – qua plural society of “I am” – and that the “universe” as the “arena” for us is misconceived, but, rather, the phenomenal is intelligible. The fact that the phenomenal is intelligible is a derivative representation of the noumenal intelligENT. Of course you are rightfully wary to see that I am only offering a picture, and not a proof for the picture, but you should be concerned that you haven’t reached the same conclusions as me (I am confident). THE I’dea. THE. A “spiritually” living intelligence. Irreducibly complex. Real: meaning: “the universe” APPEARS to be intelligible. Etc. (If you want to anchor yourself to another idea…is it not to the idea that your methods of intellectual will lead you to success, if …? {But, the philosophic question/paradox is still: what does “success” require in such asymptotic approaches? [hint: faith/e].})
You said, “Lastly, Chris argues this is all solvable through language. No, he doesn’t mean you should use language to simply analyze reality itself. He’s arguing that language needs to be some sort of mathematically self-descriptive entity onto itself.” Rubix, if THE I’dea is to be intelligible, how?
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you said, “”Information” by itself is meaningless without a physical framework behind it to give it context”, which is exactly what I warned above, – so we agree, – but you write Chris off too readily when you dismiss his motivation. Rubix, you yourself here: don’t you also imply “something more” to the physical framework (phenomena / derivative representation)?! If the “physical framework” is “behind [information]”, isn’t information “something more” to the “physical framework”? Rubix, the problem is that your idea of reality is to adhere to your METHOD. This conversation between us idealists and you materialists has always been classifiable as us presenting our conclusions, our picture, our conception of reality (compare: God), and you holding to your methods. Apples and oranges. This “paradox”, we argue, won’t dissolve for you until you recognize that your asymptotic approach to the finish line is un-real so long as you deny the need for the leap of faith/e which trusts that the idea reaching the finish line is in fact a real idea. Intelligible. Real. Complex. Etc.
you said, “Evolution is just fine for explaining how complexity arises, and it’s hardly irreducible.” – hahahaha…
lol! – sorry, I can’t stop.
(If that was lost on you, let me know.)
you said, “We can assign probabilities to things like genetic mutations just fine, and they’re all explainable in terms of physical, deterministic processes.”, when did you learn this trick?! Last I remember you had some relations, but were impotent before “processes”!
you said, “Science, for instance, is not strictly a language. It involves processes and concepts that can be described WITH language”, which is just more evidence that you too are eventually pulling a “something more” out of your “reducible” “determinism”.
You said, “Whatever language you use to describe reality — you’re only able to do so within the confines of what science can tell you. You don’t then get *around* science by using a framework you developed from *within* science and mathematics itself.” Rubix’ conflation of “reality” and “science” here is ridiculous. If this is the source of his confidence in HIS reality…
You said, “or may not have meaningful answers” – a-ha! “O ye of little faith”! Apples and oranges, Rubix. Apples and oranges.
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you said, “As if this somehow solves anything any better than the frameworks of causality/acausality do, lol.”, compare analog to digital, and continuous to discrete. Then consider again the nature of the temporal, and of the eternal. (And the need for the spiritual.)
you said, “Self-determinacy is just an attempt to avoid the issue and claim victory.” No. It is the victory. That I, or Chris, may claim it, does not mean that the claim is “[merely] an attempt”. And, self-determinacy is only possible for the self-existent. (The real power of faith/e.) Compare “self-configuring AND self-processing.
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you said, “Whether or not space is expanding or matter is shrinking is irrelevant — it’s the same model”, apples and oranges: Chris isn’t after a mere model.
You said, “Seriously, Chris, take a real analysis class. Please.”, 🙂
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you said, “Chris has an allergic reaction to simplicity, it would appear. Zeno’s Paradox *must* be a paradox no matter how many times people tell him that it’s not a real paradox.”, but you need your own admonition too! That is, your “METHOD” is the submitting to THE paradox! Chris is saying the paradox isn’t real. And he tries painting the picture. But you continue to maintain the “reality” of the paradox: that science, without “something more” …
you said, “Nothing actually gets solved this way [Chris’ way] — it just pushes the problem elsewhere, and all without evidence.” Methinks this a case of the orange calling the apple fruit. This is necessarily the case when you take as your fundamental idea a “method”! (Hint: faith/e is the solution.)
——
Tim
As I’m bored today, I’ll sum up the main defenses for CTMU, as I view them. (I feel how I’m becoming a troll on my own. Expect a strong reaction to this post).
Basically there are four supporters of Langan here: Tim, Jeremy Jar, Anonymous, and Langan himself. If I forgot someone, feel free to add to the list.
Langan himself
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Langan tries to avoid speaking about his theory, but between insult and insult, he has slipped his only argument: his use of “set” is not inconsistent because he has been using Cantor’s naive definition of a set:
“A set is a gathering together into a whole of definite, distinct objects of our perception and of our thought – which are called elements of the set.”
He claims that definition is immune to naive set theory inconsistencies. Then he uses that inconsistencies to infer things. For example, he claims there is a biggest set, a set bigger than any other. Then he speaks about its powerset, which is bigger. This paradox is directly related to his definition, which is inconsistent. This is no surprise: he is using Cantor’s definition of set. But he actually infers things from these inconsistencies.
When pointed with this simple fact, his only answer is to deny reality and insulting people.
In any case, if you really try to take his writing seriously and critically, he is not even following his own definition. He claims a set to be a gathering of objects of our perception and of our thought. Not of our potential perception or thought. Of them. But if we really take him seriously, and he says he is not using a model but reality itself, then this is a dynamical object. At any instant, imagine you have perceived or thought a limited number of objects. Then you think about its powerset, you’ve thought about an additional element. But then the former is not the “biggest set” for you. You have a new biggest set, which includes the powerset of the former. Then you can think of the powerset of this new set, but then you have a new “biggest set”. Because, by his definition (objects thought or perceived), you can not build the powerset of the biggest set without modifying the biggest set. He just claim you can. This is a stupid argument, but just because all the question of the powerset of the biggest set if pretty ridiculous, as you can not speak of a biggest set consistently.
You can easily see these problems, and how Langan is misusing his own definitions. Simply denying then is no solution.
Of course, these are just naive problems, which result from his naive and inconsistent approach. His idea of set is what mathematicians fixed a century ago, because of this inconsistencies. You can not infer anything interesting from here.
Tim
—
Tim’s arguments are, in my opinion, the worst of all. He basically claims he is right because science can not know it all.
Of course, maybe science can not explain it all. This is a possibility. But it does not mean an alternative arbitrary explanation can. This is equivalent to say “medicine science can not cure it all, so Bach flowers can”. Well, we know medicine can not cure it all because we bothered to check it. Can we at least do the same for Bach flowers? If Bach flowers can not cure a particular disease, then medicine can cure it all, because Bach flowers can’t.
Even assuming that if science can not know it all there would be other things that can (which we don’t know, probably not), that is no argument in favor of a particular alternative method. This is a god of the gasps by the book.
In any case, I will not address Tim anymore, because he is defending Langan’s theory, which states his conclusions are mathematical, necessary and exact, without error, but then he does not agree with Langan results. He has different beliefs. He supports Langan saying he has proven god exists and then he says you can not prove things. I don’t even see how you can take this position. You can not assert Langan’s proofs are right, but his conclusions are not. Tim has taken this silly position of supporting something he negates.
That’s why I say in my opinion Tim is the worst commenter here, so I will not address anything more than this. I invite anyone interested to read him and judge himself (as I ever do), and not take me as a source of information about him.
Anonymous
———
I had two rounds with Anonymous.
In the first one, his arguments were based on “the powerset of the biggest set” being real just because it’s a mathematically well-defined concept. Of course, it’s not. In mathematics you can not well-defined what the biggest set is. You can not even specify its universe of discourse. And if you define a biggest set, you automatically have inconsistencies, which explicitly means it’s not well-defined. This is an obvious error.
In the second round, his arguments are based ultimately on this:
“Relations have syntaxes because all relations take forms. This is the case because all relations that do not take a form are not interpretable; remember that symbols and even interpretations are syntactic entities. Lacking interpretability, a relation would not be cognitively accessible, and that which is not cognitively accessible (even in theory) may be severed from reality. You may object to this last point, but anything that can not, even theoretically, be cognitively processed does not have any effect on reality, and that which does not have any effect on reality is decidedly unreal.”
I don’t know what he means by relation or form. He just claims there is a relation between any two objects, and other things I will not address, having no idea what he is referring to.
But then he says this: which is not cognitively accessible may be severed from reality. Anything that can not be cognitively processed does not have an effect on reality.
He claims this is a proof of the nonexistence of true randomness. His vague language does not help, but it’s not so difficult to see this “proof” is just an assertion which assumes what it’s proving.
What does “random” means? Informally, a process is random when you can not predict it outcome. An event is random when you can not predict when it will happen. For example, the particular time for a radioactive decay. Or the result of a position measurement in quantum mechanics.
Anonymous’ proof consists on saying “that which is not cognitively accesible is not part of reality”. Being random can be thought as meaning “being not cognitively accessible until it happens”, in a sense. So his proof is “that which is random is not part of reality, so randomness is not part of reality”. The proof assumes the conclusion.
But let’s think a bit about the sentence. Randomness can refer to
1) Apparent randomness, due to a current lack of information. I will not address this, as it’s not real randomness.
2) They can also be due to chaos. This is of a different kind. A chaotic system so sensitive enough to its initial conditions that you simply can not predict it outcome until you know very very well its state. This can be a problem even theoretically: you can think there may not be enough bits of information in any subsystem to express the initial conditions with enough precision to made the computations beyond in the system itself. Is the system “cognitively accessible”, then? From a different perspective, the measurements required to know the initial state of the system may be such that they will alter the state itself. So you can not theoretically know the state, because you can not measure it and you’ll never be able. Finally, there may be limitations to your measurements, like Heisenberg’s principle. Then you can not know the state at all with enough precision to predict the outcome, and nothing at all can.
3) Then there is the possibility of true randomness. The outcome may not be predictable at all, as an individual event. Determinists may not like this (I don’t), but until you prove otherwise, you can not discard this option.
Can we discard cases 2) and 3)? The outcomes of such an event would be not “cognitively accessible”, at least a priori. Of course, you can know the position of an electron after you measured it, but that does not mean the event has not being random.
Does he speaks of events “not being cognitively accessible” even after they happen? Then he is not proving randomness not to exists, and he is not proving the Universe to be a language, except if by “having a syntax” he is just saying we can write on a notebook past events. Then he is not including the future when he speaks about “the universe”.
If he is only speaking about past events, of course randomness do not exists. But then he has not understood what random means, and this is no proof that randomness does not exist. This misunderstanding of the very concept he is trying to disprove would not be surprising.
The other possibility is that he actually understand what random means, and he is saying that if we can not know what a measure of the position of an electron would give us, so the path of an electron is not scientific, then the electron is unreal. This claim is fallacious. Despite it’s trajectory not being real, the electron still have observable effects on reality, so you can not say it’s not real just because it can not be predicted.
I believe this argument comes from the misinterpretation Anonymous make of true arguments. For example, as you (and nothing) can say what the path of an electron is, it has no sense to speak about the path. If we live in a multiverse and we can’t interact with neighbor universes, it would have no sense to speak about them. If there was a god and he had no effects on the universe, then it would have no sense to speak about it.
But if we have an electron and we can not predict the result of a measurement of its position, it still has effects on reality, so we can not say it’s not real, despite not being able to predict it.
Anonymous is just taking “not being able to predict it”, which is what random means, with “having not observable effects”. This is just a misunderstanding on his part. The future we may not be able to predict, but it sure will have an effect on us.
The argument is wrong in structure (it’s circular) and meaning.
His comments are the result of a horrible confusion with language. Is something cognitively accessible before it happens? Can you speak of randomness of past events? Can something I don’t know about have an effect on me? Can something which leads to contradictions be mathematically well-defined? Does a concept, like a “powerset of the biggest set”, exist just because we can vaguely refer to it, even when if we assume it exists we’ve got a contradiction, which is the standard method in math to prove something does not exist? Can we take two contradicting concept, like “the existence of a chair” and “the non-existence of a chair” and infer something from the contradiction?
All resulting from confusing language.
Jeremy Jae
———-
I’ll only sample one of Jeremy’s arguments. He tries to continue Anonymous’ argument:
“There is a relation between the two states, discrete bits of information, are related by the syntactic threshold of the number of dice rolls divided by the number of possible states (1 to 6 for each die). Every dice roll represents a maximal input (3) and a minimum output (1). This is what we get from the subtraction; a finite state machine with the recursive property that we can apply the same rules of the dice over and over until we get the same set of numbers (3 – 1). The state ’emerges’ from the syntax and the syntax emerges from the state. Entropy is an illusion of the semantics involved by interpretation because given the emergent recurrence of a 3 and 1 result we can circumscribe probabilistic rules. In other words the probabilistic rules become distinguishable from the random appearance and this is how all languages emerge, by trial and error esp., in natural language where a child learns over time by trial and error. Quantum mechanics; similar story using Monte Carlo methods. ”
You throw two dice, and you subtract the numbers. For example, 3-1=2. The possible results of this subtraction are between 0 and 5.
Then Jeremy claims this gives you a finite state machine. What finite? I don’t know what he is speaking about. A machine that gets you the next result? I don’t believe so. It would be a non-deterministic machine. A machine to do the subtraction, given the results of the throwing? I don’t see this machine as interesting. Or it’s a machine which counts the number of times you get a result? This would not be a finite state machine: the counting is not bounded.
Then he claims that this machine has a recursive property. I’m not sure what a recursive property is. One can evaluate a property recursively, but that may be a property of the evaluation, not of the property. I don’t understand he here. The property is
“we can apply the same rules of the dice over and over until we get the same set of numbers”.
I still don’t see why this is recursive. In fact, this is a description of an iterative process. I would not call the property of being able to be applied until you get a result “recursive”. I would call it “applicable until you get what you want”. But let’s not argue about language. This is not a discussion, I’m only trying to guess what he is speaking about.
In any case, this is not a property of every dice roll. You can not evaluate the subtraction several times without throwing the dice again. Well, you can, but then, yes, you’ll get the same result easily.
So we’ve got a process (throwing two dice), a measurement (the difference between the results of the dice), a postulated non-deterministic finite state machine whose role I don’t know, because its state is simply “this throw has been X”, with six such states and non-deterministic transitions between any pair of these states, and the property of being able to throw repeating the throwing, which he calls “recursive”.
Then he jumps to “the state ’emerges’ from the syntax, and the syntax emerges from the state”.
And from that to “entropy is an illusion of the semantics involved by interpretation because given the emergent recurrence of a 3 and 1 result we can circumscribe probabilistic rules”.
If he is trying to continue Anonymous assertion that randomness do not exists, he is doing pretty bad. I don’t believe he is saying this. I believe he is saying: this is a random process, we can assign a probability to any result of the difference.
Then he says: “In other words the probabilistic rules become distinguishable from the random appearance”. This is a surprising assertion. The probabilistic rules are distinct from randomness. Err… of course. Probabilistic rules are a way to study random events. They are not the same.
Then “this is how all languages emerge, by trial and error”. I believe this is how language in a thread like this emerges: by saying random things.
What is Jeremy really saying? He is saying: with two dice you can define the subtraction, which has six possible values. Every value has a probability. All these we already know.
And then he says this is a language. I would call this non-sequitur. In fact, this may be a language, but by defining a language as this. You can not conclude anything about this language. You can not conclude it having meaning. You can not conclude it having a syntax until you define a syntax to be something this “language” has. You can not conclude this language implies an interlocutor. You can infer nothing interesting. You can define a lot of things around this and publish it.
Now that I started, I’ll leave the reader the rest of the analysis. I just can’t make sense of the argument at all.
My guess is that Jeremy is just mocking us, so I’m not going to take him so seriously. I can not blame him for not taking this discussion seriously. I also have had a good laugh with all this. Laughing is healthy, and CTMU is just too nonsensical to take it seriously.
So this is what we get. The quality of this you should judge yourself. These are Tim, Jeremy, Langan and Anonymous arguments. I can For any doubts, refer to the original sources and judge yourselves.
And these arguments are for relatively trivial questions, like if you can infer something meaningful from naive set theory’s contradictions, or if you can rule out randomness. We have not started to speak about the complex proofs about the Universe knowing itself! XD
John,
to defend myself for the record,
you said, “Tim’s arguments are, in my opinion, the worst of all.”, I’ll gladly take such a “complement” from you! But you continued, “He basically claims he is right because science can not know it all.”, I have both claimed that I am right, and I that ~”science can not know it all”, but I defy you to find the “because” anywhere in the record.
you went on, “Of course, maybe science can not explain it all. This is a possibility. But it does not mean an alternative arbitrary explanation can.”, how boring, but, neither does it mean that it cannot.
you said, “Even assuming that if science can not know it all there would be other things that can (which we don’t know, probably not),”, I’ll repeat what I said to Rubix, “oh ye of little faith”; but, to be sure, by “all” I only mean regarding the nature of reality (and really I am just talking about the fundament, if there should be something I have missed on the other side), not the particulars of which possibilities shall be actualized (since the specifics of actualization are based on the willful and potent choices {self-limitations} of the plural “I am”). John, if you want to understand me, I suggest you take my analysis of this debate vis-a-vis apples and oranges to heart; I have never been trying to satisfy you as orange, but to get you to (at least) leave room for apples.
you said, “In any case, I will not address Tim anymore, because he is defending Langan’s theory,”, but Langan himself knows that I am not, stating, just today, “even if that were true”. I have consistently held forth that I don’t think that Chris has yet “succeeded”, but that what he has offered is a great start, that I’m thankful to have come across it, and that I think he is sitting in pole position for success, … I have also offered my hints and suggestions as to where I think he may be deficient. And, in case it wasn’t clear, I have not put in the effort I would need to put in to be able to say that I have “learned” what he has offered; I have yet to be so enticed. You continued, “which states his conclusions are mathematical, necessary and exact, without error, but then he does not agree with Langan results. He has different beliefs.”, yes! You continued, “He supports Langan saying he has proven god exists”, but I have never supported Langan’s proof, only agreed on the conclusion. You continued, “and then he says you can not prove things.”, again, I defy you to find this in the record!!! It isn’t there! I have asked you questions about it. I may even have suggested that *YOU* “can not prove”. And I have even said that I don’t have “proof” of my “confirmed” understanding of the metaphysical fundament, that faith/e is required. But, certainly, I never held the position you ascribe to me! My faith/e has always been that “real” is meaningful, and that it should be concievable. Perhaps apprehendable. Perhaps even by me. You continued, “I don’t even see how you can take this position.”, I don’t see how you can think I did. You continued, “You can not assert Langan’s proofs are right, but his conclusions are not.”, but, again, I never asserted that Langan’s proofs were right. you continued, “Tim has taken this silly position of supporting something he negates.”, do you really believe this? Or are you attempting a “political assassination”?
you said, “That’s why I say in my opinion Tim is the worst commenter here,”, thanks again (I think this just means you misunderstand me the most). you continued, “so I will not address anything more than this. I invite anyone interested to read him and judge himself (as I ever do), and not take me as a source of information about him.”, very wise; and thank you for exoterically stating such caveat.
Tim
(Tim)> You continued, “and then he says you can not prove things.”, again, I defy you to find this in the record!!! It isn’t there!
You just have a terrible terrible memory XD. It’s here:
(Tim)> I’ve never pretended that what I offer amounts to proof. In fact, I’ve exoterically offered you the exact opposite. Proof is impossible. Are you gonna ask why? Faith is the root of all knowledge.
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-28816
John,
or a pretty decent one!
Look, the quote you cropped from now went, more fully:
“You continued, “and then he says you can not prove things.”, again, I defy you to find this in the record!!! It isn’t there! I have asked you questions about it. I may even have suggested that *YOU* “can not prove”. And I have even said that I don’t have “proof” of my “confirmed” understanding of the metaphysical fundament, that faith/e is required.”
So, TO REPEAT, faith/e is required regarding ones confirmed or unconfirmed knowledge of the fundament or nature of reality. Rubix, for instance, faith/es determinism vis-avis the “process” he cannot prove from the relationships he determines, “scientifically”. I faith/e I am. But this is a long (long, long) way from saying “you cannot prove things.”!
John, this distinction need not always remain lost on you.
Tim
This is why I pretty much ignore all of your boringly solipsistic arguments. You don’t seem to understand that there’s no “faith in determinism” required. We don’t have to make any claims about “what reality really is.”
Rubix,
1) you ignore me because you know you are impotent to dispatch me.
2) my position that reality is a PLURAL society of I am is clearly NOT solipsistic.
3) you refuse to acknowledge your faith/e. But that doesn’t make it disappear. As you live, you faith/e. “One can not avoid metaphysics.” And that you are ever prepared to abandon your grand faith if – when – it should fail you, is no reason to say you don’t faith heavily moment to moment! This is just the difference in manifestation between apples and oranges. You are a “method”ist, so to say, you still faith/e in all these little moments. Ignore the evidence as you will though.
Tim
No, I ignore you because you’re beyond reason and don’t listen to what’s being said to you. There’s no faith required. At all. By definition, faith is belief in absence of evidence. Therefore, I don’t take anything on faith because my stance is via the merits of evidence and accepting that we cannot avoid ignorance.
Your argument is almost ultimately boiled down to “Well, it COULD be different and you can’t disprove this!” It’s been repeatedly said to you that this is totally irrelevant. There are an infinite number of “possible” explanations that could manifest themselves, but unless we have no reason to take any one particular path, there’s no good reason to comment on any of them. We still to what we know works and what works consistently. You don’t seem to understand this and keep yammering on about “THEE I’dea” nonsense.
Again, like I said, if you think “causality” is so loose-weave, go jump off a building. If you’re not willing to do this, it’s because you’re pretty damn sure about what’s going to happen. That’s ultimately all materialists are arguing, here. We accept what is consistent with what happens, and reject what is not.
It doesn’t require any deeper knowledge of what reality is or isn’t. We talk about our reality through what we perceive, and that’s all we talk about.
*unless we have a reason
Rubix,
ahhh, an example. You said, “This is why I pretty much ignore all of your boringly solipsistic arguments.”, but it is merely faith/e on you part that my arguments are “boring”. They aren’t! They are, in fact, exceedingly exciting! And I invite you to share.
good luck,
Tim
Rubix,
you said, “No, I ignore you because you’re beyond reason and don’t listen to what’s being said to you.”. 🙂 rather, reason is beyond intelligence (qua “meta”), and you are quite intelligent, but not yet reasonable. I listen quite well – do you have evidence that I don’t? Anyway, what you confuse for not listening is, I suspect, merely my not being persuaded to abandon reason.
you continued, “There’s no faith required. At all.”, absurd. Let’s see: you continued, “By definition, faith is belief in absence of evidence.”, good enough here, I think. To be sure though, faith/e covers incomplete evidence too. you continued, “Therefore, I don’t take anything on faith because my stance is via the merits of evidence and accepting that we cannot avoid ignorance.” This is just infantile, Rubix. You hate the idea of faith/e, so you ignore your own. Do you ever go for a run? You faith/e that the ground will support you next step. I could go on forever enumerating such little examples! Rubix, you mistake your lack of commitment to your faith as a lack of faithe. That is quite immature, and not reasonable. “one cannot avoid metaphysics.”, and by hating it so much that you won’t even look at it, you end up with a really immature one.
you said, “Your argument is almost ultimately boiled down to “Well, it COULD be different and you can’t disprove this!”, what argument?! I haven’t given you an argument here!! I have been painting a picture of THE real i’dea. I have also argued for you where you fall short. But I’m not here to lead you in some linear argument. This is the whole confusion John can’t get passed either. I’m painting a picture of THE real i’dea. You will have to seek confirmation for yourself (and it is very exciting). To sum, if I have argued, it is that you fall short. But I am not trying to carry you to the peak of the mountain. You will have to carry yourself there.
you continued, “It’s been repeatedly said to you that this is totally irrelevant. There are an infinite number of “possible” explanations that could manifest themselves,”, sound to me like you are a man of GREAT faith afterall!!! lol. I believe there is one real idea. you continued, “but unless we have no reason to take any one particular path, there’s no good reason to comment on any of them.”, Rubix, time forces you to make choices with incomplete evidence. That is no small piece of evidence!!! Do you see the repercussions??? you continued, “We still to what we know works and what works consistently.”, again – and THIS is getting boring – “works” is something you have no evidence or understanding of! Every “working” is something you expect by YOUR faith/e!!! You continued, “You don’t seem to understand this”, right, I don’t. That position is immature and incapable of accounting for the fullness of THE real idea. What reason would have someone hold to it? lol. But I certainly understand the value of abandoning something shown to be false 😉 you continued, “and keep yammering on about “THEE I’dea” nonsense.”, more of your faith/e! Or do you claim to have proof that it is “nonsense”?
you said, “Again, like I said, if you think “causality” is so loose-weave, go jump off a building.”, who was not listening? you continued, “If you’re not willing to do this, it’s because you’re pretty damn sure about what’s going to happen.”, I already told you that I have a great deal of confidence that my decision would be actualized, and that that is not the decision I want to be held responsible for. you continued, “That’s ultimately all materialists are arguing, here.”, if you would limit yourself to such an “ultimate” you would do well. But you don’t. And you don’t because that is a faith/e/full position! I have never said a bad word about your methods of gathering and analyzing relationships from your information. What I have said is that you, Rubix, go way to far when you faith/e that those relationships jump to life, just cause! You don’t understand the limits of science / intelligence. And you take foolishly immature positions for your transgressions.
You continued, “We accept what is consistent with what happens, and reject what is not.”, lol. Are you now saying that THE i’dea I am is not consistent with “what happens”?
you said, “It doesn’t require any deeper knowledge of what reality is or isn’t. We talk about our reality through what we perceive, and that’s all we talk about.”, Rubix, what you talk about is all static stuff. You cannot account for dynamism of any sort. You can attach time-tags to your relationships, but you cannot account for time itself. This is why I say you are a “method”ist. It is a very fine thing that you have so little confidence in your faith/e in grand, but in fine, you still do have it! You are a partisan before the full evidence of reality, so you miss a good deal.
Good luck,
Tim
I have plenty of evidence that you don’t listen.
This very argument, for one: “Do you ever go for a run? You faith/e that the ground will support you next step.”
This is exactly the kind of crap I am talking about. This isn’t faith. This is a conclusion made off of supporting evidence. Again, I repeat myself, your arguments always boil down to “It COULD be different! You never know!” You basically seem to reject Occam’s Razor, which basically opens the floodgates for a lot of unfalsifiable nonsense we have no reason to even consider until we get evidence for it.
Rubix,
you said, “This is exactly the kind of crap I am talking about. This isn’t faith. This is a conclusion made off of supporting evidence.”
again, you’ve never once had evidence of the future. Either you don’t understand your evidence, or you are purposely miscategorizing your faith as evidence for some other purpose.
you said, “Again, I repeat myself, your arguments always boil down to “It COULD be different! You never know!””
I have never suggested that it could be different! hahaha. (There is ONE real i’dea!)
And, *YOU* don’t know. I know. Mind you, my knowing is not based on proof, but confirmation, but if the word know is to have any meaning whatsoever: I know. (I tried to get into this with John way back, with my question to him if there was anything he would claim to know, and he admitted – at least – that he knew that he made assumptions about reality. Are you gonna claim that you don’t? Your confidence in the patterns you EXtrapolate to the future is not justified, my faithful friend-foe.)
you said, “You basically seem to reject Occam’s Razor, which basically opens the floodgates for a lot of unfalsifiable nonsense we have no reason to even consider until we get evidence for it.”
Occam’s razor had been put in its place above. But, yes, faith/e is risky. But if that is a turn off to you, you hate the confines of real: so what? You hate yourself. I don’t find this a very compelling reason to abandon “I am”, hehe. Rubix, as it happens, you are debating someone that understands your position better than you do; I understand the bounds of science better than you do. I have never suggested that you should abandon either the evidence or the METHOD of science, only that, if you want to bring yourself more fully in line with REALITY (or even just SCIENCE!), you will have to admit of your limitations. And you will have to admit that, as you live, you live by faithe!
Now, if you prefer your (immature) faithe, so be it. But the PICTURE I have been painting for you of THE REAL I’DEA: I am:: and the plural society thereof::: will withstand all scrutiny (note that this is a very concrete prediction – not that it is anywhere near the first I have made here)
Tim
“Again, you’ve never once had evidence of the future.”
And we don’t need it. We’ve had countless times where we make a prediction about the future and have it turn out to be true, and we do this constantly and implicitly with our senses all throughout our lives. Does that mean the framework itself is absolutely correct? Strictly speaking, no. *But that does not matter*. If I know that letting go of an object here on Earth will make it fall, and I see this prediction hold true every time I do it, this is knowledge I label as true until shown otherwise. Could the future turn out differently? Sure — it’s possible that the moment you finish reading this sentence, gravity could stop working altogether. But there’s no reason to suggest that such a thing is realistic or probable or even worth discussing because it’s wholly arbitrary and without merit — especially if you’re still reading this sentence instead of wondering why the hell you’re up on the ceiling now.
“I have never suggested that it could be different! hahaha. (There is ONE real i’dea!)”
Uhhhh… yes you have: “Do you ever go for a run? You faith/e that the ground will support you next step.” You’re implying that the physics of putting my foot to the ground could go up in smoke the next instant. This is suggesting that something could be different.
“And you will have to admit that, as you live, you live by faithe!”
It’s not faith *when it’s backed by evidence*. You suggest that EVERYTHING in the future is faith-based simply because there’s no evidence of the future. It’s completely possible that our universe is a false vacuum and we all suddenly stop existing in the next instant due to a vacuum metastability event, *but there’s no evidence to suggest that happening*. What we do have is evidence to suggest other things as being true and far more *likely*. At its core, that’s what science is — the best way to bet.
We make predictions (explicitly or implicitly) and test against the reality. When we find that certain evidence results in consistent explanations, that’s not faith. If you’re just going to be pedantic by claiming it’s a “faith in evidence,” then fine, but it’s just quibbling semantics. I define “faith” as a belief in something that is without direct evidence. Calling everything “faith” is typically seen as a dishonest rhetorical tactic because it implies that claims made without evidence are just as valid/strong as claims made without evidence, which is false.
Rubix,
You said, “we don’t need it [evidence].” Lol! I hope you saw this irony when you wrote it, and that I am just laughing *with* you. I had been thinking that you didn’t understand faith/e. That you thought it was UN-real. Perhaps it is just a case of you cutting off your nose to spite your face, though (not wanting to be human cause of shame over the way other humans faith/e)?
You continued, “We’ve had countless times where we make a prediction about the future and have it turn out to be true, and we do this constantly and implicitly with our senses all throughout our lives. Does that mean the framework itself is absolutely correct? Strictly speaking, no. *But that does not matter*. If I know that letting go of an object here on Earth will make it fall, and I see this prediction hold true every time I do it, this is knowledge I label as true until shown otherwise.”, fine. Nice even.
But, “Could the future turn out differently? Sure — it’s possible that the moment you finish reading this sentence, gravity could stop working altogether.”, really? It’s possible? You went on, “But there’s no reason to suggest that such a thing is realistic or probable or even worth discussing because it’s wholly arbitrary and without merit”, now you’re speaking out the other side of your mouth. Why? Perhaps these details are too fine for this discussion, now.
You quoted me, “I have never suggested that it could be different! hahaha. (There is ONE real i’dea!)”, and replied, “Uhhhh… yes you have: “Do you ever go for a run? You faith/e that the ground will support you next step.” You’re implying that the physics of putting my foot to the ground could go up in smoke the next instant. This is suggesting that something could be different.”, no, you misunderstand. I was using this to show that YOUR confidence in YOUR evidence is not-justified. I was certainly NOT suggesting that justification is impossible! I used the example of running because it is about as mundane an example as I could come up with; and faith/e has to be in the most mundane – too – if it is to be REAL. I could have tried to go straight to the easier point, suggested an experience where you did something totally new, but I thought that a weaker argument. Anyway, you may be right that there is some caveat I left out of my example, which would best be included. Rubix, I doubt you can remember the first step you took, the first time you tried to run, but if you could, the faith/e involved might be something you wouldn’t as easily dismiss! I don’t know you well enough to pick a better example, but for me, for instance, ollying a skateboard is a pretty good one. The first time I landed a moving olly is something for which I can remember very well how important faith/e is.
And I can’t imagine evolution working without it (and I know that you can’t imagine evolution WORKING at all).
You quoted me, “And you will have to admit that, as you live, you live by faithe!”, and you went on, “It’s not faith *when it’s backed by evidence*.”, you’ll have to forgive me for not entrusting you with the definition of faith/e! You don’t believe that it is real. Maybe you even think it is some bunk consolation for people who continually faith/e the unreal? You are missing something precious, Rubix.
You continued, “You suggest that EVERYTHING in the future is faith-based simply because there’s no evidence of the future. It’s completely possible that our universe is a false vacuum and we all suddenly stop existing in the next instant due to a vacuum metastability event, *but there’s no evidence to suggest that happening*. What we do have is evidence to suggest other things as being true and far more *likely*. At its core, that’s what science is — the best way to bet.”
Again, you don’t see the limitations of science! Science can not fill out the picture of “the best way to bet”!! At some point you have to take a leap into the future. If you truly gave up on faith/e you would never be able to pick. You would keep waiting, indefinitely, for (someone else to provide you with) “THE” fulfillment of science (“THE” being in quotes because it is only THE, without quotes, at the meta level).
You said (and I didn’t read ahead): “We make predictions (explicitly or implicitly) and test against the reality. When we find that certain evidence results in consistent explanations, that’s not faith. If you’re just going to be pedantic by claiming it’s a “faith in evidence,” then fine, but it’s just quibbling semantics. I define “faith” as a belief in something that is without direct evidence. Calling everything “faith” is typically seen as a dishonest rhetorical tactic because it implies that claims made without evidence are just as valid/strong as claims made without evidence, which is false.” Rubix, you never have the “evidence” you think you have! Like I said before, you don’t understand the limitations of YOUR evidence. Furthermore, since I am an apple to your orange, I could flip your “faith in evidence” around and say you are being “pedantic” about evidence: evidence is something that comes AFTER the fact… My point, though, is simply that our potent decisions are always an act of faith/e, primarily, and that “evidence” is not properly even evidence until one confirms his faith. Confirmation is a real thing/experience, qua justification, and short of it, you should not speak of evidence, but information. Perhaps that will help to allay your displeasure with …
Anyway, the phenomenal is the “wife” of the noumenal. Science is the “bitch” of religion! But she’s quite the bitch! Faith/e is risky. If you imagine you are faith/e/ing something, but it is unreal, it’s not your faith/e that will suffer, per se, but, rather, you and your imagination will take the hit for your immature faith/e.
Tim
You’re simply not getting it. It’s not that I don’t understand the limits of evidence. It’s that you don’t even seem to be aware of the evidence when you make odd claims like “I can’t imagine evolution without faith.” Evolution doesn’t require faith. The evidence is everywhere, and it’s testable, and it’s confirmed by every metric you care to invoke. Its case is watertight by genetic evidence alone. Everything else is just a bonus that further hammers the point home.
I think it’s pretty silly to suggest that I can’t be confident in the evidence that my foot isn’t going to suddenly materialize below the ground or something. Since we never see such things occur, we can, by definition, be confident. That’s what it MEANS to be confident — you have a strong prediction that you are sure will come true. And it does, again and again and again. If you’re meaning to refer to a FIRST step, that’s still a non-argument. If you don’t know what will happen, you test it. You take a step and see what happens, etc. From there, you develop and integrate your frameworks of explanation and prediction — theoies that explain the most amount of material with the simplest, predictive, consistent explanations based on direct evidence. It’s only faith if you’re believing in something that isn’t supported by the evidence or is not a necessary explanation.
So when people think that something more is required to explain evolution, this is ignorance. Again, it’s like thinking fairies are required to explain why water boils. You don’t need God to explain something like evolution.
Rubix,
you said, “Evolution doesn’t require faith.”, which is exceedingly arrogant, and does show that you do not understand the limits of your “evidence”. You continued, “The evidence is everywhere, and it’s testable, and it’s confirmed by every metric you care to invoke. Its case is watertight by genetic evidence alone. Everything else is just a bonus that further hammers the point home.”, I have never argued against evolution (I do believe that the phenomenal is of an evolutional order), so you don’t need to play the salesman / change the topic. The topic being that you are still impotent to account of TIME, change, dynamism. Your picture of evolution is woefully incomplete; in fact, what you think of as “evolution” is not filled out enough to be a real idea.
You went on, “I think it’s pretty silly to suggest that I can’t be confident in the evidence that my foot isn’t going to suddenly materialize below the ground or something.”, the point I was making is that your confidence is not JUSTIFIED. You continued, “Since we never see such things occur, we can, by definition, be confident. That’s what it MEANS to be confident — you have a strong prediction that you are sure will come true. And it does, again and again and again.”, but, again, the contention here has been over the justification – the lack thereof – of your confidence. You make think we are picking nits here, because we are talking about something that you are sooo confident about, but the nit is not such a nit when you get out or your realm of comfort, or when you confront the new or the unexpected.
you added, “It’s only faith if you’re believing in something that isn’t supported by the evidence or is not a necessary explanation.”, it’s really funny you talking about faith/e when it is something you reject!
you, changing the topic, “So when people think that something more is required to explain evolution, this is ignorance.” – more than what?! (Please be precise, start from the beginning, etc. and etc. — Good luck!)
You continued, “Again, it’s like thinking fairies are required to explain why water boils.”, I suppose you have evidence for this?! lol.
You ended, “You don’t need God to explain something like evolution.”, if you can explain evolution – and if you can do so while leaving God out – … But you can’t. You can’t account for time, change, dynamism of any sort.
Rubix, I’m about to press this “Post Comment” button. I expect that my comments will appear in the thread. You can believe that there is no code behind the scenes, that there are no tiny circuits in my computer, that there are no signals being sent here and there to facilitate this; and you can even say that such a suggestion is like saying that fairies are needed to make water boil. You can say that “it just happens”; and you can even say “we don’t need [evidence]”, but…
you really need to admit that you cannot account for the working of time. And that you have no evidence of the future. Or, tell me what this thing for which nothing more is needed is: fully and precisely! And tell me the fullness of EVOLUTION!
Tim
Rubix,
faith/e?
how about something like this?:
the REAL (Living) process whereby an I’dea (“I am”) both creates a REAL “idea”and holds himself (THE i’dea) together through a(n ideal) change which is not fully known to him – since he is but A member of the PLURAL SOCIETY.
Tim
Tim
Tim:
It’s by no means arrogant to say “Evolution doesn’t require faith” because it doesn’t. I’m not “changing the topic” — you’re the one who brought it up.
How can you say that my confidence that my foot won’t go through the gravel isn’t justified? Justification, here, is *defined* as the combination of consistent, predictive, evidence-supported frameworks. If I can take a billion steps and not go through the pavement, I am justified in saying that my next step will be predictably the same because I have no reason to believe otherwise, and it works, given the nature of my frameworks.
“You make think we are picking nits here, because we are talking about something that you are sooo confident about, but the nit is not such a nit when you get out or your realm of comfort, or when you confront the new or the unexpected.”
If we’re talking about something new that has no evidence to support it whatsoever, we can’t make any claims about it. If we took a position that didn’t have anything to support that position, that would be faith by definition. But when we test something new, we withhold judgment until the results are in. It’s like asking “What’s inside this black box, here?” You’d have no idea, and to claim to know for certain is an example of faith. You have no evidence, yet you believe in one arbitrary idea over another for no reason.
“you, changing the topic, “So when people think that something more is required to explain evolution, this is ignorance.” – more than what?! ”
Nope — again, you brought this up — so now we get to finish it. “More than what” — the “what” here is the scientific explanations for something like evolution. Plenty of people, such as Wendy Wright, can be shown and taught the evidence outright and yet assume that a creator is still needed to explain evolution. I liken this via analogy to the idea that someone could be shown and taught why water boils, and yet they’d still insist that fairies were required to explain the phenonemon.
“You continued, “Again, it’s like thinking fairies are required to explain why water boils.”, I suppose you have evidence for this?! lol.”
No, that’s the whole point. There’s no evidence for fairies. There’s no evidence for God. People intuitively understand why there are no water-boiling fairies because they understand why water boils without them. Similarly, people who think God is needed to explain anything are doing so simply because they lack the understanding and are sorting to argument from ignorance.
“If you can explain evolution – and if you can do so while leaving God out – … But you can’t. You can’t account for time, change, dynamism of any sort.”
Uh, we can. Like I said, God isn’t needed. The scientific frameworks and evidence are more than enough justification. We can test it directly, observe it out in the field, and make ridiculously accurate predictions. It works, we understand the mechanisms, and we have no need for the God hypothesis, as Laplace might put it.
“I expect that my comments will appear in the thread. You can believe that there is no code behind the scenes, that there are no tiny circuits in my computer, that there are no signals being sent here and there to facilitate this; and you can even say that such a suggestion is like saying that fairies are needed to make water boil. You can say that “it just happens”; and you can even say “we don’t need [evidence]”, but…”
But I don’t believe that. I know there is code behind the scenes, circuits in the computer, signals being sent, etc. I understand how the network protocols work and I know how text processors work and how packet sending works. I’m not making some blind assertion that the comment will post without having known how it works beforehand. The fairy argument doesn’t apply here because we’re not saying God is needed to explain why your comment posts when you click the button. We understand it in terms of natural phenomena.
“You really need to admit that you cannot account for the working of time. And that you have no evidence of the future.”
We don’t need to understand HOW time works in order to know that it does. We don’t need to know what reality “really” is in order for evidence to be supportive. The entire picture of reality via our perception may be wrong, strictly speaking, but until we have reason to believe otherwise, we stick with it because it works and it works better than anything else you can invoke. This “evidence of the future” argument is bunk and it misses the point.
Rubix,
You said, “It’s by no means arrogant to say “Evolution doesn’t require faith” because it doesn’t. I’m not “changing the topic” — you’re the one who brought it up.”, I think this is one of those times when Chris would say something about how you generate errors faster than you speak. I did bring up evolution here though, you are right. If you are going to stick to talking about its relationship to faith/e, then I will also agree that you are not changing the topic (at first you didn’t so limit yourself). I brought up evolution here as an example, as a point of contact, not to open the door to sidetracking the discussion. Anyway, you have ignored my definition of faith/e, I see, so it is very, very arrogant for you to claim that evolution doesn’t require MY faith/e. And, again, it is really absurd for someone like you (who dismisses faith/e from the outset) to be telling me that it has no (fundamental) place. And, more, and again, do you have proof for this conclusion?
You said, “How can you say that my confidence that my foot won’t go through the gravel isn’t justified? Justification, here, is *defined* as the combination of consistent, predictive, evidence-supported frameworks. If I can take a billion steps and not go through the pavement, I am justified in saying that my next step will be predictably the same because I have no reason to believe otherwise, and it works, given the nature of my frameworks.”, how is this DEFINITION (for justification) different than your definition for “confidence?! You said, previously, “I think it’s pretty silly to suggest that I can’t be confident in the evidence that my foot isn’t going to suddenly materialize below the ground or something. Since we never see such things occur, we can, by definition, be confident. That’s what it MEANS to be confident — you have a strong prediction that you are sure will come true. And it does, again and again and again.” Rubix, I never challenged you about your confidence. You’re confident, so what? You have no justification because you have no way of getting past your evidence. You are in desperate need of the wonder that is “meta”. You are wanting because you do not see that physics, in large, is the predictable outcome of the a priori reason inherent in THE I’dea. Justification is the confidence in confidence, if you like, which comes from understanding the ideal framework that must be. Your “evidence” is not sufficient to give you justification – though you are confident, I trust – because you’ve yet to link it to anything REAL.
You said, “If we’re talking about something new that has no evidence to support it whatsoever,”, I have no idea what you’re suggesting here, can you give me an example? You continued, “we can’t make any claims about it. If we took a position that didn’t have anything to support that position, that would be faith by definition.”, please; whatever. You continued, “But when we test something new, we withhold judgment until the results are in. It’s like asking “What’s inside this black box, here?” You’d have no idea, and to claim to know for certain is an example of faith. You have no evidence, yet you believe in one arbitrary idea over another for no reason.”, I wonder, do you really think what you say here is sensible? Since you hate the word faith, maybe we can find common ground near “test”! In an evolutional order, the future never comes but by “test”. How’s this for a start?
You said, “Nope — again, you brought this up — so now we get to finish it. “More than what” — the “what” here is the scientific explanations for something like evolution.”, wonderful! Where do I find it?! Lol. It doesn’t exist. Which is my point (which is why your confidence is not “justified”)! Science has not attained to the goal of your faith/e. And you have no evidence that it ever will.
You said, “Plenty of people, such as Wendy Wright, can be shown and taught the evidence outright and yet assume that a creator is still needed to explain evolution. I liken this via analogy to the idea that someone could be shown and taught why water boils, and yet they’d still insist that fairies were required to explain the phenonemon.” Rubix, you cant justifiably explain why water boils without answering such questions as: why water at all!? I guess this is where you usually tune out, so I will try to stick to your level (sub-meta). You might say something like, water boils whenever its vapor pressure equals the ambient pressure. Here you SHOULD notice that this doesn’t answer “why?”. And it doesn’t account for time, qua boils. If I press this “post comment” button, it will be done. Rubix, this sub-meta ruin for you goes way deeper, shall I proceed? Or, maybe you have a different science to explain all the follow up questions about the like of “vapor pressure”, “ambient pressure”, and the implied questions about phase? The science I am familiar with here goes by the misnomer “thermodynamics” – which is a misnomer because it is based solely on equilibrium relationships, and thus is in no wise “dynamic”, but should be called thermostatics. Anyway, is this the science you too would rely on?
Now, I had said, in part quoting you, “You continued, “Again, it’s like thinking fairies are required to explain why water boils.”, I suppose you have evidence for this?! lol.”, and you replied: “No, that’s the whole point. There’s no evidence for fairies.”, but, quite comically, you again miss the point! I was asking for evidence that your saying that what I had said was LIKE …! I wanted evidence for your COMPARING my position to your fairies position. I understand what you intend to imply with your fairies thing, and I grant it to you, but why do you suggest that I am LIKE that!? What is the evidence for this comparison!? It seems to me like you are DEFINITELY concluding this on faith (your kind) alone!!! I am the black box. You refuse to look in. Yet you have concluded what you will find. Etc. and etc.
You said, “There’s no evidence for God. People intuitively understand why there are no water-boiling fairies because they understand why water boils without them. Similarly, people who think God is needed to explain anything are doing so simply because they lack the understanding and are sorting to argument from ignorance.” To be sure, we are – assuredly – not meaning the same thing when we say “God”. But, people don’t understand “why water boils”. They understand that it boils! People who think that these two are the same are doing so …
I had said, “If you can explain evolution – and if you can do so while leaving God out – … But you can’t. You can’t account for time, change, dynamism of any sort.”, and you responded, “Uh, we can.” Again, I say, “people who think that these two [why and that] are the same …” You continued, “Like I said, God isn’t needed. The scientific frameworks and evidence are more than enough justification. We can test it directly, observe it out in the field, and make ridiculously accurate predictions. It works, we understand the mechanisms, and we have no need for the God hypothesis, as Laplace might put it.”, you don’t understand the mechanisms! You may understand THAT the mechanisms do their thing (which thing you don’t know), under such and such conditions! And, to be sure, you abuse this word justification: are you afraid of it?!!!
You said, “But I don’t believe that.”, regarding my pressing the “post comment” button scenario; Rubix, that’s why I picked the scenario: because YOU believe that there is something behind the scenes here. You went on, “The fairy argument doesn’t apply here because …”, so, again, my question from above: why do you think the fairy argument applies to ME, my philosophy of personal I’dealism? How absurd would you think it if I kept coming to you saying, code, and all those protocols and what not you mentioned aren’t needed!? I simply press the “post comment” button, and it happens. It just happens; we don’t need anything more. And people who say “protocols” or code are needed are just saying so from ignorance! It’s like saying that fairies are needed to boil water.?
I had said, “You really need to admit that you cannot account for the working of time. And that you have no evidence of the future.”, and you replied, “We don’t need to understand HOW time works in order to know that it does.”, very nice!!! Except, to be perfectly cautious, “we don’t need to understand HOW time works in order to know that it has.” You continued, “We don’t need to know what reality “really” is in order for evidence to be supportive.”, you presume that evidence is SUPPORTING a reality though! You continued, “The entire picture of reality via our perception may be wrong, strictly speaking, but until we have reason to believe otherwise, we stick with it because it works and it works better than anything else you can invoke.”, sounds like a defeated man apologizing to his son, and then going crazy at the end for fear of his enemies.
You ended, “This “evidence of the future” argument is bunk and it misses the point.” The fact that we all stand ignorant before the future is about as sharp as the point can get! 😉
Tim
I feel like I am speaking to a retarded toddler, lol. I’m not going to waste my time on this any more.
Your entire stance is bunk because you ultimately boil it down to statements like these:
“Rubix, you cant justifiably explain why water boils without answering such questions as: why water at all!”
“But, people don’t understand “why water boils”. They understand that it boils!”
Yes, that’s the point. We don’t need to know “why” something happens in order to know “how” things work in terms of things that we know. Some things have more thorough “how” explanations than others. That’s how science works. We don’t make claims about anything outside of that because we don’t know what we don’t know.
I strongly suggest you watch this: Feynman ‘Fun to Imagine’ 4: Magnets (and ‘Why?’ questions…)
As for what we know about evolution, here’s a great start to understanding the kind of evidence we have: http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs.html
I fully expect, though, that you won’t watch the video or read through the site.
Similarly, we don’t need to know “why” something exists at all in order to talk about it. This is like saying “You can’t claim that you were at school today because you don’t know the school’s mascot!” They’re totally separate things. Knowing how water operates is a totally different realm of explanation compared to knowing “why” water exists or why it works the way it does.
That ultimately ties into things like the anthropic principle, which is just a way of thinking about the problem. But we don’t make any claims one way or the other about it because nobody knows yet.
Rubix,
ugghhhh. I feel like I am talking to a college student. You think you know everything because you know how: to manipulate your equations. Rubix, knowing how to manipulate equations is not the same as knowing how something works! Please, tell me HOW water boils. I don’t see why you feel the need to ruin the word “how”. For real scientist, “that” is enough. That’s why I feel like I’m talking to a college student.
Rubix, you live by faith/e like all the rest of us. It’s a shame that you can’t see that science is a tool. It’s a shame that you can’t see it’s limitations. It’s a shame that you refuse to admit to using the other tool, faith/e. But you do.
I have a friend, got his PhD actually – does this count as a credential for me? – and I remember one of the earliest things he said to me. It was something like: when you graduate college, you think you know everything; when you get your masters, you realize there are some things you don’t know; when you get your PhD, you realize you don’t know shit.
Rubix, I don’t expect you to take that to heart, but perhaps one day you will consider the fact that science, and the “that”-type relationships it offers are just that; that they do not answer to any of the deeper questions. Perhaps when the real scientists tell you that the mechanism of time is more interesting than you are imagining it at the moment (and worth considering), perhaps then you will find motivation and think about it for yourself.
So many questions, points, arguments you have ignored, but please tell me HOW water boils.
Tim
Yes, I’ve frequently said that science doesn’t (and in many cases, can’t) answer “deeper questions” about what reality really is or why things are the way they are. I’ve said this to you outright again and again and again and you continue to ignore it.
But the point is you can’t do any better than science.
It’s also clear that you didn’t bother watching the video I linked you. It explains why “why” questions are so silly. All you *can* do is answer them in terms of a long string of “how” explanations, but ultimately it relies on something that needs to be accepted as true.
You can answer how water boils by referring to laws of thermodynamics and the properties of atoms, energy, pressures, etc. There are many forces at play that ultimately give rise to the phenomenon of boiling water, and we know this because we’ve observed it and we can control for the variables involved. It’s explainable, it’s predictable, and it’s consistent. We don’t have to answer “Why is the water there?” to answer the question of how it operates once it’s already there.
It’s similar to the fallacious strawman argument where people bash evolution because it can’t explain how life got there. Evolution technically applies to life *once it’s already there*. In terms of the origin of life itself, that is a question best answered by things such as abiogenesis (much of which has been empirically been proven to be possible in the lab).
If you want to know why water exists, it’s basically an appeal to the anthropic principle. Water exists because water is an essential component for our particular type of life. Components for our particular type of life ultimately rely on the laws of physics and the nature of atoms, energy, space, etc. Why are THOSE there? We don’t know yet. We may never know.
But we don’t *need* to know that in order to explain how stuff works once it’s already there.
Rubix,
I watched the Feynman vid. I wonder why you wanted ME to watch it! lol. Doesn’t all his squirming give YOU any pause? You see how wary he is of his limitations!?
For example, 1:38-1:45:
“Now, when you explain a ‘why?’, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true.”
now notice what I had said to you, 9/26 at 8:49 pm:
“Your “evidence” is not sufficient to give you justification – though you are confident, I trust – because you’ve yet to link it to anything REAL.”
again, Rubix, I understand the limitations of science better than you do. Now, you ready for the coup de grace? Just kidding! I’m not gonna say I understand the limits better than Feynman, but I will point out to you that the vid you linked me to was him talking to someone who I most likely had trumped. That is, Feynman certainly spoke in far too materialistic a manner. There are a number of things I could chastise him for, but I will refrain because I know that I often make similar concessions.
Tim
Rubix,
as for the evolution page, could you point me to something specif you think is worth reading? Mind you, I don’t need to be converted! My philosophy is one which proposes that the phenomenal realm MUST BE of evolutional order. That is, had Howison been before rather than in the wake of Darwin, he might have predicted evolution from his beautiful a priori position!
The deep questions remain though, at least on the science side. Why? How? And, here, Rubix, what is the framework and thing you are allowing to be true, as basis for your “evidence”?
Tim
Not wasting any more time on you. You’re simply beyond reason, and you aren’t listening. If you happen to finally get it after this post, great, but if not, enjoy your ignorance all the same.
Firstly, you don’t “understand the limits” better than I do. I’ve actually produced things of worth in the fields of science, business, and mathematics (I’m both a published author and I hold a few patents). What have metaphysicians done recently? Philosophers are largely obsolete nowadays because they sit around in a self-induced fog why scientists are out there getting shit done.
You keep ignoring the fact that scientists *understand the limitations of science*. Feynman obviously understands the limits, and that’s the entire point of his argument. He’s not “squirming uncomfortably.” He’s explaining why “why” questions are problematic questions.
“Why? How? And, here, Rubix, what is the framework and thing you are allowing to be true, as basis for your “evidence”? ”
Like Feynman said, when we get down to the laws of physics and the nature of reality and logic, we accept those things as true because otherwise nothing will make sense. We don’t know why the laws are the way they are or what made them that way yet. As we uncover more, we might find out the answer some day. We might not.
We could ask the ultimate question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It’s a whopper of a question, but even if it has an answer, you’re still going to ask “Why [that explanation]?” At some point, we have to accept that existence exists. We don’t know why, but it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to know “ultimate whys,” assuming they are even knowable, in order to make claims about our perception of reality.
Rubix,
You said, “Not wasting any more time on you.”, as you wish. But you would do well to realize that the time you are spending on “me”, is most likely the source of your problem. You continued, “You’re simply beyond reason,”, thank you, but I have pointed out the fact taht I prefer to reserve “reason” as the word for what I am, beyond intelligence. reason is beyond intelligence, qua “meta”. You continued, “and you aren’t listening.”, I both heard and understood what you’ve said, but I continue to offer you something better. You continued, “If you happen to finally get it after this post, great, but if not, enjoy your ignorance all the same.”
You said, “Firstly, you don’t “understand the limits” better than I do. I’ve actually produced things of worth in the fields of science, business, and mathematics (I’m both a published author and I hold a few patents).”, the production of things of worth (even granting that they may have been intellectual things), does not necessarily bear on your claim to understand the limits of science. In fact, I followed some of the suggestions from youtube that were linked to the Feynman vid you linked me to, and there was one where Feynman was talking about Mayan calculations of the calendar and people using mystical numerological beliefs; those numerologist could produce concrete predictions (of worth), but Feynman was laughing at them. And, by the way, hitting bottom are we?! lol. Resorting to your past to “justify” now. If I pat you on the back will you feel better? Do you want me to thank you for your “contributions”?
you continued, “What have metaphysicians done recently?”, I’m an uncredentialed an not-well-read metaphysician. I have no idea if they’ve done anything recently. In 1901 (or thereabouts), however, George Holmes Howison attained to success! Before that it was John the gospeler, under Jesus (as best we can tell). I’m just trying to let you know that it is there, waiting for you. And, in this vein, the better question is probably what will metaphysics do for us, soon (er or later). You continued, “Philosophers are largely obsolete nowadays because they sit around in a self-induced fog why scientists are out there getting shit done.”, yes, you do make very formidable weapons! Both for war and oppression!! You want my cheers and congratulations?
You said, “Feynman obviously understands the limits [of science],”, that is not obvious at all! Merely, I refused to chastise him for his errors under the circumstances of that video! I’m pretty sure I could have argued him in to a corner over his materialism (and, importantly, I limit myself to “pretty sure” only because I hope he might have been reasonable enough to refuse to be so backed earlier on!). Anyway, Feynman, we can agree, does make the point that it is important to recognize one’s limitations. You continued, “and that’s the entire point of his argument. He’s not “squirming uncomfortably.”” — you asshole! I said “squirming”, you added the “uncomfortably”! You continued, “He’s explaining why “why” questions are problematic questions.”, yes, but you still refuse to acknowledge what a great limitation that puts on science (intellect). You both need and use another tool, Rubix! But you harbor a very immature metaphysics. As if by default. Something handed to you from your molders. Without adequate questioning on your part. But, to be sure, I have no doubt that you can use your equations nonetheless. In fact, you probably do so much more effectively for it. I have no doubt that you can get “shit” done.
You said, “Like Feynman said, when we get down to the laws of physics and the nature of reality and logic, we accept those things as true because otherwise nothing will make sense.”, hehe… “nothing” will never make sense! No matter how much faith/e you give it. Feynman was comfortable not knowing. This is, in fact, the key to “good” science. On the other hand, Rubix, you seem somewhat desperate to have something make sense. (Hint: try – if you are not yet ready for “I am”, “something is”.) You continued, “We don’t know why the laws are the way they are or what made them that way yet.”, in fact – and I’m sure Feynman would agree – you don’t know what the laws are! “laws” are “known” only tentatively by decent scientists (because they don’t have that “framework” wherein the laws can sit relative to something they let be true/real). You continued, “As we uncover more, we might find out the answer some day. We might not.”, but while your waiting you still need to live! Why can’t you admit this?!
You said, “We could ask the ultimate question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It’s a whopper of a question,”, yes, quite. You continued, “but even if it has an answer, you’re still going to ask “Why [that explanation]?”, it has an answer, and I have already provided it it earlier on in this thread! You continued, “At some point, we have to accept that existence exists.”, close. Is it close enough? You continued, “We don’t know why, but it doesn’t matter.”, I know why! “nothing” is a nonsensical idea. The question is: what does/can “something” look like? Answer: I am. I am is the minimally complex i’dea. Nothing less makes sense. And it is enough. You can confirm this for yourself.
You ended, “You don’t need to know “ultimate whys,” assuming they are even knowable, in order to make claims about our perception of reality.”, fine. But why would you continue to choose the immature metaphysics of “perception” if you have such a better option before you?
thanks for your time and effort,
good luck,
please quit burdening me with your “shit”,
Tim
Tim: ‘A Universe From Nothing’ by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009
Krauss debating Behe over evolution, design, biology, and telesis (and completely dominating): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtP020hXiAU
Rubix,
duuuu-deeeeee….
I watched the second video first – since it was shorter and I had no idea who this Krauss guy was. You are either just throwing things at me indiscriminately, or you really have gleaned nothing about who I am. My very precise definition of faith/e, even my use of faith/e, should have clued you in to the fact that I am not parroting other believers. Similarly, the positions I have take vis-a-vis the CTMU should have clued you into the fact that I am not trying to hitch on to Langan either. I stand here offering you the summit! I have never stood behind anyone but Howison (and John the gospeler and Jesus). Not ID. Not Michael Behe. Etc and etc.
Rubix, it seems your talents do not lie with reading people. Can I ask?: why did you ever think I needed you to tell me about the nature of science? I’m pretty sure that the answer is: your own bias. Look what Krauss said in that second vid, starting at 8:55:
“and the fact that those same sets of people can work on the same science – evolutionary biology in particular – indicate that the science is neutral. And that’s the way science should be. Science is not all of human knowledge. It’s a very specific discipline, that says “let’s try and look at natural causes [my comment below], that might explain natural effects”; and, you know, that may not- that doesn’t explain everything in nature; and it’s unfortunate with science, scientists suggest that that’s all there is, that there aren’t other kinds of truths.”
Rubix, I have never said a bad word about science. I support science. I endorse science. But she needs saving from the likes of you! Your faith/e would trample her. (Or you would elevate her to something she is not!)
Ohh, about “natural causes” and “natural effects”, I suggest you read Howison’s first essay, “the limits of evolution”, to see how “cause” and “effect”, properly speaking, do not imply what you think they mean. Phenomena stand in relation to each other, and, properly limited, we use the labels cause and effect. But that does not mean that the one phenomena was the EFFICIENT cause of the other phenomena called “effect. Those terms describe a phenomenal relationship, and reality is more than mere phenomena. That is, the phenomenal is a derivative representation. I think that’s enough for the moment.
Tim
P.S. That was hardly a “debate”, I don’t know how you can say Krauss was “completely dominating”, lol.
On to your next vid, I’m sure I’ll be back. I really would like an answer as to why you thought you needed to teach me about the nature of science though.
Rubix,
~3:30-4:
“most religious situations”. he talks about the fact “that scientists love mysteries”, “they love not knowing”. “sterile aspect of religion”. “where the excitement is knowing everything, though clearly knowing nothing”
So, Rubix, it seems that Krauss is at least leaving room for the potential for a religion that wouldn’t rouse his antipathy. Though he is so foolish as to give off the aura of, “yea, right.” Anyway, I think I am clearly to be left out of his criticisms of religion – off the bat – because I embrace science (because I embrace evolution), and due to the fact that my offering is, in fact, far more open to the mystery inherent in idealism than your materialism!
~5:20
“that the universe was static and eternal … been around forever.”
Clearly he is not a successful metaphysician, because – as Howison clearly describes – “eternal” is a word reserved for that which is beyond phenomenal time. If phenomenal time is part of your understanding of the word “eternal”, you are misusing that metaphysical word.
~11:30
he’s talking about some connection between discoveries in cosmology and religion. And he even says, “what you take from it depends on your religious and metaphysical beliefs.”!!! Rubix, while you like to look at the imperfections of the faithful, and conclude that there is no real religion, the same attitude should lead you to look at the imperfections of scientists, and conclude there is no science! Why can’t you tolerate the possibility that both groups are developing (though some individual metaphysicians have already attained to success) their tools as best they can, with fits and starts, but that maybe, just maybe, they are converging (that is, that science need not be left behind 😉 ).
And, he ends this little section ~12:15, with “…the universe is the way it is whether we like it or not.” His materialism is a problem! Rather, the I’dea (and the plural society of I am) is the way it is whether we like it or not.
~17:30
“So forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be here [to cheers and applause]”
HaHaHa; but,I’d just like to ask you / them where they think science would be today if Jesus hadn’t been so brave as to trounce the old judaistic beliefs in an overbearing God of efficient causation – at great pain – for his I’dealsim, for his God as father, as final cause, and in whose nature we do all truly share?!
~20:11 😉
“The answer is: nothing isn’t “nothing” anymore.”
I told you.
~21:45
~”empty space is responsible for roughly 90% of your mass.”
He’s lucky here, because I bet his definition of “your” was something far too provincial for my understanding 😉
~24:20
Statue of Tycho Brahe (sp?). That was N’s favorite scientist. Not that you’ll ever be here, N, but let me give you a shout out anyway.
~33:15
Is this where you think his universe coming from “nothing” will create a problem for me? You know that, “unreasonable” as I am, I’m not talking about zero phenomenal energy when I say “nothing” is impossible, right? I’m talking as an I’dealist… And, notice that even his phenomenal “nothing” includes the potential for quantum fluctuations: that is, “something”.
~40:45
he gives the same simple answer I give as to why there’s something: there had to be. So, Rubix, thanks for the reference!
~42:45
we live in a universe dominated by nothing (but remember that this is merely his phenomenal “nothing”), and we don’t have the slightest idea why its there. Hint: if “phenomenal ‘nothing’” is to be a fair derivative representation of some real idea…
~43:45
haha! His materialism regarding “we” comes out! Jackass.
~50:30
“humility”.
Yes
~1:03:30
“we humans believe that everything that happens to us is special – and significant.”
Two things: 1) you see the difference between materialism and I’dealism in that he talks about things happening to us, while I’d talk about the things we create! 2) even in the sense of things happening to us (as the result of our potent decisions), it is special in that it is precisely the (flat) thing that is needed to allow us to hold ourselves together through the process! I am is conserved. That is both special, and as insignificant as can be: it is meaningful, and it is the least meaningful. The I’dea is real, but it has to be that way.
Rubix,
Thanks for introducing me to this Krauss guy. He’s okay. But, what was your point?
Tim
reader,
this is just to let any casual reader who might happen across this with interest know that the conversation continues below.
reader,
correction: I had said, “He’s [Krauss] lucky here,”, on second thought, though, he isn’t so lucky: his materialism should have been evident to me even then.
Another grating anti-CTMU, anti-Langan screed from the indefatigable Fringe.
Fringe: “Basically there are four supporters of Langan here: Tim, Jeremy Jar, Anonymous, and Langan himself.”
Even if that were true, what’s the problem? The main opposition consists of Fringe and Mark Rubix-Carroll. (Even if the latter is not one person as he appears to be despite the pretty pictures, he might as well be in point of mathematical illiteracy and general perspective.)
Error: “He claims that [Cantor’s] definition [of “set”] is immune to naive set theory inconsistencies.”
Absolutely not. One is free to add operations 3 and 4 (self-inclusion and “draculization” as described above) in any standard version of set theory, minus the patches of course, to obtain inconsistencies. I merely say that when Cantor’s definition is properly interpreted in SCSPL, these inconsistencies are avoided.
Error: “Then he uses that inconsistencies to infer things. For example, he claims there is a biggest set, a set bigger than any other. Then he speaks about its powerset, which is bigger. This paradox is directly related to his definition, which is inconsistent.”
As just observed, Cantor’s definition of “set” is not intrinsically inconsistent, any more than its definitive operations (discernment and conceptual aggregation) are “inconsistent”. It is in fact perfectly consistent as long as it is not misinterpreted or interpreted in the wrong language. Moreover, because CTMU inferences are made in another language entirely, they cannot possibly incorporate those inconsistencies.
Error: “When pointed with this simple fact, his only answer is to deny reality and insulting people.”
Not only have I not “denied reality”, but I have steadfastly tried to keep the discussion on course and focused on content – the alleged “errors” in the CTMU, and the errors of the owner of this blog, MarkCC – even as others have insulted *me*. If I’ve sometimes engaged in a bit of tit-for-tat, that was merely in reaction to those insults (up to and including those at the top of this page and at least one other page written my Mark, both of which are duplicated at Scienceblogs). After all, if those given to insults are not themselves insulted, they may never learn the liabilities of rudeness.
OK, that’s it. Three strikes and Fringe is out like a light. And now for the preceding screed by Rubix Chu-Carroll.
Error: “I’ll pull stuff directly from the CTMU paper itself to explicitly show why it’s all nonsense.”
I beg your pardon, but it takes more than “pulling stuff from a paper” to “show that it is nonsense”. We see plenty of pulling here, but no showing.
Error: “Langan quotes “mathematician” David Berlinski (another anti-evolution Discovery Institute crank) who says “DNA is just a material macromolecule and yet it supposedly explains everything — this isn’t realistic!”
I don’t work for the DI. In fact, I’ve never even gotten a phone call or a letter from the DI, much less a check. I met Bill Dembski and a couple of other DI fellows at ISCID … exactly once. (Bill’s a great guy.)
Error: “Chris somehow takes this quote to mean that the information in a DNA string is meaningless without something material to read it, and therefore information is meaningless without physical interaction of some sort.”
“Interaction”, yes; “physical”, not necessarily. Berlinski distinguishes between the information embodied in DNA, which relies on “causal pathways” – transformative physical interactions with other physical objects or “transducers” – to create effects, and the laws of nature themselves, which do not have the luxury of preexisting causal pathways or physical interactions to create the physical universe itself. He understandably regards this distinction as a matter for (meta-)scientific inquiry. The CTMU addresses this distinction, and the paper goes on to explain how. (Berlinski’s entire essay is on the DI website:
http://www.discovery.org/a/616 )
Error: “Chris then goes on to say that separating matter and information is like separating the mind from matter, resulting in a problematic duality because you’ve got matter competing with abstract information abstractly representing matter for primary status.”
“Duality”? That should be “dualism”. Dualism is part of the problem; duality (or triality) is part of the solution. Again, this is explained in the paper. I suppose that everyone occasionally gets something backwards, but one should try not to use such inversions as bases for one’s allegedly substantive critiques.
(Strange – the same silly error was recently made by another CTMU critic at another blog, and he didn’t know anything about mathematics either. Maybe Rubix isn’t Mark after all! Come right down to it, the only thing we know for sure is that he’s not who or what he claims to be.)
Error: “I mean, jesus, it’s pure bullshit that gets worse and worse as you read on. It’s not that we’re too dumb to understand it. It’s because Chris overestimates himself and doesn’t seem to understand why his arguments consist of ignorant rubbish that is founded on ridiculous premises.”
As this sort of ad hominem garbage is of no informational value regarding the CTMU and is thus irrelevant to the stated purpose of Rubix’ screed, it was an error to include it.
Again, three – whoops, five – strikes, and that will about do it for this grubby little crackpot, whose remarks only get increasingly stupid and offensive as his screed progresses.
Good day.
Here you’ve got again. In this last post, Langan says he does not infer things from naive set definition inconsistencies. Let’s actually look at his own writings:
(Chris Langan) “So mathematicians view sets, broadly including null, singleton, finite and infinite sets, as fundamental objects basic to meaningful descriptions of reality. It follows that reality itself should be a set…in fact, the largest set of all. But every set, even the largest one, has a powerset which contains it, and that which contains it must be larger (a contradiction). The obvious solution: define an extension of set theory incorporating two senses of “containment” which work together in such a way that the largest set can be defined as “containing” its powerset in one sense while being contained by its powerset in the other. Thus, it topologically includes itself in the act of descriptively including itself in the act of topologically including itself…, and so on, in the course of which it obviously becomes more than just a set.”
What is he saying here? Mathematicians use sets to model things. So (non-sequitur) reality itself is a set. It’s the largest set of all (non-sequitur). Every set has a larger set, like its powerset. Contradiction. So he infers reality becomes more than a set (inference from inconsistent hypotheses not related to the contradicting hypotheses, but for a third one).
You see. He assumes an absurd hypothesis (that there is a largest set), who he can because of his naive definition of set is loose enough, and he actually tries to infer something from that.
I would call this to infer things from naive set theory inconsistencies.
He then claims victory, as if this was a game. I would never play a game as silly as this one. It’s like playing tic-tac-toe. You can never win, not because the game is difficult, but because it’s so stupid. (I would even say that Langan is not a good judge over who wins at all XD).
Now, an advice for the reader: be careful with those imaginary punches Langan speaks about. Too much exposition to CTMU can have dangerous effects on your brain.
Chris:
You’re not getting it. I looked at your source and it supports exactly what I am saying.
That quote from Berlinski is clear — he’s saying that DNA is not explaining as much as it claims it does. Berlinski is either not convinced that physical explanations are enough, or he’s underestimating what DNA is able to explain. You don’t then go from that quote to “information is meaningless without matter” or whatever it was you said.
Here’s another quote from your source that supports what I mean: “Explaining all this [the intricates of a cell’s biosystem] by appealing to the causal powers of a single molecule involves a disturbing division of attention, rather as if a cathedral were seen suddenly to rise from the head of a carrot.”
AKA more biologically-ignorant appeals to the same sort of ill-founded logic you find in things like the tornado-in-a-junkyard argument. Again, he’s not directly talking about the dualism you refer to. He’s talking about his skepticism over DNA and what it purports to causally explain. If you want to use a better quote to illustrate your point, then use that instead, because the one you’ve listed is not directly related.
As for “duality”… really? Out of all my criticisms, you harp on the way I use “problematic duality” when you egregiously abuse words like “syntax,” “language,” and “set” while introducing unrefined jargon everywhere else? Clearly I was referring to “problematic duality” in the same vein that many people incorrectly view the “wave particle duality” in QM as a paradoxical problem. Whether or not it’s a dualism or duality, it doesn’t really matter. My ultimate point to you was that the information vs. matter issue is being put forth as a two-pronged problem when it’s really a non-problem that doesn’t need additional frameworks to explain it.
You also don’t seem to understand what an ad hominem is. I’ve shown why your arguments are bullshit countless times in this thread. There’s a huge difference between “Your arguments are bunk because of X, Y, and Z — your paper is worthless” and “You’re wrong because you’re an idiot and I’m right.”
Your posts are *full* of abusive ad hominems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Abusive
And you are a crank by definition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_%28person%29
Honestly, at this point, I’m convinced you lied about your SAT score. You’re so poor with your use of words… there’s simply no way you’d hit an 800V score when you’re so easily confused.
Clearly, Mr. Fringe understands not one thing I wrote.
Error: “What is he saying here? Mathematicians use sets to model things. So (non-sequitur) reality itself is a set.”
Reality is a set because, to the extent that it is subject to scientific inquiry and analysis, it consists of discernable entities subject to conceptual aggregation. One requires no particular mathematical model to infer this; one requires nothing more than the scientific method (admittedly a model of sorts, but I don’t think that’s what Fringe means).
Error: “It’s the largest set of all (non-sequitur). Every set has a larger set, like its powerset. Contradiction. So he infers reality becomes more than a set (inference from inconsistent hypotheses not related to the contradicting hypotheses, but for a third one).”
The first three sentences almost make sense, except for the “non-sequitur”. (Reality obviously coincides with the set of all things real, which is the largest real set) The last sentence appears to be saying that in order to infer that reality is more than a set, one must adopt inconsistent premises. That’s ridiculous.
Error: “You see. He assumes an absurd hypothesis (that there is a largest set), who he can because of his naive definition of set is loose enough, and he actually tries to infer something from that. I would call this to infer things from naive set theory inconsistencies.”
Wrong – I merely *referred* to a certain paradox involving the “largest set” concept in order to make a point regarding ontological closure. The paradox in question is explicitly precluded.
Having replaced himself at the plate after striking out the first time, Fringe has now doubled … that is, he has struck out twice.
I’d write “Batter up!”, but that would merely occasion the end of the inning.
Almost every idea in the CTMU is unoriginal. It’s all just a messy, fatty, buttery rehash of Wheeler’s ideas stuffed inside the moldy potato that is Intelligent Design. We don’t even need to take the battle to the CTMU to show why Chris is unfit to claim himself a master of math, logic, and physics.
Just yesterday, he was responding to posts with the fury of rapid-fire but conveniently ran off like a wet cat (as expected) when I posed some basic QM questions to him to expose his ignorance. Even though he has since returned to this blog to reply to other posts, he’s completely ignored the simple QM questions.
Furthermore, Newcomb’s Paradox is a dead giveaway of his “expertise.” It’s an easier example that we can criticize for many of the same kinds of errors the CTMU carries. It’s like an abridged version of his inanity.
http://www.megasociety.org/noesis/44/newcomb.html
Read it for yourself — it’s a lot easier than trying to plow through 56 pages of afterbirth.
But even here, Chris wastes a *huge* amount of time talking about things that are completely irrelevant to the problem. He doesn’t seem to understand that we only need to attack the premise of the problem to show why any solution you come up with will be logically inconsistent and nonsensical. It *does not make logical sense* to have a problem where you have, say, a 100%-accurate predictor and yet assume that you can still avoid being predicted. The entire problem shuts down and you can’t discuss it any further without your answers being inconsistent.
If you, however, accept that prediction means a claim about a future state that is consistent with what reality shows (where what reality shows is influenced by your choice), then it’s no longer a paradox but a problem we can talk about mathematically and statistically. Langan botches up basic utility/decision theory by implying a contradiction where no contradiction exists (in practice, we say that the different frameworks depend on your risk profile). He then launches into pseudomathematical handwaving and eventually reaches a conclusion that uses no math or statistics at all whatsoever.
He does it here in this thread, he does it in the CTMU, and he does it in every other piece of writing he’s put out there. Chris will waste many paragraphs hammering on things that say nothing substantive or relevant, but completely avoid the meat of the problem, introduce paradoxes where they don’t exist, and try to “resolve” those paradoxes with crackpot frameworks. It’s like solving bullshit with bullshit.
It doesn’t matter how many times Chris repeats “he’s right, you’re wrong” — the proof crushes him outright.
Langan’s almost worse than Wendy Wright ( see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFjoEgYOgRo ).
From Richard Dawkins’ “Greatest Show On Earth”:
“These people have been coached to say, ‘There is no evidence, show me just one fossil…’ and they say it so often that they come to believe it. So I tried the experiment of mentioning three or four fossils to this woman and not letting her get away with simply ignoring them. The results are depressing, and a good example of the commonest tactic used by history-deniers when confronted with the evidence of history – namely, just ignore it and repeat the mantra.”
Nobody exemplifies this ridiculous closemindedness more than crackpots like Chris Langan.
I agree with this statement:
“2) The components of the CTMU are not all new. The idea as a whole is new. Technically, there are no new ideas, just new combinations of old components. The CTMU is more deeply rooted in analytical philosophy and the foundations of mathematics than in practical computer science, which nonetheless plays a large part in it.”
http://www.megasociety.org/noesis/58/05.htm
> “One requires no particular mathematical model to infer this; one requires nothing more than the scientific method”
The scientific method let’s you to hypothesize that the universe is a set, then it let’s you to make experiments to see if you can falsify that hypothesis, and then let’s you maintain the hypothesis and gain confidence if it supports the test.
It does not permit you to conclude that reality is a set.
Can we expect a description on how do you apply the scientific method (this is, a method to falsify theories objectively) to infer this? Have you falsified it is not a set with the scientific method? How?
In any case, if one requires the scientific method to infer it then it’s clearly a non-sequitur from the previous proposition. That comment is right even under Langan’s claim that he can infer the universe to be a set by the scientific method.
(Remember, the scientific method is a (more or less) concrete method based on experimentation, not just anything one wishes it to be).
> “Reality obviously coincides with the set of all things real, which is the largest real set”
Well, reality is obviously the set of all real things if you define reality as the set of all real things. No problem with that.
Then you say: which is the largest real set. This is not so obvious. Your abusing the naive set again. What does mean for something to be real? We already asked this questions. Your just hiding a lot of inconsistencies under “it’s obvious”, even knowing it lead to inconsistencies.
Does real means what a materialist would understand? Physically existing? If it were so, then the set of all real things would not be real. So it would not be the biggest real set. It would be the biggest set you could form with real objects.
So we have to assume Langan understand some other thing by being real. But, what can he understand that is free of contradictions, so he can make actual inferences? Is any concept real? We already know there are contradicting concepts, so you can not infer anything from this. Is any well-defined mathematical concept real? Well, you can not well-define the biggest set of all. So, what does he mean by “real”, which is free of contradictions? If it is not, the problem is not in other suppositions. It’s in his concept of being real.
Even ignoring all this real issue, why is reality the biggest set of all? This is not obvious. Remember, infinite sets are not so easy to compare.
Just remember that the set of all integers (…, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, …) is not bigger than the set of all even numbers (…, -2, 0, 2, …).
It seems that, for anything Langan calls real, the set is going to be infinite, probably. So, why is it the biggest set? If I take an element from it, is not as big as before? Remember, infinite sets are not that intuitive. We call them counterintuitive because we already know all this fallacies, originated by people who simply says “it’s obvious that…”.
So, even assuming that reality is a set as big as any other, is there any other set as big? Remember, the size of INTEGERS is the same that the size of EVEN_INTEGERS, for any reasonable rule.
Then, even considering reality as a set not smaller than any other, is its powerset bigger? Why?
It’s not obvious. In fact, as we know we’re arriving at a contradiction and we have made at least three unjustified hypotheses (that the set of all real things is real, that there exists a set bigger than any other, and that the powerset of “the biggest set” is bigget than the “biggest set” itself), why does Langan attribute the contradiction to an unrelated hypothesis (that the universe is a set)?
Simply saying it’s obvious does not work. Because it’s obvious the contradictions are introduced with the unjustified assumptions.
So Langan is concluding that the Universe is more than a set by inconsistent assumptions. Of course, I’m not saying you need inconsistent assumptions to prove this: I’m saying Langan is doing this. And I’m explaining where is the error.
If we remove all the filling, the argument supporting CTMU reduces to this: it’s obvious. And it’s, but in the opposite sense.
(By the way, relax, dude. I have no problem with CTMU only having four supporters here. I was just enumerating them to address them. You see problems where there are none. This is not a popularity contest. You don’t need to merge us. And why do you merge Mark and Rubix and not me? It would be cool for me to earn a google’s salary, or for us to be the Holy Trinity, three and one. In fact, I may be four people myself. Does it matter?)
(Nitpicker’s corner: when I say
“Then, even considering reality as a set not smaller than any other, is its powerset bigger? Why?”
I’m not saying that a powerset of a set is not bigger in some sense than the set itself. If a set is infinite, the powerset would also be infinite, but its cardinality would be greater. I already know this. I’m just showing how what Langan calls “obvious” is a very complex issue, in which you can not take things for granted.
I already pointed that the problem is in assuming there is a set bigger that any other. There are no powerset for ill-defined sets.)
What a surprise – more Rubix.
Error: “Almost every idea in the CTMU is unoriginal.”
Everything in the CTMU, including the wealth of ageless wisdom to which it gives renewed expression, is wired together in a new and original framework. (Its overall originality is at least partially why so many people, especially fools like Rubix, fail to understand it. That, and the math part.)
Error: “It’s all just a messy, fatty, buttery rehash of Wheeler’s ideas stuffed inside the moldy potato that is Intelligent Design.”
Well, at least we’re up to something more recent than Spinoza and Young-Earth Creationism. (These too are favorite values of X in the timeworn and tattered CTMU criticism which reads “The CTMU is just a rehash of X”.)
Error: “We don’t even need to take the battle to the CTMU to show why Chris is unfit to claim himself a master of math, logic, and physics.”
I don’t recall making that claim, although I will say that an obvious numbskull like Rubix here should think long and hard before betting too much of his “Wall Street” lucre against it.
Error: “Just yesterday, he was responding to posts with the fury of rapid-fire but conveniently ran off like a wet cat (as expected) when I posed some basic QM questions to him to expose his ignorance.”
I spent most of the afternoon yesterday on a 4-ton tractor, seeing to much more important matters than little Rubix here. After all, I have to grow food for my horses and cows, each one of whom possesses a bigger and better heart than Rubix. (Come to think of it, there’s at least one other major organ to which this may apply as well, three if we’re talking about just the studs and the bulls.)
Error: “Even though he has since returned to this blog to reply to other posts, he’s completely ignored the simple QM questions.”
How best to put it? It is not the place of a dimwitted little toad like Rubix to play quizmaster with the targets of his various accusations and insults, particularly when playing along with him would have at least three unhealthy effects:
(1) It would reinforce his already insufferable idiocy.
(2) It would allow him to divert everyone’s attention, including his own, away from the many basic errors and misconceptions in which he has already been caught (and under which he still mindlessly labors).
(3) It would provide him with yet another opportunity to make mistakes, even after proving himself incapable of understanding anything much more complex than a game of hopscotch.
Error: “Furthermore, Newcomb’s Paradox is a dead giveaway of his expertise.”
Leave it to Rubix to keep pretending to be an authority on something after being beaten over his microcephalic head with it and then squashed underfoot like a stink bug.
And now, I guess I’d better announce that I’ve got to get back on the tractor, lest Rubix suppose that I’m fleeing from the slashes and thrusts of his rapier wit.
“I don’t recall making that claim”
Really? Because when someone makes the claim that nobody else is as smart as you, or that you have more knowledge of quantum mechanics in your pinky than I do in my entire head, or that everyone else makes errors faster than they can write, or that your theory is absolute knowledge, or that we’re all throwing around mathematical misconceptions left and right… I mean, do I even need to finish this sentence?
“I spent most of the afternoon yesterday on a 4-ton tractor, seeing to much more important matters than little Rubix here.”
And before you sat on that 4-ton tractor, you were here, on this blog, responding to posts very quickly. You stopped replying when I threw down my QM questions, as expected. But, hey, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you just so happened to leave for the day at that exact moment. After all, you’re back here now, reading this, and now we can proceed!
“How best to put it? It is not the place of a dimwitted little toad like Rubix to play quizmaster with the targets of his various accusations and insults.”
So let me get this straight. Chris Langan, self-proclaimed master of quantum mechanics and mathematics, won’t take the time to answer three ridiculously easy QM math questions that shouldn’t take him more than thirty seconds max, because it would somehow reinforce “my idiocy” and “divert attention away from my errors”?
Let’s stick to the more probable reason for your avoidance: You’re a delusional, narcissist crackpot who has no skill in quantum mechanics or mathematics. You’re not answering the questions *because you are not able to.*
You’re just as stupid as this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2X52rS-ZLE
I count two true statements in your first paragraph, neither of which implies the bogus statement that you made up. The lies you added don’t help.
Regarding quiz games, it appears that we may have another misunderstanding. When I address you, it is strictly for the purpose of wiping your slime trail off my theory. I have no interest in playing games with you or answering your questions. If you were to ask me what letter comes after A, I’d either ignore you or tell you to aspirate a bowl of alphabet soup and pick it out of your nose.
It’s nothing personal – it can’t be, because you’re not a real human being. You’re something like pond scum, only slimier, smellier, lighter upstairs, pathologically deceitful, and (therefore) too frightened to give your real name. This reduces you to nothing more than a minor nuisance to be corrected as I choose.
(No, I didn’t click on your video.)
I didn’t add any lies — I quoted things you yourself have said. Honestly, I think something’s wrong with you. You’ve got some weird mental issue where you are literally just making things up or selectively choosing to forget what you’ve said.
And no, there’s no misunderstanding. It’s really quite simple. You’re not able to answer my basic QM questions because you don’t actually know QM.
It’s astonishing to me that you are incapable of giving any response of substance. I show you why your theory is full of garbage with demonstrable proof and you ignore the vital points. I show you why you can’t quote properly, and you basically ignore that, too. Seriously, do you really, truly believe that just ignoring criticism makes you right? Something tells me all this name-calling of yours is just a manifestation of your own deep-seated insecurities.
The guy in the video you didn’t watch pretty much pulls the same crap you are right now — trying to finagle his way out of simply admitting that he’s no expert and can’t answer the questions he’s supposed to be able to answer.
You’re honestly embarrassing yourself and really exposing your ignorance. I’ve already shown (all one has to do is ctrl+F for this) that you misunderstand evolution, don’t know how to read your own citations, create problems where there ARE no problems, can’t do math, can’t do QM, lack an understanding of how logic works, and you don’t even seem to know the proper definitions for half the words you use.
Seriously, dude, I really hope you’re intentionally trolling me, because this is just hilarious. I at least thought that maybe you were smart but just a bit misguided, but now… I think you’re even more full of it than you were before, haha. You aren’t even close to having any quantitative expertise.
Besides, I know you’re bad at quiz games, even when really piss-easy questions are asked. Who’s on first, Chris?
1. Mark Chu-Rubix (misquoting me): “Nobody else is as smart as you.”
I never said that. (I recall answering negatively when an interviewer once asked me whether I’d ever met anyone I found smarter than me, but that’s a different statement entirely.)
2. Mark Chu-Rubix (quoting me): “You have more knowledge of quantum mechanics in your pinky than I do in my entire head.”
That’s right – I wrote that. I’d write it exactly the same way again.
3. Mark Chu-Rubix (misquoting me): “Everyone else makes errors faster than they can write.”
I never said that (except about Mark and Chubix). Another lie.
4. Mark Chu-Rubix quoting me): “Your theory is absolute knowledge.”
Yes, I wrote that (in so many words).
5. Mark Chu-Rubix (misquoting me): “We’re all throwing around mathematical misconceptions left and right.”
I didn’t say that (except about Mark and his puppets). It’s another lie, for a total of 3 lies out of 5 attributions.
Attributions 1, 3, and 5, being lies, must be discarded. So the question is, do either of the true attributions 2 and 4 imply the truth of the alleged summary attribution “You claim yourself a master of math, logic, and physics”?
Statement 2: No. It’s unnecessary to be a master of math, logic, and physics to have more knowledge of quantum mechanics in one’s pinky than Mark/Chubix has in his entire head. Indeed, this could well be true of anything smarter than an organ grinder’s monkey.
Statement 4: No. Absolute truth is a matter of logic, not personal mastery.
So not only did Mark Chu-Rubix lie 3 times out of 5; he drew an invalid conclusion from the only true attributions he made.
Premises: 60% lies
Conclusion: 100% erroneous (i.e., another lie)
If Chubix were Pinocchio, his nose would be twenty feet long and as crooked as a corkscrew. He’s a liar, and Mark is (at the very least) his accessory.
But what else is new?
Mister Chris Langan,I do not have enough time to read in depth all this “theory”(which right now appears to be nothing more than incomprehensible blabbering),but seeing all those personal attacks and disqualification of virtually anybody other than yourself,I have a few questions:
a)What are the axioms of the theory?
b)What are the definitions you use?
c)What are its predictions?
And a comment.Having read the works of great scientists,I am amazed by how they manage to convey their ideas in a way that even my limited brain can understand them.
I seriously doubt that you are such an otherwordly entity and your theory so magnificent and complicated that it is unable to be structured logically.
Please do not continue with those personal attacks,they make you look like a jerk,avoid posting 2-page-long responses devoid of any content,and post your axioms,definitions and predictions.
I’m sorry, “Alexander M.”, but it is evident from the tone and content of your questions that you haven’t actually read my work.
That, combined with your pugnacious attitude and the fact that you are merely another anonymous poster whose remarks are not supported by your name and reputation, means that it is not worth my while to discuss the theory with you until you remedy every aspect of this situation.
But thank you for your interest.
I am quite sorry for my pugnacious attitude,but then again: “How best to put it? It is not the place of a dimwitted little toad like Rubix to play quizmaster…”.This kind of insults against other commenters caused me to respond like that.My name is Alexandros Marios Konzukov,physics student,no academic reputation whatsoever(although I must point out that you do not have any academic reputation either).My main point is that a successful theory has meaning only if it can make predictions,if it “gives back” more than you “give it”.
However,the CTMU fails to meet this criterion,since it does not make any measurable predictions at all(all statements made are unfalsifiable).It contains a lot of statements about the nature of reality,the universe,etc but no explanation about HOW it works.
The reason why I asked you to post your axioms and predictions is that in a logically sound theory,given its axioms there should be unique conclusions.This would make a first evaluation of your work much easier.
Alexander M: ‘I do not have enough time to read in depth all this “theory”‘
Chris Langan: ‘it is evident from the tone and content of your questions that you haven’t actually read my work.’
This is the first demonstrably true statement I’ve seen Chris make in this entire thread. I guess you have to start somewhere, keep on going!
For one thing, Chris, you need to stop lumping Mark and myself together. We’re not the same person (this was demonstrably proven via our pictures, btw). While we’re both in agreement that you’re a crank, and while Mark and I are both very mathematical people, we’re not each other’s “accessory.”
1. During this entire thread, you’ve been calling everyone names and insulting everyone’s intelligence. And yes, you’ve claimed that you haven’t found anyone smarter than you and you doubt such a person exists. You’re being pedantic at this point — you’ve clearly said that you think you are one of the smartest people in the world. That is obviously my point, here.
2. You can blindly claim that you’re a master of QM, but there’s no evidence to show for it — and yet plenty of evidence you have no idea what you’re talking about. You intentionally avoided answering really easy, legitimate QM math questions and you weren’t able to tell when fake questions were posed to you, to which you actually entertained with a real response — you weren’t able to immediately point out that the questions were nonsense even from a QM perspective. Quite literally, it’s demonstrably true that you can’t tell real QM apart from what I pull out of my ass.
3. What’s your point here? There are only a couple people arguing here in this thread, and clearly that’s what was meant by saying “everyone else.” You’re just being stupidly pedantic here.
4. You don’t seem to understand that logic doesn’t equate to knowledge. Logic is more or less the framework with which we define what makes consistent, valid, sound sense in our reality. This is different from saying that certain logical structures must be true based on their axioms (such as tautologies), but this is, again, not knowledge. X = X is not knowledge. X = X is always true regardless of whether or not X is true or false, but the point I am making here is that X must be a binary true/false statement in order for that tautology to work. Logic, ultimately, is contingent on a sensible reality. X = X makes no sense if X = “Is the current King of France bald?” or if X = “Is the moonlight on is why the 56?” or if X = “Km dfjkdnf dksfn sdjkfndsjnf?”. X itself needs to be broken down into something that can be logically evaluated in order for it to make consistent sense.
5. Uh, yes, that’s the point. You’ve been insulting both myself, Mark, John, etc — people who have been arguing against you. You’re constantly calling us wrong, claiming nobody is worthy of discussion, asserting we’re spouting off misconceptions and making errors, etc. You have yet to put forth any real, substantive arguments *anywhere*.
5/5 true
Conclusion: P(Chris Langan is full of shit) = 1
“For one thing, Chris, you need to stop lumping Mark and myself together. We’re not the same person (this was demonstrably proven via our pictures, btw). While we’re both in agreement that you’re a crank, and while Mark and I are both very mathematical people, we’re not each other’s ‘accessory.'”
It’s possible that Mark got a friend of his who works on Wall Street to pose for a picture. You shouldn’t say that it’s been “demonstrably proven” that you and Mark are not the same person.
“1. During this entire thread, you’ve been calling everyone names and insulting everyone’s intelligence. And yes, you’ve claimed that you haven’t found anyone smarter than you and you doubt such a person exists. You’re being pedantic at this point — you’ve clearly said that you think you are one of the smartest people in the world. That is obviously my point, here.”
First of all, Chris has not insulted everyone in this thread, but merely those who have first been less than polite to him. Second of all, there is a big difference between claiming that one doubts that there is anyone smarter than oneself and that there definitely is not anyone smarter than oneself. The onus is on you to be precise about what you mean.
“2. You can blindly claim that you’re a master of QM, but there’s no evidence to show for it — and yet plenty of evidence you have no idea what you’re talking about. You intentionally avoided answering really easy, legitimate QM math questions and you weren’t able to tell when fake questions were posed to you, to which you actually entertained with a real response — you weren’t able to immediately point out that the questions were nonsense even from a QM perspective. Quite literally, it’s demonstrably true that you can’t tell real QM apart from what I pull out of my ass.”
Chris never claimed that he is a “master of QM”. He claimed that he is more adept at it than you are. Note that adeptness in QM need not refer to specifics but can refer to a deeper understanding of the general vein of QM than you possess. That is to say, if Chris needs to deal specifically with the Atiyah-Singer index theorem, he can easily look it up. It is not necessary for him to be a walking encyclopedia, after all. However, he does not have to deal with that particular piece of trivia when he deals with the main part of QM that is relevant to the CTMU.
Moreover, both your positions are unfalsifiable at the moment. This entire debate is a waste of virtually everyone’s time. I mean, you claim that Chris refuses to answer your questions, and he claims that he is refusing to debate with an anonymous heckler because he wants to be on a level playing field. The difference is that Chris has stated he will at least tackle these qualms in a new book, whereas you can only wait. But my point remains that this argument is pointless. Besides, if Chris were truly a quack there would be little reason for you to try to debate him. It’s not as if you send emails to Gene Ray periodically complaining about Time Cube, is it?
“3. What’s your point here? There are only a couple people arguing here in this thread, and clearly that’s what was meant by saying ‘everyone else.’ You’re just being stupidly pedantic here.”
One man’s pedanticism is another man’s precision.
This is a common tactic used by people who start lacking any real arguments — they start grasping at straws and being as pedantic as possible for the sake of simply trying to find something they can be “right” about. I’m not going to waste any more time on a random-ass argument started over a single paragraph that was obviously meant to express that Chris has been throwing forth insults instead of arguments of substance and that he overstates his mastery and understanding of things he claims to be an expert on.
I will address something more specifically, though:
“Note that adeptness in QM need not refer to specifics but can refer to a deeper understanding of the general vein of QM than you possess. That is to say, if Chris needs to deal specifically with the Atiyah-Singer index theorem, he can easily look it up. It is not necessary for him to be a walking encyclopedia, after all. However, he does not have to deal with that particular piece of trivia when he deals with the main part of QM that is relevant to the CTMU. ”
It’s not trivia. When you become an expert in something, you need to know your stuff. If you simply “get the idea,” that’s not enough to profess that your understanding is deep. If someone claimed to have a deep understanding of finance but had no idea what Delta-Gamma hedging, Black-Scholes, covered interest rate arbitrage, VaR, CAPM, LBO, rWACC/ADP, debt/equity capital restructuring, EPS, replicating portfolios, or put-call parity was — they’d get laughed out of the room. Same goes for people who might claim to have a deep understanding of computer science and yet draw blanks when asked about things pertaining to quicksort, class inheritance, polymorphism, object oriented programming, encapsulation, pointer math, stack/queue operations, data structures, variable scope, machine-code compilation, database normalization, etc.
There are concepts, in given fields, that ALL experts are familiar with on some level. Simply becoming acquainted with the general idea doesn’t put you on par with those who have torn ass through these subjects for years (under the teachings of Nobel Laureates, even — people at the tops of their fields) and who have actually learned how to crunch the numbers, learn the subject material, ask critical questions, and produce real results. Chris Langan is just an armchair philosopher with no real scientific or mathematical expertise. As a result, his *only* retaliation, when criticized, is to attack the opponent or ignore everything.
If he thinks he knows more than me in QM, then he should not need to look up the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. He should not have to make excuses for why he can’t identify a simple equation that almost everyone who’s ever done a QM calculation should instantly recognize. Again, it’s like this Impostor situation being in full effect here. Chris should be able to put forth some sort of proof that he actually knows what he’s talking about (after all, he’s the one claiming to have a Theory of Everything — a theory of absolute knowledge). If you’re going to talk about quantum mechanics in your paper, then you need to actually understand the subject first.
“He claims that he is refusing to debate with an anonymous heckler because he wants to be on a level playing field.”
He can claim whatever he wants — doesn’t mean he isn’t a lying dimwit. He’s spent a great deal of time here on this forum, so clearly time is not the problem, here. That “condition” of his isn’t a real condition. It’s just a way trick you into giving information for him to use against you when he decides to avoid answering your questions and just insult you in any way he can. You can see that he does this with Mark, who *has* revealed his name and credentials. Despite this, Chris has given Mark the same level of treatment he’s given me, which is to say — a treatment of invective that is completely devoid of substance and intellectually-honest debate. So Chris’ condition is simply not believable when he’s proven otherwise.
“One man’s pedanticism is another man’s precision.”
Absolutely right, but there’s a huge difference in being overly pedantic over irrelevant details like “duality vs. dualism” or what is meant by “everyone else” — and being completely ignorant, imprecise, and oftentimes wrong about core concepts in your theorem.
If anyone is interested in the CTMU here, you’ll probably be interested in these papers two:
Can Mind Affect Matter via Active Information?
http://www.mindmatter.de/resources/pdf/hileywww.pdf
Ontic and Epistemic Descriptions of Chaotic Systems:
http://www.igpp.de/english/tda/pdf/liege.pdf
Alexander: “I am quite sorry for my pugnacious attitude,but then again: “How best to put it? It is not the place of a dimwitted little toad like Rubix to play quizmaster…”. This kind of insults against other commenters caused me to respond like that.”
Apparently, Alexander, you not only haven’t read my work; you haven’t read the thread. You need to read the entire thread. I’d still have a very long way to go before “insulting” Rubix as much as he deserves to be insulted. He’s a despicable little creature … a liar, an airhead, and quite vicious. (At this point in the discussion, I’m afraid that truth trumps polity.)
Perhaps you can find comfort in the fact that the dirty little bugger steadfastly refuses to provide the least bit of (true) personal information, owing to which the “insults” you deplore cannot be attached to a real person.
Alexander: “My name is Alexandros Marios Konzukov, physics student, no academic reputation whatsoever (although I must point out that you do not have any academic reputation either).”
Very well, then. In lieu of an “academic reputation”, I’ll settle for a *real* reputation of some kind. As I’m still unconvinced that “Alexandros Marios Konzukov” is your name, you can start by providing some bona fides. (Your information should be easily verifiable on the web or by telephone.)
Alexander: “My main point is that a successful theory has meaning only if it can make predictions, if it “gives back” more than you give it.”
Firstly, this is incorrect. I’ve explained why at length; scroll up until you find my discussion of theoretical types and evaluative criteria. Secondly, the CTMU is not a scientific theory, but is explicitly formulated on the metaphysical level of discourse. Thirdly, it does “make predictions” (we need not consider them here, as I’m unwilling to divulge them in this venue). Fourthly, it does even better on the explanatory level…in fact, it is a scientific necessity. If you don’t yet understand why, then you might try to read up on it a bit more; in any case, I don’t have the time to keep repeating myself.
Alexander: “However,the CTMU fails to meet this criterion, since it does not make any measurable predictions at all (all statements made are unfalsifiable).”
Firstly, the CTMU contains statements which are unfalsifiable precisely because they are logically verifiable. Secondly, any empirical statement which exceeds the raw data is technically unfalsifiable beyond syntactic and definitional consistency. (Empirical falsifiability is pretty much shot as a scientific theoretical criterion, especially in modern physics.)
Thus, any empirical theory that is not merely descriptive is empirically unfalsifiable. Whereas a purely descriptive empirical theory can be empirically falsified by observational nonreplication on identical percepts, all other empirical theories have degrees of interpretative freedom rendering 2-valued empirical falsification out of the question. (You must have failed to read that part of the thread as well. If you can’t scroll up and read it, then I’m afraid I can’t help you.)
Alexander: “It contains a lot of statements about the nature of reality, the universe, etc but no explanation about HOW it works.”
You’ve just made a statement that is indeed falsifiable. The CTMU is very heavy on explanation; the problem is that some people are incapable of comprehending it in the forms thus far given. (The same applies to M-theory, but it has the advantage of a solid academic foothold.) In fact, many people are unable to comprehend the object of explanation or the nature of the explanation operator itself. Many of these people can’t even recognize their own incapacity.
Alexander: “The reason why I asked you to post your axioms and predictions is that in a logically sound theory,given its axioms there should be unique conclusions.”
All in good time. The reason I’m present in this thread is not to accelerate the timing of those revelations, but to stop Mark Chu-Carroll and his sock puppets (yes, I know – nobody is Mark’s sock puppet, why perish the thought!) from smearing the CTMU, and me, with false claims regarding supposed “math errors” that it contains. Look at the title of the critique at the top of the page – it’s a piece of false and defamatory idiocy in burning need of correction. The nonsense just beneath it is arguably even worse for its absurd pretensions to mathematical expertise.
If you don’t think that I’ve succeeded in correcting Mark’s critique, then you need to read the entire thread … in particular, the parts for which I have been responsible (although there’s some good writing by others as well, excluding the blogger and his clones and cronies).
Alexander: “This would make a first evaluation of your work much easier.”
I agree. However, I’m afraid that first evaluations are sometimes a little challenging. Some people have no choice but to wait for the popularizations. If you can wait, they’ll be coming.
If not, all I ask is that you refrain from misleadingly passing negative judgments on a theory that you admittedly do not understand.
Have a nice day.
LOL, ok, that post takes the cake. It’s way too obvious, now.
“Apparently, Alexander, you not only haven’t read my work; you haven’t read the thread. You need to read the entire thread.”
There’s absolutely no reason anyone should be required to read this entire thread lmfao. Most of it is garbage. This is another stupidly needless “condition” to throw in people’s faces in order to avoid engaging in rational discussion, much like that “reveal your real name and credentials” bit, even though he lacks credentials himself and won’t do you the honor of an honest debate even if he knows who you are. It’s clear why Chris won’t address these valid concerns no matter how many times they are brought up.
“Thirdly, it does “make predictions” (we need not consider them here, as I’m unwilling to divulge them in this venue). ”
No, it doesn’t. There’s not a single usable prediction in the CTMU.
“Very well, then. In lieu of an “academic reputation”, I’ll settle for a *real* reputation of some kind. As I’m still unconvinced that “Alexandros Marios Konzukov” is your name, you can start by providing some bona fides. (Your information should be easily verifiable on the web or by telephone.)”
More proof that Chris is just moving the goalposts. He demands a name, you give him one, then he claims the name isn’t enough and more proof is needed.
“In any case, I don’t have the time to keep repeating myself.”
Yes, you do. You’ve been doing it for years.
“Thus, any empirical theory that is not merely descriptive is empirically unfalsifiable. Whereas a purely descriptive empirical theory can be empirically falsified by observational nonreplication on identical percepts, all other empirical theories have degrees of interpretative freedom rendering 2-valued empirical falsification out of the question.”
Then I guess it’s a good thing that the empirical scientific theories of today *are* descriptive (in addition to being predictive). Stuff like ID, however? Completely unfalsifiable and superfluous, and by no means empirical. Much like your Berlinski quotes, your stance boils down to “Wow, it sure looks complex! Must have had a designer!” It’s a philosophy of ignorance.
“False claims regarding supposed “math errors” that it contains”
The problem is that your writing is profoundly unmathematical. When it does mention mathematical concepts, it tries to bring light to mathematical problems that don’t really exist, such as appealing to a paradox of the powerset of the universe and its underlying set. This is flat-out naive set theory whether you like it or not.
You flat-out don’t have any mathematical or scientific expertise. Period.
“Look at the title of the critique at the top of the page – it’s a piece of false and defamatory idiocy in burning need of correction”
You mean “Another Crank Comes to Visit?” Yes, you are a crank. Again, by definition. It’s not false.
Anyways, you’re just a meaningless troll who is obviously not a genius. You’re not even all that smart. Just a bored crank who likes to waste time.
There seems to be confusion over whether the CTMU is a strictly limited to Christian Metaphysics, or applies to Metaphysics from a culturally neutral perspective, I find that Chris strives to be as inclusive as possible, he’s not the first and only seeking to reconcile science and reason with an integral theory of truth and reality, Michael Heller is another.
“Heller’s starting point is the fact that the main distinguishing feature of quantum mechanics is its noncommutativity; he seeks to show the degree of generalization already present in quantum theory by using the recently discovered noncommutative geometry. It not only clearly shows the generalizing mechanisms underlying the present theory, but it also points towards further possible generalizations. Heller explores the possibility that at its fundamental level, physics is modeled by noncommutative geometry. Quite independently of whether this hypothesis will prove true, he claims that we can learn a lesson from it. Heller analyzes a few concepts, such as causality, probability and chance, which are of great importance for philosophy and theology when they are transferred from their usual context to the environment of the “noncommutative world.” The main characteristic of this world is its a-temporality and a-spatiality. It turns out, for instance, that in this a-temporal world authentic dynamics (albeit in a generalized sense) is possible.
Heller does not claim that concepts elaborated in noncommutative geometry can be used directly in theology. Instead he tries to draw consequences for theological discourse from the fact that even in physics some concepts undergo such drastic evolution that they distance themselves from our everyday linguistic intuition. He begins with an algebraic formulation of quantum mechanics based on general C*-algebra; this formulation allows one to recover the more limited formulation in terms of Hilbert spaces. C*-algebras that are relevant to quantum mechanics are noncommutative algebras, and it is this noncommutativity which is responsible, according to Heller, for all the peculiarities of quantum theory. Algebraic formulation also leads to the possibility of geometrizing quantum mechanics. The so-called “noncommutative spaces” are totally global in character; no local concept can be given any meaning. This in turn could lead to the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity. The idea is that fundamental physics is based on a noncommutative geometry that is nonlocal; only at a higher level does the distinction between spatio-temporal geometry and physical dynamical processes arise. Even at this fundamental level, there can be an authentic, though generalized, dynamics. But here the distinction between singular and nonsingular is lost, undermining such ideas as the beginning of the universe and the concept of the individual. Instead, and unlike previous approaches in physics and philosophy, singularities are a part of our macroscopic perspective, but their distinctive character is meaningless at the fundamental level. Equally, nonlocal phenomena, such as those which the EPR experiment points to, are explained within the noncommutative approach.
In his closing sections, Heller shows how important theological concepts, such as causality, are reshaped by the noncommutative framework and its properties of timelessness and nonlocality. Causality becomes a “dynamical nexus” rather than a temporal ordering of cause and effect, a combination of a-temporal and nonlocal behavior that is fertile ground for thinking theologically about God as Creator.”
In a recent exchange of comments, I object to Langan’s arguments about sets. Langan has made some unjustified claims, claiming they are obvious. For example, he claims he can infer that reality is a set with nothing more than the scientific method. I would love an explanation.
Unfortunately, he stopped when the argument was getting interesting. I’m not a person who is satisfied with “it’s obvious” answers, as far as I can justify the claim. I already asked a bunch of unanswered questions here
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29239
Those will probably remain unanswered.
Now, I would like to add some additional thoughs. Langan claims REALITY to be the set of all real things. This is basically a definition, which depends on what Langan calls real.
I’d like to remember Langan’s (Cantor’s naïve) concept of set:
“A set is a gathering together into a whole of definite, distinct objects of our perception and of our thought – which are called elements of the set.”
I already noted that I have no idea of what Langan calls real. But he asserts that REALITY is real itself. He also says POWERSET(REALITY) is real. As I don’t know what he calls real, I will model this ignorance as a predicate REAL(x), which evaluates to true when Langan calls X real, and to false when he does not.
Suppose that REAL(X)=true for all X. This is, imagine that Langan calls anything true. Then he would call X and NOT X real. We already know this is inconsistent, in the sense that we can infer from this whatever we want. Being an inconsistent concept, I don’t believe Langan is building his theory with this sense of real. To cite himself:
(*)(Langan) “Reality theory is about the stage of attribution in which two predicates analogous to true and
false, namely real and unreal, are ascribed to various statements about the real universe.
”
So, let us imagine now that there exists an element A to which Langan would call unreal, that is, not real. REAL(A)=false. Without at least one such element, Langan’s real concept would be inconsistent.
One can do here all kind of mental knots, as to say “can I think a non real object? Because, if I can think of it, then it’s real”. But again, If Langan calls anything real, then the concept is inconsistent. X=“Langan’s theory falseness” would be real. X1=”Langan’s theory correctness” would be real. Remember that we are assuming there are elements Langan would not call real here. Note that this contradiction has no relation with set containment.
Define Q as the set of all elements Langan would not call real, this is, Q={x:NOT REAL(x)}. Now, the question: is Q real? As I don’t know what Langan calls real, I don’t know if Langan would call this real. REAL(Q)?
If the answer is no, I would like to know why REALITY is real and Q is not. We know that REALITY is a set of real things, by definition, but why is itself real? Sets do not inherit the properties of their elements. A set of blue spoons is not blue. So, are REALITY and POWERSET(REALITY) real just because we’ve got a definition for them? We also have a definition for Q. Are REALITY and POWERSET(REALITY) real because they are a conceivable concepts? So is Q. Why would then be REALITY and POWERSET reality real and not Q? (Yes, here Q would be in Q).
I certainly believe we would need a justification for why Q is not real and REALITY is. That’s why I asked about what does Langan call real. Is it obvious at all? What then?
Now suppose Q is real, according to Langan. Then Q is in REALITY. This case is also very interesting, and also requires justification. Then Langan says that REALITY is obviously the biggest real set. I don’t know how many elements does REALITY have, probably infinite. But, why is it obvious that it’s bigger than Q? Here we are assuming that Q is real.
Probably both (REALITY and Q) have infinite elements. I don’t see why Q would have a finite number of objects. I don’t see why Q would have a cardinality less than REALITY. Is it obvious that there are less unreal things than real things? The elements of Q are not in REALITY.
This is not obvious, and needs further justification.
I can guess, for example, that no set with unreal objects is real, and that every set whose all elements are real are real themselves. This could be a possible evaluation of Langan’s REAL(S) for sets. It still don’t let us evaluate non-set elements, but it’s a starting guess. At least, it’s the most explicit guess we have had here (the previous one, from Anonymous, was that any well-defined mathematical object is real, but for him definitions that lead to inconsistencies are well-defined mathematically. Wouldn’t this make Q real? That’s a problem, as we will see).
Under this assumption, REALITY would be real (because all its elements are real, by definition). What about POWERSET(REALITY)? It would share the character of the empty set. So let just say the empty set is real, and ignore this case. Then POWERSET(REALITY) would be real, too. But Q would not be real.
Then I still have doubts on why POWERSET(REALITY) is bigger than REALITY itself. Both sets would have infinite elements (just in POWERSETs of POWERSETs of real things and so on). So we are comparing infinite sets.
POWERSET(REALITY) is real in this case because every one of its elements is real, so every element in POWERSET(REALITY) is also in REALITY. Moreover, there would be elements in REALITY which are not in POWERSET(REALITY), like any non-set object. Who would call POWERSET(REALITY) bigger, then? Langan says
(Langan) “But every set, even the largest one, has a powerset which contains it, and that which contains it must be larger (a contradiction)”.
But, I don’t actually see how he can compare these sets. Cantor’s theorem is not applicable here. When asked, he just claimed this is obvious.
His reasoning is: POWERSET(REALITY) contains REALITY, so it must be bigger. But he also claims that REALITY contains POWERSET(REALITY), so, by the same reasoning, it must be bigger.
Containment means nothing when talking about (sensible) measures of sets. EVEN_INTEGERS are contained in INTEGERS, but they are exactly the same size.
So, why are POWERSET(REALITY) bigger than REALITY, if all its elements are in reality? If he is simply applying Cantor’s theorem, you really need some justification in this case. I don’t believe it’s applicable at all. And I don’t believe it’s obvious. For any sensible definition of obvious.
How is he measuring the sets? Why is POWERSET(REALITY) bigger, is REALITY contains every element in POWERSET(REALITY)?
To sum up, this is what we’ve got the following possibilities:
Everything is real. There are not unreal things. This way, “Langan’s theory falsehood” is real, and “Langan’s theory rightness” is real, too. The word (predicate, concept) real has no information at all. X is real and NOT X is real. Calling REALITY to the set of all real things or just to the set of every element is completely equivalent. Then, his reality theory according to (⁾ seems to be just “any statement about the universe is real, unreal is not applicable”. Is this the case?
If there are things which are not real, is the set of all unreal things real or unreal?
If the set of all unreal things is unreal itself, then why is REALITY (the set of all real things) and POWERSET(REALITY) real? What makes a set real? Containing only real objects? Why is POWERSET(REALITY) bigger than REALITY, if every element of POWERSET(REALITY) is in REALITY, and POWERSET(REALITY) is itself contained in REALITY, and REALITY contains elements not in POWERSET(REALITY)?
If the set of all unreal things is real, why is it smaller than REALITY?
Those are not answered in the 52 page paper, they are relevant questions, and everybody will agree they are not obvious. In my opinion, they show a lot of hidden assumptions in just one paragraph. Will they remain unanswered?
If I have a bag of marbles x, y, and z, that could be modeled as a set of marbles {x, y, z}. Its powerset would be {{},{x},{y},{z},{x,y},{x,z},{x,y,z}}. That powerset doesn’t “exist” — it’s not like we now say we have a bag that has 10 marbles in addition to our 3-marble bag. A powerset is just a way to create all possible subsets in a purely descriptive way.
Chris invokes the same problems caused by naive set theory, though, by implying that the powerset is at paradoxical odds with its underlying set because the underlying set “includes everything that is real” and therefore must be the largest set.
It’s just another fake problem brought up by Chris to justify making up new frameworks that allow him to backdoor ID into things for no reason.
I would not call the powerset of the set of real objects real, neither. But I’m sure you’ll not be surprised if I tell you Langan uses his own particular “real” word.
The point is that, even assuming we don’t know what is he calling real, there are still a whole lot of unjustified assumptions. When I asked him, he just said “it’s obvious”. But it’s not, and I want everybody to actually see the bunch of assumptions hiding under just one paragraph of his work. Because some people get lost by the language, and they don’t see these hiding assumptions.
I’ll repeat myself, to insist another time.
For example, why is POWERSET(REALITY) larger than REALITY? Probably, for any meaning Langan gives to REAL(X), if POWERSET(REALITY) is real, any set formed only with real objects would be real. But then, REALITY has every element of POWERSET(REALITY), but REALITY can have elements (non-set elements, for example) which POWERSET(REALITY) don’t. So, why is POWERSET(REALITY) bigger? To assume that POWERSET(REALITY) is bigger is in fact counterintuitive, but in any case, it clearly requires a justificacion. This is true is everything is real, for example.
If POWERSET(REALITY) contains any unreal element, then sets containing unreal elements can be real. Then, why would REALITY be the largest real set? There would be real set with elements not in REALITY (unreal elements). So, why can’t they be bigger than reality?
I would say not everything is real. I believe Langan would also say this. His writings make me thing this way:
(Langan) “Reality theory is about the stage of attribution in which two predicates analogous to true and false, namely real and unreal, are ascribed to various statements about the real universe.”
(Langan) “If it were eliminated, then true and false, real and unreal,
and existence and nonexistence could not be distinguished, and the merest act of perception or cognition would be utterly impossible.”
If everything is real for Langan, REAL(X)=true for all X, then I would say real has no meaning at all, and it’s a completely useless concept. We could say that Langan’s theory rightness is real, that Langan’s theory wrongness is real, that X and NOT X are both real. You would not require so much writing to prove god is real, if you’re calling everything real. But even then, you would have to justify why POWERSET(REALITY) is bigger than reality, if every element of POWERSET(REALITY) is in REALITY.
If not everything is real for Langan, then what does it mean? We need an answer that can make both REALITY and its POWERSET(POWERSET) real, but that makes POWERSET(REALITY) bigger than REALITY. We also need the justification: why is POWERSET(REALITY) larger?
None of this follows from Langan’s writings. They are just unjustified claims, they don’t follow from the premises. Non-sequitur. So, here I am, showing people the hidden assumptions (some people have being simply repeating Langan words, without understanding what they are saying), and asking for a justification. An unjustified claim proves nothing. A theory which relies in unjustified claims is not proven, and I strongly believe they’re relevant.
But I’m repeating myself. All this is here:
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29275
John,
I’m sorry I cannot read any further right now. I am up to:
“I can guess, for example, that no set with unreal objects is real, and that every set whose all elements are real are real themselves. This could be a possible evaluation of Langan’s REAL(S) for sets. It still don’t let us evaluate non-set elements,”
I want to help though. Non-real “elements” don’t make sense. Your questions about them don’t make sense. By definition, any element of Q would not be an element of Q, because it would be an element of Real(X).
Tim
In other words: Real(x) = true for every x. It conveys no information at all AND its definition has inconsistency problems, as John explained in the part you didn’t read yet.
Robert,
“Real(x)” was John Fringe’s contribution. I am not responsible for it; nor did I endorse it. I was merely pointing out to John the absurdity in talking about an “unreal element”. I seriously doubt that he got past that in the part I didn’t read, because if he had, he would have been ashamed to post the part I did read.
By the way, if you think “x” “conveys no information at all”…
Tim
There are things that are real, and there are things that are not. If you define reality to be the ‘set’ of those things that are real, it implies you have some way to decide whether a thing x is real or not. Real(x) is this deciding function.
If this function does not exist, Langan’s reality set {x | x is real} is not well defined.
If, as you state, no unreal things exist (what about the largest prime?) the function Real must always evaluate to true. As such, the function conveys no information.
So how is Real defined? More specifically, what is the domain of this function, of what kind of things can we decide whether they are real or not.
Robert, unfortunately, you are not going to be able to communicate with Tim, because he lives in his own World.
In his World, you should be ashamed if, when speaking about what other person understands by “real”, you consider possibilities Tim doesn’t.
It’s obvious “real” means different things for different people. A lot of words have more than one meaning.
For Tim, everything is real. He is just considering a meaning of real most people would not. No problem. And, in his world, you should be ashamed by not understanding “real” to mean what he understand. In Tim’s view, everything is real: the largest prime is real, fairies are real. Everything. Tim’s idiocy is real, for example (according to him, I’m not pretending to insult him here, just showing shocking consequences).
Other people interpret “real” with an alternative meaning. Tim’s “real” actually has no information at all, because everything is real. So he would need to have an alternative word to describe that “property” of “the largest prime”, or that “property” of “fairies”. As Tim’s real has no actual information and we need that “other” word, most people interpret “real” as this second meaning. The first meaning doesn’t need a word, because it has no information. Under this meaning, someone would not call everything real. Fairies are not real. The concept of fairy is. The largest primer is not real. The concept is, so we can talk about it. I would not call Tim’s i… I would not call John Doe’s idiocy real.
This is just a question of semantics. Some words simply can be interpreted in more than one way.
Tim’s believes people interpreting this other meanings of real should be ashamed. He didn’t even read what I wrote. Some people simply should not participate in adult conversations until they mature.
The funny thing is that I was not even talking about what I understand by real, but about what Langan understands by real. Of course, I don’t really know, so I considered all alternatives, as I explicitly said. For example, I considered Langan may understand by real the same as Tim. But, in fact, this seems not to be the case, if one actually reads Langan:
(Langan) “Reality theory is about the stage of attribution in which two predicates analogous to true and false, namely real and unreal, are ascribed to various statements about the real universe.”
(Langan) “If it were eliminated, then true and false, real and unreal, and existence and nonexistence could not be distinguished, and the merest act of perception or cognition would be utterly impossible.”
I already wrote this in my comments, by Tim doesn’t feel like he need to read or make his brain work. Here Langan is saying he is building a theory of reality so he can tell apart which statements about the universe are real, and which are unreal. If Langan has Tim’s concept of real, the theory would be much simpler.
Again, Tim agrees with Langan without agreeing with him.
But again, Tim has probably not read Langan’s writings. Because if Langan uses alternative meanings for words (irony someone?), if he understand different things that Tim (and he does), he should be ashamed, according to Tim.
(As you can see, Robert, he can’t even tell Real(X) is not a set of which X can be a member).
Robert, John,
oh my god…
I had almost posted a follow up last night (I gave a rough perusal through the rest of John’s post). But then I thought I had been clear enough, that probably no one was going to look at this section of the thread anymore, and I decided against it. I don’t know if it would have helped. Let me try to show you your problem more clearly now.
Robert says “There are things that are real and there are things that are not.” John says, “Tim’s “real” actually has no information at all, because everything is real.” Robert uses “thing” and John uses “everything”; fine. But the question remains: what does it take to be a “thing”? Hint: real. When John says, “… everything is real”, he should realize that that is a tautology! It is a redundancy. It is akin to saying x = x. The problem you two make is also akin; Robert says “there are things that are not real.” What, prey tell? UGGGHHHHHH! It is you two who are being ridiculous here! Not me. You come up with some half baked imagination which you call an unreal thing. Or, an unreal real. You build the paradox in right at the beginning! YOU build. I simply refuse to build in that paradox to my view of reality. So yes, John, we do live in different worlds. You live in the one where you presume it is legitimate to think that unreal things are real things. Silly.
You suggest fairies. What is a fairy? Notice, Robert, I cannot evaluate the “function” you want me to evaluate until I am given a (full) definition of fairy. I simply cannot imagine what John means by it. Will you give us a definition, John? Until he does, his blathering about “fairies” remains real. But that is not to say that the object of his blathering is real. I have no idea what he’s blathering about, is all. This is the ignostic (with an “i”) position.
Again I couldn’t make it very far into John, but I should be able to finish him now that I have had my say:
Well, let me finish Robert first:
you asked about “largest prime”. While superficially this may seem to be sensical, when I sit here to seriously consider it, I cannot make sense enough, precisely, to entertain it. I am no expert at math, so if you can bring sense to it for me… But, to push through your obstacle, I might point you to a very nice philosophical presentation of the infinite but definite nature of numbers as presented by Josiah Royce, in an appendix to his “the world and the individual” (details to the best of my recollection at the moment, ~95% confidence). That is, “largest” makes no sense regarding numbers generally. Regarding primes, you may know better than I do: my understanding is that it is believed that there is no “largest” prime, but there is no proof either way. That is, “largest prime” is, at best, something that is as of yet beyond our evaluation, beyond our imagination. Which is to say, here specifically, it is probably a non-sensical rumination from the start, something that will never be made an (intellectual) “thing”, something that will never be “thing” enough to be called (this a priori absurd hope) “unreal thing”.
Robert, you further asked, how is Real defined? Real is an idea that holds together, proper. It doesn’t fall apart when one looks at it deeply. It is my belief that, in fact, there is only one real idea! And, in fact, numbers provide a nice derivative picture of its nature. It is a complex idea; and it is infinite yet definite. This idea I denominate “i’dea”, and descriptively I find it best: “I am”. I am, as (living) i’dea, can, to be sure, manifest particular and definite “ideas” as self-limitation of its infinite nature. And this can be done without paradox. Which you can also see derivatively in math. The even numbers are infinite too, for instance.
On to John:
“Tim’s idiocy is real” – of course! 😉 But not here. — will you admit to yours?
John said, “Tim’s “real” actually has no information at all, because everything is real.”, John, this is the conclusion I suppose you must reach when you refuse to admit that it is the “unreal” which has no information! You are simply, as they say, making the sweet, bitter and the bitter, sweet. Woe to you! If you would really follow through with your thinking, John, you would see that the constraint to Real is …
John continued, “So he would need to have an alternative word to describe that “property” of “the largest prime”, or that “property” of “fairies”.” The word, John, is blathering. You are blathering. Or, please give me a precise definition of “fairy” that I might be able to see that you aren’t blathering.
John said, “This is just a question of semantics. Some words simply can be interpreted in more than one way.”, I think if you would follow through on your abortive starts you would see that the object you think you are chasing simply doesn’t exist / have any real meaning.
John said, “Tim’s believes people interpreting this other meanings of real should be ashamed.”, John, I think you sh0uld be ashamed to call something real and unreal simultaneously! That’s what you do with “unreal thing”, “unreal element”, etc. You continued, “He didn’t even read what I wrote.”, I read a good deal of it, until I simply could not take it. And, I finished reading it (but lightly) last night at Robert’s demand.
John said, “The funny thing is that I was not even talking about what I understand by real, but about what Langan understands by real.”, the problem is that you were talking about “unreal”. I don’t recall Langan talking about that. But either way. You actually suggest this:
“(Langan) “Reality theory is about the stage of attribution in which two predicates analogous to true and false, namely real and unreal, are ascribed to various statements about the real universe.””, which, as I recall, is fine – he never goes on to suggest that “unreal” “things” can then be treated as “real things”. Perhaps I could convince Langan that he should incorporate this nuance more explicitly, that the word “unreal” is too suggestive of a metaphysical dualism, and that the contrast to real should rather be something along the lines I have suggested above, non-sensical blather.
Tim
My only answer here for any reader is: read what I wrote, read what Tim wrote. Hilarious results warranted.
And now you know why I don’t argue with Tim.
John,
the hilarity is the saving grace here!
Tim
P.S. you wanna tell me what is this fairy of which you believe it makes sense to speak?
“It is that leap for which Shahn Majid tries to prepare us in the next essay. He addresses the question of why things are quantized, how there is a problem regarding the cosmological constant, and proposes the solution of quantum spacetime, all within the tools of noncommutative geometry. If these terms are unfamiliar, the essay will help them become part of one’s vocabulary and so offer a new way of looking beyond the classical world of physics. Majid even leads us into speculations of the ‘self-dual’ nature of the new physics, and so into metaphysics.
Roger Penrose is concerned with time in respect to space. His essay puts before us the idea of conformal cyclic cosmology. He presents the idea that if the Universe is endlessly cyclic then remnant information from a previous universe could be observable in ours using gravitational wave detectors and cosmic microwave background satellites.
Even those who find that they must skim over the mathematics of the next essay, On the fine structure of spacetime, by Alain Connes, will at least come to understand that the new field of noncommutative geometry can systematize the properties of fundamental physical particles.
Michael Heller’s essay, Where physics meets metaphysics, might seem more readable; but its contrast of the fundamental level, as hinted at by quantum nonlocality, to the macroscopic world, will provoke disquieting thoughts of an aspatial and atemporal realm that conflict with classical understandings of space and time. This caution especially applies to the theology of God’s attributes such as eternity, omnipresence, or being the Prime Cause.
A final, short essay by John Polkinghorne contrasts the block universe, in which time is looked down on from the outside, with a universe of unfolding becoming. The former leads to classical theology, while the latter adds a temporal dimension to God for an Open Theology.
If the reader’s knowledge of mathematics and physics relies on school rather than university foundations, then he or she will find these essays a considerable challenge. However, courage – and an ability to skim off the essential points – will be rewarded. For this is a fascinating, contemporary book with “visions of lasting value” [xi] that are bound to stimulate new perspectives on the question of space and time. Such perspectives, ones that go beyond a mechanistic approach to the question, are essential for deepening any expression of the relationship between science and religion.” – Summary of “On Space and Time from The International Society for Science and Religion
“There is no contradiction between true religion and science. When a religion is opposed to science it becomes mere superstition: that which is contrary to knowledge is ignorance.
How can a man believe to be a fact that which science has proved to be impossible? If he believes in spite of his reason, it is rather ignorant superstition than faith. The true principles of all religions are in conformity with the teachings of science.
The Unity of God is logical, and this idea is not antagonistic to the conclusions arrived at by scientific study.
All religions teach that we must do good, that we must be generous, sincere, truthful, law-abiding, and faithful; all this is reasonable, and logically the only way in which humanity can progress.
All religious laws conform to reason, and are suited to the people for whom they are framed, and for the age in which they are to be obeyed
. . .Now, all questions of morality contained in the spiritual, immutable law of every religion are logically right. If religion were contrary to logical reason then it would cease to be a religion and be merely a tradition. Religion and science are the two wings upon which a man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism. All religions of the present day have fallen into superstitious practices, out of harmony alike with the true principles of the teaching they represent and with the scientific discoveries of the time. Many religious leaders have grown to think that the importance of religion lies mainly in the adherence to a collection of certain dogmas and the practice of rites and ceremonies! Those whose souls they profess to cure are taught to believe likewise, and these cling tenaciously to the outward forms, confusing them with the inward truth.
Now, these forms and rituals differ in the various churches and amongst the different sects, and even contradict one another; giving rise to discord, hatred, and disunion. The outcome of all this dissension is the belief of many cultured men that religion and science are contradictory terms, that religion needs no powers of reflection, and should in no wise be regulated by science, but must of necessity be opposed, the one to the other. The unfortunate effect of this is that science has drifted apart from religion, and religion has become a mere blind and more or less apathetic following of the precepts of certain religious teachers, who insist on their own favourite dogmas being accepted even when they are contrary to science. This is foolishness, for it is quite evident that science is the light, and, being so, religion truly so-called does not oppose knowledge.
We are familiar with the phrases ‘Light and Darkness’, ‘Religion and Science.’ But the religion which does not walk hand in hand with science is itself in the darkness of superstition and ignorance.
Much of the discord and disunion of the world is created by these man-made oppositions and contradictions. If religion were in harmony with science and they walked together, much of the hatred and bitterness now bringing misery to the human race would be at an end.
Consider what it is that singles man out from among created beings, and makes of him a creature apart. Is it not his reasoning power, his intelligence? Shall he not make use of these in his study of religion? I say unto you: weigh carefully in the balance of reason and science everything that is presented to you as religion. If it passes this test, then accept it, for it is truth! If, however, it does not so conform, then reject it, for it is ignorance!
Look around and see how the world of today is drowned in superstition and outward forms!
Some worship the product of their own imagination: they make for themselves an imaginary God and adore this, when the creation of their finite minds cannot be the Infinite Mighty Maker of all things visible and invisible! Others worship the sun or trees, also stones! In past ages there were those who adored the sea, the clouds, and even clay!
Today, men have grown into such adoring attachment to outward forms and ceremonies that they dispute over this point of ritual or that particular practice, until one hears on all sides of wearisome arguments and unrest. There are individuals who have weak intellects and their powers of reasoning have not developed, but the strength and power of religion must not be doubted because of the incapacity of these persons to understand.
A small child cannot comprehend the laws that govern nature, but this is on account of the immature intellect of that child; when he is grown older and has been educated he too will understand the everlasting truths. A child does not grasp the fact that the earth revolves round the sun, but, when his intelligence is awakened, the fact is clear and plain to him.
It is impossible for religion to be contrary to science, even though some intellects are too weak or too immature to understand truth.
God made religion and science to be the measure, as it were, of our understanding. Take heed that you neglect not such a wonderful power. Weigh all things in this balance.
To him who has the power of comprehension religion is like an open book, but how can it be possible for a man devoid of reason and intellectuality to understand the Divine Realities of God?
Put all your beliefs into harmony with science; there can be no opposition, for truth is one. When religion, shorn of its superstitions, traditions, and unintelligent dogmas, shows its conformity with science, then will there be a great unifying, cleansing force in the world which will sweep before it all wars, disagreements, discords and struggles – and then will mankind be united in the power of the Love of God.” – ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris Talks
“the CTMU describes reality as a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and self-execution (reflexive read-write functionality).”
I would love to see the syntax for this language. I mean it transcends the bootstrapping problem faced by all competent compiler designers. Check it out. Its
a. reflexive Reflective? So is Haskell.
b. instrinsic So it has built in constructs or instrinic functionality.
c. self-reference So it has pathological statements and is hence incomplete.
d. recursive self-definition This is the kicker. It can build itself up from itself and hence defeats the bootstrapping issue and even the need for a programmer. Maybe it just needs an empty set and all else follows? You know, u={}, u1 = {u} = {{}}, u2 = {u0,u1} = {{},{{}}}, etc. all the way to Cantor’s alephs and beyond.
Be wary of abstract nonsense. Ask, where’s the beef? I mean, could I get a code snippet?
I would be wary of the some of the protestations to the CTMU people have been spouting off in here. Many of these objections are merely “rehashes” of aggressive support for Popperian falsificationism. As Langan has told you time and time again, falsifiability has its own set of conceptual problems. These include (but are not limited to) the Duhem-Quine thesis (underdetermination by evidence), ambiguity of falsification, the problem of empirical induction (emphasized by the finite limitations of our observations and measurements), etc.
Whether you think these issues are “pseudo-problems” or not is entirely irrelevant. The CTMU never claimed to be a scientific theory, but a philosophical one, and so in light of this, I think that’s the end of it. Of course, you are free to attempt to demonstrate that the problem of empirical induction is a “pseudo-problem”, although you will quite seriously be running around in circles in your attempt to do so.
So let us recap: if you call the CTMU pseudoscience, you are either being adamant about your ignorance or you’re trolling. It has just been demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that it is philosophy pure and simple. I really don’t understand the logic behind this article. If the theory is so worthless, then why did you even feel the need to write about it? Why did you feel the need to publicly disparage it? If you feel that the author is so insignificant, then why did you even feel the need to write about him in the first place?
It can’t be because you wanted to show the author “the error of his ways” because Mark, Mr. Wallstreet, and every other Chubix crusader has clearly expressed their assumption that the author is delusional. It can’t be because you want to do “a public service” for people who might “buy in” to the CTMU. That is a lame and utterly unwarranted excuse. It seems like someone is definitely bored around here, and it’s not Langan.
And yes, Walt Streat is my real name. I just can’t verify it for reasons of security.
By Chris’s standards, you shouldn’t be allowed to comment at all. After all, you’ve got a false-sounding name, and you haven’t done anything to prove that you are who you say you are, or to show your qualifications to comment on the discussion. If that whole line of bullshit has any validity when used against critics of the CTMU, then it should be applied to defenders of the CTMU as well.
Also, the CTMU most definitely *does* claim to be science. To pull a quote from the introduction to the CTMU, arguing why it’s necessary: “Because the content of reality is a matter of science as opposed to mere semantics, this issue can be resolved only by rational or empirical evidence, not by assumption alone.” Chris has always been rather emphatic about the idea that the CTMU is a *scientific* theory.
By Chris’s standards, Walt Streat can comment all he wants, but he probably won’t get an opportunity to seriously debate the CTMU with Chris until he reveals his credentials to such an extent as to make himself easily debatable. Luckily, that doesn’t seem to be his aim, and by Chris’s standards he is definitely allowed to comment on the CTMU. So are you. So is Rubix. So is John Fringe. It’s just the case that Chris won’t dignify them with a debate until they give out their identities.
You guys can ignore this all you want, but it doesn’t make you right. MarkCC *has already revealed his identify and credentials*. And yet Chris still won’t do him the honors of intellectually-honest responses about his criticisms brought forth. It’s not a real condition. Even when “Alexander M” revealed his full name, Chris moved the goalposts and ignored his questions. It’s not a real condition.
Chris doesn’t have to “dignify us with a debate.” He can sit there and just toss ad hominems as us all he wants while his theory is exposed and decimated for the scam that it is.
Mark Chu-Carroll: “By Chris’s standards, you shouldn’t be allowed to comment at all. After all, you’ve got a false-sounding name, and you haven’t done anything to prove that you are who you say you are, or to show your qualifications to comment on the discussion. If that whole line of bullshit has any validity when used against critics of the CTMU, then it should be applied to defenders of the CTMU as well.”
That’s incorrect. Generally speaking, the typical defender of the CTMU is a model citizen if not an absolute saint next to the typical CTMU critic, who would evidently lie, cheat, steal, and pimp his sister, mother, and grandmother in order to get over on the theory, smear its author, and express his hatred of God and religion. (Think of somebody like Chubix, but whose incoherent babbling is far less voluminous.)
Mark Chu-Carroll: “Also, the CTMU most definitely *does* claim to be science. To pull a quote from the introduction to the CTMU, arguing why it’s necessary: ‘Because the content of reality is a matter of science as opposed to mere semantics, this issue can be resolved only by rational or empirical evidence, not by assumption alone.’ Chris has always been rather emphatic about the idea that the CTMU is a *scientific* theory.”
That all depends on what kind of science one is talking about – the empirical sciences, the mathematical sciences, or metascience (sometimes called “metaphysics”). The distinctions among these types of science are logical and philosophical in nature.
If one is talking about empirical science as distinguished from metascience, then the CTMU is not empirical science. This is because it relies not on empirical confirmation of specific observation statements involving particular perceptions, but on a level of rational discourse that can only be described as metamathematical and/or “meta-empirical”. In this realm, “evidence” is primarily rational, just as it is in mathematics.
That is, the CTMU follows not merely from localized observations of specific perceptual content, theorization on which is subject to the problem of induction, but from the manifest existence of perception in general. (To “perceive perception” is to perceive the existence of science, i.e., to assert a particular kind of math-reality correspondence fundamental to the philosophy of science; it involves the high-level rational consideration of empirical correspondences.)
But of course, all of this defies the kind of sullen, bone-headed oversimplification of science to which Mark has repeatedly displayed a barnacle-like attachment.
Can we continue our discussion?
I already tell you why I say your paragraph is non-sequitur: because assuming your premises, there are alternative conclusions, and one need additional assumptions to infer what you infer. I pointed a lot of possibilities and situations assuming your premises, and contradicting your conclusions. There is no justification in your writings explaining why this situations can not be. This I would call non-sequitur, and while someone justifies them… well, you know.
I should assume that anyone asking questions is a stupid and blah blah, but it would be very interesting to know your opinion on this.
Will you address them, please?
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29275
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29284
(Feel free to add any creative insult you like).
Mark, you seemed to miss the word rational there. The CTMU is a rational (as opposed to soley empirical) theory. In particular, it is a “reality-theoretic extension of logic.” Put everything in the back of your mind but extension of logic. Regardless of your opinion of the CTMU, it should be pretty obvious that any theory that claims to be an extension of logic cannot be working within an empirical methodology. Clearly, to prove the law of identity, we do not need to take a marble and place it in front of a mirror to ascertain that the marble is really identical to itself (assuming light rays travel in straight lines, that the beam of light reaching our eye is causing neural impulses allowing us to see, and every other background assumption that we don’t bother to each individually falsify). We don’t empirically falsify the laws of logic, but instead show that the reasoning used is incorrect.
So, if the CTMU is an extension of logic, it is quite clear that it does not rely on empirical methodology, and therefore is not formulated at the scientific level. Your qualm seems to be with Chris’s claim that empirical predictions can be extrapolated from rational knowledge. To refute this claim, you must demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. However, it will be a bit difficult to do so since you would have to demonstrate that every empirical theory does not conform to 2-valued logic. In other words, you would have to prove that not all theories of science are based on the distinction between perception and non-perception; this is not only impossible, it’s flat out absurd.
The problem is that CTMU is not logically deducted, neither. It’s written to appear so, but conclusions do not follow premises, and frequently there are hidden premises which are not justified, which rely on the conclusions, or which are simply non-sequitur.
I frequently observe this behavior in people. If something is not empirical, it must be logical. But sorry there, a thing can be illogical and not empirical, both at once.
First of all, you may not know it, but it’s proven that there are a lot of axioms or premises whose truth can not inferred logically. In fact, there are infinite such axioms. There is not one math, there is not one logic. It works this way: you start with axioms, you start with rules of inference, and then you get your conclusions.
The problem is you can’t decide what axioms are true and what are false. You cannot decide if in our World there is only a parallel to a line trough a point, or if there is none, or if there are infinite. So even if you accept the rules of logic, you still don’t know what axioms are true.
And it’s proven there are infinite such axioms. You simply can’t tell which ones are true.
This is the limit of logic and science in science. Choosing axioms.
In fact, the rules of logic are employed simply because they seem to work. But to know if they work, you have to experiment. God didn’t give Moses two stone tables saying “logic is how the World works”. If fact, it’s very surprising it works at all. But there are not warranties. If we observe them failing, we have to discard them.
With this I mean even if CTMU is logically inferred, it could not infer how the World works, because you can not say if logic is how the World works, and you can’t decide what axioms are true in the first place.
But a shallow problem is that CTMU is not logically inferred. It’s not based on logic at all.
If you doubt the theory is non-sequitur, you may want to answer this questions I made to Langan just about one of his paragraphs (just one). He simply claimed it’s obvious, so it may be easy for you. I was arguing with him until I make this questions, then he dissapeared. So I’m left waiting for answers:
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29275
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29284
His theory is based on these, which he and you may call logic, but it’s not. His assertions are unjustified. Would you justify them, completing the inference, please?
> This is the limit of logic and science in science. Choosing axioms.
Typo here. I meant “this is the limit of logic and math in science”
Seriously? “Walt Streat”?
Chris, can we seriously quit the obviously transparent attempts at harping on my Wall Street background, here? It’s *completely* irrelevant to this debate, lmfao.
Anyways, your argument is still balderdash. Scientists are well aware of the so-called “problem of induction,” but it’s not really a problem — it’s only a problem for philosophical types who are ignorant of how science works. Scientists have no difficulty with it. it’s the entire driving force behind falsifiability. You make multiple observations, you generate an explanation, and then you test it for its consistency and predictive powers, and repeat. There’s no “problem” there. If we say X is true, we say it’s true until Y shows that X must be false, and we become more confident in how true X is based on how much evidence and predictive ability and consistency we have. That’s the best you can do. In the words of Tim Minchin, “Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed — faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.”
If you’re going to take the stance that evidence is inherently untrustworthy no matter what, you’re beyond reason by definition. It’s basically taking the stance of conspiracy-theorist Obama-birther types who completely ignore and dismiss evidence as fake or unreliable *no matter what*. Funnily enough, these are the same people who, despite being shown countless pieces of evidence explaining why they’re wrong, will jump at the first instant of a *single* piece of evidence supporting their claims (even if that evidence is a clear forgery). Funny how they don’t apply that same mindset to their own “evidence.”
At any rate, “Walt,” Langan has claimed that he’s doing “metaphysics.” But he says this only because he’s written, explicitly, that science is limited and something more is required. In his CTMU, he writes plenty about physical phenomena (however misguided it is), so he’s making claims that overlap onto science’s turf. Your statement is outright false. That’s why MarkCC and the rest of us here have been bashing it: it’s ID babble — nonmathematical, nonscientific nonsense.
By saying “The CTMU does not rely on empirical methodology,” this is basically akin to saying “The CTMU ignores all empirical evidence and makes shit up by claiming to reach absolute truth through logic alone.” The problem is that *you don’t reach absolute truths through logic alone*. Logic is only as good as its underlying framework. Again, even if you say that X = X, X still has to be a binary variable. And in order for it to be a binary variable, it needs to fulfill a variety of conditions and underpinnings in order for it to make sense in the first place. In our case, it’s reliant on physical frameworks and consistencies. Logic isn’t something you can contort in a vacuum, slap back onto reality, and proclaim to have absolute truths.
“Your qualm seems to be with Chris’s claim that empirical predictions can be extrapolated from rational knowledge. To refute this claim, you must demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect.”
No, the onus is on the one making the claim. This is basically the same logic as theists who claim “I believe in the Great Fairy Unicorn. You can’t prove he doesn’t exist. Therefore, the Great Fairy Unicorn exists.” If you think empirical predictions can be extrapolated by fiddling around in non-empirical frameworks, you must show this to be true. The burden is not on everyone else to show why it’s false, because that can apply to an infinite number of arbitrary beliefs (like the one I just mentioned about the unicorn).
Stephen Hawking seems to believe that philosophy is dead.
Stephen Hawking tells Google ‘philosophy is dead’
Physicist Stephen Hawking has told Google’s Zeitgeist conference that philosophers have not kept up with science and their art is dead
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8520033/Stephen-Hawking-tells-Google-philosophy-is-dead.html
“Most of us don’t worry about these questions most of the time. But almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” – Stephen Hawking
Is philosophy dead or is Hawking simply trying to show that physics and philosophy converge as metaphysics?
“”[Model-dependent realism] is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth.”
“There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science.”
“According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If there are two models that both agree with observation … then one cannot say that one is more real than another. One can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration.”
“It might be that to describe the universe, we have to employ different theories in different situations. Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied.”
“According to the idea of model-dependent realism …, our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. We form mental concepts of our home, trees, other people, the electricity that flows from wall sockets, atoms, molecules, and other universes. These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no model-independent test of reality. It follows that a well-constructed model creates a reality of its own.”
In other words, our model is only as good as our ability to observe events. This is an extension of one of the basic organising principles of modern science, that a model is only as good as its ability to predict events. Hawking associated himself with the commonly assumed principle of ‘model dependent realism’ by giving it that name.”
“The name literally says it all. The phrase “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe” contains three main ingredients: cognitive theory, model, and universe. Cognitive theory refers to a general language of cognition (the structural and transitional rules of cognition); universe refers to the content of that language, or that to which the language refers; and model refers to the mapping which carries the content into the language, thus creating information. The way in which the title brings these three ingredients together, or “contracts” their relationship to the point of merging, reflects their perfect coincidence in that to which the title implicitly refers, i.e., reality (the physical universe plus all that is required to support its perception and existence). Thus, the CTMU is a theory which says that reality is a self-modeling universal language, or if one prefers, that the universe is a self-modeling language.” – Langan, Superscholar interview
A Tale of the Beginning
“In the beginning was silence. before the word there was chaos and night.
In the silence, spirit moved across the waters.
A WORD came forth, Meaning was given to form,
Direction to motion, order to chaos.
The world emerged, and the Word
Bore us in its own likeness.
As words went forth to cover the earth, history grew, word bearers multiplied.
The great and tragic were named; time grew pregnant, light and life were born
They spoke to each other.
A new heaven appeared where healing took place in mortal speech,
The words of speech were kindness, love, forgiveness.
This is how the healing power of the word came from silence.”
I find the rhetoric on this site in favor of this CATMOO thing to be quite disconcerting. Why? Because there exists a tendency within this framework or schema to favor built-in biases and fit fantastic ideas to reality rather than the other way round. You do not find argument but simply kleptocractic nonsense. If you want to do science, then, to paraphrase the evolutionist David Sloane Wilson, “roll up your sleeves and get busy”. What CATMOO can best be described as, is NOT EVEN—-.
As Frankfurt reminds us, “…bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are” .
P.S.
What is the difference between a mathematician and a metaphysician? They both have paper and pencil, but mathematicians have a garbage can.
Like I said, it’s obvious BS to anyone who actually takes the time to figure out what he’s saying.
Chris exhibits all the qualities of a pathological liar. He doesn’t listen to reason, ignores everything that he doesn’t like, and repeats his mantra over and over again even when he’s already been called out and hung out to dry. No matter what you say, he will just insist you’re wrong. Full stop. One thing you can be sure of is that he won’t ever admit fault or error no matter how badly he screws up.
I think maybe Chris started out decently smart as a child, but he wasn’t able to get the kind of life he wanted and naturally came to feel extreme bitterness towards those he felt threatened by intellectually. Eventually people started to surpass him, and he couldn’t stand it. You can see it in the way he speaks in his interviews. He’s got a major axe to grind with his childhood demons and academia (it’s also why he hammers me for working on Wall Street every chance he gets. He’s probably insecure and likely jealous over it and feels the need to insult me to make himself feel better). But his story is not one consistent with a hindered intellectual who simply lacked the means to shine.
His story is consistent with a petty, narcissistic liar who must control how others see him at all costs. That’s ultimately why his CTMU is gibberish. He knows how to make himself sound smart without actually saying anything, which is why educated people who actually know their shit find the CTMU to be obvious crackpottery. The CTMU is really more of an exercise of ego-stroking and attention-seeking than anything else.
Honestly, Chris’ story is a disrespectful, disgusting disgrace to people like myself who *actually* grew up with tremendous abuse and managed to fight their way past obstacle after obstacle in order to succeed academically, financially, and emotionally with a lot of hard work and study.
I’m pretty sure he lied about his 1600 SAT, too. He was born in 1952 in Montana, which means he had to have taken his SAT around 1970, give or take. At this point in time, 1600’s were extraordinarily rare because studying/preparation wasn’t emphasized and the competition wasn’t nearly as fierce (this was also before the scores were recentered!). Not only that, but Chris claims he “took a nap” and yet still pulled the score off. lmfao.
A 1400 was good enough to give you a shot at the Ivies, and a 1500 was usually sufficient to earn some *really* nice scholarships and have a secure score for top schools. A 1600 was practically unheard of until the late 1960’s, and scores that high were generally auto-admits. I know quite a few people who applied to schools around this time with 1500’s (and one 1600), most of whom came from humble beginnings. They all were able to get some pretty sweet deals with many top schools to choose from. Schools like Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Penn/Columbia/etc, back then, were MUCH cheaper than they are today (even AFTER you take inflation into account).
And yet, despite the “fact” that Chris had a 1600, he was somehow only able to get into Reed and Montana State, even though he could have gotten access to better scholarships and more selective schools that offered better loans and jobs to afford everything? He drops out to go into hard labor? It doesn’t add up. The story’s more consistent with an underachiever who couldn’t get what he wanted, so he lied and fabricated an image for himself to make up for it.
Chris’ problem is that he feels unjustly self-entitled. He wanted special accommodations wherever he went and got pissed off when people wouldn’t go out of their way to satisfy his unreasonable demands. Reality must bend to him, and not the other way around. It’s also a pretty good analogy to the CTMU. It thinks it can just mess around with logic (which it doesn’t even attempt to do with any real rigor!) and arrive at absolute truths around reality. The fact that the CTMU “relies not on empirical confirmation” is a huge red flag. When you aren’t relying on empirical notions, you are ignoring evidence, falling victim to unfalsifiability, and putting forth something scientifically and epistemologically unprovable. In other words, it’s completely useless.
Sorry, Chris, but the universe doesn’t work the way you want it to.
Correction: Sorry, he was not born in Montana, but he grew up there.
Whitehead was a mathematician and metaphysicist…specialization is for insects, if metaphysics has a smaller garbage can than math, which is turn has a smaller
garbage can than physics…perhaps this phenomenon of being constrained by fewer assumptions at higher levels has to do with synactic coverings.
Quantum Logical Causality, Category Theory, and the Metaphysics of
Alfred North Whitehead
Connecting Zafiris’ Category Theoretic Models of Quantum Spacetime
and the Logical-Causal Formalism of Quantum Relational Realism
“This is one of a series of focused workshops exploring the phenomenon of logical causality in quantum mechanics and the relevance of this phenomenon to the philosophy of nature more broadly. In this meeting, we will investigate the ways in which the work of Elias Zafiris on category theoretic models of spacetime quantum event structures might find a robust philosophical and physical foundation in the Relational Realist approach to quantum logical causality—a modern rehabilitation of the process event-ontology of Whitehead. Among the topics to be explored will be the relationship between a) Zafiris’s category theoretic / topos model and b) the decoherent histories interpretation of quantum mechanics in the context of the Whiteheadian mereotopological model of spatiotemporal extension.
Elias Zafiris, Complex Systems From the Perspective of Category Theory: II. Covering Systems and Sheaves.
“Using the concept of adjunctive correspondence, for the comprehension of the structure of a complex system, developed in Part I, we introduce the notion of covering systems consisting of partially or locally defined adequately understood objects. This notion incorporates the necessary and sufficient conditions for a sheaf theoretical representation of the informational content included in the structure of a complex system in terms of localization systems. Furthermore, it accommodates a formulation of an invariance property of information communication concerning the analysis of a complex system.”
“SCSPL incorporates the concepts of syntactic stratification and syntactic distribution. For example, because the laws of mathematics everywhere apply with respect to the laws of physics, the former distribute over the latter in the syntactic sense. Thus, where the laws of mathematics and physics are denoted by S1=LMS and S2 respectively, S1 distributes over S2, i.e. forms a syntactic covering for S2.” – Langan, 2002
A Spatial View of Information
“Spatial representation has two contrasting but interacting aspects (i) representation of spaces’ and (ii) representation by spaces. In this paper we will examine two aspects that are common to both interpretations of the theme of spatial representation, namely nerve-type constructions and refinement. We consider the induced structures, which some of the attributes of the informational context are sampled.”
“Aristotelian metaphysics is universal, containing in principle all Ui-relevant information (Ui-potential) U*. A theory of metaphysics M is an open inferential system which, because necessarily univer sal, reduces to a Ui-recognizable tautology T on U* heritable in M via generalized rules of inference (where “generalized inference” is just logical substitution). As specific information equates inductively to ancestral generalisms, and U* is both unique and Ui-indiscernible from T, the identification M = T = U* is practically unconditional. Now suppose that there exist two Ui-distinguishable true metaphysical theories M and M’; i.e., two Ui-distinguishable Ui-tautologies T and T’. These can only be Ui-distinguishable by virtue of a nonempty Ui-informationa1 disjunction: i.e., disjoint information d = (T ∪ T’) – (T ∩ T’) > ∅ recognizable in/by Ui (where the information in T or T’ equals the scope (image) of its univer sal quantifier, and ∅ is the null set). This information d, being the distinction between two Ui-perceptible truths, exists in Ui and thus U*. But as it is disjoint information, one member of the pair (T, T’) does not contain it. So this member does not cover U*, is not a U* tautology, and thus is not a theory of metaphysics. On the other hand, M = Uj = 1, 2… Mj, where the jointly U*-exhaustive Mj are all “true”, Ui-distinct, and M-nonexluded, does and is.
So the assumption fails, and there can be only one correct theory of metaphysics at the tautological level. This, by definition, is the CTMU. I.e., the CTMU takes this existential proof of metaphysical uniqueness and uses the implied system as the identity of a transductive algebra meeting the conditions for human cognition by its homomorphic relationship to the human cognitive syntax. So for the human cognitive equivalency-class, the universe is generalistically identical to the CTMU tautology.” – Langan, Noesis 76
“Thus, conspansive duality relates two complementary views of the universe, one based on the external (relative) states of a set of objects, and one based on the internal structures and dynamics of objects considered as language processors. The former, which depicts the universe as it is usually understood in physics and cosmology, is called ERSU, short for Expanding Rubber Sheet Universe, while the latter is called USRE (ERSU spelled backwards), short for Universe as a Self-Representational Entity. Simplistically, ERSU is like a set, specifically a topological-geometric point set, while USRE is like a self-descriptive nomological language. Whereas ERSU expands relative to the invariant sizes of its contents, USRE “conspands”, holding the size of the universe invariant while allowing object sizes and time scales to shrink in mutual proportion, thus preserving general covariance.” – Langan, PCID, 2002
Self-Representing Information Processing Systems:
“When to Take an Observation?
• A utility maximizing agent will take an observation when the value of information is positive
• As time since last observation increases agent becomes more uncertain of what will occur
• Utility distribution becomes more spread out
• Take observation when predicted utility gain from taking observation exceeds predicted utility cost of observation
• Ask question for which answer has highest expected utility
Communication
• Learning is faster when agents exchange information
• Communicating agents exchange messages
– Agent 1 asks a question of Agent 2
– Agent 1 takes an observation of Agent 2’s state
• Agents can learn each other’s representations
– Efficient communication is the expression of the difference between my knowledge and yours in the language of your representation
– Hypothesis: communication evolves toward greater efficiency
• Communication respects laws of physics
– Intrinsic randomness
– Local reversibility
– Prevents “freezing” at locally optimal representations
Theoretical Framework for Learnable Universe
• The framework described here does not depend on the specifics of the laws of physics in our universe
• Requirements for dynamics (Stapp’s terminology)
– Shrödinger evolution between observations
– Dirac probabilities to answer questions posed to Nature
– Heisenberg process evolves toward
» Choose to observe using value of information
» Choose what to observe using maximum expected utility
• Requirements for structure of Hamiltonian
– Infinite dimensional
– Can be approximated by sequence of finite dimensional models
– Self-similar structure
Summary
• Conscious agents construct representations
• Conscious agents learn better representations over time
• Common mathematics and algorithms for
– Simulating physical systems
– Learning complex representations
» Many parameters
» High degree of conditional independence
» High degree of self-similarity
• As physical system evolves to minimize free energy its conscious subsystems evolve to construct better representations of the system they inhabit
– Maximum physical entropy corresponds to maximum simultaneous knowledge of (UT,ET)”
“(Postulate) a fundamental theory of physics is incomplete unless self-dual in the sense that such a role-reversal is possible. If a phenomenon is physically possible then so is its observer-observed reversed one.
One can also say this more dynamically: as physics improves its structures tend to become self dual in this sense. This has in my view the same status as the second law of thermodynamics: it happens tautologically because of the way we think about things. In the case of thermodynamics it is the very concept of probability which builds in a time asymmetry (what we can predict given what we know now) and the way that we categorise states that causes entropy to increase (when we consider many outcomes ‘the same’ then that situation has a higher entropy by definition and is also more likely). In the case of the self-duality principle the reason is that in physics one again has the idea that something exists and one is representing it by experiments. But experimenters tend to think that the set ˆX of experiments is the ‘real’ thing and that a theoretical concept is ultimately nothing but a representation of the experimental outcomes. The two points of view are forever in conflict until they agree that both exist and one represents the other.” – Majid (2007)
isoltelesis is just spamming with huge walls of crap nobody is talking about or reading for the sake of making the thread intentionally denser than it needs to be. lol. Classic Langan.
Evidence points to that *not* being Langan. The comments came from very different IPs.
I’m not saying it’s Langan, necessarily. Just that they’re obviously on the same side of the coin when it comes to all these weird, underhanded methods of trying to “win” debates.
Wow, “equal planned progress”! And I thought intelligence and communications ability were postively correlated.
I’m not trying to defend Langan the individual as a man, that is not my interest frankly, what I’m interested in is the ideas he talks about, which hopefully by now people will begin to appreciate as an active field of research among people who probably never heard of the CTMU.
“In Section 1, using the ideas of the past two chapters, I will present the radical but necessary idea that self and reality are belief systems. Then, in Section 2, I will place this concept in the context of the theory of hypersets and situation semantics, giving for the first time a formal model of the universe in which mind and reality reciprocally contain one another. This “universal network” model extends the concept of the dual network, and explains how the cognitive equation might actually be considered as a universal equation.
Finally, in Sections 3-5, I will put forth a few speculative suggestions regarding how one might reconcile this idea with our contemporary understanding of the physical world. I will confront the well-known paradoxes of quantum mechanics, and argue that the resolution of these paradoxes may lie in the idea that the world is made of pattern. If this idea is correct, it will provide a basis for integrating the idea that reality is a belief system with modern physical science.
…
The problem is as follows: how are physical structures built from mental structures? Or, more pointedly: if reality is nothing more than a belief system, then why does this belief system obey beautiful, abstract principles like the Schrodinger equation and Einstein’s gravitational field equation?
This question is an inversion of the point of view taken by systems theorists like Ilya Prigogine, Erich Jantsch and Hermann Haken (1984). For instance, in his classic treatise The Self-Organizing Universe, Eric Jantsch (1980) applies ideas from systems theory to analyze everything from microscopic particles to molecular soups to brains, societies, evolving ecosystems and galaxies. His philosophy is universalist: self-organization, he argues, is a phenomenon underlying all levels of structure and dynamics, perhaps the vital force of the cosmos. But his actual methodology is to takeideas developed for studying physical systems and “extrapolate them upward” toward the mental and social realms.
To a certain extent, it may well be possible to study mind and brain using physical ideas. What I am suggesting here, however, is that it may also be possible to do exactly the opposite: to “build down” from the complex to the simple, and somehow derive the laws of physics from the laws of psychology.
How, then, are physical structures built from mental structures? As already warned, I do not have a solution. It seems to me, however, that the most likely source for a solution is quantum physics, and more specifically the quantum theory of measurement. In the remainder of this chpater, therefore, after a few general philosophical comments, I will briefly review some of the discoveries of this odd branch of physics, and then explore their relationship with the pattern-theoretic psychology that was developed in the body of the book. This discussion will serve to make the basic question more concrete. And it will also lead us to some surprising discoveries — such as the very close relationship between quantum measurement, pattern philosophy, and the cognitive equation.
This is admittedly a radical programme. But if one is serious about the idea that reality is a belief system, then one cannot avoid the question: where do these elegant mathematical properties of reality come from? Today the phrase “Foundations of Physics” refers to a technical subfield of theoretical physics. I venture the prediction that, in a hundred years time, it will refer to a branch of mathematical psychology.” – Goertzel, Chaotic Logic (1994)
“One rationale for the focus on psychological phenomena is that their detailed study is a necessary precondition for further questions as to their neural correlates. Therefore, the investigation of mental quantum features resists the temptation to try to reduce them (within scenario A) all-too quickly to neural activity. There are five kinds of psychological phenomena which have been addressed in the spirit of mental quantum features so far: (i) decision processes, (ii) semantic networks, (iii) bistable perception, (iv) learning, and (v) order effects in questionnaires.
(i) An early precursor of work on decision processes is due to Aerts and Aerts (1994). However, the first detailed account appeared in a comprehensive publication by Busemeyer et al. (2006). The key idea is to define probabilities for decision outcomes and decision times in terms of quantum probability amplitudes. Busemeyer et al. found agreement of their quantum model (and disagreement of a classical alternative) with empirical data. Moreover, they were able to clarify the long-standing riddle of the so-called disjunction effect (Tversky and Shafir 1992) in decision making as a consequence of quantum interference (Pothos and Busemeyer 2009).
(ii) The difficult issue of meaning in natural languages is often explored in terms of semantic networks. Gabora and Aerts (2002) described the contextual manner in which concepts are evoked, used, and combined to generate meaning. Their ideas about concept association in an evolutionary context were further developed by Gabora and Aerts (2009). Bruza et al. (2009) referred to meaning relations in terms of entanglement-style features in quantum representations of the human mental lexicon and propose experimental work capable of testing this approach.
(iii) The perception of a stimulus is bistable if the stimulus is ambiguous, such as the Necker cube. Atmanspacher et al. (2004, 2008) developed a detailed model describing a number of psychophysical features of bistable perception that have been confirmed experimentally. Moreover, Atmanspacher and Filk (2010) predicted that particular distinguished states in bistable perception may violate temporal Bell inqualitities—a litmus test for quantum behavior. Alternative approaches to bistable perception are due to Conte et al. (2007, 2009).
(iv) Another quite obvious arena for non-commutative behavior is learning behavior. In theoretical studies, Atmanspacher and Filk (2006) showed that in simple supervised learning tasks small recurrent networks not only learn the prescribed input-output relation but also the sequence in which inputs have been presented. This entails that the recognition of inputs is impaired if the sequence of presentation is changed. In very few exceptional cases, with special characteristics that remain to be explored, this impairment is avoided.
(v) Finally, sequence effects in surveys, polls, and questionnaires, recognized for a long time (Schwarz and Sudman 1992), are still insufficiently understood today. Their study as mental quantum features (Aerts and Aerts 1994, Busemeyer et al. 2011) offers the potential to unveil a lot more about such effects than the well-known fact that responses can drastically alter if questions are swapped. Work so far has used quantum probabilities, algebraic approaches may yield other insight.
It is a distinguishing aspect of the approaches listed above that they have lead to well-defined and specific theoretical models with empirical confirmation and novel predictions. This is in blatant contrast to most other examples described above. A second point worth mentioning is that the approaches have the potential to form a scientific community—already now there are several groups (rather than solitary actors) working together, partly even in collaborative efforts. There have been regular international conferences with proceedings (Bruza et al. 2007, 2008, 2009) for the exchange of new results and ideas, and a special issue of the well established Journal of Mathematical Psychology was recently (2009) devoted to new developments.” – Quantum Approaches to Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
You know, you could just link to http://www.goertzel.org/books/logic/chapter_eleven.htm instead of copying and pasting huge walls of text.
On the Ideal and the Ontological
As is proven in the ontological manuals, the thing in itself (and the reader should be careful to observe that this is true) can thereby determine in its totality our disjunctive judgements, and the Ideal is what first gives rise to the manifold. Since knowledge of our judgements is a priori, the things in themselves prove the validity of, in natural theology, natural causes, and the never-ending regress in the series of empirical conditions would be falsified. As will easily be shown in the next section, the Ideal excludes the possibility of, even as this relates to the discipline of pure reason, the objects in space and time, but the Ideal of human reason is the mere result of the power of the Ideal of natural reason, a blind but indispensable function of the soul. Noematic descriptions, in other words, are “in themselves”. If we follow up this doubt, it becomes manifest that modes of consciousness are “in themselves”, by a freely actualizable return to the reflecting Ego. Hence it follows without more ado that noetic acts inhibit my acceptance of phenomenology as existent. Therefore, the things in themselves are the clue to the discovery of, for example, natural causes. As will easily be shown in the next section, it is not at all certain that the never-ending regress in the series of empirical conditions (and to avoid all misapprehension, it is necessary to explain that this is true) has lying before it our ideas; consequently, space is a representation of the Transcendental Deduction. By means of analytic unity, what we have alone been able to show is that the Categories have lying before them the transcendental aesthetic. It must not be supposed that our experience would be falsified. By means of analysis, the architectonic of natural reason, that is to say, is the mere result of the power of reason, a blind but indispensable function of the soul. As is proven in the ontological manuals, the never-ending regress in the series of empirical conditions, even as this relates to reason, would be falsified. Philosophy (and it remains a mystery why this is true) depends on our ideas.
…
isotelesis: Could you give a critic of my abstract for a paper I am writing? It would be greatly appreciated…
P.S. on paragraph above…
8942852 individual pieces of bullshit generated since this program’s inception on November 11, 1998
Rubix,
It seems posting links has a tendency to get people blocked.
Tunapolocs,
You can send your paper to koinotely at gmail.
The spamfilter that we run here at Scientopia flags things with multiple links as possible spam, until a human being gets around to checking them. So if you post something with links, it might get delayed a bit. If it’s more than a couple of hours, and you’re concerned, you can email me, and I’ll pop over and check the filters.
Thanks MarkCC, I agree the CTMU should not be treated as if it’s above criticism, I understand how one could suspect an autodidact such as himself of idosyncratic obfuscation…in my case however I found reading about other subjects related to his ideas helps build interdisciplinary bridges rather than try to quarantine them, I have to thank Chris because it led me to find other interesting ideas beyond his own. Under the topic “Divine Philosophy, Logical Theology, and other Convergences” I compare some similarities which led me to appreciate the parallel/independent development of related concepts, there are many different ways to interpret certain ideas, so “Koinotely/Isotelesis” is my own.
http://www.commongroundgroup.net/forum/?mingleforumaction=viewforum&f=5.0
John, when you claim that the CTMU can be used to prove that, “Everything is real,” you must use “everything” as synonymous with “all that exists”. Note that, “All that exists is real,” is a tautology. You have apparently not done so as of yet.
Can you cite me saying “the CTMU can be used to prove that “Everything is real”? I don’t know what you’re speaking about. I said if Langan understand that any speakable concept is real, then “everything is real”. This is a different thing. Can you cite me, so I know what are you speaking about?
Also, I would like it very much if you address the unanswered questions about Langan’s reasoning I exposed.
I’m still waiting for you to say why my “argument” was syntactically inconsistent, an unjustified assertion for me.
Continuing my discussion with Tim down here because I’m actually glad that he watched the videos (I must give him credit for that), but finding the reply button up the comment chain is annoying:
Tim:
I posted that to show you some basic things current science has to say about the universe, as well as how the scientific method works and why we define truth the way we do. You say odd things all the time that imply you don’t really understand how the opposing position works, especially materialism.
“Can I ask?: why did you ever think I needed you to tell me about the nature of science? ”
When you imply that evidence lacks justification, or that I am operating on “faith/e” (clearly, you cannot read me well, either), or that we need to explain “why water” or “why/how time works” in order to talk about things in the physical universe. Again, if you want a more explicit definition, when we say something is true, what we really mean is that we are very confident in the predictive ability of the theory in its capacity to explain evidence due to its track record and success in the past. We don’t incorporate anything into our frameworks that have no evidence for them. There are plenty of things we don’t understand (QM is one of them) on a fundamental level, but we don’t need to understand the nuts and bolts 100% in order to know that they work. Nobody knows all the nuts and bolts, and anyone who claims to is making up an arbitrary explanation that is no better than any other (this is what Langan is doing, as he’s claiming to have absolute knowledge of something, bypassing science).
“So, Rubix, it seems that Krauss is at least leaving room for the potential for a religion that wouldn’t rouse his antipathy”
Yes, as do I. As do practically all scientists. This is why, again, I keep telling you the nature of science. Scientists aren’t claiming that religion is objectively false or that God is 100% confirmed to not exist. Those possibilities — all possibilities — are left open. But that does not give us good reason to believe in any one such possibility or accept it as true.
““The answer is: nothing isn’t “nothing” anymore. I told you.”
No, you didn’t tell me. Quantum mechanics tells me. At some point, one has to understand why “nothing” is a bit of a odd concept. “Nothing” is still a framework of “something,” and it’s enough to explain the nature of how our universe arose from it… especially when you consider that matter is just residual waste in a universe primarily consisting of “nothing.” That’s why I have absolutely no problems with questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing” or “What caused the Big Bang?” For me, the answer is ultimately one of necessary conditions: “It couldn’t have happened any other way.”
“We humans believe that everything that happens to us is special – and significant.”
What Krauss is saying here is that there’s a huge difference between thinking something’s made with you in mind, versus the fact that you just happen to be the result of some byprocess because conditions were right for it.
Rubix,
thanks for giving me some credit. Perhaps I just needed to break the ice…
I had asked you what your point in having me watch the Krauss video was; you replied: “I posted that to show you some basic things current science has to say about the universe, as well as how the scientific method works and why we define truth the way we do. You say odd things all the time that imply you don’t really understand how the opposing position works, especially materialism.”
first, I did learn a few things, thanks. Mainly I had not read into this dark stuff business, and Krauss gave me a nice lay intro. Still, I really would like to ask why he believes in any such PHENOMENAL “universe”! (I can speak of universe, or THE world, only because I see the unity as a super-phenomenal one. But phenomenally, I think we truly are in our OWN world / personal-verse! I really wonder if even the likes of Krauss could point to some evidence to justify his prefix “uni” regarding phenomena. Can you, Rubix?)
second, why do you think I don’t understand how qualified I am apply the scientific method? Third, you say “we”: a) bold, bold, bold, do you really thing you deserve to be a member; or, b), am I also a member? fourth, I think you implicitly trample “truth” – and as I pointed out (as one of the first things I said in this forum), even Feynman acknowledged that even the simple act of counting requires “a starting in the middle”. How good a starting in the middle can we choose?
Fifth, the things I say are “odd” to you; they are not odd to me. Furthermore, you attribute the oddness erroneously if you attribute it to my rather than your own inadequacy. Materialism doesn’t work. We have been over the difficulty of “work”, but you refuse to acknowledge your limitation before it. Also, I have no doubt that scientist will confirm that materialism does not work, in due time. The phenomenal (concieved alone: Materialism) is a (fair {and intelligible}) derivative picture of the i’dealistic works. Some day this will not seem odd to scientists. Anyway, if I don’t really understand your position (materialism) that does not imply that I understand it less well than you yourself. I understand your position better than you do, in fact. And it is the fact that I have moved beyond your position that you find me odd.
I had asked you why you thought I need your help understanding the nature of science. You replied, “When you imply that evidence lacks justification, or that I am operating on “faith/e” (clearly, you cannot read me well, either), or that we need to explain “why water” or “why/how time works” in order to talk about things in the physical universe.”
You have misunderstood me. I don’t think you have ever put in much effort to put yourself in my shoes, to be sure. That is, you are trying to interpret me from your position, but that’s silly because I deny your position. Anyway, concretely, first, when I say you live by faith/e I know that I am telling you something that you do not believe. Something you refuse to believe despite overwhelming evidence. I tell you that you live by faith/e, even though I know that you deny it. That is, I understand pretty well where you are coming from. Second, regarding “evidence lacks justification”, you are conflating things terribly. Evidence is evidence, the question is what is it evidence of? From there we discussed two levels in the spectrum of faith/e, namely confidence and justification. I said that I understood your confidence in attributing the evidence to your particular “of”, but that you had no justification. I tried to show you that justification is a real thing/experience, and that you have yet to attain to it (if you had you would be an i’dealist, and you would scoff at materialism 😉 ). Third, regarding about “talking about things in the physical …”, I have never chastened you for this! And, in fact, I have endorsed precisely that. All I want from you there is that you limit yourself to the relationships that science is qualified to speak to! I have chastened you for not so limiting yourself! You gloss over all sorts of very significant questions – questions that good scientists don’t allow themselves to trample (which is why they squirm – not necessarily “uncomfortably” – when answering questions: it is real hard to keep oneself from crossing lines they are not qualified to cross! Rubix, I seem “odd” to you because I am, in fact, way better than you at speaking scientifically!)
you continued, “Again, if you want a more explicit definition, when we say something is true, what we really mean is that we are very confident in the predictive ability of the theory in its capacity to explain evidence due to its track record and success in the past.”
Again, am I part of that “we”? But, Rubix, when we say something is true, we mean that it is demonstrably true relative to some starting in the middle. But the validity of that starting in the middle is left a totally open question – thus also the truth. Rubix, we are very tentative and precise about our claims; and you need some tightening up here. Furthermore, “explain” is just too strong a word! Explanation is the hope towards which we are building; we aren’t there. What we are confident about is that the rigorous relationships we have developed will not fall by the wayside this moment, or this moment, or this moment. But, Rubix, our confidence that these relationships will not be invalidated by new evidence is not to say we know how things “work”. We BELIEVE that things work, and we believe that they work in such a way that our relationships will not be shown TOO false. Or, for the lay man, science is the practice of eliminating the non-sensical. We are ever honing in on “truth” by ever increasing our ability to say what is definitely false. Science does not say what is true-hard, it says that what is true-hard – and we BELIEVE that there is such a REALITY – cannot lie too far from the relationships we have rigorously developed. (I suggest you compare this proper nature of science with my suggestion that idealism comes as a self-limitation.) Another way, Rubix, science is working towards a justified explanation, but it isn’t there yet (and this tiny mustard seed of faith/e will not be eliminated when we get there! 😉 ).
you continued, “There are plenty of things we don’t understand (QM is one of them) on a fundamental level, but we don’t need to understand the nuts and bolts 100% in order to know that they work.”, yes, you do. It is, in fact, this precise fact that drives we scientists towards an ever better and better understanding of what is definitely not true. Rubix, what is the name for the thing that does NOT require 100% understanding to use? … faith/e! Further, regarding “to know that they work”, why not say ” to know that they don’t obviously say something non-sensical – and are thus at least a decent candidate for our living faith/e”?
you continued, “Nobody knows all the nuts and bolts, and anyone who claims to is …”, very nice. But one can know the NATURE of all the nuts and bolts (by nuts and bolts I mean various “I am”, of course).. And one, God, might even be ACQUAINTED (acquaintence doesn’t violate the proprietary and unknowable limits of individual I am) with all the nuts and bolts.
you said, “”Nothing” is still a framework of “something,” and it’s enough to explain the nature of how our universe arose from it…”, ugghhhh! it doesn’t “explain”! But, to the extent that it does something like explain – it provides a rigorous relationship in which you might choose to found your faith/e – it also does not explain “how”! merely THAT! So, rather, we scientists might something like “… and it’s enough to suggest that the nature of reality is such THAT it cannot be other than …”.
you said, “What Krauss is saying here is that there’s a huge difference between thinking something’s made with you in mind, versus the fact that you just happen to be the result of some byprocess because conditions were right for it.”
There is a middle option, Rubix. It is the option that denies both a God who is an efficient cause of you and me, according to some pre-plan or fate, and it also denies the deterministic materiealism inherent in “just happen” and “byprocess”. Reality is continuously created by the plural I am. Each I am is similarly potent (though “similar” does not mean to suggest that there is not also a great phenomenal range). Everything is the result of some meaningful decision(s) by some one (many) I am. Not everything is decided with you in mind. But, nothing that is decided can utterly preclude you, either.
Rubix, you have been giving science a bad name with your transgressions. I tell you again, keep your dirty paws off her. I love her too (more than you even). 🙂
Tim
Sigh. John Fringe is right. You’re just a crank, lol. Your entire argument is pretty much repeating “I understand your position better than you do” without any actual supporting arguments, lol. It’s like you’re not even listening to what’s being said to you. How old are you?
“Evidence is evidence, the question is what is it evidence of”
Alright, get a garage with a passcode, place an expensive car in it, then tell only me the code. If your car happens to be gone tomorrow, that’s not evidence that I had your car stolen.
Rubix,
as I’ve told you before, I’m not here to present you an argument. I have a position and I am painting a picture of it for you. If you want to see where I’m coming from, though, you will have to do the work required to see it.
Anyway, I suspect I got this response from you this time because I did also just paint a far superior picture than you painted about the nature of science: eliminating the definitely false. Science is about increasing one’s ability to say what is definitely false / non-sensical, that’s it. You are a fool to claim more. And you sully science with a bad name in your wake. That is, science doesn’t properly claim to offer truth. Good scientists would chastise you for your unlawfulness. Etc. and etc.
If this means we’re done, I’m happy (as happy as I can be under the circumstances) to let you get on with your stealing, cars or otherwise.
Tim
I have a serious question for you. Do you have autism or a mental disorder or something? And, seriously, how old are you? I’m not trying to be an ass, but it’s like I can tell you something and you just ignore it and assume I’m saying something different. Read what I am saying.
I’m not “claiming more.” I’m not claiming that science is offering absolute truths. I have argued time and time again that science is all about falsification, the decay of untruth, and the strength of prediction. This is how science works.
I have no idea why you turn around and say “I’m claiming more.” I think you’re confusing yourself.
Rubix,
to be sure, when I say I’m not here to provide you an argument, that is not to say that I haven’t demonstrated that I understand both the nature and the limits of science better than you. The point I have focused on centrally is the nature or time / change / dynamism. You refuse to admit of the limits of science here. In the past, under the conditions of the debate at that time, I had asked you to tell me how one might “observe” momentum. If you want to broaden this question now, to tell us how things “work”, please do. More recently you have suggested the example of boiling water, I have asked if you could describe HOW water boils.
“It just does.” is all you offer. Not very satisfying to the inquisitive / scientifically inclined!
now I can let you get back to stealing,
best, (and I mean THAT),
Tim
Rubix,
I posted the last without seeing your reply.
I read what you say. You are not consistent. You say both things, but you refuse to admit to it. I know that you have talked about falsification, in places, but you don’t understand how deep that goes! You turn around and use science as a foundation for truth in the same paragraphs! Your words, “Again, if you want a more explicit definition, when we say something is true, …”. The better of the scientists would never go so far! While it is easier to speak AS IF one were speaking of truth, the better scientists always know that a formulation in terms of falsehood is more proper.
Tim
Rubix,
one more, regarding your, “I’m not “claiming more.” I’m not claiming that science is offering absolute truths.”. You have claimed that materialistic determinism is sufficient to explain everything. Or am I totally misremembering this? You have also claimed that the time-resolved relationships you have which DESCRIBE the phenomenal are enough in themselves to explain HOW the phenomena WORK. That is, you are claiming more than science (and scientific relationships) permits you to claim.
Tim
“The point I have focused on centrally is the nature or time / change / dynamism. You refuse to admit of the limits of science here.”
No, you’re refusing to accept that we don’t need to know “why/how time” in order to know that time DOES exist and that it works. Again, it’s like saying that you need to know “why water” in order to know “how” water works. It’s a completely silly way to approach the problem.
“In the past, under the conditions of the debate at that time, I had asked you to tell me how one might “observe” momentum”
In Newtonian physics, you could say it’s a vector quantity — a product of mass and velocity. It’s not something you “observe.” It’s a defined concept that is useful for deriving values in other applications (e.g. via conservation of momentum).
“I have asked if you could describe HOW water boils. ‘It just does’ is all you offer.”
Uhhhhhh, that is NOT all that science offers — are you kidding me? It can explain boiling water just fine. We can talk about the process of boiling water in terms of water molecules, density differentials as you add energy to the system, how the energy transfers, how pressure affects boiling temperature, how temperature is defined, how the molecules change, etc, we could go on. We explain it all in terms of the underlying frameworks.
That’s why I showed you the Feynman video. It’s like asking “Well, magnets, how do they work?” We can dig deeper and deeper, but ultimately we’re going to hit a wall because we can’t explain something in terms of something else you’re more familiar with. You have to accept something as true when faced with unknowns, as that is the best you can do. We don’t know “why” the magnetic force “exists,” specifically, or “why” it works the way it does. We just know that it does, and it works in a way we can test and observe.
“You have claimed that materialistic determinism is sufficient to explain everything.”
What I mean is that oftentimes you’ll hear philosophers and theists think that “something more” is required when science/materialism is perfectly sufficient in addressing a particular problem.
“You have also claimed that the time-resolved relationships you have which DESCRIBE the phenomenal are enough in themselves to explain HOW the phenomena WORK. That is, you are claiming more than science (and scientific relationships) permits you to claim.”
When I say something explains “how it works,” obviously I mean “how it works within the frameworks.” I’m not claiming that science tells you how something works objectively with 100% certainty (that’s the whole damn point of falsifiability). Again, actually read what’s being said to you, please.
Rubix,
you said, “No, you’re refusing to accept that we don’t need to know “why/how time” in order to know that time DOES exist and that it works.”, if only this was what the debate had been about! I never refused to accept that! I do accept that! (Tell me where I didn’t!) This question came up because we disagree about the nature of time, roughly speaking. You have suggested that the fact that it works is evidence that it works SIMPLY, qua “it just does”; that’s the problem. The fact that it works does not imply that it works without our will!
you continued, “Again, it’s like saying that you need to know “why water” in order to know “how” water works. It’s a completely silly way to approach the problem.”, my point was that science can ignore the problem of how. It can ignore that problem because scientists have another tool in their toolbox, faith/e. Scientists don’t need to go after the problem of HOW in order to go after the problem of THAT. That was the point of that exchange. Science has been pretty useless before the problem of HOW, but very impressive before the problem of THAT. And that is a distinction worth recognizing.
I had asked, “In the past, under the conditions of the debate at that time, I had asked you to tell me how one might “observe” momentum”
You replied, “In Newtonian physics, you could say it’s a vector quantity — a product of mass and velocity. It’s not something you “observe.” It’s a defined concept that is useful for deriving values in other applications (e.g. via conservation of momentum).”, right. It isn’t observable per se. That was my point to you back then, as I recall. Our debate back then was about observation, and you had proferred that science didn’t buy in to anything not observable. So I picked up momentum because it is such a fundamental concept regarding time / change / dynamism, yet it only comes about as a calculated quantity in the relationships. Many questions arise: the fact that velocity, and thus momentum, requires a relationship between… etc. and etc. Anyway, none of this here gets you past the problem of THAT.
you said, “Uhhhhhh, that is NOT all that science offers — are you kidding me? It can explain boiling water just fine.”, damnit!!!! Science doesn’t EXPLAIN shit! See how you speak out of both sides of your mouth regarding false v. true? Science offers some very rigorous THAT-type relationships which only say that things which are too much removed from those relationships (depending on which one we are talking about) are definitely false. They don’t offer any such THE true; so they don’t EXPLAIN. (Do you have a mental illness? how old are you?)
You continued, “We can talk about the process of boiling water” – cutting in, are you sure boiling water qualifies as a “process”? – “in terms of water molecules, density differentials as you add energy to the system, how the energy transfers, how pressure affects boiling temperature, how temperature is defined,” – cutting in again, please, do tell! not only temperature, but pressure too! – “how the molecules change, etc, we could go on. We explain” – describe!!! – “it all in terms of the underlying frameworks.” – I notice you answer this well away from where I first brought it up. I wonder why…
you said, “That’s why I showed you the Feynman video. It’s like asking “Well, magnets, how do they work?” We can dig deeper and deeper, but ultimately we’re going to hit a wall because we can’t explain something in terms of something else you’re more familiar with.”, this isn’t obvious. Again, I mean the “it’s like” part. Either way, again I wonder why you think I need this kind of “help”? I think my original presentation of the boiling water question should have relieved you of that concern. You continued, “You have to accept something as true when faced with unknowns,” – lol. Feynman said that he, and good scientists, were comfortable with the unknowns straight up. You continued, “as that is the best you can do.” – no. I don’t think so. And this is the point about you taking both sides of the false v. true thing. Science sticks to the false part. You continued, “We don’t know “why” the magnetic force “exists,” specifically, or “why” it works the way it does.”, thank you! you continued, “We just know that it does,” – rather, you TRUST that it does, knowing that it HAS! you continued, “and it works in a way we can test and observe.”, fine. But that you can test and observe that it works in a way that you can test and observe is not to say that you can then go on to say that you know how it works! Please just stick to your wise words, “we don’t know “why” … it works the way it does”, that’s all I have been asking you.
maybe we are honing in on some agreement after all!
next post:
I had said, “You have claimed that materialistic determinism is sufficient to explain everything.”, and you replied, “What I mean is that oftentimes you’ll hear philosophers and theists think that “something more” is required when science/materialism is perfectly sufficient in addressing a particular problem.”, Rubix, when you admit, without hitch, without fail, that the problem of time reduces you always to saying, wisely, as you have said, “we don’t know “why” … it works the way it does”, then you can never say “science/materialism is perfectly sufficient in addressing a particular problem.”! Do you see this? Like Krauss had said, ~11:30 “what you take from it depends on your religious and metaphysical beliefs.” And, I might add, like Pirsig says, ~”no one can avoid metaphysics.”
You said, “When I say something explains “how it works,” obviously I mean “how it works within the frameworks.”, this is not obvious, one; two, it is a bad habit, at best; three, scientific frameworks don’t explain HOW, but THAT. Back to this boiling water problem again; and this is funny! Technically speaking, thermodynamics actually precludes boiling! Thermodynamics is a science based on equilibrium, and boiling is a non-equilibrium phenomena! Anyway, whatever your habit has been, I hope to convince you that you will be a much better ambassador for science if you would abandon this bad habit of conflating WHY- and HOW-type problems for the THAT-type problems that science does handle very well. And that it doesn’t explain, but DESCRIBE. (There may even be a better word than “describe”; I should think about it.) So, thermodynamics gives a description of “water” suggesting THAT it will boil under so and so conditions. Are we close to agreement?
You continued, “I’m not claiming that science tells you how something works objectively with 100% certainty (that’s the whole damn point of falsifiability). Again, actually read what’s being said to you, please.”, maybe we aren’t. Rubix, you are way to lax in your speech. That’s not my problem. It so happens that better scientists (and philosophers) find good reason to be more precise. I do hope you will join us (you could be a very nice addition).
Tim
As I said before, you’re mincing words.
“Our debate back then was about observation, and you had proferred that science didn’t buy in to anything not observable.”
Strawman. Momentum technically IS an observable. It’s not a physical “thing” but it’s a measurable property. It’s still a physical concept that we can discuss in a scientific framework. It’s a useful concept because it’s defined in a specific way, we can measure it, and we can use it to explain and predict other eventualities within a physical framework.
“Science doesn’t EXPLAIN shit!”
This is just pure crackpottery, lol. The correct answer is actually yes, it absolutely does. You imply it doesn’t explain but rather “describe” — but in a scientific framework, these two concepts are used interchangeably. The explanation is done via description, hypothesis, evidence, prediction, consistency, etc. It’s not an important distinction to make. When science makes a claim of explanation, it’s *obviously* not the same as saying “Hey, we just totally explained how this works 100%, and there’s nothing more we can ever possibly learn about this.” Again, that’s the entire point of falsifiability. We say that things explain phenomena *in terms of the frameworks given*.
“[about why magnetism works the way it does] Rather, you TRUST that it does, knowing that it HAS.”
It’s Occam’s Razor, here. There’s no reason for us to think anything different. It’s always worked, and there aren’t any conditions that’d make us think it suddenly wouldn’t.
“But that you can test and observe that it works in a way that you can test and observe is not to say that you can then go on to say that you know how it works! Please just stick to your wise words, “we don’t know “why” … it works the way it does”, that’s all I have been asking you.”
Except that’s *what science already does* lmfao. How many times must I repeat myself? We don’t say “we know how it works 100%.” Everything is always with respect to the frameworks. No claims are made about “absolute reality” because there are serious problems that arise when you start claiming truths about things you can’t possibly know or have evidence for.
“We don’t know “why” … it works the way it does”, then you can never say “science/materialism is perfectly sufficient in addressing a particular problem”
Some problems may not have answers yet, but that doesn’t mean we know for sure that materialism won’t have something to say about it later. It just means we don’t know yet. There’s a difference between “we don’t know yet” and “something more is required.” If you don’t know something yet, you don’t yet know if something more is required! We can only address problems when we’re able to get to them as we learn more. It’s possible that some questions we’ll never know the answer to — and it’s a bit of a sad thought.
“this is not obvious, one; two, it is a bad habit, at best; three, scientific frameworks don’t explain HOW, but THAT”
1. It is obvious, because that’s how science works, and it’s how it’s commonly understood to work by its definition. 2. It’s not a bad habit — it’s that it’s not an important distinction to make because the falsifiable nature of science is sufficient implication that claims made are obviously not intended to be taken as objectively true explanations for how or why something works. No serious scientist claims anything differently — people who imply otherwise are attacking a strawman. 3. I just addressed this.
“Technically speaking, thermodynamics actually precludes boiling”
WTF, this is just… beyond ignorant. Whatever, lol, What an absurd statement, haha. Please learn how thermodynamics works and why the boiling of water is obviously a thermodynamic problem, especially where convection is concerned.
“Rubix, you are way to lax in your speech. That’s not my problem.”
It would help if you actually understood how science works before attacking it for how it’s defined. There’s nothing “lax” in my speech.
Rubix,
I was actually pretty hopeful that we might have been approaching some agreement when I turned to this site today. I’ve read just a couple paragraphs and recognize that it is too soon. Let’s see what you offer though.
You start, “As I said before, you’re mincing words.”, someone above had said ~”one man’s [mincing] is another man’s precision.” Rubix, I am being precise, and there is good reason for it. REASON, mind you. I hope that its just your pride getting in the way here.
You said, “Momentum technically IS an observable.”, I get your motivation for saying that. But your thinking is too superficial. There is good reason to recognize that it is a derived… “observable” if you must. You continued, “it’s not a physical “thing” but it’s a measurable property.”, this gets real interesting: not being a physical thing, what is it a property of? Velocity is something based on relationship. Mass – even – is something based on relationship. I’ll let this ruminate. You continued, “It’s still a physical concept that we can discuss in a scientific framework. It’s a useful concept because it’s defined in a specific way, we can measure it, and we can use it to explain and predict other eventualities within a physical framework.”, okay (mostly). Again, why you think I need this “help” is beyond me. Notice, though, “we”, “we”, “we”. You still need to break yourself of this bad habit vis-a-vis “explain”.
I had said, “Science doesn’t EXPLAIN shit!”, you replied, “This is just pure crackpottery, lol.”, not at all. The whole point, again, Rubix, is that science speaks of “explanation” only because speaking in positive is so much easier. Every quality scientist knows, even as he “explains” the phenomena, that he is not explaining shit, but rather, that he is painting in negative. The picture he wants to come out at last is that is that his “explanation” is such that it gets you close to that which is not false. Again, Rubix, despite your adamant demands of falsifiabilty in one extreme, you abandon yourself to truthiness in the other. What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander (here).
you continued, “The correct answer is actually yes, it absolutely does. You imply it doesn’t explain but rather “describe” — but in a scientific framework, these two concepts are used interchangeably.”, no they aren’t. You just aren’t a very good scientist. lol. Well, to be sure, there are a lot of not-very-good scientists out there (degrees are handed out like halloween candy these days: all a kid need do is say “boo” {and then be willing to wait around long enough}), getting shit done. Anyway, there is still a problem even with “describe” – since it too is in truthspeak – so I will have to see if I can come up with a better word – one rooted in falsespeak – but at least “describe” refrains from the great arrogance of “explain”. And good scientists appreciate the difference.
You continued, “The explanation is done via description, hypothesis, evidence, prediction, consistency, etc. It’s not an important distinction to make.”, “explanation” says, “we got it all covered; no surprises left in here.” I understand that scientists will, when speaking with people who are even further from being expert on the matter, end up making a great many concessions in fine just to be able to get across some broad point. This is why I granted Feynman so much leeway in that magnetism vid. And, Rubix, if you were speaking to a lesser scientist than yourself here I would probably grant you the same leeway. But that doesn’t mean its wise! Anyway, I still wonder why you think I need your “help” in comprehending how lesser scientists “get shit done”. I don’t. I am talking about what may seem a senseless fine point to you, but it has great philosophical moment. I would that scientists spoke more precisely… well, for a number of reasons. You suffer until now because this bad habit was so pervasive.
You continued, “When science makes a claim of explanation, it’s *obviously* not the same as saying “Hey, we just totally explained how this works 100%, and there’s nothing more we can ever possibly learn about this.” UGGGGHHHHH. it is not obvious at all! Certainly not to the laymen – and children – who think scientists think they know everything. It is a bad habit. And there are many very good reasons why you should desist. And, to be sure, you suffer from the fog you create too! And! If it’s as you say, that scientists use “explain” and “describe” interchangeably, why would you be so opposed to getting rid of “explain”?
You continued, “Again, that’s the entire point of falsifiability. We say that things explain phenomena *in terms of the frameworks given*.”, dude, if you think that this is the proper and precise way to say it, then just make sure never to forget this “*in terms of the framework given*” caveat. Say it every time. Without fail. But, to be sure, there is no scientific framework which describes time, so you will also have to admit there there is an implicit caveat ever present regarding “we say”, and you should make that caveat explicit, every time, without fail, too. Notice: these two caveats meet up! “*in terms of the frameworks give*” means, as Feynman noted in his lectures on physics, that there is a “starting in the middle” that was needed to (help) generate the framework (if it wasn’t based on “first” principles), and the flip side of that coin is the “I faith/e” thing that you refuse to admit in to your “explain”. Lastly, here, you say “that’s the entire point of falsifiability”, but I repeat, there is *also* the gander side to your goosey presentation! The better scientist do recognize, Rubix, that all the pictures they paint in truthspeak are just negatives of the falsespeak picture which they intend to reveal. Good scientists, Rubix, are always inverting that negative. And there is good reason to speak precisely, not only does it help in the inversion process, but it helps to keep the uninitiated, and the as-of-yet-still-immature, from being confused about the highly limited scope of scientific claims.
I had said, “[about why magnetism works the way it does] Rather, you TRUST that it does, knowing that it HAS.”, you replied, “It’s Occam’s Razor, here. There’s no reason for us to think anything different.”, yes there is: the fact that science offers no framework to “explain” time. Forgive me if I’m confused, but Occam’s Razor works when deciding between two or more “explanations”. Here you have none! I’d love to see how you’re applying the Razor! You continued, “It’s always worked, and there aren’t any conditions that’d make us think it suddenly wouldn’t.”, what “It”, jackass? There is no explanation for time therein that could have any such “it”, much less it’s “working”. If you don’t get scared, the “it” that is “working” is YOUR faith/e! Or, can you find something less complex than this arrangement I offer? (“It just does”)
you said, “Except that’s *what science already does* lmfao.”, you’re such a jackass. You know my first point, or at least you should. My second is that “science” is no real thing that it could do anything: scienTISTS do stuff. You contiued, “How many times must I repeat myself? We don’t say “we know how it works 100%.”, the problem, again, is that you *know* *how* *it* *works* precisely 0%. And it is no small crime that you give the impression that it is higher. You continued “Everything is always with respect to the frameworks. No claims are made about “absolute reality” because there are serious problems that arise when you start claiming truths about things you can’t possibly know or have evidence for.”, every good scientist believes that there is some REALITY. Every good scientist recognizes the wisdom in refraining from bearing false witness against it (/himself).
I had said, quoting you (twice), “”We don’t know “why” … it works the way it does”, then you can never say “science/materialism is perfectly sufficient in addressing a particular problem””, and you replied, “Some problems may not have answers yet, but that doesn’t mean we know for sure that materialism won’t have something to say about it later. It just means we don’t know yet. There’s a difference between “we don’t know yet” and “something more is required.” If you don’t know something yet, you don’t yet know if something more is required!”, and you don’t know that it’s not. You’ve admitted that before, so I don’t think you need hammering. But I will just point out that you are the one who suggested the “perfect sufficiency” of materialism (at least before some problem or problems). But when time itself remains a complete darkness… You continued, “We can only address problems when we’re able to get to them as we learn more. It’s possible that some questions we’ll never know the answer to — and it’s a bit of a sad thought.”, I don’t know why you find that sad! Life (which is the least complex i’dea) would get real boring if there weren’t any good questions left! Rubix, I think that betrays the fact that – despite your claims – your mind is rooted in some false-science truthspeak. That you aren’t the type of scientist that Feynman was, comfortable being rooted in the unknown. This is why I am working so hard to offer you a faith/e that you might accept. It is a faith/e that is acceptable to me. And I have offered that it is a faith/e that is OF God himself. How else might an infinite i’dea also be a definite i’dea?
I had said, “Technically speaking, thermodynamics actually precludes boiling”
you replied:
“WTF, this is just… beyond ignorant. Whatever, lol, What an absurd statement, haha. Please learn how thermodynamics works and why the boiling of water is obviously a thermodynamic problem, especially where convection is concerned.”
hahahahaha… hahahahhaha. I can’t stop!
“especially where convection is concerned”? huh? What does convection have to do with thermo? I mean, of course one could think of some tangential relation, but convection isn’t internal to thermo”dynamics” at all! lol.
Now, to be sure, I am somewhat aware, peripherally, as it were, that there is a burgeoning field of “non-equilibrium thermodynamics”, which, I suppose, would set its aims at answering such problems. Rubix, I don’t doubt that you understand QM better than I do, but you seem worse than an lay ignoramus about thermo. Thermo is a science of equilibrium. It can describe the equilibrium phase “behavior” of some such “water”. But the non-equilibrium phase transition stuff is utterly beyond it! “Please learn how thermodynamics works”. That is, “works”. Are you still laughing? Is this really where you want to challenge me on science?
I had said, “Rubix, you are way to lax in your speech. That’s not my problem.”, let me add, to be precise, while it is not “my” problem, since we are in this together, it is also my problem.
You replied, “It would help if you actually understood how science works before attacking it for how it’s defined. There’s nothing “lax” in my speech.”, if there is nothing lax in your speech, it is only because you are – without laxity – transgressing the limitations of science. I understand quite well how scientists use science. Both the good ones and the not-so-good ones. I am hoping to convince you to elevate your game. To join the better ones. I wonder on what evidence you are basing your conclusion that I don’t understand how science works. Whatever it is, it is a perfect example of why you should use more caution.
thanks for the laugh, hahahahaha,
Tim
P.S. “especially where convection is concerned.”, hahahahahaha…
“What does convection have to do with thermo? I mean, of course one could think of some tangential relation, but convection isn’t internal to thermo”dynamics” at all! lol.”
lol.
Rubix,
nice! I had had the slightest reservation that this was some sort of test, akin to the one you claim to have administered to Langan above. I was wondering why you would risk your whole credibility vis-a-vis your ability to sniff out crackpottery on such a statement. Your whole credibility is now suspect. Both as scientist and as free thinker.
I will excerpt a bit from “Introduction to chemical engineering thermodynamics” (fifth edition), by Smith, Van Ness, and Abbott (a very well respect text book):
Chapter 1.1, p.1 (PAGE 1!), [my emphasis – unless otherwise noted]:
“The science of thermodynamics was born in the nineteenth century of the need to DESCRIBE the operation of steam engines and to set forth the LIMITS of what they can accomplish. Thus the name itself denotes power developed from heat, … . However, the principles observed … were soon generalized … . These laws have NO PROOF in the mathematical sense; their VALIDITY lies in the ABSENCE OF CONTRARY experience. Thus thermodynamics shares with mechanics and electromagnetism a basis in laws.
… The chemical engineer must cope with a wide variety of problems. Among them are … and the determination of EQUILIBRIUM conditions for chemical reactions and for the transfer [not by “convection”] of chemical species between phases.
Thermodynamic considerations do NOT establish the RATES [italics in original!] of chemical or physical processes. [!] Rates depend on both driving force and resistance. Although driving forces are thermodynamic variables, RESISTANCES ARE NOT. Neither can thermodynamics, a MACROSCOPIC-PROPERTY formulation, reveal the microscopic (molecular) mechanisms of physical or chemical processes.”
Now, on “equilibrium”, see chapter 2.7, p.34:
EQUILIBRIUM [italics in original] is a word denoting a STATIC condition, the ABSENCE of CHANGE. [!] In thermodynamics it is taken to mean not only the absence of change, but the absence of any TENDENCY [italics in original] toward change on a macroscopic scale. [!!!] Thus a system at equilibrium is one which exists under such conditions that there is NO TENDENCY for a CHANGE IN STATE to occur. [!] Since any tendency toward change is caused by a driving force of one kind or another, the absence of such a tendency indicates also the absence of any driving force. Hence a system at EQUILIBRIUM man be described as one in which all forces are in exact balance. Whether a change actually occurs in a system NOT AT EQUILIBRIUM depends on RESISTANCE as well as on driving force. Many systems undergo no measurable change even under the influence of large driving forces, because resistance is very large.”
and I repeat:
“Although driving forces are thermodynamic variables, RESISTANCES ARE NOT.”
“Thermodynamic considerations do NOT establish the RATES [italics in original!] of chemical or physical processes. [!]”
“EQUILIBRIUM [italics in original] is a word denoting a STATIC condition, the ABSENCE of CHANGE. [!]
see how nice thermo”dynamics”, the scientists who properly employ it, keep their dirty hands off time?
have fun, imposter,
Tim
Uh, no, I’m not the crazy crackpot here insisting that thermodynamics and convection aren’t related and that thermodynamics precludes boiling due to the concept of equilibrium. This is beyond stupid and I’m just going to assume you’re trying to troll me, because that argument is just too ridiculous. Also, scientists use time in their equations/models *all the time*. I’m not going to waste any more time on this nonsense. Educate yourself.
Rubix,
your credibility was gone yesterday, now I’ve next to no respect for you. All this talk about how cranks will never admit that their wrong; there you go. I quoted you from the eminent text book for chemical engineers on thermodynamics. I suppose you think that not only the authors of the book themselves, but also all the professors from all the schools who use the book must have just overlooked the garbage that got in there. lol.
Please, show us one instance where convection does come in to thermodynamics. If I am the autistic, mentally-ill, trolling kindergarten crackpot you say I am, it should be easy for you, the highly credentialed, peer-reviewed article publishing, patent holding scientist to produce an equation or something showing an inherent connection between convection and thermodynamics.
About thermodynamics “precluding” boiling, you might, if you are willing to back tract on the importance of speaking precisely, be able to find a SLIGHTLY more preferable word. But let me be clear about how slight that will be. Thermodynamics does not deal with rates, as we have seen. “BOILING” is a process dominated by rates. This rate-y thing is totally beyond thermodynamics. Thermodynamics would have the equilibrium established immediately, ideally! (See how an i’dealist might like thermo?) When Smith, Van Ness, and Abbott, said “the determination of EQUILIBRIUM conditions for … the transfer of chemical species between phases.”, they weren’t talking even about diffusion (a resistance-y thing handled by the empirical subject “mass transport”), much less “convection”. They were talking about an ideal transfer! Jackass. Thermodynamics deals with EQUILIBRIUM: a “static condition”.
Let me also repeat them thus, “Neither can thermodynamics, a MACROSCOPIC-PROPERTY formulation, reveal the microscopic (molecular) mechanisms of physical or chemical processes.” — pointing out for you that I probably should have highlighted “MECHANISMS”. Regarding mechanisms within thermodynamics, the thermodynamician holds to “it just does”, ideally.
You said, “Uh, no, I’m not the crazy crackpot here insisting that thermodynamics and convection aren’t related and that thermodynamics precludes boiling due to the concept of equilibrium.”
Rubix, thermo precludes boiling because boiling is a non-equilibrium process and thermo, technically, would have the result of that process, immediately and ideally. I never said it precluded the RESULT of the process, but that it precluded the process itself. But you don’t care about precision in thinking and speech. Thermo cannot handle the resistances of the very complicated heat transfer and mass transport phenomena that occur in a pot of heating and then boiling water.
Rubix, clearly you should know (especially if you were even a mildly proficient scientist) — that you don’t understand thermodynamics! You should know to shut your mouth. And you should know when someone who could teach you something stands before you. You don’t. You need an institution to tell you who to listen to.
you continued, “This is beyond stupid and I’m just going to assume you’re trying to troll me, because that argument is just too ridiculous.”
I probably shouldn’t, but in the words of Katy Perry, “that was such an epic fail … last friday night”. Rubix, I hope you don’t take it too hard, but I hope you take it kinda hard. Actually, maybe Katy offers something here too!: “[Postings] of last night, and it got online, I’m screw-ewed. Oh well” (It’s actually a really cute video, you should watch: “Fri-daaaayy”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlyXNRrsk4A&ob=av2e)
One more nail to hammer: you said, “Also, scientists use time in their equations/models *all the time*.” — yes, in the “it just does” fashion. Time gets attached as a tag, as part of the observable making up the description (not explanation). Reality gets time-resolved in this way (as I have said), but the workings of time itself is never described. And, again, this is of huge philosophical moment. Something definitely worth the precision in thought and speech.
Rubix, you suggest to me, “Educate yourself.”. I’ll do so at my pace. But at least my pace is one that carries me forward. You have cluttered your mind so terribly that you have a huge cleaning job ahead of you. At least quit pretending. You hurt more people than just you when you play the imposter so ardently in places like this. There may be kids watching.
take care,
and if you can produce that thermodynamic convection thing you were talking about, rest assured that I’m prepared to take my own medicine, (I usually think of that before I speak, bt-dubbs {and I suspect that Feynman’s squirming in that magnetism vid is evidence that he does likewise, so you know what it [the PROCESS – whereas in a forum like this you only see the result 😉 ] looks like}),
Tim
“All this talk about how cranks will never admit that their wrong; there you go”
Because *I’m not wrong here* dude. LOL. You are being seriously stupid right now.
“I quoted you from the eminent text book for chemical engineers on thermodynamics”
Yes, and yet you still screwed up.
“Please, show us one instance where convection does come in to thermodynamics.”
Convection: A movement of molecules that is typically a great way to transfer heat. Natural convection is what makes water boil. Convection relates to thermodynamics because thermodynamics describes the nature of heat transfer in the broadest sense. If you can’t see how these two things are related, then I cannot help you.
“”BOILING” is a process dominated by rates”
Sweet jesus, boiling is a process dominated by natural convection. It’s not “a process dominated by rates.” You can CALCULATE problems that include rates with respect to boiling, but boiling itself is a thermodynamic process because it’s all about how the transfer of heat to a liquid in a gravitational field causes the physical result that we describe as boiling.
“Thermodynamics deals with EQUILIBRIUM: a “static condition”.”
Gee, I wonder what “dynamics” means. Equilibrium is a static condition *after changes have been calculated into account*.
“You should know to shut your mouth. And you should know when someone who could teach you something stands before you. You don’t. You need an institution to tell you who to listen to.”
No, you’re just running your mouth over things you don’t understand. The fact I am even wasting my time replying to this is just sad. I’m only doing this because you appear to be sincere in your confusion.
“But at least my pace is one that carries me forward. You have cluttered your mind so terribly that you have a huge cleaning job ahead of you. At least quit pretending. You hurt more people than just you when you play the imposter so ardently in places like this. ”
You’re totally right — my cluttered mind is so shitty that it carried me through perfect test scores, Ivy League institutions, top grades, fantastic research opportunities, incredibly selective career tracks, published works, and the chance to produce concrete scientific contributions to society. Yeah, I have no idea what I’m talking about. Being a metaphysical crackpot seems to be the far superior way to “carry yourself forward.”
“And if you can produce that thermodynamic convection thing you were talking about”
Sure thing: Put a pot of water on the stove. Turn the stove on.
Rubix,
I start to reply having only read up to your: “Natural convection is what makes water boil. Convection relates to thermodynamics because thermodynamics describes the nature of heat transfer in the broadest sense.” — I’m starting to feel real bad for you. This isn’t a fair fight. Never was. Anyone who has studied thermodynamics with any integrity sees how clueless you are. And how willing you are to think about it at the moment! Since you refuse to think now, there is nothing I can do for you. I am going to try to extract myself from my conversation with you. Perhaps Chris is right to never think of giving anonymous ******* the time of day. Sad. Anyway, I still have to defend myself from your baseless attacks, so while I have half a mind to go light on you, it won’t be too light.
I had said, “All this talk about how cranks will never admit that their wrong; there you go” — they’re, sometimes my hands mis interpret ;-). You replied, “Because *I’m not wrong here* dude. LOL. You are being seriously stupid right now.” — dude, you are so far out of your element right now. Why can’t you admit that thermodynamics is something you have never studied, and that you are totally clueless about? Let anyone who might be reading and who also has never studied thermodynamics (whether at an institution of on his own) know that you are totally guessing. Save some self-respect. In chess a man who knows he is defeated will lay down his king before the final blow; here, it’s like I have checkmated you – but you still keep moving your king. And then! You still move him into checkmate! And then!! you say, “your turn”, and when I point out the double checkmate, you say, “dude. LOL. You are being seriously stupid right now.”, talk about a troll.
I had said,”I quoted you from the eminent text book for chemical engineers on thermodynamics”, and you replied, “Yes, and yet you still screwed up.” — this is akin to accusing me of not knowing which chess piece is which.
I had challenged you, “Please, show us one instance where convection does come in to thermodynamics.”
You replied, “Convection: A movement of molecules that is typically a great way to transfer heat.”, okay enough, Rube. You continued, “Natural convection is what makes water boil.”, atrocious! Since I am trying to be nice, I see that you might understand the difference between “natural” and “forced” convection. But water can boil whether it is being convected or not. Boiling water in a standing pot tends to induce “natural” convective fluid flows, and it is even the defining characteristic of “boil”, but natural convection has nothing to to with the phase transformation: liquid to vapor, so this “makes” of yours is absurd for either of two reasons, either you are putting the cart before the horse, or you are speaking really loosely with verbs – as you are want to do – while speaking a total redundancy. You continue “Convection relates to thermodynamics because thermodynamics describes the nature of heat transfer in the broadest sense.”, not at all! Jackass. Admit when you are clueless. Just say that you don’t know what thermodynamics is, or what are its limits. As Smith, Van Ness, and Abbott said, the “thermo-d…” part suggests power developed from heat. But it does not describe heat transfer! If you want your point to stick, you will certainly have to refute this with something solid, some reference perhaps. And, to be sure, as I have said, “dynamics” is a MISNOMER! You concluded, way too soon, “If you can’t see how these two things are related, then I cannot help you.”, Rube, this is when a good scientist thinks something like, hey, if I can’t help another, that’s cause I can’t help myself, and if I can’t help myself, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Let me repeat for you: Thermodynamics deals only with “equilibrium conditions”, and:
“EQUILIBRIUM [italics in original] is a word denoting a STATIC condition, the ABSENCE of CHANGE. [!] In thermodynamics it is taken to mean not only the absence of change, but the absence of any TENDENCY [italics in original] toward change on a macroscopic scale. [!!!] Thus a system at equilibrium is one which exists under such conditions that there is NO TENDENCY for a CHANGE IN STATE to occur. [!]”
I had said, “”BOILING” is a process dominated by rates”, you replied, “Sweet jesus, boiling is a process dominated by natural convection. It’s not “a process dominated by rates.” You can CALCULATE problems that include rates with respect to boiling, but boiling itself is a thermodynamic process because it’s all about how the transfer of heat to a liquid in a gravitational field causes the physical result that we describe as boiling.” —
huhuhuhuhu… To be sure, I cringed just slightly when I had re-read that sentence of mine just after posting it: I should have said that boiling is a process dominated by resistances. (And rates are determined by both driving forces and resistances, like Smith, Van Ness, and Abbott said.) But on to you! Good god man, I can tell that your error about natural convection “mak[ing]” water boil was the worse of the two errors! The “how” of phase transition is – you will be flabbergasted to know – still an open question in science! “How” that first bubble of vapor (or any of the successive ones) forms is not known! If you are sitting on the answer, you might consider publishing it, lol. And that process is fundamentally beyond the reach of thermodynamics to study. Granted, a one who would study it would need know some thermo, but he would be studying a problem decidedly beyond the scope of thermodynamics! Anyway, as Smith, Van Ness, and Abbott also said, often times a system not at equilibrium will not undergo any change because the resistance is too large. This is the problem of “nucleation”. While thermodynamic calculation (“CALCULATION”) will say that the equilibrium condition is of one phase behavior, the actual system may remain in a non-equilibrium phase due to a large resistance. Which resistance is not a thermodynamic variable. And which resistance might be so great that the system would remain non-equilibrium FOREVER.
Good god, where were we?: you had said, “You can CALCULATE problems that include rates with respect to boiling, but boiling itself is a thermodynamic process because it’s all about how the transfer of heat to a liquid in a gravitational field causes the physical result that we describe as boiling.” — Rube, you simply have no idea what “thermodynamics” is about. You are misled by the name – coupled with your self-assured mental runnings. To be sure, an engineer might “CALCULATE” something like the rate of decrease in the level of water in a hot pot, and he would need even use thermodynamics (for the “heat of vaporization”, for instance), but, in main, the calculation would not be thermodynamic in nature. But even this, I suppose, will not disabuse you of your preconceived misconceptions about the word “thermodynamics”. Why do you pretend to know anything about it?
I had said, “Thermodynamics deals with EQUILIBRIUM: a “static condition”.”, you replied, “Gee, I wonder what “dynamics” means.” — you would do well if you were sincere! It is an unfortunate historical preservation. It has to do with the fact that heat was used to generate power to be used for machines and whatnot. You continued, “Equilibrium is a static condition *after changes have been calculated into account*.” — Once more, for a set of thermodynamic conditions, there is only one equilibrium! Thermodynamics is the science for calculating that equilibrium. But it simply cannot handle non-equilibrium. Thus it cannot handle (calculate) a change between equilibrium and non-equilibrium.
You said, “No, you’re just running your mouth over things you don’t understand.” — I will try not to run my mouth so meanly now that I understand how unfair this fight was. I mean, I knew it was unfair, but I was, then, under the impression that you had actually studied thermodynamics at least a little. If someone who was studying thermodynamics in college this semester for the first time were to read this, a month and a half into the semester now, he would be certain that you are playing this off the cuff, blind, and that you are clueless here. But the anonymous Rube has no shame. There I went though, running my mouth. You continued, “The fact I am even wasting my time replying to this is just sad. I’m only doing this because you appear to be sincere in your confusion.” — um hm. sure. I suppose you have a little shame. Or at least you want to salvage something of your reputation here as Rubix.
You said, “You’re totally right — my cluttered mind is so shitty” — I never suggested that your mind was shitty; at least I never meant to. What I meant to suggest is that you have abused it something fierce, and that you have a big cleaning job ahead of you if you want to refurbish it. It is fairly plain that you are naturally endowed with a good mind. That’s why (one of the reasons why) I care to break you of your terrible mental habits. You continued, “that it carried me through perfect test scores, Ivy League institutions, top grades, fantastic research opportunities, incredibly selective career tracks, published works, and the chance to produce concrete scientific contributions to society.”, what we have is either evidence that you have totally given up on the mental rigor that warranted your “successes”, or evidence that “success” is handed out like halloween candy, and you kept ringing doorbells. You continued, “Yeah, I have no idea what I’m talking about.”, a good and sincere scientist not only knows when to say this, but is comfortable doing it – and uncomfortable not doing it! But you are sarcastic. I wonder what you think you are doing? You continued, “Being a metaphysical crackpot seems to be the far superior way to “carry yourself forward.”” — again, you would be doing well if you weren’t sarcastic!
I had said, “And if you can produce that thermodynamic convection thing you were talking about”, you replied, “Sure thing: Put a pot of water on the stove. Turn the stove on.” — Rube, you’ve yet to connect convection to thermodynamics. Doubtful you will be able to see this – since you have cluttered your mind so terribly – but maybe I helped enough – at least to give you pause.
Tim
I’m not going to waste too much time on this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convection
[The term “convection” may have slightly different but related usages in different contexts. The broader sense is in fluid mechanics, where “convection” refers to the motion of fluid (regardless of cause).[2] However in thermodynamics “convection” often refers specifically to heat transfer by convection.[3]]
[Natural convection, or free convection, occurs due to temperature differences which affect the density, and thus relative buoyancy, of the fluid. Heavier (more dense) components will fall while lighter (less dense) components rise, leading to bulk fluid movement. Natural convection can only occur, therefore, in a gravitational field. A common example of natural convection is a pot of boiling water in which the hot and less-dense water on the bottom layer moves upwards in plumes, and the cool and more dense water near the top of the pot likewise sinks.]
Consider your argument nonsense.
“But water can boil whether it is being convected or not”
For one thing, when I used the example of “water boiling” in my earlier analogy, I am obviously referring to the most common example of boiling (via natural convection, such as boiling a pot of water on the stove, right here on earth). You CAN try to boil water without any sort of gravitational pull or mechanical interference, but you’ll just form a big, stagnant bubble within the liquid located about the heat source (instead of bubbles rising to the surface).
Obviously, when most people speak about boiling, they’re talking about the process of bubbles coming up through the surface of the liquid when as a result of heating. It’s a convective process. Honestly, you’re being outright ridiculous.
Even so, it’s still irrelevant. My earlier analogy was all about the fact that we don’t need to invoke nonsense like fairies to describe the processes involved with the boiling of water, because we can talk about it in terms of other frameworks and concepts. The fact that you’re now trying to turn the argument over to some BS about your misinterpretation of science… it is completely missing the point.
“And, to be sure, as I have said, “dynamics” is a MISNOMER! ”
The “dynamics” in “thermodynamics” is not a misnomer, lmfao. Your entire argument is just a combination of made up nonsense wrought forth out of your ignorance. Thermodynamic equilibrium refers to a state where there are no changes in energy/phases/matter/forces/whatever, but thermodynamics systems aren’t always in equilibrium… which is why we have thermodynamics in the first place.
“The “how” of phase transition is – you will be flabbergasted to know – still an open question in science!”
You’ve got to be kidding me. We understand phase transition just fine.
Rubix,
You said, “I’m not going to waste too much time on this.” — of course not!: if you dig much further you’re gonna pop out in china, and that would be embarrassing.
You offered “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convection
[The term “convection” may have slightly different but related usages in different contexts. The broader sense is in fluid mechanics, where “convection” refers to the motion of fluid (regardless of cause).[2] However in thermodynamics “convection” often refers specifically to heat transfer by convection.[3]]”
I see. For the reader, that is the only appearance of “thermodynamics” on the page (in ref.3). Anyway, this wiki source is deceiving you, Rube. This is – as I told you it would be – only a TANGENTIAL relationship. Thermodynamic calculations can be done on ideal pieces of equipment that would be used in a real life engineering process, but “convection” has no place in any thermodynamic calculation per se. For instance, checking the index of the text book, we see that the entry “Control volume” is followed immediately by “Conversion factors, table of”!
Also, in case you’re interested, “Binodal curves” is followed directly by “Boyle temperature” – both these terms being comical here vis-a-vis “boiling”, lol!
You’ve still yet to produce a non-tangential relationship between convection and thermodynamics, Rubix. You better start your own research program if you want to win this one!
You quoted wiki [Natural convection, … leading to bulk fluid movement. … A common example of natural convection is a pot of boiling water in which the hot and less-dense water on the bottom layer moves upwards in plumes, and the cool and more dense water near the top of the pot likewise sinks.]
And concluded, “Consider your argument nonsense.” —
Rube, again, where is the connection to thermodynamics. You are talking about a fluid flow problem. Totally different ballparks!
you said, “Obviously, when most people speak about boiling, they’re talking about the process of bubbles coming up through the surface of the liquid when as a result of heating. It’s a convective process. Honestly, you’re being outright ridiculous.”
lol. I have no problem with your talk of convection. I never said that convection was bunk, or that your use of it to describe the fluid flow behavior of boiling water was bunk. The argument here is over the connection to thermodynamics. You can go into as much detail as you like about fluid flows, but the question is still: what relationship do you find in that to THERMODYNAMICS?!
You said, “Even so, it’s still irrelevant. My earlier analogy was all about the fact that we don’t need to invoke nonsense like fairies to describe the processes involved with the boiling of water,”
Please describe the process of boiling water then! (Good luck!!)
you continued (by the way I take it you now want me to break who said what so that it is easier to see?), “because we can talk about it in terms of other frameworks and concepts. The fact that you’re now trying to turn the argument over to some BS about your misinterpretation of science… it is completely missing the point.”
Please, if you can describe the dynamics of a phase transition, the world is waiting! (But even if you do, it won’t be internal to the science of thermodynamics.)
I had said, “And, to be sure, as I have said, “dynamics” is a MISNOMER! ”
you replied, “The “dynamics” in “thermodynamics” is not a misnomer, lmfao.” — Rube, you have a whole army of chemical engineers (Ph.D. Professors particularly) that will be utterly surprised at your “discovery” here! I can just imagine you in one of your ivy league classrooms. Getting a test back. C+. Wha-wha-what? (Imagine Kyle’s mom from southpark). “Professor, you are such a crackpot. You totally misinterpret science. I deserve an A, plus plus plus.”
You continued, “Your entire argument is just a combination of made up nonsense wrought forth out of your ignorance.” — You have no idea how out of you league you are! Clueless chump. Why won’t you admit that you have never taken a class on thermodynamics? I am the kind of person that can tolerate you quite well even if you had studied on your own. But you haven’t done that either. Why can’t you admit that you are judging me here based purely on preconceived bias? I am reminded of the bible verse 1 Timothy 1:8-9:
“We know that the law is good, provided that one uses it as law, with the understanding that law is meant not for a righteous person but for the lawless and unruly,”
But I am thinking of credentials rather than law, a la: Credentials are mean not for people who are not capable of thinking for themselves, but for people who are not capable of thinking for themselves.
Also, this reminds me again of the Katy Perry song, “yeah I think we broke the law, always say we’re gonna’ sto-op, ohwhoa; but this Friday night: do it aaalll again…”
You puked, “Thermodynamic equilibrium refers to a state where there are no changes in energy/phases/matter/forces/whatever, but thermodynamics systems aren’t always in equilibrium… which is why we have thermodynamics in the first place.” — uggghhhh. Just admit that you are totally winging this, please? Troll.
I had said, “The “how” of phase transition is – you will be flabbergasted to know – still an open question in science!”
You replied, “You’ve got to be kidding me. We understand phase transition just fine.”
You may understand – just fine – THAT phase transitions occur. But you’ve no idea HOW! Like I’ve been saying. (or if you do… it isn’t public. And you’d deserve a great WOW! But you assuredly don’t.)
again, I feel kinda bad for you, it’s like I’m kicking around a new-born puppy. Or at least it would be if you weren’t so god-damned cocksure.
Tim
“You’ve still yet to produce a non-tangential relationship between convection and thermodynamics, Rubix”
Boiling water on a stove involves convection, phase change, thermodynamics/heat transfer, etc. You’re throwing forth an argument that implies fluid transfer has nothing to do with thermodynamics, without acknowledging that thermodynamics is all about the nature of heat transfer. Convection is a huge method of heat transfer. I don’t understand why you don’t acknowledge the relationship here, or insist it’s not even tangential. Normal people, let alone scientists, have no difficulty with this.
“Rube, you have a whole army of chemical engineers (Ph.D. Professors particularly) that will be utterly surprised at your “discovery” here!”
Go for it — I challenge you to find me at least three credible scientists who will agree that thermodynamics plays no role in the boiling of water on a stove. Good luck.
“Why can’t you admit that you are judging me here based purely on preconceived bias?”
Because I’m judging you on the weakness of your argument, not a preconceived bias. You’re making a weirdly pedantic argument over nothing. My entire point was that we don’t need imaginary fairies to discuss water-boiling because we can talk about water-boiling in terms of physics.
“You may understand – just fine – THAT phase transitions occur. But you’ve no idea HOW”
You’re speaking out of ignorance, here. This is another silly argument. We understand how phase transitions occur because we understand how different elements/chemicals are composed, structured, and bonded and how the latent heat of vaporization is relevant with respect to the way energy helps the molecular system change and overcome particular external forces.
You don’t seem to understand that at some point *we have to take something as true*. Even if I explain to you how we describe boiling in terms of atomic structures and energy, you’d just reply with “Well, you don’t know why energy works that way.” This is why I showed you that video about magnets. The best we can do is talk about phenomena in terms of basic concepts we already know about.
But my argument overall, with respect to what this entire thread has been about, was that you don’t need to invoke unfalsifiable things like fairies (or God) to explain something just because we eventually hit a wall when we ask “Why?” questions. That’s just God of the Gaps, and it doesn’t guarantee correctness.
Rubix,
I said, “You’ve still yet to produce a non-tangential relationship between convection and thermodynamics, Rubix”
You replied, “Boiling water on a stove involves convection, phase change, thermodynamics/heat transfer, etc. You’re throwing forth an argument that implies fluid transfer has nothing to do with thermodynamics, without acknowledging that thermodynamics is all about the nature of heat transfer.”
I was gonna’ cut in with why the “/” between thermodynamics AND heat transfer. They are two entirely different areas of study. Both are needed to describe a pot of boiling water, but the question is still why do you conflate them?!!!
You continued, “Convection is a huge method of heat transfer.” — heat transfer as a MECHANISM has nothing at all to do with thermodynamics. I keep telling you! You continued, “I don’t understand why you don’t acknowledge the relationship here,” — I do! It’s a completely tangential one! You continued, “or insist it’s not even tangential.” — I never insisted it wasn’t tangential! In your rush to not think about what I write you have gone off the deep end. Again, lol. One need not solve any heat transfer problem whatsoever to make a thermodynamic calculation! A thermodynamician who knew nothing of heat transfer could carry out his calculations without hold up. Then he could take his numbers, give them to a heat transfer specialist who was utterly ignorant of thermodynamics, and that heat transfer specialist could design the piece of equipment that was needed to carry out the process. Those two people, again, could communicate and “get shit done” without understanding what the other was doing whatsoever, based only on each others’ results! You continued, “Normal people, let alone scientists, have no difficulty with this.” — yes, normal people are often confused about what science can do! In fact, it seems a great many scientists are as well!!!
I had said, “Rube, you have a whole army of chemical engineers (Ph.D. Professors particularly) that will be utterly surprised at your “discovery” here!”
You replied, “Go for it — I challenge you to find me at least three credible scientists who will agree that thermodynamics plays no role in the boiling of water on a stove. Good luck.” — you’re such an idiot! I never said anything like this! Jackass. Please re-read what I have written and try to pay attention.
I had asked, “Why can’t you admit that you are judging me here based purely on preconceived bias?”
You replied, “Because I’m judging you on the weakness of your argument, not a preconceived bias. You’re making a weirdly pedantic argument over nothing. My entire point was that we don’t need imaginary fairies to discuss water-boiling because we can talk about water-boiling in terms of physics.”
You may end up tiring me out yet, Rube. If this is your plan… There is nothing weird or pedantic about my argument. And your “entire point” is far more than… You have argued that thermodynamics and heat transfer are not totally separate fields of study. You have argued that convection is a concept centrally important to thermodynamics. You have argued that thermodynamics is a science specifically meant to describe non-equilibrium phenomena. You have argued that the dynamics of phase transitions are well known and easily described by physics. None of these are true. All these statements show that you are an imposter and that you have no shame in pretending to be an expert on – not only on something which you don’t quite understand – but on something you have never studied at all! Something you haven’t the slightest clue about!!
I had said, “You may understand – just fine – THAT phase transitions occur. But you’ve no idea HOW”
You replied, “You’re speaking out of ignorance, here.” — I’m rubber you’re glue… You continued, “This is another silly argument. We understand how phase transitions occur” — no you don’t! You continued, “because we understand how different elements/chemicals are composed, structured, and bonded and how the latent heat of vaporization is relevant with respect to the way energy helps the molecular system change and overcome particular external forces.” — that, that, that, that, that….. no HOW!
for instance:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp0471249
Perhaps you can tell us why these “idiots” would be wasting their time when you could tell them! lol.
You said, “You don’t seem to understand that at some point *we have to take something as true*.” — quite! that “have to” is a real killer! One can propose a framework without asserting anything about its truth, for instance. You continued, “Even if I explain to you how we describe boiling in terms of atomic structures and energy, you’d just reply with “Well, you don’t know why energy works that way.” — no. Whatever I might have to say about energy, or time, etc., there is a far easier point here: DYNAMICS. Phase transitions (like boiling) are dynamic phenomena not covered by thermodynamics. Rather, the interplay between thermodynamic driving forces and non-thermodynamic resistances have given rise to more empirical studies. Like heat transfer and mass transport. This interplay has yet to be solved (adequately described). To be sure, the fluid flow expert can tell you fairly well how a rising bubble will flow to the top, but the question of where that bubble comes from – how it is formed, dynamically! – is, like I said, an open question. Notice that there are a good number of people who have referenced the article I linked you to as well… You continued, “This is why I showed you that video about magnets. The best we can do is talk about phenomena in terms of basic concepts we already know about.” — oh my god… why you still think *I* need your “help” understanding science… You doth protest far too much with “know”.
You said, “But my argument overall, with respect to what this entire thread has been about, was that you don’t need to invoke unfalsifiable things like fairies (or God) to explain something just because we eventually hit a wall when we ask “Why?” questions. That’s just God of the Gaps, and it doesn’t guarantee correctness.” — you get hammered on something small yet think you’re qualified for something big. A crackpot says what. I have provided a very nice example of where YOU are the one perpetrating your fallacy of God of the Gaps! lol. You don’t understand the limitS (plural) of science. On one end you talk nicely about falsifiability. On the other you abandon yourself in favor of your god and faith/e. Your faith/e is very immature, to be sure. You need to recognize that science doesn’t “explain” shit. It keeps working towards an explanation, but all it has achieved is various degrees of DESCRIPTION. There are still plenty of questions in the gaps, which you cover by your immature materialistic faith/e. If you had been honest about your limitS – rather than glossed over them like a raving materialistic fanatic – you might have seen how REASONABLE metaphysics could be.
Tim
“I never said anything like this! Jackass. Please re-read what I have written and try to pay attention.”
Then stop harping on this needlessly stupid argument when the only point I’ve been trying to make is that thermodynamics and convection are major concepts involved in the process of boiling water. Quit being so rude just because you refuse to listen to what the intention of my argument is.
Thermodynamics and heat transfer are not completely different areas of study, lmfao.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics
[Thermodynamics is a physical science that studies the effects on material bodies, and on radiation in regions of space, of transfer of heat, and of work done on or by the bodies or radiation.]
Honestly, are you going to quit this nonsense, yet?
“that, that, that, that, that….. no HOW!”
You ignore my point. We explain “how” *in terms* of “that.” If you’re just going to keep ignoring this point, you’re never going to understand how science works. When we say “explain,” we are *always* talking about “in terms of our observations, perceptions, facts, evidence, frameworks, and predictive successes.” No scientist is ever claiming “explanation with 100% unfalsifiable certainty.” Again, you’re hammering on a pedantic non-point.
“I have provided a very nice example of where YOU are the one perpetrating your fallacy of God of the Gaps”
Do you even have any idea what God of the Gaps is? GotG is when you don’t know the answer to something, so you just say, “Well, God did it.” It’s not equally fallacious to say “Well, we don’t know what causes these magnets to repel, so forces do it.” Forces are HOW we define that repelling action in the first place. We have evidence for it, unlike “God.” We don’t know what causes particular “forces,” but we know forces exist, so we talk about things in terms of “forces” and therefore we’re not invoking GotG.
When we point to boiling water, we look to evidence and theoretical frameworks that describe how the processes work in terms of things we can observe and measure. Do we say our frameworks explain everything 100% to where we know how every component works at the deepest of all possible levels? No. But the frameworks explain *something*, and the more of that something we can explain and predict, the better we say it works, and the more confident we are in our frameworks and ability to explain.
But if you’re just going to piss upon evidence, then that’s your decision.
Rubix,
I just spend two hours typing up a 4 page long reply. (How much would you have had to pay one of your professors for such one on one time?) You aren’t making any progress and I am now come to the conclusion that you don’t know what it is to think like a scientist. You have a superficial awareness of certain frameworks, and you have no shame to pretend that your knowledge goes deeper. You want to turn the conversation back to the grand scope because you trust that your faith/e will defend you! You are a great man of faith/e Rubix, it’s a shame I couldn’t convert you from immaturity to maturity. You are no scientist, and if you truly loved science you would quit playing the imposter. You talk down to me as if *I* need your “help – and then you call me rude for calling you on it. Anyway, I’ve no doubt that you had – at one point – some potential, and that here, in a forum like this, some might side with you – for political reasons.
However, to any serious and cautious thinker, perhaps they will see how shamelessly you are playing the imposter. Certainly anyone who has studied thermodynamics will see – it is perfectly transparent – that you have no idea what thermodynamics is about. Nor do you have any idea what its limits are. If you lured me into making a bit of an unfortunate claim about heat transfer (which is a total side point here) not needing some thermodynamic insight, my point of focus is not in doubt: the science of thermodynamics has no need for the empirical study of heat transfer.
I linked you to a scientific article entitled “dynamics of nucleation in the Ising Model”. You, of course, ignored it. In favor of wikipedia! That article was by a guy(s) with a pretty big name, (Pan and) Chandler. It has been referenced by 45 citing articles, so I’m sure that there are more than 3 Ph.D. level professors who would be able to see how transparently you are bluffing at an understanding of thermodynamics. I’m not about to email anyone to ask though.
You want to ignore the phase transformation part of boiling and reduce it to vapor bubbles rising in a pot of what is otherwise liquid. I could blow bubbles into a straw to study that. Convection has nothing to do with nucleation! This is as fine an example as I could hope to have of your general failure to think like a scientist. You simply don’t. You don’t admit “I don’t know” when you should. You don’t take the great and painstaking caution that real scientists take. So many things I have offered you (for free) that should have given you pause. But you are on an agenda to troll other faith/es
About your wiki page:
[Thermodynamics is a physical science that studies the effects on material bodies, and on radiation in regions of space, of transfer of heat, and of work done on or by the bodies or radiation.]
again, that “transfer” is an ideal one. Thermodynamics does not explain the details. And the details are unimportant to the thermodynamic calculations.
You asked, “Honestly, are you going to quit this nonsense, yet?” — it isn’t nonsense, but I am of the mind to quit.
from here you want to turn the conversation back to the general. But you are even less qualified for this. To think that you can talk about the philosophy of science when you talk about the science of thermodynamics the way you do… If you think *I* need your “help” to understand the nature of science… Anyway, if you want to draw me back into conversation with you you can 1) wait and hope I am in a better mood after I get some sleep, 2) admit that you haven’t the foggiest idea about what thermodynamics is about, and certainly that you have no idea what its limitations are (and apologize for pretending so long), or 3) prove that I am the one who is unfit to speak about thermodynamics as I have. So you have two options.
I have only give a rough skim to the wiki page on thermo, yuck, but I can offer you:
from section 3.4 “treatment of equilibrium” (and, importantly, under the section on “non-equilibrium thermodynamics”): “Many natural systems still today remain beyond the scope of currently known macroscopic thermodynamic methods.”
and also, from section 11 “scope of thermodynamics”: “But more than that, for thermodynamics, a system, defined by its being prepared in a certain way must, consequent on every particular occasion of preparation, UPON AGING, reach one and the same eventual state of thermodynamic equilibrium, entirely determined by the way of preparation.” [my emphasis]
$$$
Also, to make one point in general, I will have to thank you, actually! You have shown me why “describe” is too truthspeak-y to tolerate, much less “explain”. Thanks!
We scientists develop models which we use. Period.
If you want to talk about “explaining” the models, like you suggest out of the one half of your mouth, be my guest – but be precise about the fact that you are not explaining phenomena themselves, only the model. And do it without fail. On the other hand, you can “describe” your perceptions of your experience. That might do it; that might leave the i’dea beyond your corrupting touch.
I am. Reality is the making real of the plural society of I am.
Rubix, I am a better metaphysician than I am scientist, but I am a better scientist than you.
If you are sincere, and I doubt that by now, the first thing you should do is to quit talking about of both sides of your mouth. When you say that scientists don’t claim to know 100%, try to see where the limitations on their models really are (I told you that you will see, then, that you should claim to know precisely 0%). Cause out of the other side of your mouth you keep saying “we know”. If you doubt me, re-read what you wrote!
Tim
btw, that wasn’t the 4-page long one. And that was another hour down the drain (I though I was gonna be much more brief the second time).
Two hours? Seriously?
Why are you wasting the time? I used an analogy about the uselessness/needlessness of God being akin to the uselessness/needlessness of fairies being required to explain something we already know how to talk about just fine in terms of natural phenomena (boiling).
In this post I said:
“You can answer how water boils by referring to laws of thermodynamics and the properties of atoms, energy, pressures, etc. There are many forces at play that ultimately give rise to the phenomenon of boiling water, and we know this because we’ve observed it and we can control for the variables involved. It’s explainable, it’s predictable, and it’s consistent. We don’t have to answer “Why is the water there?” to answer the question of how it operates once it’s already there.”
That’s all I’ve ever been arguing, here. The fact that you’re going full-tilt over thermo here is just weird.
In this post, your response was as such:
“Technically speaking, thermodynamics actually precludes boiling! Thermodynamics is a science based on equilibrium, and boiling is a non-equilibrium phenomena!”
While thermodynamics is oftentimes concerned about the equilibrium of systems, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about systems that AREN’T in equilibrium via thermodynamics. Yes, in equilibrium thermodynamics, we don’t really consider the rate of reaction. But this random point is not relevant to what I’m talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-equilibrium
[Non-equilibrium thermodynamics is a branch of thermodynamics that deals with systems that are not in thermodynamic equilibrium]
So again, you’re getting riled up over like two sentences I wrote because of some stupidly pedantic point that’s totally irrelevant to what I’m talking about. Obviously phase changes are involved — I never implied otherwise. The only point I’ve ever been making, here, is that we can talk about boiling water without the use of invoking GotG type logic. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. If you want to somehow imply that just because I said thermodynamics was one of the many concepts we can talk about in the boiling of water, that I am somehow an imposter who doesn’t know anything about science… then I don’t know what to tell you. That’s just plain weird.
“When you say that scientists don’t claim to know 100%, try to see where the limitations on their models really are (I told you that you will see, then, that you should claim to know precisely 0%)”
Just because we don’t know something 100% doesn’t mean we know 0%, lol. Obviously science explains SOMETHING about the manifestation of reality. It’s not like the model is just out there sitting in a vacuum and we’re just making shit up. The model exists precisely because some aspect of reality is manifesting itself in a way we can perceive and observe on some level. We don’t know if it’s the full picture, but the fact that it’s describable in terms of laws, mathematics, evidence, and observation that yield predictable, consistent results means it’s getting something right. That’s how we make progress in science. It works. And that’s ultimately what we care about. We understand the limits of science inasmuch as we don’t make claims for something that don’t have any support. We don’t yet know what science may not be able to tell us down the road. It’s an endless frontier.
I’m not “talking out of both sides of my mouth,” here — you’re putting words in my mouth and assuming that I’m somehow claiming absolute knowledge when no scientist ever claims this. You’re attacking a massive strawman, here. If you’re just getting hung up over the words “know,” and “explain,” you have to understand how scientists use those words.
Scientists fully understand that what we know now may turn out to be wrong, and that our explanations may be incomplete. A huge example of this would be the transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics. But even if we, say, falsified gravity tomorrow, things wouldn’t suddenly start floating up to the sky. We’d just have a more elaborate framework to describe how the phenomenon unfolds and how it works. Whatever we “know” and “explain” is always defined in terms of our frameworks and evidence. When we “know” something we don’t claim to “absolutely know 100% and will always continue to know no matter what we learn next.”
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion, as am I. That’s all this thread has ever been about. We’re talking about how we view science, but this thread is still about Langan and our opinions of him and his CTMU. Can we please stick to the topic at hand?
Wow! I just stopped by this site to read MarkCC’s* tutorials on Alloy and execution specifications and thought this posing would be amusing. I must say, even with a doctorate in mathematics, I do not know the half of what is being said in relation to this CAT and COW theory. When I read statements such as,
“The real universe has always been theoretically treated as an object, and specifically as the composite type of object known as a set.”
I cringe. The “real universe” is assumed to be a set. Ok, let us assume. Then we can conclude:
A. That the universe, real that is, is a collection of “distinct” objects.
Well, electrons have no hair. So, I do not know if property A holds.
B. It is considered an object itself.
Yeah, but I give the universe a lot more credit than that…
It also “appears” that the author of this “paper” is using naive set theory, as someone not educated above an undergraduate degree in a science or math subject might be expected to use.
And stuff like this is obvious malarkey. “Let S be the real universe and let T = T(S) be its theoretical description or “TOE”.”. I have got news for you, S is the theoretical description. Just think about it. Anyway, you guys can have it …
I have to add thy while I consider everything under the sun as worthy of critical scrutiny, I haven’t yet come across any good argument against the CTMU, most people take cheap shots and fatuously hold on to their original views. I admit that I don’t fully understand every aspect of Langan’s ideas, but I can tell when others plainly do not understand them yet pretend to have him pinned. The problem with the CTMU is that it’s ahead of its time, but whose problem is that really? And for the mathematicians, are locales used in sets? If not, why does Langan refer to them?
“Diagram 10: In the syndiffeonic diagram [Diagram 6], we can plainly see the containment of objects by the medium, but we cannot see the containment of the medium by the objects. Bearing in mind that the terms syntax and content are to some extent relative designations, the upper node in Diagram 10 corresponds to the global medium (global syntactic unisect or “metasyntax” of reality), while the lower node corresponds to the objects therein (syntactic operators contained in the medium); each is a multiplex unity. Coherence flows from global syntax into local content by way of global topological containment, thereby enforcing unity across diverse locales, and back to global syntax in multiple entangled streams generated by cross-transduction of content. Syntax becomes state, and state becomes syntax (where “syntax” is understood to encompass an “ectosyntactic” distribution of syntactic operators). The universe thus remains coherent and consistent in the course of evolution.” – Langan, 2002, PCID, pg. 24
Q: Many people conceive of the universe as a “supreme being”. The interconnectedness is evident in the consistency of physical laws and repetition of motif seen on a many levels. What is interesting is understanding the sentience of that supreme being. A drive toward growth, or self-actualization seems evident, but how can we prove a “will of God” that would go beyond a drive toward optimal actualization? A: There are several ways that we can be logically certain that the being called “reality” or “the universe” is sentient. 1. *We’re* sentient. Because we live in the medium known as “reality”, and because any attribute supported by a medium exists throughout the medium in the form of potential (to be objectively actualized), sentience implicitly exists in reality. 2. Despite the principle of locality – the existence of separate locales and local systems within the universe – the universe is globally consistent. The aspect of a system which reflexively enforces global consistency is necessarily globally coherent, and that which is coherently reflexive (self-active, self-referential) is, in effect, “sentient”. 3. Because, by definition, there is nothing outside of reality that is sufficiently real to recognize the existence of reality, reality must distributively recognize its own existence; every time one object interacts with another within it, the objects “recognize” each other as things with which to interact. But that means that reality is distributively self-aware. Now, given the absolute logical certainty that the universe is sentient (self-aware) – a certainty that nobody can possibly refute, as we see from the inevitability of 1-3 above – can we characterize its “will”? Yes. First, what is will? That function of a sentient entity which forms intent prior to actualization. So by definition, the “will” of the universe is that function which determines how the universe will configure itself “in advance” of actualization. In cosmological terms, this function is just that which determines, among other things, the laws of mathematics and physics embodied by reality. Such a function must, after all, exist. For without it, there would be no reason, from one moment to the next, why the laws of physics should not spontaneously change into one of the infinite number of other nomologies that might have arisen. Concisely, this function is defined as that reflexive mapping which effects the nomological character and stability of reality. The “will of the universe”, AKA the “will of God”, AKA teleology, is the name of this function, which we have just concretely defined. Does the universe “feel” its volition as do we? Well, let’s see. What the universe feels properly includes what *we* feel, plus much more (because we are merely parts of it). The universe therefore “feels” teleology far more powerfully than a mere human being “feels” an act of human will. The mechanism of its “feeling”? Well, there are a lot of those, including every human being, every animal, every plant, and every alien microbe on every planet in every star system in every galaxy in the cosmos. As you can well imagine, the impressions that get channeled to the universe through all of these “sense receptors” add up to very powerful sensations indeed. In fact, these are the sensations that feed back to teleology to tell the universe how to self-actualize in the “optimal” way…i.e., so that it ends up with the “best feeling” possible. They have already told the universe how to configure the laws of math and physics; for more specific elements of configuration, the universe relies on US. Every decision we make, including our every act of will, we make on behalf of the universe. That’s why we should always make the very best decisions we can.
Q (On 3/24/2002 8:03:00 AM, Darko Djurdjic wrote): Einstein said that he ‘do not believe in a personal God’ because he ‘cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves’. And he also said that ‘mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all’. So my question for You would be: is God person or not? And what does CTMU say about that?
A: The CTMU says that God, as embodied by the universe, Self-configures. To do this, He needs two things: (1) active sensors (agents, internal proxies) who can recognize and affect the state of the universe from local internal vantages; (2) a stratified utility function allowing Him and His agents to prefer one possible future over another. Human beings and other intelligent life forms are useful to God on both of these counts. Thus, the first criterion of His development is the possibility, and in fact the inevitability, of their existence. To understand this, consider an extraordinarily wise child responsible for the development and maintenance of its own body and physiology (because the universe is in the process of self-configuration, we can liken it to a child). To meet this responsibility, the child requires internal sensors that provide information on exactly what is happening deep inside its growing body, preferably at the intracellular level, and that permit feedback. The child further requires that these sensors be able to register the utility of what they detect… whether it is “good” or “bad” from their own local perspectives. That way, the child can weigh the perceptions and utilities of all of its internal sensors to form overall developmental goals. In order to meet the Self-configurative goals that it sets (as aggregates of the goals of its sensors), the child has the power to establish internal self-optimizative tendencies that affect the behavior of its internal agents, influencing them to perform such local operations and make such repairs as are necessary for the good of the whole child. To this end, they are equipped with global utility functions, “consciences”, that combine with intelligence to make them responsive to the welfare of the whole organism (as opposed to their own individual welfares). For want of a better name, we can use the term “soul” to describe the channel through which individual and global utility functions are put in consistent mutual contact. This channel permits the sensors to make more informed, more global, and more valid judgments about what is “good” and what is “bad”, and gives them the internal strength to do what is good even if it means sacrificing individual utility (because global utility is an aggregate function of individual utility, serving global utility ultimately makes individuals happier).”
The inability to appreciate the CTMU by many has to do with a lack of context, some seem to think his ideas must have formed in a vacuum, there is a plethora of ideas which provide relevant background, as in the issue raised in the CTMU of how to maximize global utility in light of decision and game theory, emerging fields such as “information economics” and “mechanism design” address these challenges, even how to best “serve mankind” are becoming practical through “service systems engineering”. These ideas are not explicitly mentioned in Chris’ work, they are however they are implied…the other problem (or challenge) is that he leaves many things up to the reader figure out, I think it tends to put some people off, on the other hand for me that it led to research new ideas, particularly determining incentive compatibility between the collective and the individual in terms of the CTMU concept of “entangled utility functions”…could this lead to a new form of econophysics for multiagent systems?
“Homeotely: The term homeotely signifies that subsystems will direct their behaviour in such a way that it is beneficial for the well-being of the overall system. When applied to the evolutionary process, it states that subsystems will develop in such a way that they are beneficial for the well-being of the overall system. At first glance, this sounds embarrassingly teleological. However, if we recognize the fact that the behaviour as well as the evolution of systems is guided by context-sensitive self-interest, teleology vanishes into thin air. Context-sensitive self-interest is a systemic evolutionary principle: organisms are forced by their selfish genes to seek nothing but their own advantage – but the environment in which they develop, or the system of which they are a subsystem, only allows a limited set of developments and patterns of behaviour, any breach of the rules being punished with elimination. For an animal endowed with choice this harsh law transforms into an ethical principle: since its behaviour is only partly genetically determined, the word sensitive assumes its active meaning, i.e. it refers to conscious reactions to perceived or anticipated effects of behaviour or development on the overall system.” (LM, based on Edward Goldsmith, The Way)
“How, in general, would the universe self-configure? It would select itself from a set of internally-generated, internally-refined structural possibilities in order to maximize its self-defined value. In the (somewhat inadequate) terminology of quantum mechanics, this set of possibilities is called its quantum wave function or QWF, and the utility-maximizing self-selection principle is traditionally called teleology. In exploiting this self-actualization mechanism, human beings would select their specific goals from the global QWF according to their own specific self-selection principles or “teleses”. In the course of being realized, these individual teleses would interfere with teleology (and each other) in a constructive or destructive way, depending on whether they and their specific methods of implementation (modes of interference) are teleologically consistent or inconsistent. In this way, the “good”, or teleologically constructive, may be distinguished from the “bad”, or teleologically destructive. I.e., free will would give human beings a real choice between good and evil…a choice like that which we already seem to possess.” – Langan, The Art of Knowing
“The utility concept bears more inspection than it ordinarily gets. Utility often entails a subject-object distinction; for example, the utility of an apple in a pantry is biologically and psychologically generated by a more or less conscious subject of whom its existence is ostensibly independent, and it thus makes little sense to speak of its “intrinsic utility”. While it might be asserted that an apple or some other relatively non-conscious material object is “good for its own sake” and thus in possession of intrinsic utility, attributing self-interest to something implies that it is a subject as well as an object, and thus that it is capable of subjective self-recognition.([41]In computation theory, recognition denotes the acceptance of a language by a transducer according to its programming or “transductive syntax”. Because the universe is a self-accepting transducer, this concept has physical bearing and implications.) To the extent that the universe is at once an object of selection and a self-selective subject capable of some degree of self-recognition, it supports intrinsic utility (as does any coherent state-syntax relationship). An apple, on the other hand, does not seem at first glance to meet this criterion.” – Langan, Cheating the Millenium
Q: What are your thoughts on moral relativism? Can an action be classified as *objectivly* evil or is it only relatively so, depending on one’s viewpoint? (Based on a question posted to the Ultranet by Mike Hess after the 9-11 attacks.)
A: Moral relativism says that utility is context-sensitive…that to decide whether an act results in positive net utility (is “good”) or negative net utility (is “evil”) cannot be decided except with respect to an arbitrary psycho-social frame in which utility is defined, and that frames are essentially incommensurate.
However, since one thing can have utility in more than one frame, intersecting content provides a basis for entanglement of utility functions. For example, if there are two hungry people A and B on a desert island and nothing to eat but one mango hanging from a tree, their individual utility functions both acquire the mango as an argument. Indeed, where teamwork has utility – and this is the rule in human affairs – A and B are acquired by each other’s utility function (e.g., suppose that the only way A or B can reach the mango is to support or be supported by the other from below).
In a system dominated by competition and cooperation – a system like the real world – this cross-acquisition is a condition of interaction. But given a system with interacting elements, we have a systemic identity, i.e. a distributive self-transformation applying symmetrically to every element (frame) in the system, and this implies the existence of a mutual transformation relating different elements and ultimately rendering them commensurate after all. So “absolute moral relativism” fails in interactive real-world contexts. It’s a logical absurdity.” – Langan, Q & A
“The purpose of this symposium is to explore the uses and limits of game theory in explaining ethical behavior and illuminating the nature and dynamics of moral order and even, perhaps, moral transformation. It takes place in the fiftieth anniversary year of the death of John von Neumann whose groundbreaking 1928 paper “Theory of Parlor Games” proved the famous minimax theorem and whose later book (with Oskar Morgenstern), Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), presented a groundbreaking mathematical theory of economic and social organization, based on a theory of games of strategy, that revolutionized economics and was soon used to analyze many real-world phenomena involving policy choices.
The interest of von Neumann and his successors in such practical application becomes clear when we consider that societies exist to a large extent because of the collective benefits that can come from group actions, especially in regulating public goods. This is cooperation at a level higher than some game theorists are addressing—and learning how to model hierarchical multi-levels of competition and cooperation presents game theory with an important challenge. In human culture, the empirical evidence clearly demonstrates the immense powers and influence of groups. The data raise difficult theoretical questions about how groups form and the role, from earliest times, of innovations in religious concepts in maintaining the integrity and ethical identities of groups. In practice, such norms and ideals can support the creation of beneficent new mentalities, institutions, and group practices as well as systems of morality and justice. But they also may drive inter-group conflicts involving out-group hatred and xenophobia. Enmity seems built into the fabric of history; yet, evidence also exists for growing recognitions of mutually beneficial interdependence and cultural evolution towards more expanded notions of moral community. The globalizing economy has created an arena of competition and cooperation within which ever enlarging group identities involve debates over the scales of shared rules-of-the-game. Similarly, the loss of biodiversity has brought forth a new domain of concern and action where the daunting task is to develop group identity on a planetary scale.
But game-theoretic approaches generally have been used to study cooperation among individuals, without attention to the formation and persistence of collectives, and the interplay between individuals and the collectives to which they belong. The fifteen scientists and scholars gathered at Princeton University come to examine how such approaches can be extended to consider the broader questions that cross scales of organization, from individuals to cooperatives to societies. How do groups form, how do institutions come into being, and when do moral norms and practices emerge? By expanding traditional analyses to meta-game situations, can we explain how heuristics, like concepts of fairness, arise, and how they become formalized into the ethical principles embraced by a society? Are there ways to distinguish “good” from “evil” normative behaviors; and if so, can we understand when one or the other will emerge? How can game theory model the concept of moral transformation in groups as well as individuals? Can we define the “goodness” of human behaviors in terms of benefits for the collective or other entities beyond the individual? Can game theory help predict when goodness will grow and when it will decline? What maintains the robustness of social contracts? Can game theory identify common properties of the implicit strategic exchange that operates as religious beliefs in believers but as something else in non-believers? What aspects of game-theoretical analysis of moral behavior may be changed when players hold strong convictions about the existence of a divine, omnipresent moral being and the likelihood that one’s actions have consequences that transcend the game itself? The conversation addressing these questions takes place under the aegis of the John Templeton Foundation.” – Games, Groups, God(s) and the Global Good
“Multiagent systems consist of multiple autonomous entities having different information and/or diverging interests. This comprehensive introduction to the field offers a computer science perspective, but also draws on ideas from game theory, economics, operations research, logic, philosophy and linguistics. It will serve as a reference for researchers in each of these fields, and be used as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses.
Emphasizing foundations, the authors offer a broad and rigorous treatment of their subject, with thorough presentations of distributed problem solving, non-cooperative game theory, multiagent communication and learning, social choice, mechanism design, auctions, coalitional game theory, and logical theories of knowledge, belief, and other aspects of rational agency. For each topic, basic concepts are introduced, examples are given, proofs of key results are offered, and algorithmic considerations are examined. An appendix covers background material in probability theory, classical logic, Markov decision processes, and mathematical programming.” – Multiagent Systems
“I haven’t yet come across any good argument against the CTMU”
This is like saying “I haven’t come across any good argument against fairies.” The real point is that “We haven’t come across and good arguments in favor.” The CTMU claims to be metaphysics and not ground in empiricism, which makes it unfalsifiable. There’s no way we could prove or disprove it. And yet, Chris claims his theory is absolute truth and absolute knowledge anyway. The CTMU brings up lots of problems where problems don’t actually exist, and then insists additional frameworks are required to solve them.
“I can tell when others plainly do not understand them yet pretend to have him pinned”
Nobody’s really claiming to understand him 100%, but this is largely Langan’s own doing. His writing is intentionally obfuscated and needlessly verbose, and he refuses to answer many questions directly (while ignoring most counterpoints altogether). As long as you’re sufficiently vague, you can always claim that people just don’t “understand you.” Communication is a two-way street. If someone doesn’t understand you, you have to figure out a way to bridge the gap. But Chris does not appear interested in doing this, which is why it’s clear that the obfuscation is intentional, especially when there are many demonstrable instances where things could be written *much* more clearly and concisely.
In many cases, there are things we DO understand, and it’s easy enough to pluck things out of the CTMU that reveal a misunderstanding or ignorance of something.
Teleology is not needed. It’s just a word that means “planned/intended goal” of some sort. Things don’t have an intended function, especially where evolution is concerned.
This is getting ridiculous. Isotelesis, do you not know how to cite things without pasting entire paragraphs? Refer to sources with links. I use links all the time, and the spamfilter hasn’t blocked me or anything like that.
Posting paragraphs is okay if they’re short, but you’re just posting huge globs. Use “[…]” or something to bridge between the start and end of a quoted paragraph so we can refer to it, given your source. All you’re doing is causing clutter.
This isn’t my blog, but jeez.
Rubix,
The CTMU is basically advanced database theory…call it what you wish, it doesn’t really matter to me…I just hope whatever interests you, that it doesn’t start and end with words, but at least ends with actions.
Answer me this, please:
Give me an example of a problem that you think the CTMU is required for in order to solve it, and in a way that science does not or can not offer a sufficient explanation for. How does the CTMU solve it, and why must it be true?
When A.I. and the scientific method converge, the issues raised by the CTMU will be relevant, you can burn his work for all I care, it will crop up elsewhere, and it will be in the field of computing.
Rubix,
The CTMU is not really a new idea, it’s just conveniently condensed for us by Langan, virtually everything he describes has been said elsewhere by others, it’s just that he puts a lot of seemingly independent ideas together in an integrated way.
Answer the question, please.
MU
This is not a sufficient answer. Elaborate, please, in simple terms and directly address the question.
If science is a method of asking and answering questions, then perhaps the only way to unlock certain answers is to determine the best questions as one’s resources may be limited and the outcome uncertain, so the question of why something is “valuable to know” becomes relevant. In the case of the CTMU, its current value is uncertain for most, however its potential value really depends not on the answers it provides, but the questions which it produces. If the CTMU doesn’t raise questions you consider valuable to consider, well it’s not my prerogative to convince otherwise.
“The process of reducing distinctions to the homogeneous syntactic media that support them is called syndiffeonic regression. This process involves unisection, whereby the rules of structure and dynamics that respectively govern a set of distinct objects are reduced to a “syntactic join” in an infocognitive lattice of syntactic media. Unisection is a general form of reduction which implies that all properties realized within a medium are properties of the medium itself.
Where emergent properties are merely latent properties of the teleo-syntactic medium of emergence, the mysteries of emergent phenomena are reduced to just two: how are emergent properties anticipated in the syntactic structure of their medium of emergence, and why are they not expressed except under specific conditions involving (e.g.) degree of systemic complexity?” – Langan (2002)
“Robert Rosen (1985, p. 341), in the famous book Anticipatory Systems “tentatively defined the concept of an anticipatory system: a system containing a predictive model of itself and/or of its environment, which allows it to state at an instant in accord with the model’s predictions pertaining to a later instant.”
Robert Rosen considers that anticipatory systems are related to the final causation of Aristotle. A future cause could produce an effect at the present time. Then the causality principle seems reversed. Robert Rosen relates some anticipatory systems to feedforward loops. So, for such anticipatory systems, it is perhaps better to speak of a finality principle and to see the process at a non-local or global point of view instead of seeing locally the causality process. In cybernetics and control theory, a goal and objective, defined at the present time by an engineer, drives the future states of a system by feedback loops.
It is interesting to point out that in physics, recursive causal systems can be formally expresses in a global and equivalent way from the principle of least action of Maupertuis. An important class of anticipatory system is a system with multiple potential future states for which the actualisation of one of these potential futures is determined by the events at each current time. Such an anticipatory system is thus a system without an explicit future objective.
An anticipatory system could be also a system which contains a set of possible responses to any potential or, even, unpredictable external events. In this sense, the co-operative dynamics of the immune systems, for example, is a self-organising system which can be considered as an anticipatory system. Then all learning and evolutionary systems belong also to this class of anticipatory system.” – Dubois (1998)
It seems MarkCC agrees with Chris Langan on at least one point, the universe can be modeled by an intrinsic, self-scaling, multi-attribute/constraint satisfying information synthesizer.
This reminds me if Robert Rosen (closer to MarkCC) and Daniel Dubois (closer to Chris Langan), the former mostly described “weak” anticipatory systems while the latter also describes “strong” anticipatory systems. The difference has to do with the relationship between the modeler and that which is modeled.
Data Structures in Natural Computing: Databases as Strong or Weak Anticipatory Systems:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.103.659&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Actually the gets into the theological issue of whether the creator and the created are in any way commensurable, the idea of stratifying self-cognition as Global, Agentive, and Local is an important distinction.
Why on earth would you say that?
MarkCC: “The universe is not a set; a set is one potential model to describe the universe. From his arguments here, I don’t think he really understands that distinction, but it is a crucial one. Things like the position and velocity of an object are intrinsic, inter-related properties of the object – not things that are defined by an external universal relation.”
MarkCC, what does is really mean for an “object” to have “properties”? A mathematician/computer scientist shouldn’t take those concepts for granted.
In the CTMU agrees with your statement that they are “not things that are defined by an external universal relation”…for example, the supposedly objective, externally defined property of the universe as simply expanding would be incomplete without the “intrinsic, inter-related properties” of the subobjects within its domain. The idea that the external objective and internal subjective cannot be totally separated, but form *for all practical purposes* a “mutually universal” relation in which attributes (or properties) may be defined is basically the idea behind conspansion.
There is however a crucial difference between your approach to how this “modeling relation” works, and how Langan describes it, and basically this comes down to the difference between weak and strong anticipation.
“Anticipation allows a system to adapt to conditions that have not yet come to be, either externally to the system or internally. Autonomous systems actively control their own conditions so as to increase their functionality (they self-regulate). Living systems self-regulate in order to increase their own viability. These increasingly stronger conditions, anticipation, autonomy and viability, can give an insight into progressively stronger classes of models of autonomy. I will argue that stronger forms are the relevant ones for Artificial Life. This has consequences for the design of and accurate simulation of living systems.
…
Autonomy basically means self-regulation. Self-regulation implies internal control of system states to achieve greater functionality, either internally or interactively with the environment. Functionality, as a teleological notion, implies that the system must be directed by likely future states; that is, it must anticipate and (possibly) adapt to likely future states. Functionality does not require autonomy (assuming functional goals are externally set), but merely that current states of the system can select suitable future states on the basis of suitable input. In this restricted case of functionality, selection of states is under the control of external inputs, and not under internal control. Specifically, the system in the minimal case does not add information to the input-output relation. If the inputs are strings of symbols, for example, and the outputs are strings of actions, then for the minimal case there is a many-one mapping of input strings to output strings (a function from input string to output) that completely describes the non-stochastic aspects of the system. This is equivalent to a behaviourist system on the well-known approach of B.F. Skinner. The simplest form of self-regulation must permit the selection of states over and above input-output relations: for example, the same input, depending on selection of internal states, may produce differing outputs, or the same output may be selected by differing inputs, or both. That is, the rules governing input-output relations vary, and must themselves be selected internally. Alternatively, self-regulation might be limited to the selection of internal states.1 (Information theoretic criteria for these cases are given by Bertschinger, Olbrich, Ay and Jost (this volume). They assume that “[a]utonomy might mean the freedom of a system to set its own goals, to construct its own rules of operation, or to select the methods for achieving its aims according to some internal procedure or set of rules that is shielded from the control of the environment the system happens to be situated in.” I will argue that their approach gives a measure of independence (which is correlated with autonomy, and might be considered to be a weak form of autonomy), but not directly of the sort autonomy found in living systems.) More complex forms of self-regulation would involve higher order control of this internal selection of rules. The requirements of anticipation, functionality, and internal selection of rules will turn out to put some non-obvious constraints on what can be properly considered to be autonomous. In order to see this, the relevant concepts and their relations need further analysis.
Daniel Dubois (2003) makes a very useful distinction between external and internal control of future states which he calls, respectively, weak and strong anticipation. Dubois tentatively defines anticipation: “an anticipatory system is a system for which the present behaviour is based on past and/or present events but also on future events built from these past, present and future events”. Weak anticipation relies on externally produced data to internally model future states of the environment, while strong anticipation uses internally produced data to model future internal states. In general, anticipation requires that some future state determines or guides present dynamics. Since the future state is not directly accessible, it must be modelled some place within the system and its environment. Weak anticipation relies on externally produced data (and environmental regularities) to internally model the environment and project its future states, while strong anticipation uses internally produced data to model internal states and project their future states. The notion of modelling here requires Rosen’s (1991) idea (well established and used in science) that goes back at least to Hertz, according to which logical (inferential) relations are used to represent the supposed causal structure of another system. The idea is that one system (the object of the modelling) has a certain causal structure, and another system (it could be the same one if the modelling is internal, i.e., in strong anticipation) has logical relations that mirror the causal relations of the object, so the model is a set of relations mirroring the set of relations constituting the structure of its object. Anticipation further requires that the logical structure of the model can be projected to possible future states, thus allowing the current modelling of future states. Functionality implies that these models are used to aim at some goal.
In order to connect the model (logical structure) to the world, the model itself must have a dynamical embodiment (a dynamical structure, defined in terms of forces and flows – the mathematical definition of dynamical system is insufficient here since it is a logical definition, and as such would get us no closer to the world). Elements of the model serve as signs (vicariants) for elements in the world, with their dynamical embodiment causally mirroring the logic, so that the dynamical processes embodying the model correspond to the logic of the model. To be effective in control, the model must also be connected to the system under control, though this may be very indirect. In weak anticipation inputs and outputs to the system are transmitted to a model of the external world, computations (digital or analogue) are done, and an output is generated. The output is a function of the input and the logic of the model, up to any stochastic variation. Weak anticipation, then, takes the form of a behaviourist system, and control is determined by the input, or rather the sequence of inputs. In strong anticipation, there is an additional model of the system itself, which has inputs from the internal state of the system, and outputs modifying that state, allowing the system to control itself, certainly a necessary condition for autonomy understood as self-regulation.
Homeostasis is perhaps the simplest version of self-regulation. In temperature control in mammals, for example, there are signals from internal states to the hypothalamus, which compares those signals to internal conditions and computes a difference, which is then output to the system, either causing the internal state of the system to alter to bring the temperature in line with a set point (difference vanishes), or altering the behaviour of the system (e.g., seeking shade) to the same effect, or perhaps both. The alert reader will perhaps have noted that a thermostat performs the same function, but we do not consider a thermostat, or a thermostatically controlled system, to be autonomous. Why should we have different standards for living systems, or their simulations? The straight-forward answer is that we should not. An internal model controlling internal states is not sufficient for autonomy. At best it ensures independence of operation, where independence involves shielding of internal processes from external inputs.
Despite this problem, Dubois (2003) conjectured that an autonomous system is one that shows strong anticipation. The rationale behind it is that self-regulation is impossible without acting on the self and that this requires an (at least partial) model of the self to achieve in any consistent way (except for the degenerate case of a system that is its own model – Collier 2004a). If we consider systems that only model their environment, the logical rules of the model permit only environmental inputs and outputs, since that is all that the model represents. Some independence from the environment may result, for example if the environmental cues result in outputs that move the system to a safer location, or to a source of energy required for continuing operation. However, the behaviour of such a system is determined by its environment, so it is a behaviourist system as described above. If there is a self-model, however, mappings of internal states onto internal states are possible, which allows the system to control its internal condition, and possibly also to control the rules that govern its responses to environmental signals. It appears then that an internal model is sufficient for self regulation. If it is also necessary, then Dubois’ conjecture is true. Most of the rest of this paper is directed at establishing the necessity condition and its consequences. First, though, there is an issue that needs to be cleared up about the nature of Dubois’ conjecture. I think that a modification, or rather clarification, of Dubois’ conjecture is in order.”
http://collier.ukzn.ac.za/papers/Biosys_revised_final.pdf
Langan: “Reality as a Cellular Automaton: Spacetime Trades Curves for Computation
At the dawn of the computer era, the scientific mainstream sprouted a timely alternative viewpoint in the form of the Cellular Automaton Model of the Universe, which we hereby abbreviate as the CAMU. First suggested by mathematician John von Neumann and later resurrected by salesman and computer scientist Ed Fredkin, the CAMU represents a conceptual regression of spacetime in which space and time are re-separated and described in the context of a cellular automaton. Concisely, space is represented by (e.g.) a rectilinear array of computational cells, and time by a perfectly distributed state transformation rule uniformly governing cellular behavior. Because automata and computational procedures are inherently quantized, this leads to a natural quantization of space and time. Yet another apparent benefit of the CAMU is that if it can be made equivalent to a universal computer, then by definition it can realistically simulate anything that a consistent and continually evolving physical theory might call for, at least on the scale of its own universality.
But the CAMU, which many complexity theorists and their sympathizers in the physics community have taken quite seriously, places problematic constraints on universality. E.g., it is not universal on all computational scales, does not allow for subjective cognition except as an emergent property of its (assumedly objective) dynamic, and turns out to be an unmitigated failure when it comes to accounting for relativistic phenomena. Moreover, it cannot account for the origin of its own cellular array and is therefore severely handicapped from the standpoint of cosmology, which seeks to explain not only the composition but the origin of the universe. Although the CAMU array can internally accommodate the simulations of many physical observables, thus allowing the CAMU’s proponents to intriguingly describe the universe as a “self-simulation”, its inability to simulate the array itself precludes the adequate representation of higher-order physical predicates with a self-referential dimension.
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CTMU >> CAMU in Camo
Before we explore the conspansive SCSPL model in more detail, it is worthwhile to note that the CTMU can be regarded as a generalization of the major computation-theoretic current in physics, the CAMU. Originally called the Computation-Theoretic Model of the Universe, the CTMU was initially defined on a hierarchical nesting of universal computers, the Nested Simulation Tableau or NeST, which tentatively described spacetime as stratified virtual reality in order to resolve a decision-theoretic paradox put forth by Los Alamos physicist William Newcomb (see Noesis 44, etc.). Newcomb’s paradox is essentially a paradox of reverse causality with strong implications for the existence of free will, and thus has deep ramifications regarding the nature of time in self-configuring or self-creating systems of the kind that MAP shows it must be. Concisely, it permits reality to freely create itself from within by using its own structure, without benefit of any outside agency residing in any external domain.
Although the CTMU subjects NeST to metalogical constraints not discussed in connection with Newcomb’s Paradox, NeST-style computational stratification is essential to the structure of conspansive spacetime. The CTMU thus absorbs the greatest strengths of the CAMU – those attending quantized distributed computation – without absorbing its a priori constraints on scale or sacrificing the invaluable legacy of Relativity. That is, because the extended CTMU definition of spacetime incorporates a self-referential, self-distributed, self-scaling universal automaton, the tensors of GR and its many-dimensional offshoots can exist within its computational matrix.
An important detail must be noted regarding the distinction between the CAMU and CTMU. By its nature, the CTMU replaces ordinary mechanical computation with what might better be called protocomputation. Whereas computation is a process defined with respect to a specific machine model, e.g. a Turing machine, protocomputation is logically “pre-mechanical”. That is, before computation can occur, there must (in principle) be a physically realizable machine to host it. But in discussing the origins of the physical universe, the prior existence of a physical machine cannot be assumed. Instead, we must consider a process capable of giving rise to physical reality itself…a process capable of not only implementing a computational syntax, but of serving as its own computational syntax by self-filtration from a realm of syntactic potential. When the word “computation” appears in the CTMU, it is usually to protocomputation that reference is being made.
It is at this point that the theory of languages becomes indispensable. In the theory of computation, a “language” is anything fed to and processed by a computer; thus, if we imagine that reality is in certain respects like a computer simulation, it is a language. But where no computer exists (because there is not yet a universe in which it can exist), there is no “hardware” to process the language, or for that matter the metalanguage simulating the creation of hardware and language themselves. So with respect to the origin of the universe, language and hardware must somehow emerge as one; instead of engaging in a chicken-or-egg regress involving their recursive relationship, we must consider a self-contained, dual-aspect entity functioning simultaneously as both. By definition, this entity is a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL. Whereas ordinary computation involves a language, protocomputation involves SCSPL.
Protocomputation has a projective character consistent with the SCSPL paradigm. Just as all possible formations in a language – the set of all possible strings – can be generated from a single distributed syntax, and all grammatical transformations of a given string can be generated from a single copy thereof, all predicates involving a common syntactic component are generated from the integral component itself. Rather than saying that the common component is distributed over many values of some differential predicate – e.g., that some distributed feature of programming is distributed over many processors – we can say (to some extent equivalently) that many values of the differential predicate – e.g. spatial location – are internally or endomorphically projected within the common component, with respect to which they are “in superposition”. After all, difference or multiplicity is a logical relation, and logical relations possess logical coherence or unity; where the relation has logical priority over the reland, unity has priority over multiplicity. So instead of putting multiplicity before unity and pluralism ahead of monism, CTMU protocomputation, under the mandate of a third CTMU principle called Multiplex Unity or MU, puts the horse sensibly ahead of the cart.
To return to one of the central themes of this article, SCSPL and protocomputation are metaphysical concepts. Physics is unnecessary to explain them, but they are necessary to explain physics. So again, what we are describing here is a metaphysical extension of the language of physics. Without such an extension linking the physical universe to the ontological substrate from which it springs – explaining what physical reality is, where it came from, and how and why it exists – the explanatory regress of physical science would ultimately lead to the inexplicable and thus to the meaningless.
Spacetime Requantization and the Cosmological Constant
The CTMU, and to a lesser extent GR itself, posits certain limitations on exterior measurement. GR utilizes (so-called) intrinsic spacetime curvature in order to avoid the necessity of explaining an external metaphysical domain from which spacetime can be measured, while MAP simply states, in a more sophisticated way consistent with infocognitive spacetime structure as prescribed by M=R and MU, that this is a matter of logical necessity (see Noesis/ECE 139, pp. 3-10). Concisely, if there were such an exterior domain, then it would be an autologous extrapolation of the Human Cognitive Syntax (HCS) that should properly be included in the spacetime to be measured. [As previously explained, the HCS, a synopsis of the most general theoretical language available to the human mind (cognition), is a supertautological formulation of reality as recognized by the HCS. Where CTMU spacetime consists of HCS infocognition distributed over itself in a way isomorphic to NeST – i.e., of a stratified NeST computer whose levels have infocognitive HCS structure – the HCS spans the laws of mind and nature. If something cannot be mapped to HCS categories by acts of cognition, perception or reference, then it is HCS-unrecognizable and excluded from HCS reality due to nonhomomorphism; conversely, if it can be mapped to the HCS in a physically-relevant way, then it is real and must be explained by reality theory.]
Accordingly, the universe as a whole must be treated as a static domain whose self and contents cannot “expand”, but only seem to expand because they are undergoing internal rescaling as a function of SCSPL grammar. The universe is not actually expanding in any absolute, externally-measurable sense; rather, its contents are shrinking relative to it, and to maintain local geometric and dynamical consistency, it appears to expand relative to them. Already introduced as conspansion (contraction qua expansion), this process reduces physical change to a form of “grammatical substitution” in which the geometrodynamic state of a spatial relation is differentially expressed within an ambient cognitive image of its previous state. By running this scenario backwards and regressing through time, we eventually arrive at the source of geometrodynamic and quantum-theoretic reality: a primeval conspansive domain consisting of pure physical potential embodied in the self-distributed “infocognitive syntax” of the physical universe…i.e., the laws of physics, which in turn reside in the more general HCS.
Conspansion consists of two complementary processes, requantization and inner expansion. Requantization downsizes the content of Planck’s constant by applying a quantized scaling factor to successive layers of space corresponding to levels of distributed parallel computation. This inverse scaling factor 1/R is just the reciprocal of the cosmological scaling factor R, the ratio of the current apparent size dn(U) of the expanding universe to its original (Higgs condensation) size d0(U)=1. Meanwhile, inner expansion outwardly distributes the images of past events at the speed of light within progressively-requantized layers. As layers are rescaled, the rate of inner expansion, and the speed and wavelength of light, change with respect to d0(U) so that relationships among basic physical processes do not change…i.e., so as to effect nomological covariance. The thrust is to relativize space and time measurements so that spatial relations have different diameters and rates of diametric change from different spacetime vantages. This merely continues a long tradition in physics; just as Galileo relativized motion and Einstein relativized distances and durations to explain gravity, this is a relativization for conspansive “antigravity” (see Appendix B).
Conspansion is not just a physical operation, but a logical one as well. Because physical objects unambiguously maintain their identities and physical properties as spacetime evolves, spacetime must directly obey the rules of 2VL (2-valued logic distinguishing what is true from what is false). Spacetime evolution can thus be straightforwardly depicted by Venn diagrams in which the truth attribute, a high-order metapredicate of any physical predicate, corresponds to topological inclusion in a spatial domain corresponding to specific physical attributes. I.e., to be true, an effect must be not only logically but topologically contained by the cause; to inherit properties determined by an antecedent event, objects involved in consequent events must appear within its logical and spatiotemporal image. In short, logic equals spacetime topology.
…
In a conspansive universe, the spacetime metric undergoes constant rescaling. Whereas Einstein required a generalization of Cartesian space embodying higher-order geometric properties like spacetime curvature, conspansion requires a yet higher order of generalization in which even relativistic properties, e.g. spacetime curvature inhering in the gravitational field, can be progressively rescaled. Where physical fields of force control or program dynamical geometry, and programming is logically stratified as in NeST, fields become layered stacks of parallel distributive programming that decompose into field strata (conspansive layers) related by an intrinsic requantization function inhering in, and logically inherited from, the most primitive and connective layer of the stack. This “storage process” by which infocognitive spacetime records its logical history is called metrical layering (note that since storage is effected by inner-expansive domains which are internally atemporal, this is to some extent a misnomer reflecting weaknesses in standard models of computation).
The metrical layering concept does not involve complicated reasoning. It suffices to note that distributed (as in “event images are outwardly distributed in layers of parallel computation by inner expansion”) effectively means “of 0 intrinsic diameter” with respect to the distributed attribute. If an attribute corresponding to a logical relation of any order is distributed over a mathematical or physical domain, then interior points of the domain are undifferentiated with respect to it, and it need not be transmitted among them. Where space and time exist only with respect to logical distinctions among attributes, metrical differentiation can occur within inner-expansive domains (IEDs) only upon the introduction of consequent attributes relative to which position is redefined in an overlying metrical layer, and what we usually call “the metric” is a function of the total relationship among all layers.
The spacetime metric thus amounts to a Venn-diagrammatic conspansive history in which every conspansive domain (lightcone cross section, Venn sphere) has virtual 0 diameter with respect to distributed attributes, despite apparent nonzero diameter with respect to metrical relations among subsequent events. What appears to be nonlocal transmission of information can thus seem to occur. Nevertheless, the CTMU is a localistic theory in every sense of the word; information is never exchanged “faster than conspansion”, i.e. faster than light (the CTMU’s unique explanation of quantum nonlocality within a localistic model is what entitles it to call itself a consistent “extension” of relativity theory, to which the locality principle is fundamental).
Metrical layering lets neo-Cartesian spacetime interface with predicate logic in such a way that in addition to the set of “localistic” spacetime intervals riding atop the stack (and subject to relativistic variation in space and time measurements), there exists an underlying predicate logic of spatiotemporal contents obeying a different kind of metric. Spacetime thus becomes a logical construct reflecting the logical evolution of that which it models, thereby extending the Lorentz-Minkowski-Einstein generalization of Cartesian space. Graphically, the CTMU places a logical, stratified computational construction on spacetime, implants a conspansive requantization function in its deepest, most distributive layer of logic (or highest, most parallel level of computation), and rotates the spacetime diagram depicting the dynamical history of the universe by 90° along the space axes. Thus, one perceives the model’s evolution as a conspansive overlay of physically-parametrized Venn diagrams directly through the time (SCSPL grammar) axis rather than through an extraneous z axis artificially separating theorist from diagram. The cognition of the modeler – his or her perceptual internalization of the model – is thereby identified with cosmic time, and infocognitive closure occurs as the model absorbs the modeler in the act of absorbing the model.”
http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/Supernova.html
“Fundamental properties of the world in which all life evolved, such as space, time, force, energy and audio frequencies, are modeled in physics and engineering with differentiable manifolds. A central question of neurophysiology is how information about these quantities is encoded and processed. While the forces of evolution are complex and often contradictory, the argument can be made that if all other factors are equal, an organism with a more accurate mental representation of the world has a better chance of survival. This implies that the representation in the central nervous system (CNS) of a physical phenomenon should have the same intrinsic mathematical structure as the phenomenon itself. The philosophical principal, put forth by Monad (1971) and others, that under certain conditions, biological evolution will form designs that are in accordance with the laws of nature is referred to as teleonomy.
All of the diverse sensory input an organism receives must be combined with internal mental state and integrated together to form a coherent understanding of the environment and a single plan of action. For this to happen, all of the manifolds must be in some way unified. A common assumption is that all of the “low-level” manifold representations are converted to a set of “high-level” symbols and that these high-level symbolic representations are the basis for the unification. A central thesis of this article is that this need not be the case; we can leave the sensory input representations in their multi-dimensional form and instead create a unified system of computational manifolds.”
http://www.gmanif.com/pubs/TR-CIS-0602-03.pdf
lol. Yeah, that wasn’t predictable at all. More wall-spam, even after I already explained to you a more effective way to cite your sources/arguments without all the word vomit.
MarkCC, I don’t care if they’re different people — they’re obviously in on this whole thing together. For example, you can find people like Anonymous on other anti-CTMU blogposts, with the same mannerisms, arguments, and all.
Well if it’s a conspiracy you’re looking for Rubix, there could be synchronicity between seemingly independent events (extended superposition principle notwithstanding) which I’ve already posted a link to on what got me interested:
http://www.commongroundgroup.net/forum/?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=16
If Chris is (according to some of his critics/admirers alike) an American Christian, and I’m a Persian Baha’i, then perhaps it was planned to be that way from the beginning.
Anyways, all I will say is that Chris Langan is by **far** the best troll I’ve ever seen. For that, I have to give him credit. He follows the rules pretty darn well.
He’s uncrackable. I’ve wasted a great deal of time trying to get him to admit his scam, but he’s just too persistent. I yield, Chris. You win.
Chris’ game is pretty simple. He enjoys being an ass and laughing at people who fall for his troll. He makes up an obviously bullshit theory, and then lets it sit there. He doesn’t promote it. He won’t simplify anything. He won’t explain anything. He obviously can’t do this because it ruins the troll.
His intention: hope that someone credentialed will be dumb enough to fall into the trap and grant Chris status (ABC’s 20/20, Errol Morris, and Malcolm Gladwell have all fallen for it). People have come to interview him, grant him exposure, get him into a book, allow him on a gameshow, etc. Further bolstering himself with absurd credentials (1600 SAT while napping, 500+ lb benchpresses, 190+ IQ, etc), he’s a regular Aleksey Vayner.
All of his fellow CTMU buddies are in on the joke, too.
Chubix: “Anyways, all I will say is that Chris Langan is by **far** the best troll I’ve ever seen. For that, I have to give him credit. He follows the rules pretty darn well. He’s uncrackable. I’ve wasted a great deal of time trying to get him to admit his scam, but he’s just too persistent. I yield, Chris. You win.”
Of course I do, Mark. This was written in stone from the beginning. In terms of mental capacity, we’re just not on the same level.
Of course, I keep telling myself that someone like you can reach down through the chin-high mire, grab his own bootstraps, pull with great force, and redeem himself. But when all is said and done, I can only surmise that this is not in the cards for you.
Chubix: “Chris’ game is pretty simple. He enjoys being an ass and laughing at people who fall for his troll. He makes up an obviously bullshit theory, and then lets it sit there. He doesn’t promote it. He won’t simplify anything. He won’t explain anything. He obviously can’t do this because it ruins the troll.”
It’s not simple at all, Mark. That’s why you’ve been unceremoniously squashed every time you’ve made any attempt to address the actual content of the discussion, and why you lack clue one about how to climb out of the hole you’ve dug around yourself. That’s why you resort to lies, libel, and circumlocution – you couldn’t successfully argue a point of content if your silly little life depended on it.
Mark Chubix-Carroll: “His intention: hope that someone credentialed will be dumb enough to fall into the trap and grant Chris status (ABC’s 20/20, Errol Morris, and Malcolm Gladwell have all fallen for it). People have come to interview him, grant him exposure, get him into a book, allow him on a gameshow, etc. Further bolstering himself with absurd credentials (1600 SAT while napping, 500+ lb benchpresses, 190+ IQ, etc), he’s a regular Aleksey Vayner.”
Actually, I’ve never requested attention from any member of the press regarding me or the CTMU. They called me, never vice versa. The press did their own research, usually with care and accuracy, sometimes regarding details I’d rather not have shared with them. I’ve turned down several high-profile interview requests that any publicity-seeker would kill for. Nobody “allowed” me on their game show; “begged” would be more accurate, as I had to be asked three or four times after completely ignoring the initial request.
In other words, when the media asked me to share my information and/or participation with them, I (sometimes) agreed, end of story. There is no possible evidence you could ever bring to bear in favor of your contention that I somehow “lured them in”; no such evidence has ever existed.
But then again, a total lack of rational or empirical support never seems to stop you from saying what you say. It simply pours out of you in total contempt of logic and decency.
Incidentally, don’t bother wasting more time by denying that “Rubix” is your pseudonym. Rubix is the only participant here whom you have explicitly supported by name; his viewpoint, pattern of ignorance, and style of expression are strikingly similar to yours; and regarding his lies and repeated demonstrations of scientific and mathematical illiteracy, the ubiquitous question “Cui bono?” has only one possible answer: Mark Chu-Carroll, self-styled “math expert”.
Now why don’t you take your pseudonym(s), your confusion, and your lies, not to mention your notorious self-confessed racism, and go to the devil? He’s been waiting for you, and I’m told that patience is not his forte.
Mark and I aren’t the same person, and we don’t even share the same views (he’s religious, I am not). If we have similar arguments otherwise, it’s because we’re mathematically literate and know BS when we see it.
Look, man, you’re obviously trolling. Every single one of your posts is the same. You accuse people or circumlocution but then you dodge and weave your way out of answering *anything* when asked. It’s what trolls do. Ignore everything and keep the futile discussion going on forever. Whether you’re even the real Chris or not, I don’t care — either way, you help expose the CTMU for the garbage that it is, which is hilarious.
“Actually, I’ve never requested attention from any member of the press regarding me or the CTMU”
What part of “He makes up an obviously bullshit theory, and then lets it sit there. He doesn’t promote it” didn’t make sense the first time? Again, with that reading comprehension of yours, lol. The whole point of a good troll (via my earlier link) is to just set the trap and see who falls for it. Whether or not you’ll admit to being a troll or a crank, it doesn’t matter — you’re indistinguishable from either, and that’s what matters. If you actually took your CTMU seriously, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t be trying to promote it, and there’s no reason why you wouldn’t take the time to actually clarify your langauge. The fact that you don’t do any of this is telltale. You *rely* on it being obscure nonsense.
Anyways, there’s no proof you can point to that shows you actually have any expertise, but there’s plenty of evidence showing that you don’t understand basic QM, can’t even interpret your own quoted sources correctly, ignore 95%+ of the arguments brought forth against you, don’t understand math, and have no credentials.
What a surprise – more nasty ad hominem garbage from Mark Chubix-Carroll, unredeemed by a single constructive sentence.
Mark complains that I dodge questions, but everything he writes is a dodge … a perfectly unmathematical content-free representation of his confused and highly negative emotional state, utterly devoid of intellectual value. Having failed to understand one word of explanation thus far given, he promises that more would be wasted on him as well.
Mark’s post does, however, carry a bit of unwitting comedic value: it’s funny when an unrepentant troll complains about trolling even while handing out free trolling advice and trolling me personally despite the fact that I hadn’t even addressed him.
Mark seems to have a desperate need for attention … *my* attention. First his sockpuppet Rubix promised to run away; then it came running back with another bellyful of insults and a pop quiz to puke up. (In fact, if Rubix were anyone but Mark, “troll” would be an inadequate description. “Stalker” would be better.)
Fortunately, because it is clearly Mark with whom we’re dealing here – the circumstantial evidence is pretty overwhelming – we can chalk it all up to the fact that he doesn’t have a real job any more. He’s now a full-time troll…er, blogger…with infinite time on his idle and mischievous hands. Oh, joy!
The way I see it, the main problem here is that Chubix wants a freebie – he wants the freedom to fling insults and libel at me while never giving anybody a real name to which his insults can be returned. It’s a dirty, rotten, low-down cheat, a polemical rip-off, a cowardly attempt to dance the ad hominem fandango on somebody else’s face without paying a sou to the band.
So here’s my offer to Mark: If he will admit to being Chubix (which almost everyone here realizes anyway), I’ll talk a little quantum mechanics with him, and we can get to the bottom of yet another relative competency issue that has evidently been plaguing his mind.
How about it, Mark? Personally, I think it would be great if everyone could see what you actually know about quantum mechanics in a “deep” and topical kind of way, don’t you?
MarkCC: Are you able to confirm that Chris’ IP is from Missouri via http://www.geobytes.com/iplocator.htm ? I think there’s serious reason to believe that he’s just a troll posing as Chris. If he’s the real deal, then my earlier argument is more accurate. He’s obviously a troll, but I’m really curious if he’s the real guy.
Chris:
“a perfectly unmathematical content-free representation of his confused and highly negative emotional state”
Talking about yourself again — quote me examples of anything you’ve said that’s mathematical and shows you know what you’re talking about. The evidence is pretty laughable. Remember Newcomb’s Paradox? I sure don’t see any statistics or mathematics despite the fact that it’s largely a utility/probability problem once you decide to choose how accurate the predictor is. Yet, there is nothing other than garbage. Same goes for your CTMU. There’s no math. Just a lot of handwaving and retardation.
“Fortunately, because it is clearly Mark with whom we’re dealing here”
We’re not the same person. Troll harder, please.
“We can chalk it all up to the fact that he doesn’t have a real job any more. He’s now a full-time troll…er, blogger…with infinite time on his idle and mischievous hands”
Funny, because on the front page, Mark says, clearly, that he left Google and now works for Foursquare. Again, please, troll harder.
“The way I see it, the main problem here is that Chubix wants a freebie – he wants the freedom to fling insults and libel at me while never giving anybody a real name to which his insults can be returned”
Not falling for it. Besides, you’re the one flinging insults at others without offering substantive responses to criticisms.
“Personally, I think it would be great if everyone could see what you actually know about quantum mechanics in a “deep” and topical kind of way, don’t you?”
I think it’s great that your incompetency has already been exposed in more ways than one. You couldn’t correctly call foul when nonsense questions were asked of you (any competent student of QM would have been able to immediately recognize the trap), and you weren’t able to answer my simple QM math questions which would take no more than 10 seconds to answer. Instead, you wasted MUCH more time offering excuses.
Yes, according to an IP geo-lookup, Chris is posting from Missouri. There’s absolutely no reason to doubt that he’s who he says he is.
Look, he’s free to be as much of an asshole as he wants. My policy around here is to allow people to insult me as much as they want; after all, I feel free to insult them. But I’d really rather not have things like accusations of fraud between commenters. Yeah, I know Chris has been doing that too, but since he’s doing it in a way that targets me, I don’t feel like it’s appropriate to ban him. But please cut it out, OK?
Chubix: “We’re not the same person.”
Like hell you aren’t. 😉
There’s at least twice as much circumstantial evidence in favor of Mark being Chubix as one needs in order to make the identification with reasonable confidence. This includes the points I already mentioned; the fact that until his last post, he seemed to enjoy access to server data (knowing when I was logged into his site); he spews in the same emotional, content-free way that Mark spews at the top of this page (and elsewhere); Mark unwisely tolerates highly specific and potentially damaging accusations from Chubix that no sane, neutral, emotionally uninvolved forum moderator could afford to tolerate; Mark lives in the Greater NY area, raising the probability that he could easily have had a friend or relative take photos of Wall Street, and so on.
There’s a margin of error, but it’s now small enough to be considered negligible. As far as I’m concerned, Mark is Chubix, period. So the question is, will Mark confess? He might as well, because regardless of anything that he “and” Chubix may say or do, Mark will be picking up the tab for Chubix from here on out. Chubix’ errors are Mark’s errors; Chubix’ insults are Mark’s insults; Chubix’ libel is Mark’s libel.
All that Mark has to offer at this point is a little honesty. So can we at least get that out of him?
Disemvoweled by MarkCC
Chris: Notice how you completely ignored my comments about Newcomb’s Paradox in my prior post. That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. You do it all the time in this thread.
Alright, I’m getting pretty tired of this discussion, so I’m just going to be straight with you.
You assert mathematical and scientific superiority and yet I can point to evidence that questions the credibility of such claims. For instance, you refused to acknowledge why the “universal powerset” problem is an example of the kind of self-inclusion paradox you find in naive set theory (which is not a real problem we need concern ourselves with). You refuse to answer any questions about QM, no matter how basic. You didn’t point out that the nonsense QM questions were nonsense (and instead addressed it with a serious response). You just threw around insults otherwise.
I mean, seriously, what’s the point? It’s the sort of thing a troll does — ignore vital counterpoints at all costs, sling insults, and keep the debate going on forever. You’re perfectly entitled to do it, just as others are perfectly entitled to criticize, but again, what’s the point? The only conclusion I can think of is that you enjoy insulting people. A lot of your argumentation is basically “I’m right, you’re wrong.” If you think your understanding is so great, and your theory is so correct, then how come you don’t show why?
I know you want to “wipe the slime trails off the CTMU,” and you’re perfectly free to defend yourself in this thread — but I don’t understand why you would rather insult people instead of clearing up the confusion around your theory. The fact that you absolutely refuse to clarify anything, to me, means that you’re intentionally keeping it obfuscated and difficult to understand. When you refuse to answer questions, what do you expect? If someone comes across someone else’s work and thinks that it is nonsense, then the best way to clear up the confusion (if you insist it ISN’T nonsense) is to show proof and defend your theory with basic examples that everyone can understand and talk about. But you don’t do this.
The only reason I’ve even been posting in this thread was to better understand your intent and mindset with respect to the CTMU, because you claim to be a “high-IQ genius” who believes in Intelligent Design, which, to me, is an interesting combination (typically, the data supports the notion that higher IQ is correlated with a lack of belief in God). If you saw my earlier video from Neil deGrasse Tyson, he also speaks about how the belief in God starts to drop off as you become more scientifically literate, and yet even among the elite scientists, the percentage of believers isn’t zero. It’s a question he struggled with, and it’s one I struggle with. I was hoping that by coming here, I’d gain some insight.
I’m sure you can acknowledge that communication is a two-way street by definition. As Feynman would argue:
“And that’s where I discovered the great difference in what goes on in the head when people think they’re doing the same thing! And so it struck me, therefore, if that’s already true at the most elementary level […] that the imageries and methods by which we’re storing it all and the way we think about it — could be, really, if we could get into each other’s heads, entirely different and in fact why someone has a great deal of difficulty understanding a point which you see as obvious, and vice versa, it may be because it’s a little hard to translate what you just said into his particular framework and so on.”
If you’re tired of people calling you names, then why not spend ten minutes writing a post that tries to meet people halfway? Start simple. That way people can agree/disagree on certain premises before you move onto more advanced things within the scope of your theory.
Are you willing to do this, and if not, why? Because if not, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree and go about our separate ways. I wish you warmth and success either way, despite the rather heated nature of our discussion, but I nevertheless don’t appreciate the fact that you insult myself (and others) all the time instead of simply clarifying your position and addressing points brought forth in greater detail.
Let’s start over, Mark.
Are you ready to confess to being Chubix?
Remember, you’re not fooling anyone any more. The charade is already over; all you need do is demonstrate a little honesty by belatedly admitting it.
(No quantum mechanics, or Newcomb’s paradox, until you decloak and come 100% clean. Do that, and maybe we can talk.)
Why? We’re not the same person. If Mark wanted to address you, he’d do so under his own name, as he has done many times in this thread already.
If you’re just going to endlessly insist that we’re the same person and that you won’t talk until we claim to be the same person, then we’re never going to get anywhere.
You’re just imposing a silly restriction (as usual) because you want to avoid contrary opinions and criticisms no matter what. There’s nothing to “admit” to — we’re not the same person. Period.
Chris:
I’ve been blogging for a long time, but I’ve got to say you’re one of the most profoundly, pointlessly, and arrogantly idiotic people I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with.
No, I am not Rubix. As you well know. This is just yet another attempt to create an artificial excuse that allows you to weasel out of actually saying anything with any substance. As dodges go, it’s a good one – because, of course, it’s impossible for me to ever prove that I’m not Rubix.
But really, what possible reason would I have for suddenly hiding behind a sock-puppet? Like I said before, I’ve been blogging for a long time, and I’ve never needed to hind behind a puppet. I’ve made my opinion of you absolutely clear: you’re a lying jackass with delusions of grandeur, and it’s not worth my time to sit and squabble with you, because you’ve made it painfully obvious that you’re never going to actually address the meat of any criticism. You’re just going to sit here, shout, call people names, and generally avoid actually talking about anything. I’ve made my criticism of your “theory” quite clear, and you’ve clearly shown that you’re never going to actually address it. If I wanted to argue with you, why wouldn’t I do it under my real name?
To be honest, personally, I think Rubix is a bit of an idiot. I can’t imagine why anyone would continue to spend so many hours squabbling with you. You’re not worth the effort. Rubix has been wasting an unbelievable amount of time pointlessly bickering with you. Personally, I think that that gives you far more attention than you’re worth. Personally, I have better things to do with my time.
Mark, you’re a full of it as a Thanksgiving turkey.
Bottom line: You’re in the habit of trying to make yourself look intelligent by denigrating work you don’t come close to understanding. This includes any work involving basic mathematical distinctions like set and set theory, model and universe, and syntax and semantics, which you totally misunderstand. Worse, when your incomprehension is revealed, you gather up all of your mistakes in a heavy-duty trash bag and lay them on the doorstep of your opponent, hoping that thanks to the various deceptive techniques you employ in your writing, nobody will notice the switcheroo. But everybody notices anyway.
In addition to being snide and/or downright nasty, your criticisms baselessly accuse your targets of ignorance regarding matters they understand far better than you do. When caught in fundamental mathematical errors, you manufacture pseudonymous trolls who issue lies, insults, and defamatory accusations to your black little heart’s content. You’re not interested in truth at all; you just want to emerge from the conflicts you initiate smelling like something other than sewer water, and you don’t care what it takes to do that. You end up smelling like sewer water anyway.
You claim to be religious, but religious people typically don’t behave as you do. You live not by your conscience, by the 3D’s – doublespeak, deceit, and defamation. It’s all you really know; the “math” is just a distraction. All in all, you’re a stain on the Internet, your mother, and the planet Earth.
Come clean, or go to hell. It’s up to you. Either way, you’re no longer fooling anyone.
MarkCC: I can at least explain why I’ve been so persistent.
Like I said, the only reason I am here is because I wanted to better understand why Chris says what he does and why he believes what he does. I find interest in the relation between intelligence and belief in God (since intelligence is typically correlated with a lack of belief), and I find interest in Chris’ backstory (namely because I myself grew up with abuse and managed to come out ahead). And yet I don’t understand how someone who claims to be self-sufficient, knowledgeable about the universe, and intelligent can turn around and write something like the CTMU. I wanted to see if Chris was just misunderstood because of his lack of formal training, or if he’s just a namecalling crank whose theory relies on being dense and obfuscated in an attempt to sound smart, or what.
All we can do is offer our opinions and speculate on his theory and level of expertise and background because Chris is, a great majority of the time, so unwilling to divulge anything other than personal insults, bullshit conditions, and blind assertions without adequate supporting arguments. And yet, there are many things we can point out that appear inconsistent and indicative of a *lack* of expertise and knowledge.
But I honestly can’t think of any good reason why someone would so get so defensive over his theory but in the same breath refuse to address the meat of the criticisms.
You’re right, though — it is pointless. Despite this massively long thread, Chris makes up any excuse he can to avoid delivering a response with substance. For that, I am a bit of an idiot for giving him more credit than he’s obviously credible for. It was clear from the beginning that he wasn’t going to deliver an intellectually honest debate.
Chris:
Let me make something abundantly clear to you.
I am under no obligation to provide you with a forum for your ranting. As of now, you’re a moderated commenter – you comments will not be automatically posted; they’ll be directed to me, for moderation.
If you want to keep playing these idiot games where you spew insults, you’re welcome to waste your time, but they’ll hit the bit-bucket, unread.
If you want to actually engage with people and discuss things, then that’s fine; I’ll release the comments from moderation at my earliest opportunity. But if all you want to do is get your rocks off by pissing me off? Find another forum.
For those interested in self-determinacy and (super)rational ethics.
Gary Drescher on Newcomb’s problem and its implication for choice machines and philosophy. Drescher holds a PhD from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Newcomb’s Problem and Beyond
Choice, Determinism, and Cooperation
Gary L. Drescher
Center for Cognitive Studies
…
A goal-pursuing agent must somehow ascertain when an action would serve as a means to achieving a goal. Various criteria (causal, evidential, counterfactual) have been proposed (e.g. Joyce 1999). Examining Newcomb’s Problem (Nozick 1969) and more-mundane thought experiments, I argue for an acausal but non-evidentialist counterfactual criterion (but without invoking the “possible worlds” of e.g. Lewis 1973) for means-end recognition: an agent acts for the sake of what the outcome would then be, not necessarily for what the action causes.
Newcomb’s Problem posits an imaginary situation in which a large reward was (irrevocably) set up for you if and only if a reliable prediction anticipated that you would now make a choice which (apart from the large reward) is slightly unfavorable to you. A paradox arises as to whether to make the choice that (almost certainly) implies that you reap the reward. Newcomb’s Problem bears on the compatibility of choice with determinism. Further, Lewis (1979) and others argue that the Prisoner’s Dilemma (e.g. Shubik 1982), a thought experiment that bears on the rationality of altruistic cooperation, reduces to Newcomb’s Problem.
I propose a radical variant of Newcomb’s Problem in which the already-inalterable reward outcome is also already visible to you, yet (I claim) you are still correct to act in pursuit of that outcome. I argue that the radical variant is key to reconciling choice with determinism, and that it suggests a foundation for cooperative behavior that goes substantially beyond what a resolution of the Prisoner’s Dilemma alone would provide.
http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/lcc03/Drescher_synthese.rtf
The problem is that the question is nonsensical by its premises. If the Predictor is able to predict your choices with 100% accuracy, then there’s no paradox. It doesn’t matter if the boxes have already been filled with items by the time you enter the room — he already knows what you’re going to do. If you take both boxes, the black box will be empty. If you take just the black box, it’ll have $1 mil. No matter what, because we’ve stated that the Predictor is 100% accurate.
But if you’re asserting that you can still make a decision and somehow fall outside of a Predictor’s 100%-accurate prediction, this is inconsistent and the problem becomes worthless to talk about because you can’t escape a defined 100% prediction accuracy if you’re formulating the problem that way.
But if you’re going to assert that the prediction rate isn’t 100% but something less than that, then we can discuss the problem in terms of utility theory, mathematics, and statistics using posterior probabilities and risk profiles/decision theory.
I really don’t have anything to add, please don’t mind my posts, simply interested in honestly learning something interesting.
For AI ethics philosophers.
“Timeless Decision Theory gets the correct answer to Newcomb’s Problem and to the Smoking Lesion Problem. It takes the strengths of Causal Decision Theory but attempts to deal with its weaknesses. It also resolves many of the other decision problems mentioned. For example, if two agents using Timeless Decision Theory met for a Prisoner’s Dilemma, they would cooperate rather than defect.
That’s not to say it solves everything. Eliezer has explored some problems it still doesn’t provide the desired answers to in a post and Gary Drescher has outlined another issue. However, given that Eliezer is currently writing a paper on Timeless Decision Theory, it seems likely that some of these issues may be resolved soon.”
http://formalisedthinking.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/an-introduction-to-timeless-decision-theory/
Timeless Decision Theory:
http://singinst.org/upload/TDT-v01o.pdf
“All right, fine, here’s a fast summary of the most important ingredients that go into my “timeless decision theory”. This isn’t so much an explanation of TDT, as a list of starting ideas that you could use to recreate TDT given sufficient background knowledge. It seems to me that this sort of thing really takes a mini-book, but perhaps I shall be proven wrong.
The one-sentence version is: Choose as though controlling the logical output of the abstract computation you implement, including the output of all other instantiations and simulations of that computation.
The three-sentence version is: Factor your uncertainty over (impossible) possible worlds into a causal graph that includes nodes corresponding to the unknown outputs of known computations; condition on the known initial conditions of your decision computation to screen off factors influencing the decision-setup; compute the counterfactuals in your expected utility formula by surgery on the node representing the logical output of that computation.
To obtain the background knowledge if you don’t already have it, the two main things you’d need to study are the classical debates over Newcomblike problems, and the Judea Pearl synthesis of causality. Canonical sources would be “Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation” for Newcomblike problems and “Causality” for causality.
For those of you who don’t condescend to buy physical books, Marion Ledwig’s thesis on Newcomb’s Problem is a good summary of the existing attempts at decision theories, evidential decision theory and causal decision theory. You need to know that causal decision theories two-box on Newcomb’s Problem (which loses) and that evidential decision theories refrain from smoking on the smoking lesion problem (which is even crazier). You need to know that the expected utility formula is actually over a counterfactual on our actions, rather than an ordinary probability update on our actions.
I’m not sure what you’d use for online reading on causality. Mainly you need to know:
That a causal graph factorizes a correlated probability distribution into a deterministic mechanism of chained functions plus a set of uncorrelated unknowns as background factors.
Standard ideas about “screening off” variables (D-separation).
The standard way of computing counterfactuals (through surgery on causal graphs).
It will be helpful to have the standard Less Wrong background of defining rationality in terms of processes that systematically discover truths or achieve preferred outcomes, rather than processes that sound reasonable; understanding that you are embedded within physics; understanding that your philosophical intutions are how some particular cognitive algorithm feels from inside; and so on.”
http://lesswrong.com/lw/15z/ingredients_of_timeless_decision_theory/
I’d like to respond to Langan’s rant that “the typical defender of the CTMU is a model citizen if not an absolute saint next to the typical CTMU critic, who would evidently lie, cheat, steal, and pimp his sister, mother, and grandmother in order to get over on the theory, smear its author, and express his hatred of God and religion.”
I’ve been extremely impressed by all the time, effort and sheer decency that Langan’s critics have shown, and they hardly deserve this kind of abuse.
For some examples:
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-28901
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-29275
http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2011/02/11/another-crank-comes-to-visit-the-cognitive-theoretic-model-of-the-universe/#comment-28524
It takes time to make a clear, rational argument and make it accessible to most readers, and Rubix, CausticDuality, John Fringe and others have generously spent this time.
Thank you.
And, Langan, on page 9 of your 56 page CTMU document, you write
“Some numbers, e.g. irrational ones like √2, cannot be precisely computed and therefore do not correspond to any physically meaningful location on a number line or physical trajectory; they have an abstract existence only.”
As Rubix has already pointed out, if you take a square one unit in size and draw the diagonal, you obtain a line those length is the square root of 2, contradicting
your statement.
Do you have any response?
Honestly, Chris, what do you expect? People read your theory, find it to be indecipherable, and you insult them. They ask for clarification, and you insult them some more and *actively refuse* to clarify anything. Do you just expect everyone to take your word for it and trust you? That your work should “speak for itself”? Because if that’s your expectation, it’s a futile one — nobody’s going to take your word for it without a good reason, and a paper that “speaks for itself” is useless if nobody can understand what it’s trying to say. Seriously, what do you expect? What is your intention/ideal goal?
Even something like physics is rather dense with mathematics and jargon, but the difference is that it can be taught in a simple way and explained clearly in a way everyone can understand. From simplicity, you can then ramp up to complexity. Same goes for computer science, or finance, or mathematics, etc. Basic examples can be given to clarify key concepts at every step.
So, what do you say, Chris? Are you willing to start over? We’ll begin from a completely blank slate, here — no insults, no namecalling, no baseless accusations, no pointdodging, no references to past arguments, etc, and that goes for everyone. I’m willing to apologize for the harsh language I’ve directed at you and forgive you for yours, and hope you can do the same.
Maybe we can then have a proper discussion.
Rubix
You know, CTMU meets almost all of the criteria for pseudoscience and therefore would be more properly ignored, not argued. I mean, its as though CTMU was constructed purposely as pseudoscience, which I believe you have mentioned, and then selectively exposed to various audiences to “test” their response. If so, then I would conclude this to be a more malicious type of underhandedness than simply “believing” what you peddle. Besides, it burns compute cycles you could be applying to much more worthy and successful causes, ideas, etc.
See: Identifying pseudoscience
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience
Yes, I agree with you. The CTMU fits practically all the criteria for pseudoscience, just as Chris meets the criteria and characteristics of a crank.
I have no real desire to debate the CTMU because, IMO, it’s intellectually lazy codswallop dressed up to sound smart to the ignorant reader. My goal is to see if Chris is even knowledgeable about basic mathematics/physics. I don’t think that he is, but this is why I’d like for him to step up to the plate and show that he’s not an outright fraud. I’m certain though that he won’t accept the challenge, let alone comment again.
Right now, I think it’s blatantly obvious that he’s a liar. But I still feel that it’s worth at least extending the olive branch out there if Chris is willing to wipe the slate clean and prove his level of understanding. If not, then I think we’ve got our answer.
May I suggest this forum for discussion?
“The question of the relationship between category theory and model theory emerged in this thread. So I was interested to read some things David Kazhdan had to say about this relationship in his Lecture notes in Motivic Integration.
In spite of it successes, the Model theory did not enter into a “tool box” of mathematicians and even many of mathematicians working on “Motivic integrations” are content to use the results of logicians without understanding the details of the proofs.
I don’t know any mathematician who did not start as a logician and for whom it was “easy and natural” to learn the Model theory. Often the experience of learning of the Model theory is similar to the one of learning of Physics: for a [short] while everything is so simple and so easily reformulated in familiar terms that “there is nothing to learn” but suddenly one find himself in a place when Model theoreticians “jump from a tussock to a hummock” while we mathematicians don’t see where to “put a foot” and are at a complete loss.”
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/07/category_theory_and_model_theo.html
Mark, All,
I want to leave something as a thank you. I just wrote it for “my home institution”, and I don’t want to leave you a thank you so much that I will try to cater it to yu’all, but I have been more involved with you all here recently, and so I think you deserve some thanks for the part you played in my coming to focus in on this. I can’t specify what that “part” is, but I know it was significant: thank you all: Mark for hosting, those I’ve interacted with actively, those I’ve only interacted with “inactively”.
$ $ $ $ $
Mary, Platt, All,
I thought I’d type out the 2nd law of thermodynamics:
“Two of the most common [statements of it]”:
“1) No apparatus can operate in such a way that its ONLY effect (in
system and surroundings) is to convert heat absorbed by a system
completely into work.”
“2) No process is possible which consists solely in the transfer of heat
from one temperature level to a higher one.”
—“Introduction to chemical engineering thermodynamics”, Smith, Van Ness, Abbott.
To help picture what this means I must remind you that thermodynamics is
talking about an IDEAL change: it is not dynamic per se, but a leap-frog
from one static equilibrium to another static equilibrium (where, in
neither state can there be even a TENDENCY to change) based on some
IDEAL manipulation in either the system or its surrounding (where system
+ surroundings = universe, and the boundary must remain the same ideal
boundary for the comparison: the system must remain the system.). That
means that the “apparatus” in 1) is an ideal apparatus (an idea!), and
PART OF that idea is that it must leave some “waste”! Where “waste” is
in quotes because one I am’s waste is another man’s air to breathe (the
first I am was a plant, for instance). Looking at 2), one cannot
progress solely on his own waste. (In the bible “I reap what I do not
sow”).
The point here is this, who would want to overcome entropy!?! The
increase in entropy is evidence of an increase in LIFE! It represents
and increase in “waste”, yes, but that is evidence of an increase in
life: diversity: potential! However, there is “waste” and then there is
prodigalism! One need not worry about making “waste”: one cannot avoid
it. Prodigalism is to hurt oneself in the worst way though. And
hurting yourself hurts your neighbors, which hurts you even more, …
Do you see exactly how this paints the picture of betterness! Waste is
guaranteed – and a joy – but at some point the fruit can turn rotten
(bible: ~”what are you to do if salt looses its flavor?”, one can
degenerate into prodigalism.
How does prodigalism relate to SOL, you ask? It is the DQ counterpart!
SOM is the metaphysics wherein one has a prodigalism/SOL divide rather
than DQ/SQ! Do you see why? Because it is to think that the boundary
between system and surroundings separates independent things, qua
subject and object! But living things to not lay claim to such a
phenomenal boundary! Just as Marsha has beautifully, consistently, and
ardently argued! But keep pushing Marsha!!! When you loose such a
boundary, then you see that your creating this “waste” is evidence of
your ideal existence!!!!! And you are happy because you see that
someone else will reap what you have sowed for them (qua present), even
though to you you were not only happy to do it, but NEEDED to eliminate
your waste!!! Platt, this metaphysical position is just as consistent
with the science as the one “most” som bound scientists take – in fact,
more so!
Now, making the ideal division in the science of thermodynamics IS quite
useful! It allows one to analyze the efficiency of certain “systems”.
Since prodigalsim is to “waste” the potential on far less than “better”,
some concern for efficiency is quite wise. Notice how the solution is
complex (even beautiful!). More waste is, all else the same, actually
better!, but similarly so for efficiency! This is the optimization
problem to be solved for a step in evolution! If it is a good idea it
is worth the waste.
mmmmmwwaahh (that was a little kiss 🙂 )
Who will pay?
Tim
Disemvoweled by MarkCC
Just so nobody gets the wrong idea:
Yesterday, in a post that I didn’t approve, Chris made some rather interesting threats concerning legal action if I didn’t do what he wanted. My response was simple: “Please, sue me.” I would truly love to see the response of any court to Chris’s allegations. In the meantime, Chris continues to play his little games, spewing insults at everyone in sight, while complaining about how people don’t treat him with the appropriate deference.
Disemvoweled by MarkCC:
Let me just point out, Chris, that when you say something like:
It’s true that you haven’t specifically said “Stop it or I’ll sue you”, but the actual intent of the words is, quite clearly, “stop it or I’ll sue you”. I’m sure you’ll deny that, but we both know that your intent was to make an obvious implied threat while maintaining your deniablility.
Do you not think you appear as a coward when you disemvowel Chris’s posts? In any case, I liked to read them, and I can’t do that anymore if you take the vowels out. What do you achieve by doing that?
But I do not understand why Langan would sue you for any other reason than in a frivolous sense. This page is probably useful to him rather than harmful. Heck, at least it has been useful for me! I managed to even contact Langan, although it didn’t seem like I could talk with him as much as I wanted. Do you know that this website used to be my only way of contacting Langan?
Thank you for that, Mark.
Disemvoweled by MarkCC
(Aw, what’s the matter Chris? Don’t like getting called out on your threats? You poor baby!)
Tht’s fn. ‘ll b wtchng, Mrk. (Dsmvwlmnt by pstr.)
Chris, don’t be too discouraged (or taken in) by the above reception. Remember, “fools rush in…”. I can’t wait for the book.
Also, I noticed this statistic at the bottom of the page:
“Bad Behavior has blocked 1111 access attempts in the last 7 days”
The reconciliation of mind-matter through dual-aspect monism in the CTMU has also been explored by Pratt’s conception of “communes”.
“Materialism arbitrarily excludes the possibility that reality has a meaningful nonmaterial aspect, objectivism arbitrarily excludes the possibility that reality has a meaningful subjective aspect, and although Cartesian dualism technically excludes neither, it arbitrarily denies that the mental and material, or subjective and objective, sides of reality share common substance.
…
How come the “one world” out of many observer-participants? Insofar as the term “observer-participants” embraces scientists and other human beings, this question invites a quasi-anthropological interpretation. Why should a universe consisting of separate observers with sometimes-conflicting agendas and survival imperatives display structural and nomological unity? Where observers are capable of creating events within the global unitary manifold of their common universe, why should they not be doing it strictly for themselves, each in his or her own universe, and never the twain shall meet? Where the observer-participant concept is generalized to include non-anthropic information-transducing systems, what is holding all of these systems together in a single unified reality?
…
A scientist employs empirical methods to make specific observations, applies general cognitive relationships from logic and mathematics in order to explain them, and comes off treating reality as a blend of perception and cognition. But this treatment lacks anything resembling an explicit justification. When a set of observations is explained with a likely set of equations interpreted therein, the adhesion between explanandum and explanation might as well be provided by rubber cement. I.e., scientific explanations and interpretations glue observations and equations together in a very poorly understood way. It often works like a charm…but why? One of the main purposes of reality theory is to answer this question.
…
Thus far, it has been widely assumed that reality theory can be sought by the same means as any other scientific theory. But this is not quite true, for while science uses the epistemological equivalent of magic glue to attach its theories to its observations, reality theory must give a recipe for the glue and justify the means of application. That is, reality theory must describe reality on a level that justifies science, and thus occupies a deeper level of explanation than science itself. Does this mean that reality theory is mathematical? Yes, but since mathematics must be justified along with science, metamathematical would perhaps be a better description… and when all is said and done, this comes down to logic pure and simple. It follows that reality theory must take the form of an extended logic…in fact, a “limiting form” of logic in which the relationship between theory and universe, until now an inexhaustible source of destructive model-theoretic ambiguity, is at last reduced to (dual-aspect) monic form, short-circuiting the paradox of Cartesian dualism and eliminating the epistemological gap between mind and matter, theory and universe.
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This common attribute invalidates any assertion to the effect that the difference between the relands is “absolute” or “irreducible”; the mere fact that the difference can be linguistically or geometrically expressed implies that it is only partial and that both relands are manifestations of one and the same ontological medium. Where X and Y represent arbitrary parts or aspects of the difference relation called reality, this diagram graphically demonstrates that reality ultimately consists of a unitary ontological medium. Accordingly, reality theory must be a monic theory reducing reality to this medium (this idea is further developed in the Principle of Infocognitive Monism).
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The primary transducers of the overall language of science are scientists, and their transductive syntax consists of the syntax of generalized scientific observation and theorization, i.e. perception and cognition. We may therefore partition or stratify this syntax according to the nature of the logical and nonlogical elements incorporated in syntactic rules. For example, we might develop four classes corresponding to the fundamental trio space, time and object, a class containing the rules of logic and mathematics, a class consisting of the perceptual qualia in terms of which we define and extract experience, meaning and utility from perceptual and cognitive reality, and a class accounting for more nebulous feelings and emotions integral to the determination of utility for qualic relationships. For now, we might as well call these classes STOS, LMS, QPS and ETS, respectively standing for space-time-object syntax, logico-mathematical syntax, qualio-perceptual syntax, and emo-telic syntax, along with a high-level interrelationship of these components to the structure of which all or some of them ultimately contribute. Together, these ingredients comprise the Human Cognitive-Perceptual Syntax or HCS.
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Lest the inclusion of utility, qualia or feelings seem “unscientific”, we need merely observe that it would be vastly more unscientific to ignore things that are subjectively known to exist on the wishful and rationally unjustifiable assumption that subjectivity and subjective predicates play no part in the self-definition of reality. Insofar as subjectivity merely refers to the coherent intrinsic identities of the elements of objective relationships, this would be logically absurd. But in any case, our aim at this point is merely to classify the basic elements in terms of which we view the world, whether or not they have thus far proven accessible to standard empirical methodology, and this means recognizing the reality of qualic and emotional predicates and adjoining the corresponding nonlogical constants to SCSPL syntax. If QPS and ETS predicates turn out to be reducible to more fundamental STOS/LMS predicates, then very well; it will permit a convenient reduction of the syntax. But this is certainly not something that can be decided in advance.
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Cognitive-perceptual syntax consists of (1) sets, posets or tosets of attributes (telons), (2) perceptual rules of external attribution for mapping external relationships into telons, (3) cognitive rules of internal attribution for cognitive (internal, non-perceptual) state-transition, and (4) laws of dependency and conjugacy according to which perceptual or cognitive rules of external or internal attribution may or may not act in a particular order or in simultaneity.” – Langan, 2002
The Yoneda Lemma without category theory: algebra and applications
“3.3 Ontology of properties and qualia
Three long-standing problems of philosophy are, in decreasing order of seniority, Cartesian dualism, the nature of properties or attributes, and the existence of qualia.
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In 1929 C.I.Lewis, an early contributor to modal logic, wrote Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge in which he summarized his thinking about qualia as entities bridging the physically observable (as measured by scientific instruments) and the psychologically observable (as the sensations reported by human observers). Philosophers have since divided themselves into qualiaphiles such as Edmond Wright, editor of The Case for Qualia, a just-published score of qualia-friendly essays, and qualiaphobes such as Daniel Dennett who maintain that the concept is incoherent.
Communes are a new mathematical construct that provide a common solution to all three problems by giving a way of thinking about them. Since communes are well-defined, this allows the questions to be formulated more sharply as, how faithfully do communes capture the notions of mind, property, and quale? Communes also suggests novel ways of defining and organizing those notions so as to make them more consistent both individually and in combination with each other.” – Pratt, 2009
There are many interesting applications for model theory these days in computer science, with the potential for practical application, particularly used in ontologies.
“This document uses a basic technique called model theory for specifying the semantics of a formal language. Readers unfamiliar with model theory may find the glossary in appendix B helpful; throughout the text, uses of terms in a technical sense are linked to their glossary definitions. Model theory assumes that the language refers to a ‘world’, and describes the minimal conditions that a world must satisfy in order to assign an appropriate meaning for every expression in the language. A particular world is called an interpretation, so that model theory might be better called ‘interpretation theory’. The idea is to provide an abstract, mathematical account of the properties that any such interpretation must have, making as few assumptions as possible about its actual nature or intrinsic structure, thereby retaining as much generality as possible. The chief utility of a formal semantic theory is not to provide any deep analysis of the nature of the things being described by the language or to suggest any particular processing model, but rather to provide a technical way to determine when inference processes are valid, i.e. when they preserve truth. This provides the maximal freedom for implementations while preserving a globally coherent notion of meaning.
Model theory tries to be metaphysically and ontologically neutral. It is typically couched in the language of set theory simply because that is the normal language of mathematics – for example, this semantics assumes that names denote things in a set IR called the ‘universe’ – but the use of set-theoretic language here is not supposed to imply that the things in the universe are set-theoretic in nature. Model theory is usually most relevant to implementation via the notion of entailment, described later, which makes it possible to define valid inference rules.” – W3C, RDF Semantics
“According to this vision, the activity of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) centered around the specification of recommendations for structuring the data on the web using logic-based representation formalisms that would provide a well-defined model-theoretic semantics for carrying out inferences and drawing conclusions about these data.”
http://www.iiia.csic.es/files/pdfs/womo2010.pdf
“This chapter discusses the institutional approach for organizing and maintaining ontologies. The theory of institutions was named and initially developed by Joseph Goguen and Rod Burstall. This theory, a metatheory based on category theory, regards ontologies as logical theories or local logics. The theory of institutions uses the category-theoretic ideas of fibrations and indexed categories to develop logical theories. Institutions unite the lattice approach of Formal Concept Analysis of Ganter and Wille with the distributed logic of Information Flow of Barwise and Seligman. The institutional approach incorporates locally the lattice of theories idea of Sowa from the theory of knowledge representation. The Information Flow Framework, which was initiated within the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology project, uses the institutional approach in its applied aspect for the comparison, semantic integration and maintenance of ontologies. This chapter explains the central ideas of the institutional approach to ontologies in a careful and detailed manner.” – The Institutional Approach, R. E. Kent (2010)
“This paper discusses system consequence, a central idea in the project to lift the theory of information flow to the abstract level of universal logic and the theory of institutions. The theory of information flow is a theory of distributed logic. The theory of institutions is abstract model theory. A system is a collection of interconnected parts, where the whole may have properties that cannot be known from an analysis of the constituent parts in isolation. In an information system, the parts represent information resources and the interconnections represent constraints between the parts. System consequence, which is the extension of the consequence operator from theories to systems, models the available regularities represented by an information system as a whole. System consequence (without part-to-part constraints) is defined for a specific logical system (institution) in the theory of information flow. This paper generalizes the idea of system consequence to arbitrary logical systems.” – System Consequence, R. E. Kent (2009)
http://www.iiia.csic.es/files/pdfs/womo2010.pdf
“The founders of the Polish mathematical school made a brave experiment consisting in inviting two philosophers with a modest mathematical background as professors at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences; this did not happen in any other country. The gifts of Leśniewski and Łukasiewicz as teachers and the abilities of the latter as an organizer attracted young mathematicians. In Poland mathematical logic was considered to be an autonomous science, not a part of mathematics or philosophy. From the present-day point of view this might seem as an exaggeration, but this ideology contributed essentially to the strength of Polish logic. Their representatives were fairly conscious of the fact that the propagation and defence of the autonomy of this field had to be confirmed by important scientific results and international recognition. Moreover, this view about logic motivated various purely theoretical investigations on formal systems. On the other hand, Polish logicians strongly insisted that logic should not be restricted only to mathematics and required the co-operation of representatives of all field in which logic might be used. Still another factor played an important role, namely the conviction about the social significance of logic as a weapon against all kinds of irrationalism. Tarski once said “Religion [you can also say “ideology” — JW] divides people, logic brings them together.” According to Łukasiewicz, “Logic is morality of thought and speech”. Thus, Polish logicians doing logic and teaching it were convinced that they were performing an important social service.” – Lvov-Warsaw School, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“In 1930, Tarski characterized and abstracted mathematically those general procedures that correspond to the most significant human mental processes that, for finite collects of such symbol strings, yield deductive conclusions. The mathematical operator so obtained is termed a consequence operator. In modern mathematical logic, there are two types of such logic operators. The most basic is the finitary consequence operator of Tarski (1930). However, there is a similar operator that is more general in character and is often termed simply as a consequence operator.
The small amount of set-theoretic language that is employed in this paper is taken from a standard high-school algebra course and, in some cases, is only considered as an abbreviation. Indeed, each abbreviation is specifically defined. No actual mathematics appears in this paper. The formal mathematics can be found in Herrmann (1987, 1991). The symbol used to represent the finitary consequence operator is the symbol Cn. The more general consequence operator is often denoted simply by C. Informally, such operators take any subset A of L (i.e. A subset L) and yield all those members of L that can be deduced from A (i.e. Cn(A)). A basic requirement is that the assumed premises can always be deduced logically (i.e. A subset Cn(A)). Once a human being has deduced all of the consequences, then no more consequences can be deduced from the same set of premises (i.e. Cn(Cn(A)) =Cn(A)). For C, if one set of premises B is a subset of another such set A (i.e B subset A subset L), then deductions from B form a subset of those deductions from A (i.e. C(B) subset C(A)). For a finitary consequence operator, the human argument of using only finitely many symbol strings from a set of premises A to obtain a deduction is modeled by the additional requirement that if x is deduced from A (i.e. x in Cn(A) or x is a member of Cn(A)), then there is a finite set of premises F subset A such that x can also be deduced from F. One can show that this last requirement also implies the last property listed for the general consequence operator C. Consequence operators that correspond to specific deductive processes such as those defined for propositional, predicate, and higher-order formal languages (i.e. those logical processes used in modern scientific discourse) can be further characterized so that each can be differentiated one from another.
What Tarski did was to take a concrete everyday experience and mathematically abstract its most basic properties. From this abstraction, mathematical arguments establish other properties. These other properties may then be interpreted with respect to the original linguistic terms that generate the Tarski abstraction. Thus new insight is gained into what constitutes human thought patterns. As will be discussed later, the same type of formal abstraction is possible for certain dialectic logics.
In 1978 (Herrmann, 1981), Tarski’s consequence operator theory was investigated through application of the new mathematical discipline called Nonstandard Analysis for the specific purpose of finding a nonnumerical model for the concept of subliminal perception. Nonstandard does not mean that different mathematical procedures are employed. This is a technical term relative to abstract model theory. After many years of refinement, the basic properties of nonstandard consequence operators appeared in mathematical journal form (Herrmann, 1987) and book form (Herrmann, 1991). Cosmological interpretations of these results have been reported upon numerously many times within other scientific and philosophic journals as well. However, also of significance is a linguistic interpretation of these fundamental results. Generating the mathematical structure is not extremely difficult. But interpreting it linguistically has been arduous.
A Special Linguistic Interpretation
In order to interpret a formal mathematical structure relative to different disciplines, a correspondence is created between terms in one discipline and the abstract entities of the structure. This actually yields a many-to-one correspondence since numerous disciplines can be correlated to the same mathematical structure. Each time this is done, a mathematical model is constructed. Our interest in this paper is a specific correspondence between some terms relative to intelligence, linguistic, and similar human activities associated with a physical world and the mathematical structure. With respect to nonstandard structures, however, many new objects emerge that are not present within the standard structure. Although these new objects have all of the properties of the original entities and thus the same properties as the nonabstract objects from which they were originally abstracted, they also have many additional properties not shared by any of the original entities. What one does, in this case, is to created new terms that have a similar linguistic-like character as the original linguistic terms and assign these new terms to appropriate unassigned entities within the nonstandard structure. But can you assign a concrete dictionary meaning to these new terms?
A dictionary meaning to these new terms will not carry the appropriate content. One reasonable method to obtain an in-depth comprehension is to have a strong understanding of the workings of the mathematical structure and to reflect upon the relations between these new linguistic-like terms themselves, as well as between the new terms and the standard linguistic expressions. What this means is that you must study the written statements depicting these relationships. The model that this creates forms a portion of the deductive world model or, simply, the D-world model. There is, however, a new method that has been devised that renders these new concepts comprehensible without the necessity of an in-depth study. The method is termed negative comparison.
Negative comparison is a description as to how these new concepts negatively compare with the original standard concepts. Certain aspects of such linguistic type interpretations have been discussed elsewhere (Herrmann, 1991) but not as it directly relates to the concept of a higher intelligence. Further, this present interpretation uses a few special terms not previously introduced. The linguistic-like terms that correspond to new abstract entities that, at least, have similar properties as the original have the prefix “ultra-” attached. It is always to be understood that prior to each statement one should insert an expression such as “It is rational to assume that . . .” where the term “rational” means the logical processes science uses to develop its most cherished theories. To be as simplistic as possible within this section, only one of many distinct logical processes will be compared. What can be said about this one process will hold for all similar processes that can be characterized by the consequence operator. Note that logical processes are also termed mental processes.
The use of the “ultra-” prefix does not remove the term from being only a defined mathematical abstraction. Within a description, additional phrases that correlate such terms to a specific discipline are either inserted or, at least, understood by the reader. Relative to a supernatural higher intelligence, one basic correlating phrase is “entity within the universe.” This signifies any corporeal entity of which the human mind can conceive and which makes its home within the material universe. The insertion of this phrase is the basic change in the interpretation from those previously used. Other obvious correlating terms will appear when relationships between the ultra-objects and the concrete linguistic entities from which the model was generated are discussed.
There exists an ultra-language, denoted by *P, that at least has all of the properties of the most simplistic of human languages, the propositional language P. The language P is a subset of *P. A simple informal propositional language P can be constructed from but two primitive words such as “house” and “door” and the usual additional symbol strings such as “or” “and” “not” and “implication.” In this case, all of the expressions in P are meaningful in the sense that they impress on the human mind various images. Assume that all of the members of P are meaningful in this sense. There are many members of the ultra-language *P that cannot be used for any purposes by, and have no specific meaning to, any entity within the universe. However, all members of *P are ultra-meaningful. The mathematical model would require “ultra-meaningful” to correspond to a statement such as “they ultra-impress on an ultra-mind various ultra-images.” Remember that deep understanding of what these new terms might signify requires an investigation of the relationships between such terms as expressed by hundreds of such statements. Suppose S denotes the consequence operator that characterizes the simple human mental process called propositional (sentential) deduction. Then S is a finitary consequence operator and all of the consequences S(B) that can be deduced from a set of premises B subset P are obtained by deduction from the finite subsets of B. Now there exists an ultra-logical process, denoted by D, defined on subsets of the ultra-language *P, where D has, at least, the same properties as those of the logical process S when D operators on finite subsets of the humanly comprehensible language P (Note 1).
What happens when the ultra-mental process D is applied to any finite subset F of the humanly comprehensible language P. The set of consequences D(F) contains all of these consequences S(F) comprehensible by entities within the universe (i.e. S(F) subset D(F)) and many that are not comprehensible by entities within the universe. Using consequence operator terminology, when this occurs, the ultra-mental process being modeled by the consequence D is said to be stronger than the mental process modeled by S. It is this and other, yet to be described, properties that led to the selection of the term “ultra” as a prefix. Further, no entity within the universe can duplicate the ultra-mental process D, and this process also has numerous properties that are not comprehensible by any entity within the universe (Note 2).
There is a delicate analysis that can reveal the composition for some of the ultra-words in *P, where w in the ultra-language *P is an ultra-world if it is not a member of P. What this analysis details is often quite startling. For example, there are ultra-hypotheses, a single one of which is denoted by w, that cannot be comprehended by entities within the universe and that, when the ultra-mental process D is applied to w, yields a consequence that can be comprehended by entities within the universe. These ultra-hypotheses exist in subsets of *P that, at least, have the same characterizing properties as sets that describe human behavior, natural laws and the like. For example, if a sentence x in P describes a certain human behavior trait, then, although there may not appear to be a hypothesis h in P from which x can be deduced by the human mind, there does exist in *P an ultra-hypothesis w such that the ultra-mind process D when applied to w yields the conclusion x.
There are other mental processes that seem to correspond to intelligence. One of these is choosing from a list of statements, that is potentially infinite, a specific finite set that is meaningful for a particular application. Embedding this finite choice process into the deductive-world model yields the same type of conclusions as those for the ultra-logic D. This ultra-mind process cannot be duplicated by any entity within the universe, it is stronger than all such mental processes and has properties that in all cases improve upon the mental process of finite choice (Herrmann, 1991).
Another human reasoning process is the dialectic. Basic characterizing expressions can be listed for many such dialectics (Gagnon, 1980). Such dialectics can be applied to any language E constructed from two or more symbols. The basic ingredients are a set of theses T, a set of antitheses A, and an operator Sy, among others, which yields a synthesis z for any t in T and some a in A. For all the dialectics listed by Gagnon (1980), it is not difficult to show that there exist sets of symbol strings T and A and operators such as Sy that when embedded into the deductive-world model become sets of ultra-theses, ultra-antitheses and, an ultra-mental process, the ultra-synthesis operator *Sy (Herrmann, 1992). Once again, the same type of conclusions hold for these ultra-dialectics as holds for the ultra-logic D.
It appears that all forms of such mental-like processes are improved upon, to an extreme degree, by their corresponding ultra-mental processes. When the collection UM of ultra-mental processes is compared, as a whole, with the corresponding set M of mental processes that are displayed by humanity, then it appears reasonable to characterize the collection UM as representing a higher intelligence. The logical existence of UM is obtained by use of the most fundamental tool of modern science and establishes that the acceptance of the existence of a supernatural higher intelligence is scientifically rational and verifies the conclusions discussed in the introduction to this paper. Moreover, any properly stated model MH that either specifically utilizes such a postulate or logically implies the existence of a supernatural higher intelligence cannot be rejected as somehow or other not being scientific in character. Indeed, if such a model MH explains past natural events or human experiences, and predicts other events as they are observed today, then the scientific method explicitly states that such models are to be considered as good as or even better than other models.” – The Scientific Existence of a Higher Intelligence, Herrmann (1994)
”Let us sum up then in a couple of words: all philosophy, directly or indirectly, can be traced to Descartes.
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For the goal he set for both philosophy and science, which he merged together in a sort of universal knowledge, was to ‘render us the masters and owners of nature’, no doubt alluding to the study of life and particular medicine, but imagining this study in such a way that it presupposed our physics and mechanics. Recent commentators have thus taken this very far and maintained that, for Descartes, theory was subordinate to its application. One of them has said: ‘Aristotle’s physics is the physics of an artist; Descartes is the physics of an engineer.’ Is this quite right? My answer would be yes, and yet no. Certainly not if the ultimate aim would be the comfort, well-being, even prolongation of life that philosophy would bring us, according to Descartes, via the intermediary of a physical and mechanical biology. Yes, on the other hand, if we consider that aside from their physical utility, scientific applications are so many successes through which we demonstrate our force to ourselves, and affirm our independence, even our sovereignty. He made a clean sweep of Aristotelianism, and consequently of the method which proceeds by manipulating pre-existing concepts: the new elements he will operate with must be ‘clear and distinct ideas’. But by what criteria do we recognize a clarity that is not artificial or accidental, or a distinction that is not the result of an artificial division of experience? It can only be by its effectiveness, or rather, taking the French word in the English sense, by its ‘efficiency’ (efficience). Such that philosophy, which includes science, will make us little by little masters of nature, and this mastery, as it progresses, will provide an ever more complete material for philosophical speculation. Theory and application would thus condition eachother in what we could call, from a certain point of view and to a certain extent, a metaphysical pragmatism.
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I know there is much to be said on the relations between thought and action. But the motto that I would suggest for the philosopher, and even for the ordinary man, is the simplest one of all and in my opinion the most Cartesian. I would say that one must act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.” – Message to the Descartes Congress, Bergson (1937)
”This paper addresses the chief stumbling block for Descartes’ 17th-century philosophy of mind-body dualism, how can the fundamentally dissimilar mental and physical planes causally interact with each other? We apply Cartesian logic to reject not only divine intervention, preordained synchronization, and the eventual mass retreat to monism, but also an assumption Descartes himself somehow neglected to reject, that causal interaction within these planes is an easier problem than between. We use Chu spaces and residuation to derive all causal interaction, both between and within the two planes, from a uniform and algebraically rich theory of between-plane interaction alone.” – Rational Mechanics and Natural Mathematics, Pratt (2005)
”We will use the term natural mathematics for instances of the actual situated practice of mathematics, in textbooks, papers, or live interaction, and the term text for any segment taken from any one of these. We note that natural mathematics is always materially mediated [5]., e.g., by printed or handwritten symbols, or by speech (which is vibrating air). Mathematics is a natural social activity, done by and for human beings in particular social contexts, and thus we view the language of mathematics a particular variety of natural language among many others, including narrative, plans and jokes. This approach is quite di erent from attempts to ”purify”
the language of mathematics, rendering it formal and without meaning, as in logical studies of mathematics, or rendering it purely mechanical, as in many e orts in computer science (Donald McKenzie [27] has made a careful social study of mechanized mathematics). In particular, we are interested in the values that are implicit in mathematical discourse, and that get attached to mathematical objects.
Our analysis draws on traditions that include cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis (in the sense of socio-linguistics), semiotics, and ethnomethodology. It should not be thought that we accept everything from each tradition, nor that our way of combining them is random. If we discard a certain amount of narrowness and dogmatism, not only are these traditions largely compatible, but they are also mutually reinforcing in many respects, for example, in rejecting psychological reductionism, cognitivism, Cartesian dualism, naive Platonism, and in supporting a pragmatic empiricism.” – Reality and Human Values in Mathematics, Goguen
”Two Paradoxes of Mathematics:
1. Real math is embodied, situated, material, but math objects appear to be objective & transcendental .
2. Although very abstract, math is very applicable (Wigner)” – The Reality of Mathematical Objects, Goguen
“A much more difficult and confusing situation would arise if we could, some day, establish a theory of the phenomena of consciousness, or of biology, which would be as coherent and convincing as our present theories of the inanimate world. Mendel’s laws of inheritance and the subsequent work on genes may well form the beginning of such a theory as far as biology is concerned. Furthermore,, it is quite possible that an abstract argument can be found which shows that there is a conflict between such a theory and the accepted principles of physics. The argument could be of such abstract nature that it might not be possible to resolve the conflict, in favor of one or of the other theory, by an experiment. Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form. It would give us a deep sense of frustration in our search for what I called “the ultimate truth.” The reason that such a situation is conceivable is that, fundamentally, we do not know why our theories work so well. Hence, their accuracy may not prove their truth and consistency. Indeed, it is this writer’s belief that something rather akin to the situation which was described above exists if the present laws of heredity and of physics are confronted.
Let me end on a more cheerful note. The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.” – Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (1960)
“So I started this blog on Blogger. And my goals for the blog have never changed. What I’ve wanted to do all along is:
To show people the beauty of math. Math is really wonderful. It’s fun, it’s beautiful, it’s useful. But people are taught from an early age that it’s useless, hard, and miserable. I want to show otherwise, by describing the beauty of math in ways that are approachable and understandable by non-mathematicians.
To help people recognize when someone is trying to put something past them by abusing math – what I call obfuscatory mathematics. Because so many people don’t know math, hate it, think it’s incomprehensible, that makes it easy for dishonest people to fool them. People throw together garbage in the context of a mathematical argument, and use it to lend credibility to their arguments. By pointing out the basic errors in these things, I try to help show people how to recognize when someone is try to use math to confuse them or trick them.” – MarkCC, (2008)
“The goal of theoretical physics, at least in my opinion, is to arrive at our best understanding of the fundamental processes of nature. We use of course the language of mathematics, and most physicists (including me) would ideally like to find a single elegant theory powerful enough in principle to explain all known phenomena. In practice it means our existing domains of understanding should be recovered as special limits. Personally, I would go a bit further and say that ideally, on my deathbed, I would like to have reached the `right point of view’ whereby it was all obvious, why the world had to be that way. If I was religious (I’m not), I guess I would be Buddhist and this would be nirvana.
There is obviously an element of philosophy to this quest and, while I do not think that philosophy per se should be confused with theoretical physics, one can still think about the `big picture’ and have views that sit in the background and underly or motivate ones actual research. This page contains some of my thoughts about this bigger picture. I am not a qualified philosopher, so take it as my opinion only.
In a nutshell, the idea that has influenced me most in my actual research work is the principle that there is a deep duality or `conceptual Fourier transform’ between theory and experiment, between abstract laws and measurement. More details are given in the paper S. Majid, Principle of representation-theoretic self-duality, Phys. Essays. 4 (1991) 395-405, where the thesis presented is (roughly speaking) that physics polarises down the middle into two parts, one which represents the other, but that the latter equally represents the former, i.e. the two should be treated on an equal footing.
The starting point is that Nature after all does not know or care what mathematics is already in textbooks. Therefore the quest for the ultimate theory may well entail, probably does entail, inventing entirely new mathematics in the process. In other words, at least at some intuitive level, a theoretical physicist also has to be a pure mathematician. Then one can phrase the question `what is the ultimate theory of physics ?’ in the form `in the tableau of all mathematical concepts past present and future, is there some constrained surface or subset which is called physics ?’ Is there an equation for physics itself as a subset of mathematics? I believe there is and if it were to be found it would be called the ultimate theory of physics. Moreover, I believe that it can be found and that it has a lot to do with what is different about the way a physicist looks at the world compared to a mathematician (so yes, I too spend an inordinate amount of time at dinner parties debating this interesting question).
To begin with, theoretical physics is not so much concerned with `what’ is observed but with the question `why is it observed?’; i.e. it always seeks to explain structures in terms of still more fundamental structures or principles. This reductionist programme takes the naive view that there are indeed some fundamental laws of nature, of which our experiments and observations are representations. Thus it is supposed that something is absolutely true, and that something else measures or observes it. However, one of the themes one can explore is that such evaluations should generally be thought of more symmetrically as a `duality pairing’ of one structure with another. An evaluation f(x) can also be read x(f), where f is an element of a dual structure. Since theoretical physics adopts the language of mathematics, such an `observer-observed’ reversed interpretation of the mathematical structure can always be forced, but will the dual interpretation also describe physics? It is exactly the idea that the answer should be `yes’ which led to some of the first Hopf algebras (quantum groups), namely as quantum systems exhibiting an observable-state self-duality (see the paper S. Majid, Hopf algebras for Physics at the Planck scale J. Class. Quant. Grav. 5 (1988) 1587-1607). We can then try to elevate the idea to a more general principle of representation-theoretic self-duality, that a fundamental theory of physics is incomplete unless such a role-reversal is possible. We can go further and hope to fully determine the (supposed) structure of fundamental laws of nature among all mathematical structures by this self-duality condition.
Such duality considerations are certainly evident in some form in the context of quantum theory and gravity. The situation is summarised to the left in the following diagram. For example, Lie groups provide the simplest examples of Riemannian geometry, while the representations of similar Lie groups provide the quantum numbers of elementary particles in quantum theory. Thus, both quantum theory and non-Euclidean geometry are needed for a self-dual picture. Hopf algebras (quantum groups) precisely serve to unify these mutually dual structures. One finds, at least in some specific models that imposing the duality requirement in the context of particles moving on homogeneous spaces forces the homogeneous spaces to come in mutually dual pairs, and, moreover, constrains the allowed effective metric and dynamics in a way not too unlike Einstein’s equations in this context. More recently, the notion of T-duality in string theory should probably be viewed as a further manifestation of this idea (a nice research project to make this precise…)
If this principle is right, we should be able to use it as a guide to the required mathematical structure for the next more advanced theory of quantum mechanics and gravity. There are two steps, the first being to identify or invent the relevant self-dual category or axiom-system beyond Hopf algebras but with similar input–output symmetry or self-duality properties of the axioms. The second step would be to construct some concrete models in such a framework. The long-term aim is to have in this way a picture of the full Einstein’s equation on a general metric (i.e. not only homogeneous ones) appearing as a self-duality constraint. Recall that Einstein’s equation does indeed equate a geometrical object (the Einstein tensor which measures the curvature of spacetime) to a quantum-mechanical object (the vacuum expectation of the stress energy tensor which measures the matter content).
We also note that, in addition to the `end’ of theoretical physics in the form of quantum-gravity, we can ask also about its `birth’. We take the view that the simplest theories of physics are based on classical logic or, roughly speaking, Boolean algebras. It appears that the relevant duality here may be provided by complementation with Boolean algebras considered self-dual according to De Morgan’s theorem. The situation is summarised on the right in the figure. Going above the axis to Heyting algebras and beyond takes us into intuitionistic logic and ultimately into an axiomatic framework for quantum field theory. A Heyting algebra describes logic in which one drops the familiar `law of the excluded middle’ that either a proposition or its negation is true. This generalisation is also the essential feature of the logical structure of quantum mechanics. Dual to this is the notion of co-Heyting algebra and co-intuitionistic logic in which one drops the axiom that the intersection of a proposition and its negation is empty. It has been argued by F.W. Lawvere and his school that this intersection is like the `boundary’ of the proposition, and, hence, that these co-Heyting algebras are the `birth’ of geometry. The long-term programme at this end of physics is to develop this geometrical interpretation of co-intuitionistic logic further into the notion of metric spaces and ultimately into Riemannian or Lorentzian geometry.
In between these extremes, a well-known example of a self-dual category is that of (locally compact) Abelian groups. For every such group there is a dual one G^ of its representations. Especially important is that G^^ is isomorphic to G. The position and momentum groups in flat space are dual to each other in this way. Another example is for a particle on a circle, where the allowed momentum modes are labeled by the dual group Z. Fourier transform interchanges the roles of the group and its dual. This familiar setting gives a clue to the philosophical basis of the principle of representation-theoretic self-duality. For if some theorist thought that a group G was the `true’ structure underlying a law of physics and that G^ was its representations, a more experimentally-minded physicist might equally well consider G^ as the true object and G as its representations. Only in a self-dual category could both points of view be entertained. This says that the principle has its origins in the nature of the scientific method. If, for example, Einstein’s equation and other laws of theoretical physics could be deduced from such a principle alone, we would have achieved a Kantian or Hegelian view of the nature of physical reality as a consequence of the choice to look at the world in a certain way. Of course, it’s never going to be as simple as that, but it’s something to think about on a rainy day.” – Majid, A Web Essay on Physics v Mathematics (1997)
For goodness sake, don’t you have anything better to do with your time than copy-and-paste what seem to be entire books?
It seems to be for interest’s sake, Mark.
http://isotelesis.blogspot.com/
For interests sake, it would be perfectly sufficient to post a link instead of spamming the site with reams upon reams of copy/pasted text.
Hell, the volume of stuff he’s copying here is, arguably, not even legal. Legally, under fair use, you can post small portions of text for the purpose of criticism and education. But posting hundreds of lines of copyrighted text with no commentary at all? That’s really just not right. It wastes storage space and CPU on our servers, and it’s a potential violation of copyright law – and it serves no useful purpose.
Mark, I hope you are aware that by childishly censoring CL you reinforce his characterisation of you as incompetent, in the eyes of your readers. The petty arrogance of it is unsurprising, considering how you have conducted yourself throughout the discussion. To me it reinforces that you only serve your own ego.
Shulgin, I can’t speak for all of Mark’s readers, but neither can you. I’ve seen disemvowelling used elsenet, and if a reader generally trusts the blog owner, it’s going to look more like “they are sparing me this” than like censorship. Bear in mind that not only can some people read disemvowelled material without a problem (which makes the technique less helpful to them), there are disemvowellers available online for the rest of us, if we want to read that stuff.
Furthermore, CL can set up his own blog, just as Mark has set up this one. Yes, there are levels at which control of and access to the media is relevant: if politician A gets an hour on Fox News, and politician B is limited to mimeographed fliers, there’s a problem. That isn’t remotely the case here.
I find all of this very entertaining.
Chris, it seems that you enjoy the work you’re doing now, but if you’re ever hard up for cash, then you could always monetize a website or blog à la Steve Pavlina. You could write about whatever you want. It seems that you’ve probably thought of this before, and dismissed the idea for your own reasons. However, I’m not sure that you’ve been given the assurance from others that such a thing would be genuinely appreciated.
Such a thing would probably attract a lot of flies. But, whatever. I’m selfish. I’d like to see it.
Alternatively, you could go the Roger Ebert route and spam Twitter with affiliate links. I don’t recommend this..
Apparently my last post was deleted, here is the last link I have to share:
http://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Related_work
Well… if Chris Langan is so smart, then his next project should be to find a way to explain his ideas to laypeople.
Because hiding behind opaque language is what first year philosophy students do too – they do it in hopes that if they sound smart nobody will question them and just assume they are right.
Physical reality has not yet violated causality and in that respect, it obeys logical syntactical transformation rules, and, it appears to have a type of pixelated bit infrastructure that condenses from a wavelike potentiality. The basic bits of the structure of reality form the elements of linguistic[computational] statements – a correspondence between the concrete and the abstract – that is relevant up to isomorphism. Reality includes that which is real and excludes that which is not real.
Indeed, there are some researchers working on the idea that the universe is one big quantum computer. Alas, the CTMU cannot be written off by the anti-cranks network, much to their chagrin. 😉
Uber Crank,
uuuggghhhh! Dangit! — I have to say something:
you suggested “the idea that the universe is one big quantum computer”.
you really should consider the alternative. That this “the universe” you believe you are on the verge of conceiving is a fantasy. Rather, a trustworthy cover-story for the immature. But that maturity demands … individuality. And individuality demands that this “the universe” conception you were driving at to be entirely yours. … The long of it being that each “I am” is the sole occupant of his very own – absolutely proprietary – “universe”, if you must. Reality is a harmony amongst the plural (N-universes / N-“I am”).
Tim
Tim,
The universe as a quantum computer is not my original idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_the_Universe
Eccentric highly educated minds and also autodidact minds have been contemplating this for quite some time.
Solipsism is a distributive property of the universe, yes.
Uber Crank,
I’m sorry that I’m too dense to know what to make of your “solipsism is a distributive property of the universe, yes.” I have oft been accused of solipsism by the crew of metaphysic-ers I had been in the habit of conversing with. I am perfectly confident that I avoid “solipsism” with my conception of the plural society of “I am”. From your one sentence I cannot tell where you stand: perhaps you avoid what is commonly called solipsism via “distributive property”?
anyway, for better and worse we seem to approach the problem from either side of the abyss. I tend to think that I have gone through the proper “gate”… And I tend to think that it is impossible for one coming from the other side to succeed without first succeeding on this side. This is not to suggest one abandon his approach to success from that side, god forbid, only …
anyway, I would be much obliged if you could point me to some fact or argument that would convince me that such a “universe” is a real thing / idea. (Perhaps we are using “universe” in disparate ways? I doubt it though.) My point is that all of phenomena must be a derivative representation (absolutely necessary / integral, to be sure) of the noumena. Only an “I am” is so potent as to be able to CREATE (constantly) such a “universe”. (I tend to think of the whole of my “universe” as my body. Such that, for instance, if I jump, one part of my body jumps relative to another part of MY body…) There are, then, N “universes” – where N represents the number of “I am”. The way I figure it, on your side of the abyss this problem of harmonization is the one you should be after, if you are as arrogant as I am (and you do seem to be – but what do I know). And I have already said that it must work because the i’dea “I am” is not complex enough to prevent its working!
A bit more? sure. Every “I am”, ultimately i’dea, must be incorruptible (indestructible). This means that each “I am” must be “attached” within the plural society in such a way that it is also essentially “detached”. The complexity of the i’dea makes this possible, and it is precisely this manner of complexity that – as far as I can tell – cannot be accounted for by any conception of reality based on any such “universe” as you propose!!! Speaking not so much from your side of the abyss now, every “I am” is self-creative, holding himself together through the ideal changes he himself … creates! There are, here, two layers of uncertainty (the second being impossibility) that any other “I am” must encounter when trying to “place” that (other to him) “I am”! I have not settled on the language, attached-co-detached is maybe less preferable to included-but-fuzzily…
Reality is the making real of the plural society of “I am”. This “making” doesn’t come from any such objectively operating outside/universal computer. Every “I am” is of this same spiritually creative nature. Free will. Confined to the noumenal reality of MIND. There simply cannot be one universal computer! There must be a plurality of the degree N! My main point, again then, is that whatever solution you may come up with for the problem “what is the universe?”, you will have to endow this solution individually to each “I am”, and allow him to make what he will with it. Thankfully the real constraints of i’dea keep certain base aspects UNIVERSAL (to degree N).
Tim
von Neumann really laid the foundation for a lot of Langan’s work, operator theory, utility theory, relational logic, self-reproducing automata, etc. The Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) is important to basic philosophical concepts found in the CTMU.
“The computational theory of mind requires representation because ‘input’ into a computation comes in the form of symbols or representations of other objects. A computer cannot compute an actual object, it must interpret and represent the object in some form and then compute the representation. The computational theory of mind is related to the representational theory of mind in that they both require that mental states are representations. However the two theories differ in that the representational theory claims that all mental states are representations while the computational theory leaves open that certain mental states, such as pain or depression, may not be representational and therefore may not be suitable for a computational treatment. These non-representational mental states are known as qualia. The computational theory of mind is also related to the language of thought. The language of thought theory allows the mind to process more complex representations with the help of semantics.” -Computational Theory of Mind
If there was one topic to research if someone was serious about the ideas developed in the CTMU, it would be the following:
“”Geometric logic”, so-called from its origins in algebraic geometry in the mid 20th century, is an ingenious way to combine two apparently very different mathematical subjects: topology (which studies continuous change) and logic (which studies discrete deduction steps).
Its trick is to take the set-theoretic operations of intersection and (possibly infinite) union, which are used to combine the important open sets of topology, and reinterpret them as logic. Intersection becomes “and”, and union becomes “or”. Because it has a restricted range of logical connectives it is weaker than the standard “classical” logic of mathematics, though the ability to form “infinite ors” gives it some interesting features.
Under this translation, topological spaces, their points, and continuous maps between the spaces become logical theories, models and interpretations of one theory in another.” – Steve Vickers
“Instead of particles being “transmitted” from one point of space to another through the familiar kinematic osmosis based on a dissociation of logic and geometry, the motion of a particle is locally expressed within its own prior image, i.e., wavefunction.” – Langan
Well, I’ve tried several times to study the CTMU, mainly because I’ve got quite a wide reading in philosophy, and I can see echoes of all sorts of things in the CTMU every time I read it, and each time I read it I seem to grasp something that makes a bit more sense. I could be delusional, but at least it’s fun.
I had a similar experience with the later Wittgenstein (who I sometimes think represents the total antithesis of what Langan’s trying to do – either Langan is precisely one of Wittgenstein’s “flies”, or there’s a level above the later Wittgenstein that Langan’s on). With the later Wittgenstein, you read, re-read, re-read several times, and eventually what at first sight appear to be the gnomic aphorisms of a poseur, start to really make sense, and not just any kind of sense, but “busting-wide-the-whole-tradition-of-philosophy-since-Plato” sense.
Anyway, I’d be inclined to defend Langan (who I think is more like “Plato/Hegel/Spinoza cranked up to 11”), or at least I would be if I had the time. I think that part of the problem is that some of Langan’s critics:-
1) aren’t very widely read; and
2) have bees in their bonnets about various things, especially there’s a sort of clinging to a certain academic way of speaking about things. (This seems to be the substance of MarkCC’s comments.)
Re. 1), I think when you read Langan, he expects you to catch a lot of philosophical and literary allusions, I think his writing is EXTREMELY condensed, every word is EXTREMELY carefully chosen (I mean much more than usually so in these kinds of texts – when you’re reading Langan, it’s like he’s talking about several things parallel, that you’ve got to try and bear in mind), and I think he takes for granted that you’ll put a little effort into understanding it.
One example I found recently in a critical discussion about Langan was that the people dismissing him didn’t know much about Hume. But an understanding of Hume’s central problems – and not just a superficial philosophy 101, “tick the multiple choice answer that applies” understanding, but an understanding that comes from having wrestled at least a bit with the problems in your own mind, really thought about them, and connected them to what other philosophers have said – is IMHO something you absolutely have to have when reading Langan. And that’s just one little thing.
Re. point 2) This is sort of understandable – it’s like a filtering mechanism (by ditching the idiosyncractic, you might miss something interesting, but the chances are you won’t).
Ok, so Langan hasn’t gone through the academic mill, and doesn’t quite use the right lingo. And he hasn’t really benefited from the only thing a university education really gives you – hearing brilliant thinkers expound their own ideas, and arguing extensively with your peers.
But when it comes to someone as obviously smart as Langan, I’m inclined to give him more benefit of the doubt than I would any other apparent internet loony.
So yeah, lay off him. Truth is, I reckon that it will probably be recognized in the future when people talk about what Langan’s talking about with the “correct” lingo, that he was on to something.
I feel pretty much the same way about Popper, the depth and explosively revolutionary nature of whose epistemological insights hasn’t really been fully grasped by academia (so far as his epistemology he’s in a little box marked “something to do with Logical Positivism, bit of a crank, KO’d by Putnam”).
Hmm, I’d only read part of the thread after posting the above; since reading the whole thread I thought it would be fun to stick my oar in. Not guaranteeing I will be have the time to sustain an argument – actually I’m not interested in arguing, so much as in trying to see if I can make sense of Langan in a way that might ring some bells for others. IOW if one understands something, one ought to be able to put it into one’s own words, so here’s my understanding of the gist of what Langan is saying:-
Whatever the enumerated contents and patterns of Reality may turn out to be, we can say with absolute certainty that it logically necessarily must be the kind of thing in which whatever it is we’re calling “perception”, “experience”, “theory”, “truth/falsehood”, etc., arise. It must be the kind of thing in which these are possible.
So far, so sort-of-Kantian.
If these are possible, then logically Reality must (not inductively “must” – there is no such thing, there is no logical necessity in inductive “logic”, hence the superficiality of science) have the abstract character of a being a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language, IOW a communication, mutual shaping, mutual informing, between one aspect of Reality and another (this is, so to speak, the One thing that Reality is doing, in zillions of guises). This is Langan’s pinning down in modern language of what is (as he would probably acknowledge) an ancient, ancient insight that can be found in many cultures, many times, as the insight of many thinkers most of whom have been acknowledged as the profoundest we’ve ever had (the “Perennial Philosophy”, as it were).
The logical “must” here is really a STIPULATION of the only thing (i.e. SCSPL) that’s worthy of being called “Reality”, given that what’s called “Reality” must logically be the sort of thing that can give rise to what we call “perception”, “experience”, etc., etc.
Another way of saying this: if anything ever is (or was or will be) experienced that exists, or is said that’s true, then that can’t be an accident (or rather, if it is an accident or truly random, then can be no such things as perception or truth, and the universe is literally meaningless); so then there must be some hard, logical “must”, some deep structure to Reality that makes that congruence (between mind and the world) possible.
It turns out that the logical necessity involved is the logical necessity for Reality to always and everywhere form a reciprocal duality of communication and mutual (in)forming, that’s really just Reality talking to and shaping Itself. (Or, again, perhaps better to say, nothing less than this is worthy of, logically fitting to, the term “Reality”, as the Totality of Totalities or whatever concept one might use for “the which than which there is no whicher”.)
There’s a sort of tribal defence against this kind of thinking, something like “But we get on better by Generate-and-Test, all this kind of grand system-building never did us any good”. This is to an extent true, but only pragmatically speaking. Just think: Democritus sitting in his arbor was actually able to excogitate just through sheer thinking about it, a deep structure to Reality that we recognise now as true – IOW, out of all the ancient thinkers sitting in their arbors excogitating, he was the one that got it closest. So it is absolutely possible to come up with the truth by sitting in an armchair – just impractical to do so to any great level of detail. Plus, any such theory would have to be checked against its empirical implications. But the very fact that this process is possible, shows that there’s some kind of deep structural barrier-crossing going on between mind and matter (they’re in some sense isomorphic, like record groove and music, perhaps, or Spinozistically, or in some other way).
One last point: one of the funniest exchanges here has been between Tim and Rubix, with Tim getting the better of Rubix on many points that seem to go right over Rubix’s head – not because he’s stupid, but because he (seemingly) hasn’t really been bitten by the philosophical bug. He’s smart and understands the arguments, but one gets the impression he’s never felt his life depended on finding the correct answers. One instance: Tim actually understands “falsification” much better than Rubix (who is one of those hanging the term out like a fetish in these discussions). Yes, Popper was right, yes science if falsificationist, absolutely – but what Rubix and his friends who use “falsification” as a tribal badge don’t seem to get is that all this means is that science proceeds by rejecting falsehoods, which says absolutely nothing about justification whatsoever (but rather, corroboration, as Popper said). IOW, we throw a bunch of ideas about what exists against the wall, we test their implications, by modus tollens those theories whos implications don’t pan out must be false. BUT THAT’S ALL WE CAN TRUTHFULLY SAY. i.e. that’s all we can truthfully say if we’ve really taken Hume on board and understood him. The result is, science doesn’t get us truth, but narrows down our range of possible truth candidates. The limitation is purely subjective – if we can’t think of a criticism to test our theory to destruction with, then we simply have nothing better to go on, in the interim (i.e. what we have that’s survived testing to destruction may be true). And of course this is just instructed common sense.
It’s particularly comical when Rubix keeps insisting on things that Tim is insisting on, all the while seeming to be under the impression that Tim isn’t insisting on them and that they must be something novel to Tim, when Tim’s been banging on about nothing else for several long and careful discussions 🙂 Not that Tim doesn’t have his own quirks, but what the hey, anybody who’s nerdy enough to be even thinking about this stuff has their quirks 🙂
P. George Stewart,
what a nice treat! Happy Thanksgiving!
you said, “one of the funniest exchanges here has been between Tim and Rubix”, I’m glad that I wasn’t the only one to get a great laugh from the exchange. And, to be sure, I don’t mean to say I’m laughing so much at the expense of Rubix, whom I really do like, and think would be a great addition to the society of the mature (however small or large that society is). But, so that you might laugh more, – and so that others may laugh to, – let me let you in on a secret:
Rubix, near the end of our discussion, commented that it was a strange thing that I was hammering so hard on thermodynamics and entropy. (Did you too think this was one of my “quirks”, George?) The Reason (one) is that I thought it important to illustrate with a concrete example where Rubix’s superficial scentism crashes down. I am not qualified to do that – well, in many areas I suppose – but certainly vis-a-vis “quantum mechanics”. And (two) I am (supposed to be) quite qualified vis-a-vis thermodynamics. The big laugher for me is that Rubix walked right into this “trap” with his saying that we don’t need “anything more” to EXPLAIN boiling. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to “show off”. To be sure, if you search the list of “other” authors who have referred to that article I suggested on the dynamics of nucleation, by Chandler and Pan, you will find an article by the authors Chandler, Balsara, Pan, and one Tim R. Hello! I was a decent and somewhat “accomplished” scientist before I turned rogue metaphysician, proper! So I had a real hearty laugh when Rubix was trying to show ME to be the ignoramus there…
Now, to more difficult matters: George, I like what you say about “falsification”, however, I think you are missing a very important realization about induction. Before I get to the point, let me take you on a quick aside to set the stage. George, it seems are the well-read philosopher you claim to be. I am interested in your help, actually. By some standards I am well-read, but I think not anywhere near widely enough to be “professional” – professional is not synonymous with expert, or having attained to metaphysical success. I have not come by way of the well-known pillars, but by Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Michael Polanyi, GEORGE HOLMES HOWISON, and, afterwards, JOHN the Gospeler. I am very interested by your assessment of Democritus, whom I have not touched; is there anything you can say directly, or point me to in him right now?
Anyway, I – now – see that Jesus was (almost assuredly) the first SUCCESSFUL metaphysician. For better AND worse, we have the sources we have. And these are dominated by the Pauline view – not to say that that is worse! But Paul, self-admitedly, had not succeeded to “the TRUTH”, but brought the message of faith/e to the hellenistic side (whereas Jesus’ revolution brought the message of THEE TRUTH to the faith/e inclined jews). (Here I kinda picture the mutually intertwined nature of Electro-Magnetism, but, whatevs on that.) While Paul testifies – with stunning beauty – to the promise of faith/e in THEE TRUTH, for a proper presentation OF the truth the Gospel of John must be viewed as the place to look. But even there, one must wonder whether John considered himself SUCCESSFUL, or whether he considered himself only qualified to look on, but not so much capable of taking a fully mature and responsible role with it. And we have even less to go on with the likes of Peter and James…
So. It seems THEE TRUTH did not survive the “deaths” of these original pillars, and a successful metaphysician was not to be found again amongst humans until George Holmes Howison. Howison was on the trail of Success in the late 1800’s, having written a number of essays which he ultimately published as the book “the limits of evolution, and other essays, illustrating the metaphysical theory of personal idealism” (Jesus “I am”: “the way, the truth, and the life”) in 1901. Though, I suggest you look for the 1905 version because there is a second introduction and a set of 5 valuable appendices. You can find it free on google books, and I have linked to it above. Have you read him, George, George?
Anyway, I suggest you read his conclusion on induction. The need for such an ultimate leap of faith/e is testimony to the creative potency of the idealizing MIND (soul). And! It is testimony to the fact that faith/e is THE dynamic process of creation (which IS going on continuously, much faster, for instance, than even someone like my new quarterback [Tebow] can say “I want to thank my lord and saviour Jesus Christ” {meaning that such sayings can never give a fully proper glory to God}). Furthermore, induction, faith/e, and our ability to actually create REAL by such methods of ideation is testimony to the fact that THEE I’dea is infinite (yet definite).
Anyway, thanks again!
And I really would be interested in what you have to say about my “quirks”. I would welcome your help. However, at the same time I would maintain that I have SUCCEEDED at metaphysics, that I am a “mature” “I am”, so I will be hoping to win you to the same; and that my “quirks” (which I don’t doubt that I have – and which I hope won’t serve to harm anyone) must come somewhere lower down on the mountain of the mind.
Tim
George,
also, you said, “But the very fact that this process is possible, shows that there’s some kind of deep structural barrier-crossing going on between mind and matter (they’re in some sense isomorphic, like record groove and music, perhaps, or Spinozistically, or in some other way).”
There is no “matter” as such. There is information. And the information is the derivative representation of the super-phenomenal i’dea(s). I have shown above that living “I am” are actually creative of laws of thermodynamics (when properly considered). IOW, that “I am” are not internal to any phenomenal conception of system & surroundings; but rather, systems and surroundingses a real creations of eternally potent minds. I would suggest for consideration, now, the recent theory of entropic gravity. However, the ideators of it, at present, are locked in a materialist metaphysic, so they think not that the “universe” is the holographic screen of the eternal (as Howison uses the word) truth, but think that there should be a holographic screen OF it. Look at the distinction between logos (which is better translated I’dea rather than “word”) and kosmos as presented by John the gospeler.
the greek interlinear bible:
http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/Greek_Index.htm
Thankfully,
Tim
Hey Tim, yeah I was with you on the thermodynamics thing, Rubix did kind of step in it there.
I don’t mean “quirky” in a bad way, I’m not a professional philosopher either, and although I have a decent education my higher level qualification is in music rather than any of the subjects being discussed here, and I’m basically an autodidact too.
Yes, I’m very familiar with Rand, Hayek and Polanyi too, but Howison is a new one on me, he sounds interesting. There are quite a few odd treasures here and there in late 19th, early 20th century philosophy, especially the old Idealists.
Us autodidacts carve our own path through the jungle of scribblings, and that’s both an advantage and a disadvantage. Because our path is followed as a passion rather than a vocation or career, it has a certain flavour that’s missing from these latter. Often, as soon as you do something professionally it sort of loses its lustre – you see how they make the sausages, so to speak. But for us autodidacts, the lustre is still there. The disadvantage is of course that it’s sometimes hard to interface with people who have gone about things in a more “official” way. There’s just a manner and lingo you won’t get unless you’ve lived through the process – but of course that goes both ways. An autodidact’s thought requires a bit of sympathetic sympathetic effort from the academic, because it’s in fresh language, and many academics (for quite understandable reasons) aren’t willing, or don’t have the time for that.
Again, that’s probably part of Chris’ problem (if he has any, I doubt he feels he has from his point of view, but I might venture to say from the world’s point of view it’s a tiny problem) – there’s an interfacing difficulty between him and academia.
Which is a shame, because I think he’s genuine, sincere, and in the Great Tradition of philosophy. He really is participating in the conversation that started back in ancient Greece, carried on through the Enlightenment, but seemed to die out a bit as a consequence of the increasing specialization and compartmentalization of academic thought in the 20th century. At any rate, as I say, I do keep coming back to the CTMU, and find myself intellectually stimulated each time I do – maybe I’m just hallucinating meaning where there’s none, but I do enjoy it.
But anyway, all the academic divisions of labour, all the tidy compartmentalizationsof studies, all that situation is gradually changing – interdisciplinary work is where the action’s at, and philosophers are getting their hands dirty, and instead of using intuition pumps based on the same old tropes (“consider this table!”), they’re starting to contribute more, as both engineers and artists of concepts.
Re. the Christian thing. I have strong doubts about the historicity of Christ, but I certainly recognise the mythic and mystical power of Christianity (I’d rather say that GJohn was probably an originally Gnostic text that was Catholicized – i.e. the work of genuine mystics, layered over by the orthodox intent to tie religion to politics). (I am myself a bit of a mystic on the side, I had some powerful experiences as a kid that gave me reason to think there’s “something to” all that – not necessarily religious, but very much worthy of engaging with.)
By instinct and temperament, I’m actually very strongly materialistically and sceptically inclined, but I’ve been around the houses enough to understand the depth and profundity of the kind of subjective Idealism you seem to be settled with. Have you read Max Stirner (Ego and Its Own)? Also if you haven’t already, check out Advaita Vedanta, the hardcore traditional stuff as exemplified by people like Swami Dayananda Saraswati here:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUsrcqVuJRw I think you might love it! 🙂
George, (isotelesis,)
This past month has been a time to try my patience (I just left my “home institution” for metaphysics discussion), so I’m gonna let you be the recipient of my ATTENTION. Purely selfish; ofcourse. And attended as true religion must: in spiritual communion with THEE REAL I’dea.
I’m real happy for you have to come to this forum now. Take that as you will. So you know from the outset, I’m not watching your suggest vid until later. I don’t want to miss my walk.
I think I might be able to tie a few things together – for myself! – regarding this academic v. rogue thing, now.
To be sure, I understood that you specifically presented yourself as a non-profession; I guess my insistence on that statement was primarily for Rubix, just in case. However, I do NOT think that a difference in language is to blame. I have said before, and I say again, Langan is a great example. The difference between his language and the language of academy is real, yes, – and of course, – but the real difficulty each has with understanding the other is that neither of them yet thinks rightly. And it is a difficult task to try to wade through someone else’s mistakes. And it is that much more difficult when you haven’t found a trustworth mental home. That is to say, even if one of them had been right, – which they aren’t, – leading the other to see that “fact”: how do you do that?!
Then, supposing one COULD establish a functioning teacher(student) – Student(teacher) relationship, the ultimate SUCCESS is yet hindered because the Student(teacher) has yet to mature to the peace that is integral to mental confidence. How do you help someone transcend a barrier the rules of which are ultimately — I AM?
That this is THEE i’dea may come off to the Student(teacher) as too naive. And the turning inside out of ones kosmos (system) view – that is, attaining to maturity – is not without _________ . (Better for me not to play Teacher(student) any more precisely on that – now.) It is no easy task to CONQUER one’s own materialistic perspective. But, in truth, thee i’dea. The derivative representation is just that, derivative. And thee derivative is necessarily integral OF/FROM thee creatively potent living i’dea.
So, Langan? I have said that I thought he had pole position. I think that is pretty much irrelevant now. Academia, in general, has taken to demanding that work be done only from the failing perspective, never to reach the succeeding perspective. Langan, amongst so many others, have realized the futility of that demand, and have even going a long way to enumerating its failures. But such enumeration, much like the infinite process that academia currently demands, is infinite. Success cannot come to Langan until he recognizes that the noumenal aspect is the seat of REAL; or something equivalent, if the language / perspective is different in mere personal style.
Which reminds me, I also know that you didn’t mean “quirk” to be derogatory-hard, but I would still like an example – even just one – because there is neither a need for me to lock in on any such “quirk”.
Back to Langan. To be sure, I don’t claim to have cracked him as a nut. But with a confidence of a similar type to the one I have about my SUCCESS at metaphysics (which is not just mine; and which is, to be sure, just that, confidence. Ever dependent on my continued faith/e that I AM; and that that is thee only real truth I can know {except that I am not alone}). Again, with a similar type confidence, though certainly of far lesser degree, I am confident that Langan falls prey to materialism in the end. And, in truth, that is simply insufficient. Thee I’dea is a little more (minimally) complex. MIND-faith/e-representation-faith/e-MIND. (!!!)
Evidence? The “U”. (And isotelesis might be honing in on this too.) I think Langan will eventually see that he has to get rid of the “U”, and recognize that the ability for an “I am” to manifest his (very own) “U” is PART OF thee physics of ideation. We are a plural society of “I am”. Look at the picture of this physics GJohn offers, at, but for one example of many, John 17:2o-23, Jesus speaking:
“I pray not only for them, but also for those who would believe in me through their logou, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the kosmos may believe that you sent me. ANd I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the kosmos may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me.”
Now running through to see what I missed:
1) I am just coming to appreciate music, and I am particularly loving music videos. I wonder, do you think that these are just the greatest art too? I think they’re incredible. And I think it’s a shame that most academics probably have never gotten to appreciate them like I am. I but I’m always on the verge of feeling guilty for all the great things I get to experience 🙂
2) Josiah Royce is another great find from the turn of the 20th century.
3) you said, “But for us autodidacts, the lustre is still there.” — and man is it ever!
4) you said, “At any rate, as I say, I do keep coming back to the CTMU, and find myself intellectually stimulated each time I do – maybe I’m just hallucinating meaning where there’s none, but I do enjoy it.”
I was real happy to find the CTMU, but I haven’t found reason to go back to it. But I didn’t find the CTMU until after Howison. I’m having hella fun going back through the Gospel of John real carefully at the moment though!
5) you said, “interdisciplinary work is where the action’s at” — I was once effectively told that I would have to abandon my jack-of-all-trades ways. I didn’t want any part in loosing that! And, that there is only one real i’dea afterall, my inclinations toward reinventing the wheel (“why are you wasting your time?”) have hit the jackpot!!!!! Noone should be precluded his opportunity to re-invent that wheel. And the experience is certainly not underwhelming just because you aren’t the first to invent IT!
6) you said, “I have strong doubts about the historicity of Christ”
either way, really. The history is unimportant to me. What’s important is that GJohn credits him with the words that he credits him with, and that they reveal a MIND who had succeeded at metaphysics.
while it may be important that he was the first (and neither I nor Howison, who was professional, has found a prior), this, I suspect, could only have MYSTICAL import. Similarly with his death. Whatever human was to be first, I’m very confident, would have had to tackle similar mystical hurdles. I don’t like speaking of the mystical, because it is something to be tamed, qua mature, but it is easy for me to accept that Jesus was thee annointed (Christ) one; that he was the one that really did triumph in the mystical battles which I don’t doubt he waged. And it is similarly easy for me to see that – not the death itself, per se, – but the being cool with that if that’s the thing other’s insisted on imposing was a vital and integral part of the character (better translation than “name”) of Jesus. Justice is real; and those against it do not have eternal life “in” them. That is, they have excluded it. To be sure, such exclusion is, ultimately, not exclusion per se, but a lie, a falsehood, a living lawlessly.
7) you said, “I’d rather say that GJohn was probably an originally Gnostic text that was Catholicized”
we’d have to settle too many semantics for me to handle this fully, but as I read you know, I doubt it. I strongly suspect that GJohn wrote to make sure that the very important nuances of the metaphysics were not lost due to the small infractions of Paul and the rest of the brothers who pretty much saw the picture “from above”. Furthermore, the great conclusion about pragmatic concerns is to love your neighbor. I’m don’t doubt that GJohn could have had a great deal of respect for the gnostics, while still maintaining his proper regard for the distance they had yet to travel.
8) you said, “I am myself a bit of a mystic on the side, I had some powerful experiences as a kid that gave me reason to think there’s “something to” all that”
I too have had mystic experiences. I think that anyone who will re-invent thee i’dea must. However, while they can be overwhelmingly beautiful, they can also be overwhelmingly terrifying. Best not to submit to mysticism! Hold yourself together.
9) you said, “By instinct and temperament, I’m actually very strongly materialistically and sceptically inclined”
“instinct” is a word I’ve found no meaning for. “intuition” rather?
re materialistic inclinations, I don’t come to condemn them whatsoever! In fact, it is not infrequent (I only succeeded at metaphysics this past April or so) that I find such an “inclination” that I still have to wrestle. But the victories do keep coming easier and easier. What to say of when I was younger? I don’t think I ever doubted that “I am”. But I certainly fell prey to intellectual materialism. I think this is inevitable. Even a cause for joy. Every newborn gets to start of immature. (If it wasn’t this way, would life be tolerable?) No, the only problem I have is taking immature as mature. And it is real rough that the world is so dominated – I mean at the “highest” levels – not just by immaturity, but by an institution designed specifically to PRECLUDE maturity! Absurd! Deadly.
10) you said, “but I’ve been around the houses enough to understand the depth and profundity of the kind of subjective Idealism you seem to be settled with”
hmmm… first, “settled with”. If someone malicious had said that I would say that it is entirely unfair. I see time as needing to be bound, again, at the very small scales, in order that an ideal change, that is, an eternal idea, can be made real. That is, there is a sense in which time is digital, and decidedly more than 1 dimensional. The derivative representation seemingly captures reality with a lower dimensional (1-D) aspect to time (much like those offering the conception of the holographic imagine our “4-D” world being captured on a lower dimensional screen.
So, this is to say, “I am” is not a “settled” thing. I renew it, by faith/e, every moment. But I can’t imagine anything supplanting it. I have “confirmed” the i’dea. And that means that I accept that fundamentally I must live by faith/e. Anyway, I’m confident that “not a bone of it” will be broken.
also, I would have to suggest that you haven’t quite seen the depth or profundity of Howison’s and my personal i’dealism 😉 But I’m stoked for the thought that I might get you to read him before too long!
11) you asked, “Have you read Max Stirner (Ego and Its Own)?”
no, but it sounds real interesting; thanks for the suggestion.
I’m gonna head out for my walk now, but I know that I have your offering to look at later.
Thanks,
Tim
George,
I am watching swami dayananda in very small chunks, mainly this follow-up vid first.
The evidence mounts at every step that he has not quite succeeded in seeing the COMPLEX nature of thee i’dea “I am”. And it is that complexity that is required for REAL. But he does seem quite close. But, because of that, it is really kinda painful for me – mainly because the only thing I can do is absorb it, now. But I suspect I will keep trying to take him in, small piece at a time: thanks!
I also looked up Stirner on wikipedia. I enjoyed his boxed quote on tying everything to himself, but a criticism further down suggests that, at the same time, he didn’t recognize the hard boundaries of thee I’dea. And real is real for reason. Bet yes, he seems potentially quite an interesting “specimen”.
They are on my radar, but if I am under a misimpression, do you have anything to add?
Tim
No, nothing to add. Dayananda represents the ancient teaching of Monism (or more properly Non-Dualism), going back to Shankaracharya and beyond (back to the Upanishads). It’s funny because the understanding the West had of Advaita has been a bit skewed because of the way it was introduced to the West (via Westerners exploring ideas, and the occasional maverick Easterner coming over). When one reads things like the Upanishads, it’s tempting to make up your own meaning in your head about it, but actually the meaning is pretty narrowly circumscribed, embedded in a living tradition that’s been going on for centuries, and is rather precise (the West probably had similar traditions at one time, with the pre-Socratic philosopers, who were really more like “gurus” than armchair academics; hence the ancient sense of “philosophy” as something pertaining to one’s personal life, wisdom in one’s personal dealings with the world).
Not sure I agree with what you’re saying about Langan missing out on the “U” – in fact that seems to be a central part of his philosophy (as indeed of most forms of Idealism so far as I’m aware), that the “I am” (Being) creates and co-creates (in a sense *surprises*) itself through the subterfuge of an “apparent” dualism (I-Thou). “Apparent” here would I suspect have something to do with what Langan’s talking about the two types of “containtment” (topological and descriptive). As I understand it (very roughly with my poor 135-while-stoned IQ 🙂 ), the ideational (subjective experience or being) “works on” the physical, and the physical (objective “stuff”) “works on” the ideational. Right at bottom, it’s just one thing, but it’s “divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union” (Aleister Crowley – another fascinating maverick).
IOW, the real “stuff” of the Universe is sheer potential, in some unfathomable sense. In order for this potential to be brought to some kind of light of being known at all, the Universe births dualism out of itself, and serially expresses its possibilities as “experience” (on a material level, things just bumping into each other and causally affecting each other, as it gets more sophisticated, in terms of sensory experience, time-binding, understanding, reason, etc.).
In this way, all encounters whatsoever are a kind of language, the Universe telling Itself of Its own infinite possibilities. And that is what you are, what I am, what we all are, what everything is. Right at the bottom of the bottle,we are all doing just One thing, and it’s that.
George,
I didn’t quite finish reading what you wrote, but I have to start replying. This should be fun! (I will get to the end.)
First, regarding Dayananda, I watched a little more, and he now appears to be even closer than I first conceived, but I’m still quite confident that he doesn’t see thee complex (thee i’dea).
Now to it!:
you said, “Not sure I agree with what you’re saying about Langan missing out on the “U” – in fact that seems to be a central part of his philosophy”
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear, but this IS his problem! (“wait for it” – like Barney from “how I met your mother”)
you continued, directly, “(as indeed of most forms of Idealism so far as I’m aware)”
yes, this is why Howison clarified his idealism as “personal”, and why I clarify it with my ” ‘ “, I’dealism. And it is why Howison, in the 1905 edition, specifically addressed one appendix (the first?) to some other philosophers who had taken on the name “personal idealism” as well.
But THEE truth is THEE. All else fails. And, as far as I have seen, all else succumbs to materialism. There is but the one gate out.
you said, “that the “I am” (Being) creates and co-creates (in a sense *surprises*) itself through the subterfuge of an “apparent” dualism”
I don’t immediately see a problem with this statement; but I would have some questions. Let me know if you want me to dig.
you said, “”Apparent” here would I suspect have something to do with what Langan’s talking about the two types of “containtment” (topological and descriptive)”
I think that Langan’s system for mutual containment is not complex enough. I think he has given short shrift to the syndiffeonic medium. IOW, his error comes in at the beginning. If he gets the beginning right (adds the degree of complexity I think he is missing), and then works out the repurcussions, I think he’ll see that his conception of a “Universe” dissolves. In a plural, to degree N, society of “I am”, there are N creative beings. Each one inviolate. And each one with his own proprietary “Universe”. Then, each I am is real amongst this real society, but there simply is no external “objective” society. Know “I am” can fully know another “I am”; that’s the hard part. The god of the materialists, “the universe”, turns out to be a lie. (And why were they not more skeptical of IT?!) Each “I am’s” own “universe” is a derivative representation of his WHOLE noumenal mind – within the plural society of spiritually communing / potent MINDS.
you said, “with my poor 135-while-stoned IQ :)”
🙂
you said, “As I understand it …, the ideational (subjective experience or being) “works on” the physical, and the physical (objective “stuff”) “works on” the ideational.”
and this is where we see the need for an added degree of complexity: true freedom cannot be found if the “physical” can work directly “the ideational”! The idealist creates the derivative representation, and then actively takes from it (see above description of thee complex: MIND-faith/e-representation-faith/e-MIND. The representation has no power, it is just a representation.
you said, “Right at bottom, it’s just one thing, but it’s “divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union” (Aleister Crowley – another fascinating maverick).”
that’s quite lovely, and not unlike things I have said before (elsewhere). I’d heard of him, but now I’ll keep him more on my radar.
you said, “IOW, the real “stuff” of the Universe is sheer potential, in some unfathomable sense.”
This where I started needing to tune out and reply. Again, I suggest great skepticism about this “Universe”. And potential is not unfathomable! Real ideas can be made real.
you said, “In order for this potential to be brought to some kind of light of being known at all, the Universe births dualism out of itself”
you really have your work cut out for you if you want to convince me of this “Universe” which “births”. And, like langan shows, but lightly, any dualism is only meaningful relative to another, qua syndiffeonic medium. That is, nothing less complex than such a triadic relation can even be an a priori candidate for REAL.
you said, “and serially expresses its possibilities as “experience””
again, I suspect a gloss of proportion as stunning as the gloss of “Universe” vis-a-vis “serially”. Vital experience requires that “something more” that Rubix couldn’t buy. Vital experience is birthed from above (just as Jesus said). And for this to work, to be REAL, “serial” must take on more than the nearly trivial 1D character I suspect you implied.
you said, “on a material level, things just bumping into each other and causally affecting each other”
I’ve found no such “material level”! No such “things just bumping into each other”. It is merely our great FORTUNE (from above) that we are developed enough to enjoy a life where it can seem that way – because the true causes are so intertwined by then that it is a vain (and even hopeless) task to TRY to unravel. Can you define ANY such “thing”? Can you do it while leaving yourself out? No. An example? A good thing to think (/ pray /meditate) about is food. I see it as primarily a working of MIND. If it is hard to see, consider “the circle of life” (from the Lion King movie). Vis-a-vis MIND it plays out something like this: The physics is deeper than the phenomenal representation alone. And it is about communication between plural “I am”. But since each I am is truly proprietary, we can only process of others their spiritual “waste”, as I perceive it in my (very own) “universe”. What can you make with such “waste”. Call it “low” level if you must, but eating “food” is a processing of waste. And that processing can only be done IN TRUTH (that is, the noumenal MIND of each “I am”).
So, at the “material level”, we end up not with “matter” per se, but information. And that information is ultimately about oneself. Oneself in a plural society. REAL. Thus the materialist world view is trustworthy as far as it goes, but only that far. It doesn’t offer “explanation”. But it does let you get on with a lot of business.
you said, “In this way, all encounters whatsoever are a kind of language, the Universe telling Itself of Its own infinite possibilities. ”
rather, I am living, and constantly deciding how I will self-limit within my infinite potential. Not bounded by any such UNIVERSE; but bounded only by the infinite and definite limits of REAL. Amongst noumenally equivalent others.
you said, “And that is what you are, what I am, what we all are, what everything is.”
But can you now see that this UNIVERSE thing (can) goes the PLURALISTS’ way?
you said, “Right at the bottom of the bottle,we are all doing just One thing, and it’s that.”
We are doing one COMPLEX-thing. There is more than one aspect to what we are doing.
Life.
Real.
I am.
Tim
Hmm, there’s no reply button to your last post, which I very much enjoyed. I suspect the good folks at this blog will probably wish we would get a room now 🙂
If you feel like continuing the discussion you’re welcome to hop over to my livejournal blog (which should be linked here, if it’s not it’s definitely linked in my first response in these comments) any time and say hi! I’ll make a post quoting something you said.
I think that you guys are, frankly, doing the intellectual equivalent of masturbation, but you’re perfectly welcome to do it here. My long-standing policy is that I don’t limit commenters in any way as long as they’re not abusive.
The “reply” button being missing is because wordpress comment threading is limited. It only allows a certain level of nesting, beyond that, it chokes. You can always just post a new top-level comment by going to the entry box at the tail-end of the comment thread, and start a new chain of replies there.
George,
okay, I’ll try dopping by your blog, but, to be sure, I don’t think we need move there necessarily. That reply button thing is just a limit to the nesting on this forum, nothing personal to our discussion; Rubix and I tussled with that inconvenience too.
Tim
Hey Tim, I wouldn’t mind carrying on here, it’s just that I get twitchy when a thread departs too much from the topic – as I think us exploring each others’ philosophies would be (except for the Langan bits I guess).
George,
it’s probably best to carry on here, and I don’t think we diverged too far afield of the thread… but there is another option. I was just welcomed back to my “home institution”, the “lilasquad” at google groups; you could join there – I think. “We” do “center” on Robert Pirsig’s works, the metaphysics of Quality, so if you haven’t read them, that might be a problem, but that forum is probably more facile than your blog (I still haven’t found the thing I tried to contribute yesterday).
sorry for this housekeeping, Mark.
But what would you like to press about the plural society of “I am”, George?
Tim
“The result is, science doesn’t get us truth, but narrows down our range of possible truth candidates.”
Most people understand that just fine, I think. The problem is when people assume things are true simply because it hasn’t been proven false (and when there’s absolutely no reason to assume it true).
All subjective experiences are different as they are unique. Blind faith is a subjective experience that does not appear amenable to a scientific and “rational” understanding. Faith in the observed regularities of natural laws is not blind faith but it is trust i.e. faith nonetheless. The discussion quickly becomes polarized, when the topic refers to ultimate causation and the nature of that causal agent.
If no two subjective experiences are the same then there is no invariant symmetry of subjectification even if such symmetry exists for objectification across all possible worlds. Truth depends on that which defines truth. Ambiguity rules the definitive properties of the descriptive reality of observation. The semantic juxtapositioning of qualia and quanta form a mutually dependent status quo of inherent uncertainty. Ironically, randomness as an ultimate “cause” also becomes tautological in a circular definition way.
Arguments of faith lead to ambiguity with respect to objectivity, because ambiguity is the existence of multiple and possibly inconsistent points of view. that is to say, an ambiguous situation is a single situation or idea that can be seen from two or more conflicting viewpoints, AKA perspectives of subjectiveness. Rightness or wrongness of models is replaced by them being good or bad, in a semantic shuffling of the status quo.
Structure is captured by generalizations[equations] even though objectivity and subjectivity appear to be conjugate terms[in the Heisenberg uncertainty sense].
Time symmetric causality makes the multiverse idea redundant and the other worlds become potential worlds – back where they belong, yes. Is computation a generalization of mind or is mind a generalization of computation? Mind is probably the more general concept so the universe as a mind is more general than the universe as a computer.
Birds use quantum entanglement to navigate:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/birdcompass/
If we regard the universe AKA all of reality, as a set {reality}, then, there is a slight problem. IF reality is the biggest set and every set has a corresponding power set which contains every possible combination of that set, and because there is no “larger than reality set” the power set would have to reside inside reality itself, a contradiction. The branching multiverse of Everett’s many worlds would then carry excess theoretical baggage. Everett’s decription of many-worlds decoherence depicts many branching actualized universes all cut off from the others. The many-worlds branching concept requires a higher meta-space to contain the other worlds. Yet all the potential worlds interfere with each other as observed with the double slit experiment. Philosophically speaking, in order for free will to exist, all possible configurations of self must also exist[as potential] AKA the powerset, in order to freely choose from possible future states and conditions of self, and actualize, thereby condensing into concrete manifestation.
Uber Crank,
this post really pushes me, thanks!
you said, “Faith in the observed regularities of natural laws is not blind faith but it is trust i.e. faith nonetheless.” — I’m glad both come to faith/e!
you said, “If no two subjective experiences are the same then there is no invariant symmetry of subjectification even if such symmetry exists for objectification across all possible worlds.”
This one is real tough. I’m venturing out on the limb. How could such a symmetry exist for “objectification” if there weren’t a REAL symmetry at “the bottom of the [subjective] bottle”? It seems to me that the individual proprietary, and spiritual (or syndiffeonic medium-y), experience of faith/e-ing “I am” should (MUST) be the same — while at the same time maintaining uniqueness because that general (universal) experience is not complex enough to be real without the particularity imposed concomitantly as the specific noumenal self-limiting concept (idea wo / ” ‘ “) – co – phenomenal representation. Is this what you were getting at with your “objectification”? And can I then say that the subjective experience – at the bottom – is the same, though plural?
Anyway, that is how I manage to envision thee i’dea being pluralized. Integral complexity. Which permits both sameness and difference. As quantized i’dea; plural “I am”. I cannot be in you, nor you in me, unless we are “the same” in some aspect. Similarly, I cannot be in you, nor you in me, unless we are truly distinct, in some aspect. Noumenally we are precisely equal (not “the same”); spiritually we are “the same”, at bottom – that is, as creative mechanism of ideal change. Phenomenally (particular representation of the infinite noumenal potential) we are utterly unique. And our great and evolving capacities within our infinite potential are only opened up by (trustworthy) cooperation of “I am”. That is, if we could imagine putting an end to all co-operation, we should all be reduced to the exact same experience, very lonely, very boring.
what do you think?
$$$
you said, “Time symmetric causality…”
Could you tell me what you mean by this? Did you like my MIND-faith/e-representation-faith/e-mind (I intentionally change to big MIND first and little mind last, now) thing, or do you mean something different?
You continued, directly, “makes the multiverse idea redundant and the other worlds become potential worlds – back where they belong, yes.”
If I read you rightly, I think I say YES!, but I’m not up to speed on what EXACTLY this “multiverse” was supposed to be. I say, REAL is real as self-limitation from potential.
You said, “Is computation a generalization of mind or is mind a generalization of computation? Mind is probably the more general concept so the universe as a mind is more general than the universe as a computer.”
consider, for instance, the sense of smell. Doesn’t mind have to be the more general in order for that sense to work? Doesn’t the “computation” have to be a lower dimensional representation of that real working of the sense?
The bird article was really a treasure to consider, thanks!
You said, “If we regard the universe AKA all of reality, as a set {reality}, then, there is a slight problem. IF reality is the biggest set and every set has a corresponding power set which contains every possible combination of that set, and because there is no “larger than reality set” the power set would have to reside inside reality itself, a contradiction.”
Recognizing how thee i’dea is (minimally) complex reveals the way to get past a great many SUPERFICIAL contradictions. Is this one of them?
Tim
Let’s try to keep the discussion here related to math, I’m not interested in sophomoric rhapsodies on speculative hermeneutics, doing otherwise only distracts from the CTMU itself and perpetuates gratuitous confusion…which is pretty much the strategy those attempting to discredit Langan also use.
Lattice theory is another good place to start btw.
isotelesis,
you would have have me speak only lies because you don’t understand the true “math” that is thee physic of I being in you and you being in me?
Tim
isotelesis,
and, since equality is only valid noumenally, what math do you propose? When 1 = 1 is a lie (either 1 is, or one is not one), you can’t even count: what math do you propose?
Tim
isotelesis,
I mentioned to George that I’m really starting to appreciate music videos. Certain artists I find appear spiritually in tune. Whether they are consciously aware of the deep metaphysical underpinnings of their songs or not, I have found a number of videos that speak to super-phenomenal reality. As I recall, you are Baha’i? You might enjoy this gem, Lupe fiasco, “the show goes on”:
Do you see how I can see my metaphysic, and physic, shining through?!
Tim
isotelesis,
I’m not familiar with lattice theory, but do you find an example of any artist expressing it unawares, simply by being spiritually in tune?
Tim
For those interested, you should also check out the paper on palindrome grammar.
Crab Canon on a Möbius Strip
Achilles and the Tortoise happen upon each other in the park one day while strolling.
http://www.evl.uic.edu/swami/crabcanon
”Duality principles thus come in two common varieties, one transposing spatial relations and objects, and one transposing objects or spatial relations with mappings, functions, operations or processes. The first is called space-object (or S-O, or S
I wonder how the SCSPL sub-Planck length space-time micro-structure, differs from space-time microstructure of the causal dynamical triangulation theory?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_dynamical_triangulation
http://www.signallake.com/innovation/SelfOrganizingQuantumJul08.pdf
Uber crank,
your last link doesn’t work, so you know. You question is very interesting, of course, and I don’t have much to offer. But, one, I continue to confidently suspect that Langan’s CTMU is missing a degree of complexity. What is self-configuring and self-processing is thee i’dea (“I am”), and “language” doesn’t fully capture it. Langan, I think, gives short shrift to the syndiffeonic meduim, and endorses his unbound telesis (UBT), but thee i’dea must be self-bounding, so, in short, I don’t think he can properly arrive at an understanding of Jesus’ “above”. And should I suspect other than that the “Iron Rod” with which the “victor” will “smash” “the nations” [below] is the Plank scale?! (See Revelation 2:27, and the context! {and should I suspect other than that “Jezebel” is materialism, qua the lie “universe”?})
And again I suggest that what is translated as “the world” [kosmos] in so many bibles is better understood as “the [materialist’s] system” as provided in this greek interlinear bible:
http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/NTpdf/joh16.pdf
where I strongly suggest considering John 16:33, Jesus speaking:
“… but take courage, I have conquered the world.”
So, when I look at your CDT suggestion, and I read:
“The results of researchers suggests that this is a good way to model the early universe, and describe its evolution.”
I see that they haven’t overcome / conquered the world as they would need to for success.
“the universe” is a lie. Each “I am” has his own. And it is only a derivative representation from “above”; one who wants to understand the sub-Plank scale desires to understand the above: true metaphysics / religion.
Tim
This all reminds me of a chapter (“Is Electricity Fire?”) from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” where Feynman goes to a certain conference:
[[[“There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read–something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.”
So I stopped–at random–and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”
Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.”
later on:
“This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There’s a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!”
later on:
There were a lot of fools at that conference. Pompous fools. And pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools, guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus–THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at this conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset.”
later on:
They said, “In the Talmud it says you’re not supposed to make fire on a Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturday?
I was shocked. They weren’t interested in science at all! The only way science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret better the Talmud! They weren’t interested in the world outside, in natural phenomena.]]]]
I don’t understand how you guys think you’re talking about science and math when I don’t see any science or math coming out of you (or the CTMU) at all. What you guys are talking about is philosophy. I’m not going to read everything here but from the posts I’ve looked at, there’s a lot of faux-intellectualism going on, and an extreme aversion to scientific/mathematical discussion.
I think that your last sentence is an excellent summary.
CTMU is a load of pompous garbage. It starts its argument out with a silly elementary error, and then just continues to build on that flawed foundation. When you force-translate it from pompous artificially complex self-congratulatory babble down to english, it gets to be absolutely facile. Chris loves to make fun of anyone who dares to point this out, but the whole foundation of the basic CTMU argument is the classic paradox of naive set theory. He hides that behind reams of verbiage trying to distract from the issue, but his whole “the universe can’t contain the superset of the universe, therefore the universe isn’t the biggest thing that there is, but the universe is defined as the biggest thing there is, therefore it’s a contradiction, therefore the need for CTMU” is nothing but a shallow repackaging of the usual naive set theory self-containment paradox.
When you really look at it carefully, and you take out the obfuscation and the undefined terms and the underdefined babble, what you end up with is, roughly, “definitional wordplay and really big stuff therefore meaningless babble therefore God”.
It’s bad math, bad science, bad philosophy, and bad theology. All wrapped up in Chris’s insipid self-adulating prose, masked by a refusal to define things.
Shadonis,
you said, quoting Feynman, “So I stopped–at random–and read the next sentence very carefully.”
I suggest you take his advice!: read anything I have written; find a similar example – if you can.
then, your last paragraph (which mark liked so much), two bible versus come to mind. Concerning your “I don’t understand how you guys think you’re talking about science and math”, I think of the verse saying “a bathed sow returns to the mire”; why would I want to do that? To be sure, I do also think that I am talking about PROPER science and math; that is, science and math from above, not rooted in a faith/e in the licentious God you want me to worship: “the universe”. So, here, I suggest, also vis-a-vis your labeling of “faux-intellectualism” Jude 1:10:
“But these people revile what they do not understand and are destroyed by what they know by nature like irrational animals.”
Tim
Shadonis,
It is my understanding that the CTMU is a theory of metaphysics and philosophy. It is a very general and highly abstract treatise about the nature of theories.
isotelesis,
How is the SCSPL operator ideas different from the causal dynamical triangulation models of sub-Planck scale space-time microstructure?
http://www.signallake.com/innovation/SelfOrganizingQuantumJul08.pdf
Uber Crank,
Does causal dynamical triangulation’s model of sub-Planck scale space-time microstructure explain how the model was composed itself? One is a theory, the other is a meta-theory (theory about how theories operate, i.e. sensation (qualio-perceptual syntax), reason (logico-mathematical syntax), path-dependence (space-time-object syntax), inspiration (emo-telic syntax)…which comprise the human cognitive syntax which able to processes informationally and configure cognitively various relations in the universe by means syntactic isomorphism, however reality cannot be defined arbitrarily by local observers, they are being defined by that which they observe, which is limited by a globally invariant syntax, this ensures that the ultimate unity of reality has priority over any finite differences and multiplicities may be expressed within it.
It’s nice to see that C.S. Pierce’s semiotic view (interesting how he acknowledges the role of goal compatibility in models, this could be used in incentive compatibility problems in market engineering for distributed e-science knowledge acquisition…) is appreciated by some working on quantum gravity and others interested in the mutual relationship between the discrete/concrete and continuous/abstract.
“My fascination of Peirce’s text is, in particular, based on the following observations which may appear trivial (or known from Friedrich Engels), but are necessary to repeat many times for the new-modeller:
1. For good and bad, we are all equipped with innate (or spontaneous) orientation, sometimes to exploit, sometimes to subdue. Our innate orientation is similar to the habits of animals in our familiar neighbourhood. We are all “logical machines”.
2. However, inborn logic is not sufficient in foreign (new) situations. For such situations, we need methods how to fixate our beliefs. Peirce distinguishes four
different methods. All four have mathematical aspects and are common in mathematical modelling.
Tenacity is our strength not to become confused, not to be blown away by
unfounded arguments, superficial objections, misleading examples, though
sometimes keeping our ears locked for too long.
Authority of well-established theories and results is what we tend to believe in
and have to stick to. We will seldom drop a mastered approach in favour
of something new and unproved.
Discussion can hardly help to overcome a belief built on tenacity or authority.
Consequences have to be investigated in all modelling. At the end of the day,
they decide whether we become convinced of the validity of our approach
(Peirce’s Pragmaticist Maxim).
3. The main tool of modelling (i.e. the fixation of belief by mathematical arguments) is the transformation of symbols (signals, observations, segments of reality) into a new set of symbols (mathematical equations, models, and descriptions).
The advantage for the modeller, for the person to interpret the signs, is
that signs which are hard or humid and difficult to collect in one hand can be
replaced by signs which we can write and manipulate.
4. The common mapping cycle reality → model → validation is misleading.
The quality of a mathematical model is not how similar it is to the segment
of reality under consideration, but whether it provides a flexible and goal-oriented approach, opening for doubts and indicating ways for the removal of doubts (later trivialized by Popper’s falsification claim). More precisely, Peirce claims
• Be aware of differences between different approaches!
• Try to distinguish different goals (different priorities) of modelling as precisely
as possible!
• Investigate whether different goals are mutually compatible, i.e. can be reached simultaneously!
• Behave realistically! Do not ask How well does the model reflect a given
segment of the world? But ask Does this model of a given segment of the
world support the wanted and possibly wider activities/goals better than other
models?
I may add: We have to strike a balance between abstraction and construction,
top-down and bottom-up, and unification and specificity. We better keep aware of the variety of Modelling purposes and the multifaceted relations between theory –model – experiment. Our admiration for the power of mathematization, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics (Wigner) should not blind us for the staying and deepening limitations of mathematization opposite new tasks.”
Steps Towards Quantum Gravity and the Practice of Science
http://milne.ruc.dk/~Booss/QuantumGravity/QG_LNP_Good-for-Print.pdf
“Each act of observation intends the gathering of information concerning the status of the brain and body with respect to expected possible future states. Those states are predicted from the context of experience embodied in synaptic networks constituting memory and knowledge, and the present relations that hold in the dynamic states of brain and body constituting selective attention. This process is known as the action-perception cycle [Merleau-Ponty, 1942]. It is the mechanism by which brains solve the symbol grounding problem by assimilation of their experience in exploring their environments and changing
themselves to conform to what they find.
The salient characteristic of intentionality, as conceived by its originator Aquinas [1272] and more recent commentators Heidegger [1972], Merleau-Ponty [1942] and Dreyfus [2007], is that the brain is an open system with respect to energy and information but a closed system with respect to meaning. Its unity is inviolate. It can predict the form of an object or event and test its predictions, but the macroscopic form and information content
of an object or event are not transferred through the microscopic sensory receptors and pathways into the brain. The intentional act of observation anticipates a collection of possible outcomes of the sensory consequences of each action. These expectations are actualized from moment to moment from the global knowledge base in cortex by a neural process termed preafference [Kay and Freeman, 2001]. Preafference is revealed in the selective sensitivity of the aroused sensory cortices to sensory input that is relevant to the prevailing situation. It denotes the process by which the limbic system selectively
activates an array of pre-existing synaptic networks of neurons that embody some part of knowledge in the brain (a collection of memories) that is made topical by the intent of forthcoming observations, and that is realized in the selection and activation of one among a collection of nerve cell assemblies controlling access to attractors in landscapes [Skarda and Freeman, 1987].” – The search for ‘koniocortex’
Isotelesis,
you said, “which comprise the human cognitive syntax which able to processes informationally and configure cognitively various relations in the universe by means syntactic isomorphism, however reality cannot be defined arbitrarily by local observers, they are being defined by that which they observe, which is limited by a globally invariant syntax, this ensures that the ultimate unity of reality has priority over any finite differences and multiplicities may be expressed within it.”
Now, let’s see YOUR math!
you said, “My fascination of Peirce’s text …”
I have not read Pierce myself, but I know some of him by way of Josiah Royce; he gives a very nice “tribute” to Pierce in his “the problem of christianity”. I will just point out that Pierce’s use of “sign” is another example of the fact that a relation less than triadic is not even a PRIMA FACIE (I accidentally said “a priori” just earlier when I meant to say this) candidate for REAL! Contemporary materialist physicists simply doom themselves to failure by looking for an ever simpler beginning to “the universe”!!!
you said, “”Each act of observation intends the gathering of information concerning the status of the brain and body with respect to expected possible future states.”
dude, let’s see YOUR math! The math that shows that the “brain” is the thinking tool. And the “body” a causal thing. to be sure, I tell you that they are merely (lower dimensional) derivative representations of the noumenal MIND and causal SPIRIT. Your math here is no better than mine; in fact, it is far worse.
you continued, “This process is known as the action-perception cycle [Merleau-Ponty, 1942]. It is the mechanism by which brains solve the symbol grounding problem by assimilation of their experience in exploring their environments and changing
themselves to conform to what they find.”
as Shadonis would say, this is just a bunch of faux-intellectual philosophy. Brains don’t solve anything! They represent that the noumenal MIND does!!! It is merely your faith/e that lets you believe you are talking truthfully and that I am telling the lies. Eventually …
you said, “The intentional act of observation anticipates a collection of possible outcomes of the sensory consequences of each action.”
This sentence is nice. It doesn’t impose materialism! And, to be sure, the materialist cannot find a way to bring the idea of “… observation anticipates …” to life!
but then, directly, “These expectations are actualized from moment to moment from the global knowledge base in cortex …”
it goes awry. Whether the science be solid or garbage I don’t know, but if it is solid the cortex is still only a derivative representation of the noumenal knowledge base! Or, show me your math.
uggghhhh,
Tim
isotelesis/tim/etc
See, I don’t know how you guys can be talking about something like SCSPL so casually.
To quote the Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
If you look up SCSPL, it only shows up in reference to the CTMU, but it’s never actually explained or laid out in any way where people can actually study it. To quote more from Feynman’s book:
[[[“He would answer me with great clouds of fog, and I’d say, “I don’t understand,” and everybody else would say they DID understand, and THEY tried to explain it to me, but they couldn’t explain it to me! But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.”]]]
If I were to take each one you guys into separate, isolated rooms, and asked you all a bunch of questions about the CTMU and SCSPL and all this sort of thing, I’m pretty sure you’d all give wildly different answers that are largely full of fluff. When I look at your guys’ posts, I see a lot of namedropping and scientific jargon being thrown around, but none of it is actually relevant to the discussion (lattice theory???). What on earth does lattice theory have to do with a paper about God and intelligent design?
Uber Crank:
It’s ok if you want to make a theory that’s all about metaphysics and such, but the author is doing more than that. He’s making claims that step onto science’s turf, so you don’t get to excuse yourself from scientific rigor by simply claiming to be doing metaphysics. That’s just a way to set up a logical framework so that you can’t ever be falsified. How can you disprove the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Well, you can’t. But I’m not about to go around acting like it’s absolutely true or anything and call people names because they can’t disprove me.
You guys talk about lattice theory and Planck scales and quantum physics, so it’s pretty obvious you guys ARE trying to talk about science, and yet you defend it by claiming metaphysics? You can’t really have it both ways. If you’re talking science, talk science. But if you’re doing metaphysics, don’t pass it off as scientific truth, because you will fail in doing so.
Shadonis,
Here are some definitions for you as I understand them, I’m sure fundamentalist creationists could have a different understanding, I’m not here to support a group or person but a subject worth investigating.
Intelligent Self-Design=Anticipatory or “self-simulative” output selection (more than reactive outputs).
The CTMU is about how the universe which generically contains its contents topologically is simultaneously being descriptively simulated by its contents.
“A. H. Louie’s More Than Life Itself is an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organization of entailment relations in living systems. This book represents a synergy of the mathematical theories of categories, lattices, and modelling, and the result is a synthetic biology that provides a characterization of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a specialization of mechanism, but an expansive generalization of it. Organisms and machines share some common features, but organisms are not machines. Life is defined by a relational closure that places it beyond the reach of physicochemical and mechanistic dogma, outside the reductionistic universe, and into the realm of impredicativity. Function dictates structure. Complexity brings forth living beings.”
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/
Ok but this isn’t really saying anything. All you’re saying is that Intelligent Self-Design is about self-simulation and that the CTMU is about a universe being a container for objects, but the objects define the nature of the container.
Sounds a lot like Bruce Lee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sonZq6ZnF90
This is exactly what I meant by the kind of obfuscatory verbiage that characterizes the CTMU.
What, exactly, do you mean by “generically contains its contents topologically”? Mathematically, that statement is so ambiguous as to be entirely meaningless. Taken literally, what it says is “the universe contains the stuff that’s inside it” – but without bother to define “contains” or “inside”.
Similarly: “simultaneously being descriptively simulated by its contents” – what does it mean for the universe to be descriptively simulated by its contents? What’s the difference between the contents simulating the universe, and the behavior of the contents being the behavior of the universe?
That kind of stuff isn’t defining anything. It’s just words being used in a way which obscures things.
MarkCC, I am not an expert on topological and/or descriptive set theory, and I know you’re trying to prove a point you consider valid, whether or not you’re right to be suspicious of Mr. Langan, it’s wrong to throw around words like “Crank” just because someone you find catankerous. My motivation is understanding, not defamation of character, I am unattached to the outcome really, I’m just annoyed by those who misrepresent. Langan is arcane, but not totally arbitrary in the ways a true crackpot, there is a deeply systematic way in which he develops his ideas, although few references to other ideas which develop along similar lines.
Mathematics, Form and Function is a survey of the whole of mathematics, including its origins and deep structure, by the American mathematician Saunders Mac Lane.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Action_to_Mathematics_per_Mac_Lane
“The concept of syndiffeonesis can be captured by asserting that the expression and/or existence of any difference relation entails a common medium and syntax, i.e. the rules of state and transformation characterizing the medium. It is from these rules that the relation derives its spatial and temporal characteristics as expressed within the medium. Thus, a syndiffeonic relation consists of a difference relation embedded in a relational medium whose distributed rules of structure and evolution support its existence.
Every syndiffeonic relation has synetic and diffeonic phases respectively exhibiting synesis and diffeonesis (sameness and difference, or distributivity and parametric locality), and displays two forms of containment, topological and descriptive. The medium is associated with the synetic phase, while the difference relation is associated with the diffeonic phase (because the rules of state and transformation of the medium are distributed over it, the medium is homogeneous, intrinsically possessing only relative extension by virtue of the difference relationships it contains). Because diffeonic relands are related to their common expressive medium and its distributive syntax in a way that combines aspects of union and intersection, the operation producing the medium from the relands is called unisection (US). The synetic medium represents diffeonic potential of which the difference relationship is an actualization.
…
This generic syndiffeonic diagram illustrates a simple fact: any difference relation requires a supporting medium with extension in the differential parameter. As illustrated, the medium distributes over both the linear relation “X differs from Y” and its relands (related entities) X and Y, bestowing on them a common “relatedness” property equating to “inclusion in the relational medium X(US)Y”, where X(US)Y is the unisect or “syntactic product” of X and Y. This common attribute invalidates any assertion to the effect that the difference between the relands is “absolute” or “irreducible”; the mere fact that the difference can be linguistically or geometrically expressed implies that it is only partial and that both relands are manifestations of one and the same ontological medium. Where X and Y represent arbitrary parts or aspects of the difference relation called reality, this diagram graphically demonstrates that reality ultimately consists of a unitary ontological medium. Accordingly, reality theory must be a monic theory reducing reality to this medium (this idea is further developed in the Principle of Infocognitive Monism).
Note that any syntactic (as opposed to informational) inhomogeneity in the common medium is itself a difference relationship and thus invites a recreation of the diagram. Similarly, any inhomogeneity in the common medium illustrated by the recreated diagram would invite yet another recreation of the diagram, and so on. Any such syndiffeonic regress must terminate, for if it did not, there would be no stable syntax and therefore no “relation” stable enough to be perceived or conceived. The informational stability of perceptual reality shows that reality has a stable syntax.” – Langan, 2002
I don’t call Chris a crank because I find him cantankerous. I call him a crank because he is a crank.
I keep harping on the set theory – but I do that for a very important reason. It’s a simple example of what’s wrong with the CTMU, and it’s also a critical example of what’s wrong with the CTMU.
Chris devotes a lot of verbiage in several different places to the supposed problem concerning self-containment.
The problem with that is that it isn’t a problem. Not in any way. The self-containment problem is an artifact of an inconsistent foundation. And you can’t build anything meaningful – not in math, not in philosophy, not in metaphysics – on an inconsistent foundation.
The self-containment issue is an utterly typical example of the CTMU. He refuses to ever assign a specific meaning to “set”, but he uses it in a way that could only possibly ever make sense if it was naive set theory. And then he uses the well-known flaw in naive set theory to create a supposed contradiction. And then he uses that contradiction to build a foundation for why his theory is necessary. When you call him on this, he starts to spew word salad and obfuscate – saying ridiculous things like “he’s talking about sets, not set theory.”
That kind of rhetorical step isn’t a real answer to the problem. What, exactly, does set mean? How does it address the well-known inconsistencies in the intuitive definition of set?
Similarly, the rest of the CTMU continues to play the same game. What does topological containment mean? What does language, in the sense used in the CTMU mean? What does syntax mean? Those are all terms that are well-defined in math, logic, and philosophy – but his meanings are clearly not the standard ones. A “self-processing language” is completely non-sensical under the standard definition of language used in math, logic, and computer science. But he won’t define what he means by it.
These aren’t trivial questions – they’re the heart of the CTMU, and Chris has never defined them precisely. Whenever someone points these out to him, he just goes off into one of his rants – either about how his critics don’t have the right credentials to criticize him, or how his critics are too stupid to understand, or how his critics are overcredentialed academics, or … or really anything that would actually address any of the deep, fundamental problems with his “theory”. He never responds with anything except more and more obfuscation.
Mark CC (responding to Nov 27 5:43pm)
You keep saying he doesn’t define such-and-such, but he does, and he’s done so several times in the responses in this thread. I think the reason he got exasperated was because your responses didn’t even acknowledge it.
For example, he said several times that he acknowledges that he’s starting with Cantor’s basic definition of a set, and he said that he understands that there are other solutions to the problems that arise with that, but that he’s proposing a solution that’s different, and has a specific function in reletion to the requirements of reality theory (i.e. to the constraints that the use of the idea of a set must have when it’s being used to talk about reality).
You seem to think he’s spouting verbiage, but to me it seems he’s being extremely terse and condensed in his use of language.
e.g. “topological containment” and all that – it’s not all that mysterious, it’s part of his solution to the paradoxes in the context of reality theory. As he says, “the universe (set of all sets) is that which topologically contains that which descriptively contains the universe (set of all sets)”
What’s so problematic about that? It’s just metaphysics, it’s just part of the process of trying to find a most-general description of the universe/reality.
Same for most of the things you’re talking about – either he does define them explicitly, or you get an understanding of them in the course of what he’s saying.
So yeah, I think that, although, sure, he obviously does get quite annoyed with you guys, he has a right to be. To an outside observer (me) it just looks like you’re playing to your peanut gallery, but not really engaging with him.
isotelesis,
thanks for bringing this refresher to me! But why does Langan conclude that his syndiffeonic medium relates to a “Universe” rather than the SPIRITUAL aspect of EACH incorruptible individual “I am”! And why doesn’t he recognize that at bottom the difference relation that springs from it is the one between the noumenal aspect (MIND / idea) and the phenomenal (and derivative) represntation?! (Or: does he? That darned “U” still has me believing that he hasn’t seen how this {complex} triad is SELF-BOUNDING, and, thus, needs to be PLURAL(ized) if there is to be REAL individuals other than God.)
Tim
Mark,
you said, “And you can’t build anything meaningful – not in math, not in philosophy, not in metaphysics – on an inconsistent foundation.”
When I first came to this forum I suggested Feynaman; in his chapter on algebra (again, yes, algebra for his cal tech students) from his lectures on PhysicS he admitted that math requires a starting in the middle, even just to be able to count. That is, a proper foundation is not found in math, per se! The only consistent foundation is “I am”. When one sees the REAL, and COMPLEX, nature of that I’dea, all else (should) falls out, necessarily.
you said, “When you call him on this, he starts to spew word salad and obfuscate”.
I take this as evidence that he hasn’t quite succeeded – though he is quite close. But, I haven’t pressed for success at thee physic, so … who’s to say it won’t require “word salad”?
you said, “Those are all terms that are well-defined in math, logic, and philosophy”.
But the “math, logic, and philosophy” you are considering “start in the middle”! And Langan (and I, and many others) are trying to start at the beginning!!! When you do that, you have to get rid of all the well-defined lies!!!!!
Tim
George,
I want to hammer a fine point from your response to Mark. You said, “It’s just metaphysics, it’s just part of the process of trying to find a most-general description of the universe/reality.”
again, you are speaking of “dead” metaphysics. Reality is no REAL thing per se! REAL is a constraint, it is a boundary, it is a condition that must be conformed to, but there is no grand reality, per se. Similarly with Universe, again. So, rather, live metaphysic is about finding the general nature of thee i’dea! Thee REAL i’dea. And, I thought you had liked my point about REAL being PLURAL! 😉
That is, since each i’dea, “I am”, is incorruptible and proprietary, there is no way any “I am” (nor any society of “I am” cooperatively) could have access to any complete reality. There are N realities harmonizing, but the proprietary information (which comes from the derivative representation) is not universally available! That is, there can be no grand “reality” as such! Consider again my suggestion of MIND-faith/e-representation-faith/e-mind. … What is taken from MIND, by faith/e, must conform to the dictates of REAL. And the act of will, of creation, that is taken from the noumenal aspect MIND is represented universally, for all “I am”, but the later act of faith/e, where one chooses what he intends to try to observe, is not made universally available, as the derivative representation has already been “set”! What one observes in that little act of “mind” is utterly proprietary! One observes only his own body (“universe” if you must). It must be this way if there is to be plural “I am”; and this is why I confidently suspect that Langan, despite his hopes, has fallen prey to pantheistic materialism, which would have there be but one real “I am”, with, perhaps, some utterly dependent conscious centers – but let me shut up on such nonsense.
look again at MIND-faith/e-representation-faith/e-mind. And consider 1 John 2:23:
“No one who denies the Son has the Father, but whoever has confesses the Son has the Father as well.”!
Tim
Shadonis,
you suggest to me, amongst others, “See, I don’t know how you guys can be talking about something like SCSPL so casually.”
But I don’t claim to be talking about SCSPL! I’m talking about THEE (only REAL) i’dea: I am.
You continued, “To quote the Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.””
I really suggest you think of that quote any time you hear someone say “universe”!!!!! What, that word gets a pass? What, all reasonable people must start out with a lie, and preclude success? Don’t you use that word casually? Another bible verse, ~”first take care of the beam in your own eye, then you can see to address the splinter in your neighbor’s eye.”
you suggested, “If I were to take each one you guys into separate, isolated rooms, and asked you all a bunch of questions about the CTMU and SCSPL…”
you wouldn’t find me very interested. I’ve read the paper, and I was very happy to, once, but I think I see that Langan has not succeeded, and so my interest in the CTMU as such is next to nill – because of the “U” (see my response to George of Nov 24). BUt, you continued: “and all this sort of thing”. If you want to talk about THEE I’dea, I’ve effectively had a “room” here on various occasions, and I don’t doubt that we too could get one.
for Uber Crank you said, “He’s [Langan is] making claims that step onto science’s turf, so you don’t get to excuse yourself from scientific rigor by simply claiming to be doing metaphysics.”
For my part, I certainly do not excuse myself from the REAL limits of TRUTH. Thee physic will fall out of thee metaphysic like a ripe fruit. And without thee metaphysic, physicists are stuck in an infinite (and vain) “do loop”. Langan and I agree that far.
you said, “If you’re talking science, talk science. But if you’re doing metaphysics, don’t pass it off as scientific truth, because you will fail in doing so.”
Again I suggest the bible verse I just suggest to you above, Jude 1:10. Furthermore, I have already SUCCEEDED at metaphysics; and I’m just trying to share – because I selfishly would prefer to live amongst more successful, and hopefully mature, “I am”.
Tim
shadonis,
to be sure, when I say that I have already SUCCEEDED, I mean at metaphysics / religion. About thee physic, I do – certainly – still have some blind spots: but they are in the middle! I have seen what I might call the “fertilization of the seed”, and I have also, so to say, “had my ‘feet’ washed”. Regarding the metaphysic, like I’ve said, I’m confirmed in the faith/e that “not a bone of it will be broken”. Further, regarding thee physic, (I trust that) I see it even better than Howison did (whether or not I see it better than Jesus did in his time “in the world” I cannot know from the writings extant). This is to say, if the materialist physicists who are better at math than I (though I am far from terrible at it myself) came to comprehend the metaphysic I have described (quite readably I think), then that “eventually” I alluded to above would come, and it would be seen that I have not been speaking lies. I don’t press for success at the physic though; why would I?
Tim
Shadonis,
Metaphysics and physics are not mutually exclusive as you imply.
I give you a quote from the wonderful Wikipedia 😉
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_physics
quote:
“In philosophy, the philosophy of physics studies the fundamental philosophical questions underlying modern physics, the study of matter and energy and how they interact. The philosophy of physics begins by reflecting on the basic metaphysical and epistemological questions posed by physics: causality, determinism, and the nature of physical law. It then turns to questions raised by important topics in contemporary physics:
Physical cosmology: space, time, the origin and ultimate fate of the universe;
Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics: energy, work, randomness, information;
Quantum mechanics: the rival interpretations thereof, and its counterintuitive conclusions.
Centuries ago, the study of causality, and of the fundamental nature of space, time, matter, and the universe were part of metaphysics. Today the philosophy of physics is essentially a part of the philosophy of science.”
Ok but all of those things are describable by science, not the “philosophy” of physics. Philosophy isn’t required to talk about any of those topics and is largely useless today when we start talking science.
My point is that if you’re going to be touching on science, you should at least talk about relevant science. Again, what does lattice theory have to do with anything? Serious question. What does lattice theory have to do with a paper on God?
Uber Crank,
“physical law” testifies to the noumenal realNESS of thee I’DEA (and his particular ideas) which an “I am” (and all “I am”) chooses to CREATE (a derivative representation of) IN TRUTH with HIS potent spirit. It is only the “waste” of that potent spiritual activity that “I am” can phenomenally “observe”. It is only by processing such “waste” of his own – and other – “I am”, that one can (try to) know another “I am”. This is why the creation of “waste” (increases in entropy) are not useless, but evidence of production and evolution! To be sure, prodigalism is wanton and excessive, waste for waste’s sake; and such prodigalism testifies that the resource (spiritual will) might have been used even more productively.
Tim
Tim
Shadonis,
Lattice theory in the CTMU is a result of advanced computation theory – regarding the ontology of the Universe as a Mind. SCSPL is also a form of self exited circuit – similar to John Archibald Wheeler’s participatory universe.
Example?
Shadonis,
One possible example is the astronomical delayed choice concept of John Archibald Wheeler.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%27s_delayed_choice_experiment#Wheeler.27s_astronomical_experiment
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse
Time symmetric causality and garden slugs:
http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/Time.html
George:
“e.g. “topological containment” and all that – it’s not all that mysterious, it’s part of his solution to the paradoxes in the context of reality theory. As he says, “the universe (set of all sets) is that which topologically contains that which descriptively contains the universe (set of all sets)”
I think the point is that this isn’t a real answer that actually says anything that makes sense.
What paradoxes? Are they actually paradoxes or just paradoxes in the sense that naive set theory leads to paradoxes? Any time anyone ever mentions “set of all sets,” you’re talking about naive sets. You can’t have a set of all sets. It’s not a satisfying answer.
George:
Chris has never admitted that he’s using Cantor’s definition of a set. If he ever did, that wouldn’t just be a minor thing – it would mean that his entire theory falls apart.
You can’t just say something like “Yeah, there are problems with that that other people have solved, but that’s not important for what I’m doing”.
The problem with Cantor’s set theory isn’t something trivial. It isn’t something that can be ignored. Cantor’s set theory is inconsistent. Inconsistency means that if you include the inconsistent element in your reasoning, then no proof that you produce can be valid. You can’t do any valid reasoning in an inconsistent system.
What an inconsistency like this means is that using the inconsistent premise, you can prove anything. You can simultaneously prove A and not-A. You can prove that the moon is made of green cheese. You can prove that spaghetti is the messiah. You can prove that the color green is actually a sentient intelligence. An inconsistent premise makes every proof in the system completely worthless and meaningless.
If Chris were to admit that he’s using naive set theory, that would mean that he’s admitting that his entire theory is meaningless.
Similarly, with respect to the topological containment thing: you’re still not addressing the real question. What does topological containment mean?
What does topological mean in that context? What does he mean by containment?
That’s important – because topology actually means something. But the conventional mathematical or scientific definition of topology doesn’t appear to be consistent with what Chris means by “topological”.
“Chris has never admitted that he’s using Cantor’s definition of a set.”
In fact, Chris has written the following on this very page.
“The foundation I’m talking about is not NBG, or ZF, or naive set theory, but the CTMU and SCSPL. For the hundredth time, sets can be interpreted therein as collections of discernable, distinguishable objects and events (just as Cantor defines them), or if one prefers, as functions and functional arguments whose more involved properties are developed not in set theory, but in (you guessed it) SCSPL.”
Thus he has admitted that he’s using Cantor’s definition of a set.
“If he ever did, that wouldn’t just be a minor thing – it would mean that his entire theory falls apart.”
The CTMU is not even based on the set-theoretic approach shown in the Intro. That’s a starting point that Chris uses in that essay, but it is not the starting point from which the CTMU is derived. Given that you still do not understand this, it is clear to at least Chris and me that you fail to see the big picture with regards to the CTMU and thus fail to understand it whatsoever.
In the section that you quoted, Chris specifically denies using naive set theory. Naive set theory is Cantor’s set theory. They’re the same thing. We started calling Cantor’s set theory naive set theory because it’s inconsistent, and people had created slightly more complex set theories to fix those problems.
Chris simultaneously denies that he’s using Cantor’s (aka naive) set theory and confirms that he’s using Cantor’s (aka naive) set theory.
“Chris simultaneously denies that he’s using Cantor’s (aka naive) set theory and confirms that he’s using Cantor’s (aka naive) set theory.”
Chris is using Cantor’s definition of a set. However, he is also using two different types of containment. This means that his set theory isn’t Cantor’s naive set theory.
You’re playing exactly the same game as Chris.
*If* Chris is using Cantor’s definition of set, then he’s using Cantor’s naive set theory. If he’s *not* using naive set theory, then he can’t be using Cantor’s definition of set. The two are inseparable – they’re essentially the same thing.
Chris: Chris has never admitted that he’s using Cantor’s definition of a set.
George: But he does in the Aug 11 10:58 am post. He says he used the wikipedia definition, and then pointed out it’s no different from Cantor’s definition, which is general – as general as the Wikipedia definition – and distinct from his (Cantor’s) theory.
Chris: If he ever did, that wouldn’t just be a minor thing – it would mean that his entire theory falls apart.
George: How? He’s said that he’s using the general definition of “set”, and (in the same post as above) he says: “I’m using the term “set” in a very general way … the way that, e.g., Wikipedia uses it. If Mark doesn’t like this definition, then he needs to explain why it is inadequate for my purposes even when I’m not relying on it in my essay, and why I need to settle for one standard version of set theory or another even while explicitly rejecting set theory as an exclusive basis for the CTMU.”
Chris: The problem with Cantor’s set theory isn’t something trivial. It isn’t something that can be ignored. Cantor’s set theory is inconsistent. Inconsistency means that if you include the inconsistent element in your reasoning, then no proof that you produce can be valid. You can’t do any valid reasoning in an inconsistent system.
George: Yes, but he’s not using Cantor’s set theory, he’s using a theory-independent informal definition of set, which is used both by Wikipedia and by Cantor. He explained that several times in these comments.
What’s he actually doing? I think he’s taking a look, to *start* with (i.e. in the bit where he’s talking about the “set of sets”), at the GENERAL IDEA of what we mean by “everything”, “reality”, “universe”. He’s starting on a general, common-sense level of discourse and refining it as he goes. e.g. one possible general way of looking at reality is that it’s what can be gathered together into “a whole of definite, distinct objects of our perception and of our thought”. That’s more or less how we think of reality, in a rough-and-ready way isn’t it? As the whole of what we perceive and think?
Then, pointing out the problems with that, he finds his own solution to the problems (the two sense of “containment”) and then moves on.
Chris: Similarly, with respect to the topological containment thing: you’re still not addressing the real question. What does topological containment mean?
What does topological mean in that context? What does he mean by containment?
George: “containment” is about HOW what’s contained in reality is contained in reality. Roughly, as I understand it, Reality is (logically *must* be) that which topologically contains itself as it descriptively contains itself.
IOW, in terms of ordinary day-to-day life, reality is what contains us (spatiotemporally – ONE VERSION of “topologically”) even as we contain it in our knowledge of it (descriptively).
i.e. in knowing reality (Langan says), we’re doing a “miniature” version of what the Universe does (and logically must do) as a whole (we are “microcosms”), and indeed that’s precisely what *makes* us real.
Does that really make no sense to you at all? A more simple, poetic way of saying the same thing is what Alan Watts said, as quoted in the Q&A on the CTMU website:-
“If you can agree that you are not separated from reality, then you must agree that your ‘self’-awareness is also reality’s awareness of itself.”
We don’t normally go about our daily business thinking that’s what we are, but metaphysically, that is indeed what we are: reality cognizing itself.
Is that “trivial”? Well, it depends on how you look at it. It doesn’t bring you any new information, because it’s actually what’s deeply implicit in ANY bit of knowledge; but having it pointed out to you, maybe that’s not so trivial? (Metaphors about fish not noticing *water* because it’s omnipresent are apt here 🙂 )
I was thinking the other day, too, about the “language” thing. It was bothering me but I couldn’t put my finger on it. You say he doesn’t give a definition of language as he’s using it in contexts like SCSPL, but he does, as plain as day, in the CTMU itself:-
“Reality is a self-contained form of language. This is true for at least two reasons. First, although it is in some respects material and concrete, reality conforms to the algebraic definition of a language. That is, it incorporates
(1) representations of (object-like) individuals, (space-like) relations and attributes, and (time-like) functions and operations;
(2) a set of “expressions” or perceptual states; and
(3) a syntax consisting of (a) logical and geometric rules of structure, and (b) an inductive-deductive generative grammar identifiable with the laws of state transition.
Second, because perception and cognition are languages, and reality is cognitive and perceptual in nature, reality is a language as well.”
Again, what’s so problematic about this? It seems to make sense to me.
First of all, that should be “mark” not “chris”.
Second: yes, it is important. It’s very problematic.
As I keep saying: you can’t build anything on an inconsistent foundation.
If Chris is using the “naive” definition of set, then the introduction to his theory is simply restating (without any acknowledgement) the well-known problem with naive set theory as if it’s something profound. But it isn’t: it’s a well known problem with an inconsistent system. So either he’s being extremely dishonest and misleading by pretending that this well-known error is something important to the argument for the need for his theory, or he’s woefully ignorant of the stuff that he’s talking about.
If he isn’t using the naive definition of set, then the introduction is a piece of garbage, because the conclusions that he reaches are impossible to reach using non-naive set theory.
You can’t hand-wave your way past that.
Finally, with respect to the language issue:
That isn’t a definition of a language. That is a handwave. By that definition, pretty much any dynamical system is a “language”. If that’s what “language” means, then telling us that something is a language tells us nothing.
I can produce for you a dozen different constructions with dramatically different properties, and you wouldn’t be able to say whether or not they were valid “languages” in Chris’s sense. By one argument, they’d all be languages. But it would be incredibly easy for Chris to take any of them that he didn’t like and say “Nope, that’s not a language”.
And even if you accept that definition: under that definition, what does it mean to say that “perception is a language”? How can you, under Chris’s definition, distinguish between something that is a language, and something that isn’t?
Of course, the answer is that you can’t in any kind of objective way. It’s just yet another piece of misdirection – a bit of wordplay that provides more weasel-room for pre-emptively shutting down critics.
MARK: First of all, that should be “mark” not “chris”.
GEORGE: Gaaah, many apologies – Chris on the brain lol
MARK: Second: yes, it is important. It’s very problematic.
As I keep saying: you can’t build anything on an inconsistent foundation.
GEORGE: But in the very post you’re responding to you I quoted Chris saying that’s not what he’s doing:-
“If Mark doesn’t like this definition, then he needs to explain why it is inadequate for my purposes even when I’m not relying on it in my essay, and why I need to settle for one standard version of set theory or another even while explicitly rejecting set theory as an exclusive basis for the CTMU”
I don’t understand how you can keep going on about him “using naive set theory as a foundation”, when he’s explicitly said he’s not using set theory, far less using naive set theory, as a foundation.
Maybe he’s doing something other than what you think he is?
Maybe he’s doing what I suggested in the post you’re responding to? i.e. starting “in the middle” with a rough-and-ready concept of “reality” or “everything”, and then gradually refining it in his own way?
MARK: Finally, with respect to the language issue:
That isn’t a definition of a language. That is a handwave. By that definition, pretty much any dynamical system is a “language”. If that’s what “language” means, then telling us that something is a language tells us nothing.
GEORGE: Well, it’s the opposite of saying that “things just happen to be the way they are” (which is what the modern scientific consensus boils down to – doesn’t it? Even supposing the BB is something law governed and mathematically speakable-about, its CONDITIONS apparently just happen to be the way they are; or there just happens to be a quantum soup). It’s saying that there’s something rational and meaningful about the Universe – that’s not exactly “telling us nothing”.
And anyway, it’s not a “definition of language”, it’s him telling us why he’s using the word “language” as a key word in his metaphysics – it’s a definition of how he’s using “language” in that context (i.e. because the world has certain features that are language-like – and then what he’s trying to show after that is that this is not an accident, that there’s a logical link between what we ordinarily call language, and the language-like spacings and timings of things according to natural laws).
MARK: And even if you accept that definition: under that definition, what does it mean to say that “perception is a language”? How can you, under Chris’s definition, distinguish between something that is a language, and something that isn’t?
GEORGE: If it’s meaningful, I guess. So, the question is: is the Universe meaningful or not? Langan’s saying it is, and trying to show that and how it might be (obviously he thinks he’s demonstrating that and how it HAS TO BE, and that’s what he probably hopes people would argue about – whether he’s actually demonstrated more than a coherent possiblity, whether he’s demonstrated that the Universe logically necessarily has meaning and is rational through and through).
MARK: Of course, the answer is that you can’t in any kind of objective way. It’s just yet another piece of misdirection – a bit of wordplay that provides more weasel-room for pre-emptively shutting down critics.
GEORGE: You keep saying “word play”, but I don’t see any “word play” in what Chris says – I see him using words utterly consistently throughout, indeed almost ferociously so.
Again, as I said to Shandonis, reading Langan is like reading Kant or Hegel or something – really quite difficult, not the sort of thing you can do without slowing down, even if you’re quite smart. And like Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, etc., Langan has his neologisms – but so what? It’s not as if he DOESN’T explain them in the course of his writing.
Chris can say that he’s not using set theory all he wants, but that doesn’t change reality.
I’ve said this before, multiple times.
Set theory isn’t just some esoteric randomness that math geeks like me like to play with. Set theory is what defines the meaning of the word “set”. The whole point of a construct like set is that it has a precise meaning – precise enough to allow it to be used as a basis for formal logical reasoning.
You can’t talk about sets without set theory. Saying you’re talking about sets without set theory is like saying that you’re talking about language without semantics.
Chris refuses to pin down his definition of set in a precise way. The closest he’s ever gotten is to point to an informal definition from wikipedia which is precisely the definition from naive, Cantor set theory.
And that definition is well known to lead to exactly the kind of self-containment paradox that Chris complains about.
How many times do we need to go around this circle? He refuses to define what set theory he uses. He hedges his way in circles, contradicting himself – in the same paragraph, he denies using naive set theory, and then confirms using it. He reproduces a classic problem that’s been well known for over a hundred years, presents it as his own novel discovery, and then throws tantrums when anyone points out what a load of rubbish it is.
With respect to the language thing: you’re just playing a game of regress: meaningful is another vague, undefined term. It’s a term that has intuitive meaning to us in terms of our experience; but what does it mean in a theory of the universe? It becomes a circle: Chris asserts that the universe is conscious because it’s a language. What’s a language? Something with meaning. What’s meaning? Something understood by a consciousness. So the universe has a consciousness, because the universe has meaning to the universe’s consciousness. How do we know that the universe has consciousness? Because the universe is a language which has meaning. Why does the language of the universe have meaning? Because the universe is conscious of it.
But even more than that: Chris specifically cites a very vague version of the logical definition of language. That definition says nothing about meaning. It talks about objects, relations, and grammatical transitions. Where does meaning fall into it? OR is that just your own random creation?
MARK: You can’t talk about sets without set theory. Saying you’re talking about sets without set theory is like saying that you’re talking about language without semantics.
GEORGE: It seems to me you can talk about sets without set theory, just as Chris is doing, just as I might talk of any set of objects. “Set” is a word in ordinary language, and it’s informally definable the way the Wiki quote and the Cantor quote define it.
MARK: Chris refuses to pin down his definition of set in a precise way.
GEORGE: But he’s told you he doesn’t have to, for his purposes. Why don’t you believe him?
MARK: How many times do we need to go around this circle? He refuses to define what set theory he uses.
GEORGE: Well, surely that’s because he’s not using any set theory? He says he’s not. You seem to think he has to, but I don’t see why he has to. He’s starting with an informal idea of a set, as a first approximation, to capture something of our intuitive idea of “reality”, “universe”, etc. If you like, he’s talking about the “folk mathematical” way we think of reality.
MARK: He hedges his way in circles, contradicting himself – in the same paragraph, he denies using naive set theory, and then confirms using it.
GEORGE: No, he denies using set theory and confirms he’s using an informal definition of “set” as a preliminary part of his discourse.
MARK: He reproduces a classic problem that’s been well known for over a hundred years, presents it as his own novel discovery, and then throws tantrums when anyone points out what a load of rubbish it is.
GEORGE: But he’s obviously not interested in the “classic problem” qua classic mathematical problem, he’s interested in the definition of things like “reality”, “universe”, etc., and his discussion of “set” is like an entry-point into that.
That’s what he’s saying, anyway, it seems to me. You seem to think he’s saying something else, that his aim is something else.
MARK: Why does the language of the universe have meaning? Because the universe is conscious of it.
GEORGE: Well it obviously does. Here you are, understanding human language (WHICH DESCRIBES NATURE), beginning (along with the rest of us human beings in our great adventure) to understand the “language of nature” (WHICH IS, STRANGELY, UNDERSTANDABLE BY US).
What Chris is doing is trying to find a clear way of describing (what I’ve been pointing out to Shadonis) that and how it is the case that one piece of reality (a rock) is understandable by another piece of reality (us). And part of the problem is of course that “piece” isn’t the right word; but nor are words like “part/whole”; nor are words like “member/set”. Set theory isn’t quite right; mereology isn’t quite right; Hegelian dialectic isn’t quite right. What is right, what logically HAS to be right? Well that’s what Chris is after.
What did you think he was after?
Is this a fruitless endeavour? Well it may be an endeavour with little practical application, but seeing as its about absolute truth (that in any instance of perception/knowing, reality is perceiving/knowing reality) I hope intellectual curiosity isn’t so dead that nobody at all finds it interesting!
MARK: But even more than that: Chris specifically cites a very vague version of the logical definition of language. That definition says nothing about meaning. It talks about objects, relations, and grammatical transitions. Where does meaning fall into it? OR is that just your own random creation?
GEORGE: It’s my own paraphrase, putting what I think I understand of what Chris is saying into my own language, constructed in the course of my own life on the basis of my own experience and reasoning.
An excellent way of putting it, George.
Mark:
But Nicholas Rescher presents a blatantly circular argument to the effect of rationality being equivalent to virtuousness. The argument is presented in Rationality, which is published as recently as 1988. He is the youngest person to ever obtain a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University, and has written about 400 articles and 100 books. Why don’t you go yapping to him?
These modern set theory axioms forbid the asking of questions that lead to things like the liars paradox, Russell’s paradox, Cantor’s power set paradox, etc. Because paradoxes are a result of pathological linguistic[syntactic] self reference, sweeping them under the rug by restrictive axioms does not resolve the true problem.
http://megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/Theory.html
quote:
“But what if we now introduce a distinction between levels of proof? For example, what if we define a metalanguage as a language used to talk about, analyze or prove things regarding statements in a lower-level object language, and call the base level of Gödel’s formula the “object” level and the higher (proof) level the “metalanguage” level? Now we have one of two things: a statement that can be metalinguistically proven to be linguistically unprovable, and thus recognized as a theorem conveying valuable information about the limitations of the object language, or a statement that cannot be metalinguistically proven to be linguistically unprovable, which, though uninformative, is at least no paradox. Voilà: self-reference without paradox! It turns out that “this formula is unprovable” can be translated into a generic example of an undecidable mathematical truth. Because the associated reasoning involves a metalanguage of mathematics, it is called “metamathematical”. “
No. Those modern set theory axioms create a different logical foundation which is consistent.
Because the self-containment paradox isn’t just an accidental, unattractive little wart. It’s a fundamental, unavoidable, logical inconsistency. If you use an axiomatic system that permits inconsistency like the self-containment paradox, then you have a meaningless, useless system. You can’t reason. You can’t prove things. You can’t argue about things.
I don’t know how else to say this – but the moment you allow inconsistency into your system, you’ve got a system in which everything is completely meaningless. Because *everything* is provable. Yipee! A is provable. But… so is not-A. So is B. And not-B. And C. And not-C.
MarkCC,
Thank you for the clarifications. I still need to research these ideas and the math further, so I will respectfully bow out of this discussion. I am in deep over my head here. Perhaps only Christopher Langan can set things straight regarding the CTMU theory.
MarkCC,
The idea of self-containment may be irrelevant to you in your domain of inquiry, but in cosmology at least, the Hawking-Hartle No Boundary Proposal seeks to address this very problem.
“Stephen Hawking is among those who have proposed a way out of the regress. In collaboration with James Hartle, he decided to answer the last question – what is the universe and who made it? – as follows. “The universe made itself, and its structure is determined by its ability to do just that.” This is contained in the No Boundary Proposal, which Hawking describes thusly: “This proposal incorporates the idea that the universe is completely self-contained, and that there is nothing outside the universe. In a way, you could say that the boundary conditions of the universe are that there is no boundary.” To mathematically support this thesis, Hawking infuses the quantum wavefunction of the universe with a set of geometries in which space and time are on a par. The fact that time consists of a succession of individual moments thus becomes a consequence of spatial geometry, explaining the “arrow of time” by which time flows from past to future.
Unfortunately, despite the essential correctness of the “intrinsic cosmology” idea (to make the universe self-contained and self-explanatory), there are many logical problems with its execution. These problems cannot be solved simply by choosing a convenient set of possible geometries (structurings of space); one must also explain where these geometric possibilities came from. For his own part, Hawking explains them as possible solutions of the equations expressing the laws of physics. But if this is to be counted a meaningful explanation, it must include an account of how the laws of physics originated…and there are further requirements as well. They include the need to solve paradoxical physical conundrums like ex nihilo cosmogony (how something, namely the universe, can be created from nothing), quantum nonlocality (how subatomic particles can instantaneously communicate in order to preserve certain conserved physical quantities), accelerating cosmic expansion (how the universe can appear to expand when there is no external medium of expansion, and accelerate in the process to boot), and so on. Even in the hands of experts, the conventional picture of reality is too narrow to meaningfully address these issues. Yet it is too useful, and too accurate, to be “wrong”. In light of the fundamentality of the problems just enumerated, this implies a need for additional logical structure, with the extended picture reducing to the current one as a limiting case.
The CTMU takes the reflexive self-containment relationship invoked by Hawking and some of his cosmological peers and predecessors and explores it in depth, yielding the logical structures of which it is built. Together, these structures comprise an overall structure called SCSPL, acronymic for Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language. The natural terminus of the cosmological self-containment imperative, SCSPL is a sophisticated mathematical entity that possesses logical priority over any geometric explanation of reality, and thus supersedes previous models as a fundamental explanation of the universe we inhabit. In doing so, it relies on a formative principle essential to its nature, the Telic Principle. A logical analogue of teleology, the Telic Principle replaces the usual run of ontological hypotheses, including quasi-tautological anthropic principles such as “we perceive this universe because this universe supports our existence,” as the basis of cosmogony.” – Langan
I find it interesting that nobody can give me examples when specifically inquired.
So if CTMU is bullshit, how about materialism? Materialism cannot refer to mind as the fundamental ontological category.
Speaking of “mind as the fundamental ontological category” as the output of some sophisticated brain scanner, which examines the brains of a person who believes in idealism, would be wrong, because the data produced by the scanner is completely different than the experience of believing in idealism. If the scanner were to output that the idealist indeed believes in idealism, he’d be fine with it. But if it were to output, that he does not believe in idealism, the idealist would say that the machine doesn’t work.
Also, speaking of mind as something which emerges from material phenomena is wrong, because for the idealist, the mind is the -fundamental- ontological category, and the question is, how can we refer to that from within materialism? We can’t.
But if we can’t do that, and if we still are capable of making the observation that there are idealists around, then materialism isn’t an -ontology-, because it does not account for all things that exist. Instead, it only accounts for all material things that exist.
So?
(a) The fact that we find something unattractive, or that it doesn’t fit our personal beliefs and/or idealogical preferences doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. Many people – me included – don’t like the idea of materialism. But does that mean that it must not be true? Of course not.
(b) The CTMU is far from the only alternative to materialism. The fact that the CTMU is a pile of bullshit says nothing about anything except the CTMU.
Why not?
Seriously. You’re just asserting that materialism must be wrong, because idealists don’t believe that it could possibly be right. What if the idealists’ belief that materialism can’t be right is wrong?
How do you know that materialism can’t account for everything? What if it turns out that the phenomenon of consciousness and self-awareness is explainable in terms of basic physics?
I did not assert as fact that the CTMU is bullshit. I think it’s not necessarily inferior to materialism and answers philosophical questions materialism apparently cannot express. A commentator of my blog called “llama” found the following passage, which answers the problem of evil:
I didn’t assert materialism to be wrong. I would not make such an assertion, because there are no criteria for determining whether ontologies are right or wrong, or more appropriately, true or false. (Were you actually referring to moral value instead of truth value?) Ontologies have other kind of properties. The above indicates that CTMU can express something materialism doesn’t.
For a materialist, materialism does account for everything. I don’t know what it’s like to be a materialist and nothing else. However, given that there are many ontologies around and not one of them can be proven true, simply choosing to “be a materialist” doesn’t indicate much interest towards ontology in the first place.
The mind is entirely explainable in terms of physical phenomena (we can trace everything to the brain), so I don’t see the issue here. Sounds a lot like the old philosophical zombie/hard problem of consciousness debate.
Indeed the mind is explainable in terms of physical phenomena. But no small child is born with information about quantum mechanics. And children who were born hundreds of years ago would never acquire such information. Let’s suppose you could ask these people whether they have a mind, and they said yes. Would you think they are wrong? If not, what do you suppose they would mean by giving that answer?
We’re not born with information, because we learn it over time, obviously. Even today, we’re born without certain knowledge, and we’ll die without certain knowledge. Knowledge that, a few hundred years from now, will likely be earth-shattering, front-page news that we wish we could have known today.
We all obviously have a mind because we’ve defined “mind” in a particular way. The question is what the mind is in terms of phenomena. We can explain the mind in terms of physical phenomena, but not everyone is satisfied with that explanation because “consciousness” seems to be something people consider separate.
As in, why aren’t we “philosophical zombies?” We could conceive of a person who has all the same functions, thoughts, emotions, actions, etc, as a human, but with “nobody experiencing it” first-person. I think the answer is that both answers are right. We are just components moving around and flowing electrons back and forth between synapses in the brain, but that’s what defines the “someone up there” experiencing it.
In other words, I think our consciousness is just a generated effect of the physical components. The “qualia,” or private mental experiences such as color, only exist in raw “coded” physical format that our brain interprets. It’s like how data on your hard drive is physically very different from how it manifests itself on your screen.
Shadonis,
you said, “We’re not born with information, because we learn it over time, obviously.”
That we learn over time is true, but in order for it to be possible to learn the first thing, we must have the capacity to learn, and that means that we are born with certain a priori knowlege. This testifies to the REAL-NESS and irreducibility (and complexity) of thee I’dea, “I am”.
you said, “The question is what the mind is in terms of phenomena.”
hahaha… The MIND is not phenomenal, but noumenal. You (your faith/e!) has doomed you to failure from the start. You might as well ask what is water in terms of fire, or earth in terms of air.
you said, “We can explain the mind in terms of physical phenomena”
no you can’t. Or let’s see it. I’m confident that the best you might do is to show that there is a correspondence between certain phenomena (observations of “brain”) and certain acts of MIND. Correspondence is no explanation. And, as I have been hammering, the noumenal MIND is pramate to teh derivative phenomenal representation, the creator of it. The creating of a derivative representation is just part of thee complex, part of the bounding of thee i’dea which is necessary to attain to REAL.
you continued, directly, “but not everyone is satisfied with that explanation because”
for a similar reason that people are no longer satisfied with a physics which states that there is only the four “elements” earth, air, water, and fire: it is no EXPLANATION, and it is a faith/e suitable only for immature ignorami.
you said, “We are just components moving around and flowing electrons back and forth between synapses in the brain, but that’s what defines the “someone up there” experiencing it.”
No it isn’t. This is mere faith/e on your part. To the extent that the dynamic you describe is valid, it merely reveals correspondence, no such explanation.
you said, “In other words, I think our consciousness is just a generated effect of the physical components.”
Thanks for at least qualifying your ignorance with “I think” this time (notice that I appreciate this, yet do not do it myself: I have staked my life!). What do you think is “generated” though? Do you then say that consciousness is a physical (phenomenal) thing?! What? Or do you say that the physical produces a noumena?! But if the noumena comes AFTER, you cannot explain creativity or evolution!: where do you find infinite potential in the brain alone?! And, what of less developed beings: where do you find infinite cognitive potential in the “brains” simplest creatures? Where do you find infinite cognitive potential in the cognitive processors of plants (which they do have)?!
you said, “The “qualia,” or private mental experiences such as color, only exist in raw “coded” physical format that our brain interprets.”
where’s your “I think”?! Are you staking your life on that crap?
Tim
Tuukka,
you said, “Indeed the mind is explainable in terms of physical phenomena.”
The MIND has not yet been (and never will be) EXPLAINED in terms of physical phenomena. This is pure materialism. MIND is noumenal. MIND is not “brain”. Brain is PART OF the derivative representation of MIND. MIND-co-SPIRIT (that is, the super-phenomeal, or Jesus’ Eternal (-co-) Life) is the creator of the derivative representation. In order that an “I am” may take information from the derivative representation he himself creates, he must be endowed with a priori knowledge. Without such a priori knowledge experience / observation would be impossible: one could never learn thing one!
Tim
Isotelesis:
Please, use links. Posting pages and pages of quoted material is well-beyond the appropriate limits of fair use; it’s also incredibly disruptive, because it makes it impossible to view the comment-thread in context. If you post links, interested readers will follow them. But just posting large dumps of text copied from someplace else is unacceptable.
“If you can agree that you are not separated from reality, then you must agree that your ‘self’-awareness is also reality’s awareness of itself. We don’t normally go about our daily business thinking that’s what we are, but metaphysically, that is indeed what we are: reality cognizing itself. ”
I would say: Of course this is true. But this is true even in a purely materialist framework. No CTMU or God or religion etc is needed to explain that at all. The universe is simply a type of universe that ultimately allows for its components to assemble in a way that creates self-perception/awareness. That doesn’t mean God exists. It just means the universe exists, and it happens to be a type of universe that can allow for this type of perception (anthropic principle).
“I was thinking the other day, too, about the “language” thing. It was bothering me but I couldn’t put my finger on it. You say he doesn’t give a definition of language as he’s using it in contexts like SCSPL, but he does, as plain as day, in the CTMU itself:-
“Reality is a self-contained form of language. This is true for at least two reasons. First, although it is in some respects material and concrete, reality conforms to the algebraic definition of a language. That is, it incorporates
(1) representations of (object-like) individuals, (space-like) relations and attributes, and (time-like) functions and operations;
(2) a set of “expressions” or perceptual states; and
(3) a syntax consisting of (a) logical and geometric rules of structure, and (b) an inductive-deductive generative grammar identifiable with the laws of state transition.
Second, because perception and cognition are languages, and reality is cognitive and perceptual in nature, reality is a language as well.”
Again, what’s so problematic about this? It seems to make sense to me.”
We can describe different aspects of reality through languages such as mathematics, but that’s totally different from saying that reality IS language. Also, language doesn’t have timelike/spacelike properties in itself. Reality does, and that’s what allows us to USE language.
Just because you can combine various things together doesn’t mean it’ll do you any good. Numbers are objects, much like chickens and love are objects, but that doesn’t mean it’ll make sense if I ask you what gghodkff + chicken + 422 + love equals. You have to define your terms consistently.
So, for the third time, I will ask you guys: Example? Isotelesis has avoided my challenge to explain why lattice theory is important, and nobody can show me an example of this supposed logic system SCSPL.
If you guys are going to keep avoiding this, you’re technically doing no better than the guys in the Feynman story. If you can’t explain it, why keep up the pretense that you can?
Shandonis: I would say: Of course this is true. But this is true even in a purely materialist framework. No CTMU or God or religion etc is needed to explain that at all. The universe is simply a type of universe that ultimately allows for its components to assemble in a way that creates self-perception/awareness. That doesn’t mean God exists. It just means the universe exists, and it happens to be a type of universe that can allow for this type of perception (anthropic principle).
George: “happens to be” – is that supposed to be an EXPLANATION? 🙂
Yeah, maybe it just happens to be that way (lottery argument – which, incidentally, I doubt Mr Langan is unfamiliar with 🙂 ), but on the other hand, if it’s possible to conceive of a way that the Universe is rational through and through (that there’s a reason that it’s that way), then maybe that’s a worthwhile exercise to pursue?
I might agree that a materialist universe supports a metaphysical perception of reality by reality – at least in terms of a third-person perspective sense of “perception” or “consciousness” (in the way we would say “this guy’s conscious – his eyes are following my finger”), but what about the first person perspective (the “hard problem”)? It’s not at all obvious YET whether materialism can really account for the existence of first-person perspectivalness (qualia, etc. – and I’m familiar with the counter arguments a la Dennett, but just reminding that this the fat lady hasn’t yet sung on ANY of it, therefore Langan’s thought can’t be ruled out of court as some here seem to wish to do).
So I think Langan’s saying a bit more than the third-person “reality is perceiving reality”, as you would say of a mother hen and its chicks – he’s talking about the “inside view” as well – that right at home, in one’s innermost being, one is reality, and not just a bit of it, but the WHOLE of it (or better, a “holon” of it).
Shandonis: We can describe different aspects of reality through languages such as mathematics, but that’s totally different from saying that reality IS language. Also, language doesn’t have timelike/spacelike properties in itself. Reality does, and that’s what allows us to USE language.
George: well he’s saying that the relational properties of language are analogous to the spacelike linking of objects. The upshot is that timing, positioning, etc., of objects in space is LIKE language. Think of something like this writing, there are similar objects laid out in patterns, repetitions, and spatial and sequential relations. Material existence itself is like that, with higher-order relations linking objects (space, laws of nature, etc.).
IOW, the general idea is that your experience of a tree, say, is reality “speaking tree” to itself. And this goes back to the intuitive idea of God that can be found in many cultures (e.g. the Tibetan “wheel of letters”, the Stoic concept of “Logos”, the Hebrew and Islamic notion of “names of God” – even right back to Parmenides:-
“Its name shall be everything —
every single name that mortals have invented
convinced they all are true: birth and death,
existence, non-existence, change of place, alteration of bright color.”
What’s the “it”? Reality.
Shandonis: nobody can show me an example of this supposed logic system SCSPL.
George: I think Langan has said that he’s working on something that will go into more detail on it. The CTMU paper is obviously just a general introduction to the idea.
Of course, I agree, whether he can really come up with something that passes scrutiny by fine minds is yet to be seen; but I’d say at the stage of what we’ve got from him so far, there’s nothing so terribly objectionable about it. It’s really just an outline or a precis.
I think without that, yeah, of course, you could just chalk him up as another failed metaphysician – but his system, as outlined in the available stuff, seems no less interesting than those of the great system-builders of the past, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, etc. (I find with Langan that I have the same difficulty in reading him as I have such philosophers – I have to read slowly, sometimes read each sentence several times, and sometimes read paragraphs again and again. But I find with Langan, the same as with those guys, 9 times out of 10 I’m rewarded by something that’s at the very least thought-provoking and inspiring, and sometimes with something that really clicks and gives me a glimpse of the possibility that the Universe might actually be rational through and through after all.)
Character assassination is also unacceptable, especially when presented in a misleading manner or is presented without the necessary context. Physics cannot rely on geometry alone, but needs logic.
http://www.csus.edu/cpns/epperson/
Who on earth is arguing that physics relies on geometry alone?
Shadonis,
String theorists treat geometry as primary, with logic secondary, it seems the CTMU treats logic as primary, while those doing work in relative realism and geometric logic treat them on equal footing (which “isotelesis” has refered to).
You’re suffering from a rather serious misunderstanding of string theory.
There is no such thing as geometry without logic. You can’t do geometry without logic. It’s meaningless.
String theory has traditionally focused on geometric models because the logic led them there. That is, if you try to put together a working model of the universe in terms of string theory, you end up with a certain necessary family of topological constructions; for example, one variant requires the dimensional structure conforms to something called Calabi–Yau manifolds.
That doesn’t mean that they’re treating geometry as primary. It means that they’re actually precisely defining their model, and attempting to work through it to a sufficiently great degree of detail and precision that it yields a testable hypothesis. The main criticism of string theory is that after decades of work that promise an answer is around the corner, it has never produced a single testable prediction. To real scientists, the fact that no one has any idea of how to test string theory, that it makes absolutely no testable predictions of any kind is damning.
Contrast that, for just a moment, to something like CTMU. Is there any aspect, no matter how trivial, of the CTMU that is sufficiently precise that you can imagine what it would mean to test it?
MARK: Contrast that, for just a moment, to something like CTMU. Is there any aspect, no matter how trivial, of the CTMU that is sufficiently precise that you can imagine what it would mean to test it?
GEORGE: how can you “test” metaphysics? The whole of experience is the only thing that proves a metaphysics – i.e. the Idealist, the Materialist, the Panpsychist, etc., etc. all hope that what they’re accounting for is the whole of experience, not any portion of it.
It’s not like testing a scientific theory, where you figure out testable empirical consequences a theory implies, and test the theory to destruction by testing those empirical implications. A metaphysical theory is about everything, reality, the whole, etc. (that general intuitive “set” definition again), so you can’t test it empirically.
How do you test a metaphysical theory? By seeing whether any truth, knowledge, experience, whatsoever, logically necessarily must imply its truth.
I think someone said above – metaphysics is like Marmite, it’s a love/hate thing. Maybe you just don’t like metaphysics? It might have been better to say that, rather than calling a genuinely interesting metaphysician a “crank” 😉
I don’t have a problem with metaphysics per se.
Back in my college days, I was a hairs-breadth away from double-majoring in philosophy and comp sci. The only reason that I didn’t is because I would have needed to take another semester of Descartes, and I couldn’t face that. One of my favorite classes was the semester of metaphysics.
The problem with metaphysics is that it’s very attractive to cranks. On the one hand, it can be incredibly fascinating, with a lot of wonderful depth. On the other hand, it’s prone to vagueness and handwaving. In particular, many people who are interested in metaphysics don’t understand the difference between deep thought and midnight dorm-room bullshitting.
But in the case of someone like Chris – he’s not just claiming to do abstract fuzzy metaphysics. He’s claiming to do actual science. He’s not just exploring abstract concepts of selfhood and existence and reason; he’s claiming to be describing the real fundamental way that the world works. Handwaving doesn’t cut it in science.
Chris says the universe is a language, and goes on to quote a definition of language from a math textbook. (Or, actually, a definition of grammar, rather than language; he doesn’t seem to understand the difference between the two.) But he doesn’t bother to show what he means by that. He just throws out the (incorrect) definition, and then pretends that he’s said something profound. It’s just like the whole set-theory nonsense: he gives a vague hand-wavy definition; uses it to allegedly produce results; then whenever anyone points out a problem, he throws a tantrum and claims that you’ve got the definition wrong, all the while refusing to say what the definition actually is.
What’s a set? Well, you could use the definition from wikipedia. Of course, that’s a bad definition which produces inconsistencies. But that’s not a problem, because it’s not the definition that Chris is using: he never said it was, he just said that you could use that one if you wanted.
What’s a language? He never says. The closest he ever comes is to make an allusion to phrase-structure grammar. Of course, you can’t do a phrase-structure grammar for the universe. But that’s no problem, because Chris isn’t using phrase structure grammar. What is he using? He never actually says.
What does “self-processing” mean in SCSPL? Never says. What does he mean by configuration? Never says.
It’s all the kind of hand-wavy bullshit metaphysics that gives the entire field a bad name. And all the way, he claims that he’s doing science.
Hehe, just for amusement, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the excellent comic Louis CK, but he has a great skit on the way children persistently ask “why” questions. I just remembered it and thought it would give people here a laugh (especially if they have kids too 🙂 ) :-
(7:20 onwards)
Ok, I think we’ve both shot our wads on this. One final comment though:-
MARK: What does “self-processing” mean in SCSPL? Never says. What does he mean by configuration? Never says.
GEORGE: (in my own words) As I understand it, that’s what comes out in the course of reading him. What he means by “self-configuring” is simply that reality sets its own rules and writes itself; “self-processing” simply means it reads itself according to its own rules.
Once again, in your act of perceiving or knowing something right now, this process is operative. Those things that you perceive or know are one portion of reality (e.g. a rock, a law of physics, these marks on a screen) being “read” by another portion of reality (you).
It’s the “one” thing (reality, or God – deus sive natura) doing both things (e.g. cf. Wheeler’s “U” picture). But (as I said somewhere else here) it’s not right to call this a part/whole or member/set relationship. What’s it right to call it? That’s what Langan seems to me to be aiming for, a way of talking about it that takes something from the language of sets, something from the language of algebra, etc., etc., and puts them together in a new way for the purpose of trying to understand more clearly this one thing that everything is doing, this one thing that has (he claims) to be true if anything is true.
But that’s just yet another word-game.
CTMU argues that the universe is a computational system. It then goes somewhat beyond that simple statement, essentially claiming that it’s a special kind of computational system – a “self-configuring, self-processing” computing system. But he doesn’t bother to say what that actually means.
What you’ve done doesn’t clarify what “self-configuring” means. It just says it in slightly different words. The problem isn’t that the specific words “self-configuring” or “self-processing” are unclear. It’s that they’re incomplete. “self-configuring” could mean many, many different things, and CTMU never bothers to explain which of those many possible meanings is correct. Similarly, your rewrite of the definition, “reality sets its own rules” doesn’t really say anything. What the heck does that mean? It’s a hand-wave, not a definition.
Response to Mark, November 30, 2011 at 10:15 am
MARK: CTMU argues that the universe is a computational system.
GEORGE: Are you sure that’s what it’s saying? Looks to me more like it’s saying “Reality is LIKE a computational system in some important respects; LIKE a language in some important respects; LIKE a set of all sets in some important respects; LIKE a part/whole relationship in some important respects” And then it puts the metaphors together in a way that (hopefully) sheds fresh light on the matter, by showing how the “in some respects” are all One thing that can’t be adequately captured by any one of those ideas, but perhaps can be by blending them in the right way. (I say “hopefully” because I don’t know enough to be sure whether Langan is successful – for one thing, I’d have to be better versed in maths and logic than I am in order to judge. It’s one of those things that’s on the back burner for my fifteenth lifetime 🙂 Meanwhile, of course I’m interested in what you guys – actual experts – say. However, I’m not completely sure you’re taking Langan’s metaphysics in the spirit that it’s meant either.)
MARK: It’s that they’re incomplete. “self-configuring” could mean many, many different things
GEORGE: Don’t you think that might be the whole point? It “means” many, many things – it “means” (points to) what’s necessary and sufficient in everything real, that makes it real, and makes it be able to be real together with other real things. (Again, HOPEFULLY – at least that’s what I think Langan is aiming at. And I’m sure we all agree, even Langan, the the CTMU paper, along with the other scant materials on the CTMU, is basically an outline, a promissory note, for something more developed and rigorous.)
MarkCC,
I think what you have a serious misunderstanding ofthe geometric pedestal upon which string theory was founded upon. I also think what you consider ”logic” is not the same type as that studied in mathematical logic, formal languages and model theory, they have very different starting points, which is why it doesn’t surprise me that you underestimate the research which has been done in computer science which will ultimately save physics.
”The Shape of Inner Space is a hymn to geometry. Without geometry, Yau points out, we cannot account for the forces of nature. Einstein’s general theory of relativity is, essentially, nothing but geometry. Yet geometry is the poor relation of modern science.
Yau is aiming to put that right. “I would go so far as to say that geometry not only deserves a place at the table alongside physics and cosmology, but in many ways it is the table,” he writes. A measure of his obsession is his admission that discovering the Calabi-Yau space gave him the same feeling he experienced when he first laid eyes on his wife.”
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/09/the-geometric-pedestal-of-string-theory.html
I think that you have a very poor understanding of just what “logic” and “geometry” actually are.
I’m a computer scientist by training, and a software engineer by trade. I did my PhD specializing in programming languages. I’ve spent rather a lot of time studying mathematical logic and formal languages, both because I find them fascinating, and because they’re the most fundamental and foundational tools for both my research and my career as an engineer.
What is geometry? How do we talk about it? What is its foundational core?
Euclid’s axioms.
What is the Calabi-Yau space that Yau is talking about? It’s a mathematical construct from the field of topology. What is topology? Well, you could look at the series of posts that I wrote in this blog abut it. But it’s a system built on the basic axioms of set theory (most commonly using the ZFC formulation) which defines what shapes mean in terms of logical and mathematical constructs.
You can’t do geometry without doing logic. You can’t put geometry before logic, because every statement that can be formulated about geometry, every geometric description, every geometric theorem – they are all statements in formal logic – almost always first order predicate logic.
It’s too bad you didn’t take that extra semester of Descartes, then perhaps you would appreciate what the CTMU and other computation-inspired approaches to understanding the universe are attempting to overcome.
It’s interesting you mention Euclid’s axioms, since the logical independence of the 5th postulate was challenged centuries later with non-Euclidean geometry.
With regard to the nexus between computational language theory and physics, there are those such as Abramsky (Oxford Computing Laboratory) who have explored model-oriented (using Chu spaces and Coalgebras) rather than axiomatic approach to quantum mechanics and representing physical systems, since new models often suggest new axioms.
I don’t know how on earth you can treat logic as “secondary” when things like mathematics already take logic into account. Can you give an example of how a string theorist prioritizes “geometry” over “logic”?
Shadonis, (Mark,)
logic is secondary to math because math starts – as Feynman acknowledged – with a “starting in the middle”. The logic that you see in math is the logic that falls out of that starting in the middle, but logic didn’t produce the starting in the middle. Have you ever derived math for yourself? How do you start?! And if you do get past that hurdle… perhaps you (too) will find some evidence for the “N” dependence of your starting i’dea! And, isn’t it the fact that physicists don’t “find” a place for a dependence on “N” in their formulations that has them believing in the licentious “external” UNI-verse?
Also, compare this “starting in the middle” with your earlier statement that “we can trace everything to the brain”. Seriously? Are you making “brain” the metaphysical fundament now?! WTF!
Or, how did such a “brain” to which “everything” can be “traced” arise?
you had said, “I would say: Of course this is true. But this is true even in a purely materialist framework. No CTMU or God or religion etc is needed to explain that at all. The universe is simply a type of universe that ultimately allows for its components to assemble in a way that creates self-perception/awareness. That doesn’t mean God exists. It just means the universe exists, and it happens to be a type of universe that can allow for this type of perception (anthropic principle).”
There is no such “purely materialist framework”! Consciousness is left unaccounted for. When you say, “framework” you are admitting that there is a conscious “I am” thinking IT. For instance, if you take up the “math” problem – try to derive the sphere from the very beginning – you will see that your “solution” leaves room for uncertainty — and in more than one level! In reality such gaps can only be bridged by thee REAL i’dea, holding himself together!! (You say Pi is a simple constant; I say pI is inherently complex, and, to the extent that it is meaningful, it is LIVING!) “Whoever denies the son does not have the Father.”
Then you go into the lies about the “universe”. You have no proof for your god. Neither do you even have evidence to suggest it is reasonable to suggest. Mark too, you are so hung up on meaningful definitions, please just give a meaningful definition for “universe” before you throw around such “word salad”. Or else let us leave of imposing it on our pursuits.
If you all want to talk about math, let’s talk about math. Let us derive it, and see what falls out if we are honest and not-negligent about our steps. Then I can break you of your false conception that there is such a simple constant Pi. Or at least that belief in such is not rooted in logic.
Tim
I think you’re crazy.
I have been accused of that before too! 🙂 But as Pirsig says, “crazy” is a social phenomena. That I am a society of one, here (I am certainly not in a society of one spiritually), has its associated difficulties, but I will still take the Truth over the common (so-called “sane) lies.
But you wanted concrete, let me see your derivation of math. And THEN let’s see who you think is “crazy”.
Tim
“happens to be” — “Is that supposed to be an EXPLANATION?”
No, it’s not an explanation, because I don’t know what “caused” the universe or why our universe is the way it is. I don’t know, and neither do you, or anyone else. But what is wrong with “happens to be”? If I throw a bunch of ping pong balls towards a narrow opening, at least a few are going to make it in by sheer luck alone. The few that made it in “just so happened” to make it, and so what more explanation is needed there? We don’t know what mechanism gives rise to our universe, but there’s no reason to believe it’s anything particularly special or acting with us in mind. Similarly, our universe “just so happens” to be a kind of universe that allows for our existence. There may be many other types of universes (e.g. multiverse theory), but we wouldn’t know about them because if they aren’t conducive to sentient life, nobody can ever observe them.
“If it’s possible to conceive of a way that the Universe is rational through and through (that there’s a reason that it’s that way), then maybe that’s a worthwhile exercise to pursue?”
Because a possibility alone doesn’t mean it’s true. Any God is “possible.” Are they all true? I doubt it. I think, personally, a “possibility” should have some good reason behind it before it’s worth pursuing.
“hard problem of consciousness”
I’d agree this is a tough problem to talk about, but there’s no real reason to believe that there’s anything more than materialism going on. Our brains have evolved from scratch over long timespans, and so consciousness is something that’s emerged in gradual stages, dependent on whatever functions the brain’s capable of. It’s certainly interesting to think about.
And, personally, I find Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, etc, a lot easier to read than Langan. I find myself sharing the mindset of Feynman in this case. The CTMU, as shown in Mark’s post, could be written a lot simpler than it is, and examples could better drive the main points home.
SHANDONIS: If I throw a bunch of ping pong balls towards a narrow opening, at least a few are going to make it in by sheer luck alone.
GEORGE: Really? It thought it was because of deterministic physical laws (at least at the level of material objects like ping-pong balls)? 😉
It’s a different thing to say the universe “just happens to be” in the sense that you’re causally ignorant of the details, so to speak (like with the ping-pong balls) from saying “it just happens to be” *tout court*.
SHANDONIS: Because a possibility alone doesn’t mean it’s true. Any God is “possible.” Are they all true? I doubt it. I think, personally, a “possibility” should have some good reason behind it before it’s worth pursuing.
GEORGE: Of course, and clearly, what Langan believes of his own theory is that he is rationally proving absolute logical necessity (the the Universe is and *must be* meaningful, couldn’t not be) rather than mere possibility (i.e. a mere pretty picture that hangs together).
And I don’t know whether he has done that. I’m really only at the stage that it looks like a pretty picture that hangs together – but it’s a VERY pretty picture, and it seems to be extremely internally consistent (he’s not making any mistakes in his own logic, so far as I can see).
All I can say is that it does look internally consistent, and that therefore it has a chance of being true (obviously something that wasn’t internally consistent couldn’t be true). It might be that the more I read it and go over it, I’ll see more of the necessity – or maybe not. Dunno, still in the middle of it – just defending him because I think he’s been unfairly pilloried here.
SHANDONIS: And, personally, I find Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, etc, a lot easier to read than Langan. I find myself sharing the mindset of Feynman in this case. The CTMU, as shown in Mark’s post, could be written a lot simpler than it is, and examples could better drive the main points home.
GEORGE: well, if you’re saying that, then you must be finding something meaningful in it after all. So it can’t exactly be the work of a “crank” can it?
Cantankerous autodidact with a shedload of brain-stopping neologisms, perhaps, but “crank” … naah, that’s just plain rude.
Shadonis,
once more, when you say, “No, it’s not an explanation, because I don’t know what “caused” the universe or why our universe is the way it is.”
you don’t even know that there is such a thing as “the universe”! There isn’t!!!!! Why don’t you fess up, Crank!!! 😉
Thee only REAL I’dea is “I am”, and the trustability YOU experience is YOU testifying to YOU that YOU are REAL.
Tim
Sounds a lot like solipsism. I think I’ll stick to the more reasonable explanation and say that yes, the universe exists. But feel free to go around and try to convince people that the universe doesn’t exist.
Shadonis,
I have been accused of solipsism many (many, many) times. I am not a solipsist, but a pluralist. That there is only thee one real i’dea does not mean that there are not a plurality of “I am”. I am overly convinced that there are; and the evidence is irrefutable: ever greater potentials are only opened up by co-operation; and I am highly developed in this way (as are you).
Furthermore, not only is belief in the universe fail to provide any “explanation”, it is UN-reasonable!
And, I certainly do “feel free”! “And the TRUTH will set you free”.
Thanks for the reply,
Tim
Then, quite simply, you’re a fool. Langan is putting together a word-salad, using terminology that he has absolutely no idea of what the words involved actually mean. He just mixes it all up. If you want to appreciate it as pretty poetry, be my guest. But there is absolutely no content to his theory. It’s 100% pure gibberish.
Hint: some of us actually know the vocabulary.
It may be rude, but Langan is a crank.
For the record, he is not really an autodidact. Merely copying words out of big books is not an education.
WILLIAM E EMBA: Then, quite simply, you’re a fool.
GEORGE: Possibly, time will tell.
WILLIAM E EMBA: Langan is putting together a word-salad, using terminology that he has absolutely no idea of what the words involved actually mean. He just mixes it all up. If you want to appreciate it as pretty poetry, be my guest. But there is absolutely no content to his theory. It’s 100% pure gibberish.
Hint: some of us actually know the vocabulary.
GEORGE: And I’m sure philosphers in Kant’s day “knew” the scholastic vocabulary that Kant was using and wondered what on earth he might have meant by the bizarre construction “synthetic apriori” 🙂
What you “know” when you “know the vocabulary” is the use of that vocabulary amongst a set of academic thinkers. There is no “THE MEANING” of that vocabulary. So Langan’s use of that vocabulary is different, granted; and its idiosyncracy is a good reason for academics to ignore his work, granted (the pragmatic time factor I mentioned in my very first post here). But none of that touches whether Langan is actually talking sense or not given the meanings he gives the terms, and unfolds in the course of his writing.
You know that the Critique of Pure Reason was met with almost total incomprehension on its first publication? It remained uncomprehended by most people for almost a decade after its publication, in fact, and even then only became famous through the writings of another philosopher, who more or less just used Kant for his own ends. Even then, Kant kept complaining for years that people still didn’t REALLY understand what he was banging on about (he was particularly tetchy when people said his philosophy was a species of Idealism). EVEN NOW, people talk rubbish about Kant’s philosophy (for the record, the only people whose interpretations of Kant I agree with are Henry E. Allinson and Arthur Collins).
So maybe Langan’s like Kant, and it will take a while for people to penetrate his apparently impenetrable jargon, or maybe he is a crank and he’ll fade into obscurity – or maybe something inbetween. (I reckon he’ll probably fade into obscurity but be remembered later as an idiosyncratic precursor to a more generally accepted future metaphysics – IOW, I think he may just be “ahead of his time”, as the saying goes.)
These things come and go. Metaphysics has been in and out of fashion before, several times.
Time has already told.
Kant gave numerous examples. The challenge was almost entirely with the arguments themselves.
Actually, there is. You lose.
Like I said, Langan is simply grabbing high-and-mighty vocabulary and then just using them in his own mix-and-match way.
As a matter of fact, academics regularly repurpose vocabulary. We’re used to it, and can see past it normally. Sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot when the same vocabulary is used in similar but subtly distinct manners. But somebody always sees through the mess.
Also, the fact that it’s utter gibberish.
He doesn’t give them meanings.
Ah, more Kant and metaphysics. You are aware that our criticism of Langan is that he’s claiming to model reality, not the subtleties of human knowledge?
Like I said, you’re a fool. You’re blatantly changing the subject, and then criticizing us? (A common tactic among defenders of crackpots., actually.) And yes, Langan is simply a raving crackpot, in love with his deluded worship of his own imaginary genius.
WILLIAM E EMBA: Like I said, you’re a fool. You’re blatantly changing the subject, and then criticizing us?
GEORGE: I haven’t changed the subject. You were saying that Langan uses vocabulary in a non-standard way, and seems to be talking gibberish; I pointed out, by the example of Kant, that it’s quite possible for a philosopher to use vocabulary in a non-standard way and seem to be talking gibberish to his contemporaries, yet later turn out to have been making sense with his non-standard vocabulary and apparent gibberish.
Obviously this doesn’t prove that Langan’s as great as Kant, but it’s food for thought, surely? Put yourself in the shoes of one of Kant’s (no doubt fairly smart) scholastic-vocabulary-using contemporaries and consider whether it’s possible you might be mistaken in an analogous way about Langan.
And btw, where do I critize “you” (plural)?
“It’s a different thing to say the universe “just happens to be” in the sense that you’re causally ignorant of the details, so to speak (like with the ping-pong balls) from saying “it just happens to be” *tout court*.”
What I mean is that we just don’t know one way or the other, and we’re not going to get any closer to the truth by just making an assumption about it. We just don’t know, and making claims that something “must be true” when we don’t know is particularly dangerous. Logic alone doesn’t tell you anything. Had we lived in classical times with classical physics, “logic” would tell us something very different about the universe versus today, where “logic” would imply something else when you consider the nature of quantum physics and relativity, for instance. “Logic,” in other words, is only as strong as the science allows it to be. This is why I think it’s weird when people like mereotelic claim that logic is somehow “secondary.” Logic is already being taken into account.
“All I can say is that it does look internally consistent, and that therefore it has a chance of being true (obviously something that wasn’t internally consistent couldn’t be true). It might be that the more I read it and go over it, I’ll see more of the necessity – or maybe not. Dunno, still in the middle of it – just defending him because I think he’s been unfairly pilloried here.”
A lot of things can be internally consistent but still utterly false (even at that I can’t speak to the consistency of the CTMU because it looks like gibberish to me). It needs to be more than just consistent, and it needs to offer somethng new and useful to the advancement of knowledge.
SHADONIS: What I mean is that we just don’t know one way or the other, and we’re not going to get any closer to the truth by just making an assumption about it.
GEORGE: I agree, assumptions are no good. But logic is good. What you say about past times is right, but that’s because people mistook the scope of logic. It can’t tell us anything new. But metaphysics isn’t about learning something new, it’s about discovering absolute truth
i.e. it tries to make explicit what must necessarily be implicitly affirmed if anything at all is to be affirmed – if nothing can be affirmed, then the game’s up, and there’s no point in even speaking or doing anything at all except screwing, shitting and eating (and not even those). But if truths can be affirmed at all, then there’s something very deep and peculiar and interesting going on with respect to the fact that some of the logical structures we spin off the tops of our heads “just happen” to be interpretable in terms of experience; that the “logical necessity” in our abacus-game constructs/stipulations seems to carry over into something analogous to logical necessity in nature – “causality” – i.e. that there’s any such thing as a rule-governed cosmos at all that’s amenable to our knowing it. Yeah yeah, the “lottery argument” – but are you SURE that’s the final word?
Most sensible people believe in objective truth, it’s just that it’s extremely difficult to understand how it’s even possible, that’s all. Why should we expect to have solved these extremely difficult problems when we’re only wet behind the ears as a species, relatively speaking? It seems to me that with questions like these, that have puzzled minds far greater than yours, or mine, for centuries, we must expect a lot of failures before we home in on the truth.
No. Metaphysics is about developing our understanding of reality. There is a valid school of metaphysics that says that there is no such thing as absolute truth.
Even if you do believe that metaphysics is about absolute truth, that’s absolutely not what most of the supposed metaphysicians around here are doing. See, the thing about absolute truth is that it’s absolute. It doesn’t depend on your personal perception, your personal understanding, your personal ability to understand it. If there is a fundamental absolute truth, it’s the objective fact of what reality is.
In other words, it’s what science tries to discover. But science knows that you can never be perfectly certain. You can just get progressively closer and closer to an accurate description of that absolute truth, which is what science does.
It’s frankly just laughable to claim that you’re studying absolute truth, while simultaneously claiming that what you’re doing doesn’t need to be testable, falsifiable, or to have any actual grounding in observable reality.
By any reasonable standard, CTMU fails miserably as an attempt to describe any absolute truth – because it remains so vague, so ill-defined, so totally fuzzy that you can never conclusively say whether it’s right or wrong.
MARK: It’s frankly just laughable to claim that you’re studying absolute truth, while simultaneously claiming that what you’re doing doesn’t need to be testable, falsifiable, or to have any actual grounding in observable reality.
GEORGE: Well, since metaphysics is trying to rationally account for the whole of experience, it’s difficult to see how any portion of experience could test it. If you have metaphysics systems X, Y and Z, there would be no difference in experience whichever of X, Y and Z were true, since each of them is supposed to conform to whatever experience we have.
Don’t mistake me, I’m a rationalist with a penchant for physicalism by default, and I understand what you are saying about science discovering OBJECTIVE truth (the way things actually are), one has the feeling for that almost as a religious calling, one wants to stick what’s the case regardless of our fond wishes.
But that’s not the same thing as figuring out if there’s any rational reason WHY they should be the way they are – that’s what the search for absolute truth is, trying to reason out not just THAT the world as a whole (which so far as we are concerned amounts to our experience of a world) is X way, but if there’s any logical necessity WHY it should be that way. If there is such a thing, then that logical necessity has to be implicit in any truth.
There are only two possible answers to this type of question, the traditional approach and the later Wittgenstein approach. Either there is some kind of logical necessity at the root of why things are the way they are, or the search for such is a like a fly banging his head against the window in a fly bottle, and metaphysicians are mistaking our stipulations and measuring rods for apriori truths about the Universe.
Langan is in the first camp, the traditional camp, and I think his approach does share a lot with older systems of metaphysics, and in a way he’s not saying anything new, but why should one expect anything fundamentally new to be said in this area? On the contrary, since there are similarities between most systems of metaphysics, why not look at it this way: lots of intelligent people have glimpsed something similar about reality as a whole, and have put it into their own words, but have made criticizeable mistakes. This could be due to some overall error in the whole enterprise (as the later Wittgenstein would have said), but maybe not, maybe it’s a case of a gradual homing-in on the truth (as I said, not a true description of patterns in the world of experience, but some logically necessary truth about WHY any universe at all).
Personally, I find that completely unacceptable as an explanation.
Because on the one hand, you’re saying that metaphysics is trying to find the ultimate, absolute truth. But then, you’re saying that the ultimate absolute truth is completely unknowable, because there are multiple possible explanations, all of which are completely equal, and all of which are completely untestable.
That’s pretty much the definition of handwaving. No matter what you do, you can never be wrong.
Response to Mark Nov 30 2011 at 10:16 am
MARK: Personally, I find that completely unacceptable as an explanation.
Because on the one hand, you’re saying that metaphysics is trying to find the ultimate, absolute truth. But then, you’re saying that the ultimate absolute truth is completely unknowable, because there are multiple possible explanations, all of which are completely equal, and all of which are completely untestable.
That’s pretty much the definition of handwaving. No matter what you do, you can never be wrong.
GEORGE: I’m not saying that there’s no way of telling which metaphysics – X, Y, or Z in my example above – is valid; what I’m saying is that a metaphysical system is SUPPOSED TO account for experience as a whole, so whatever the right way of deciding between them may be, it CAN’T be on the basis of an empirical test – i.e. any PART of the whole of experience. (This was in response to you wanting empirical tests for Langan’s metaphysics.)
What is the right way of deciding? I’m note completely sure. Comprehensiveness and consistency would seem to be the only useful signs we can have; also, something like the old Rationalist idea of self-evidence.
It all has to boil down to something self-evident really.
But that’s precisely why I think “reality telling itself about itself and understanding itself” is a pretty good idea, because it really does look self-evident (to me, anyway) that that’s it, that’s the One thing that’s happening in everything that happens. If I think about any part of experience, it can be boiled down to that – information coming in to one bit of reality, being understood, and information going out, and being understood by another bit of reality. If I see a tree, talk to someone, make love, fight, play, it’s all that One “doing”, Reality-on-Reality.
George, (Mark,)
wonderful post! I’m glad I waited to see your reply to Mark; I had deleted two “attempts” to reply, – the first relatively short, the second even shorter, – before I decided it was best not to interrupt at all. Now I can be longer 🙂
I want you to be comforted by the fact that your point was not lost on everyone. However, I do think Mark has a point about handwaving, though certainly not as he intended. And, btw, Mark, though you may be very good at “learning” other’s “formally” “completed” works, do you think yourself good at learning from scratch?; because I’m quite confident that even Einstein waved his hands a lot about what it would be like to move at the speed of light before he put it all together formally. The pirsigians would call this “a finger pointing at the moon”, and it is integral to the process of learning, and not something to be despised! Why can’t you be grateful that Langan was so generous as to share his work – whether it is handwaving or success – that you might be afforded the opportunity to process his “waste” (and even the presentation of thee successful physic will be worthy of the title “waste”, whenever it is to appear), possibly even before him?
Anyway, George, I want to press a nuance of your “finger pointing”. “Whole of experience”, is that term really adequate? Is it meaningful? (I did notice in a post above you talked about the inadequacy of certain, dualish, langauge in this regard.)
I maintain that every experience is only a “portion”, a self-limitation. One cannot ask all questions at once. One creates a derivative representation of some REAL – amidst a plural society of similar “I am” – and then gets to ask for only limited amount of information regarding that which he, – and the WHOLE plural society of similar “I am”, – created – in harmony. One can only hold himself together through such uncertainty. This is to say, isn’t metaphysics after something that is not-quite-adequately-termed “whole of experience”? Isn’t metaphysics after, even more, an understanding of the capacity to experience at all? And which capacity CANNOT be rooted in experience alone?
Second, you said, “If you have metaphysics systems X, Y and Z, there would be no difference in experience whichever of X, Y and Z were true”. I think there is an important nuance here worth recognizing too! As Pirsig has stated (and effectively shown), “no one can avoid metaphysics”. (And, to be sure, metaphysics and religion are seen to be the same at the summit [Zion?].) So, while one might be able to converse about X, Y, and Z, perhaps even ALMOST as if unbiased, one is always biased. You cannot ask all questions at once, just like you cannot look east and west at the same time (even with the help of a mirror, you cannot focus on both). So, must not one’s biases effect his experience (which experience, again, comes by the self-limiting act of asking certain questions rather than others; of saying “no” to looking east rather than saying “no” to looking west [rather, saying “no” to looking anywhere other than the direction he is looking])?! At least at some level? If one has set himself up for failure (said “no” to looking even NEAR to success), must not failure rather than success ensue?
Tim
In response to Tim Nov 30 2011 5:30pm
TIM: “Whole of experience”, is that term really adequate? Is it meaningful? (I did notice in a post above you talked about the inadequacy of certain, dualish, langauge in this regard.)
GEORGE: In a way “experience” isn’t actually meaningful at all. That’s why I’ve always had problems with Idealism – like any other metaphysics, it’s a synecdoche (using name of part for whole). In ordinary discourse, “experience” usually connotes the experience of one thing of something else that’s different from it, whereas what metaphysics is pointing to is how reality “experiences” reality 🙂
IOW, one has to be as circumspect using a word like “experience” or “consciousness” (as in “everything is …”) as one would be if one used “matter/energy” (for example). Some things in experience are matter/energy, and so a Physicalist metaphysician, like every other, fancies a bit that pleases him (the logic of which pleases him) and names the whole after it, projects it onto the Whole.
But the whole IS physical, and it IS experience (mental). It’s physical at THAT end, and mental at THIS end – they’re just “grades” or “graduations” of the same “thing” (Schopenhauer’s idea of the Platonic Idea was like this – “grades of objectifaction of the Will” – but then “Will” is synecdoche too 🙂 ).
Really, what use of a word like “whole of …” is getting at is what I’ve been saying about “every experience, thing, event, truth, no matter what, has THIS at it’s root, that brings it into contact, or potential contact, with everything else that’s real.
TIM: I maintain that every experience is only a “portion”, a self-limitation. One cannot ask all questions at once. One creates a derivative representation of some REAL – amidst a plural society of similar “I am” – and then gets to ask for only limited amount of information regarding that which he, – and the WHOLE plural society of similar “I am”, – created – in harmony. One can only hold himself together through such uncertainty. This is to say, isn’t metaphysics after something that is not-quite-adequately-termed “whole of experience”? Isn’t metaphysics after, even more, an understanding of the capacity to experience at all? And which capacity CANNOT be rooted in experience alone?
GEORGE: Yes, I think I sort of addressed that above. Langan addresses it too – the primal freedom, which implies choice, cleaving to this and foregoing that (economics – cost!). But at the same time (as Langan would say, I think) the choice is constrained by what’s logically possible given the constraint arising from it being the One thing, Reality , that’s eating itself and being eaten by itself (Ouroboros – “Autology”, as Langan has it). In one sense the content of the meal is always the same – Reality – in another sense it’s always different – what’s possible in Reality, given a step-by-step linking from one “moment” to the next according to the “laws” (from another point of view the freedom) of Nature (can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear).
TIM: So, must not one’s biases effect his experience (which experience, again, comes by the self-limiting act of asking certain questions rather than others; of saying “no” to looking east rather than saying “no” to looking west [rather, saying “no” to looking anywhere other than the direction he is looking])?! At least at some level?
GEORGE: Yes, as above – there is a “way” (again, the Chinese concept of “grain” – as in “not good to go against the grain”, of wood or jade). There are natural laws and there are tendencies and biases of one’s character (mini natural laws, an example of the same “thing” as natural laws, but on a tiny, human, and more probabilistic level, further “in” on the Fractal, therefore a tiny bit more quirky and chintzy at the fringes).
The upshot of all this being that yes, you are right, in fact neither “whole” NOR “experience” are absolutely beyond reproach. But they have a part to play in this kind of discourse.
all,
I laid down the gauntlet above, and I repost it here, for one, so that those who might not go back above to see how I replied might also see it:
“If you all want to talk about math, let’s talk about math. Let us derive it, and see what falls out if we are honest and not-negligent about our steps. Then I can break you of your false conception that there is such a simple constant Pi. Or at least that belief in such is not rooted in logic.”
and two, to encourage YOU. I have already done my homework, – though some time ago, – and I will tell you that I spent about two weeks to do it. I worked hard, – but a little casually too, – just to arrive back at the place where I (MUST have?) started! A “living” “sphere”. With a complex and multi-uncertain pI.
What kind of music (plurally experienceable “note”) could a simple (non-REAL) and constant (perfectly taut) Pi (instrument) make? And what is, for but a concrete example, the length of a sounding cello string (I mean this to suggest the relativity of “radius” and “circumference” conjugate to the uncertainTIES in their “relation”, not “string theory”)?
Tim
oops,
when I said, “Then I can break you of your false conception that there is such a simple constant Pi. Or at least that belief in such is not rooted in logic.” I had first thought that I would say something like “Then I can convince you that your conception in a simple constant Pi is false.” in which case my second sentence makes sense; but then I decided to lighten my language to “break you of” rather than “convince”, but I forgot to rethink the thought that I had already vaguely prepared to follow. That is, the “not” in the second sentence should be removed: I would hope to break you of the conviction that belief in a simple constant Pi is BASED in logic, and, perhaps, to convince you that it is based in (a deadly materialist) faith/e. Real is complex; and pI, when properly derived … that last step of generalization – “in the limit of ‘N’ gone to infinity” – is neither defensible nor warranted! Such is a deadly faith/e!
Tim
isotelesis, (all,)
Is everyone afraid? Or just dismissive?
isotelesis, you might be interested, since you seem to be interested in maths that do not presume continuous spacetime. Pi was derived in a time when faith/e in a continuous space & time were presumed, by faith/e. I wonder and am amazed that it has not been requestioned in light of the questioning of that preumption! It is not hard! The perfect circle / sphere, where has anyone seen it it or experienced it? Why then do the maths stick to the idea of a simple constant Pi?! Non-continuous spacetime demands that the inductive “reasoning” that is used to defend the leap to “N” gone to infinity, – which results in the simple constant Pi, – is NOT-reasonable!!!!! This, the proper derivation, then shows a picture of an ideal, infinitely UN-attainable!!! uncertainTIES result, and pI is seen to be complex. As you go up in dimension, from circle to sphere, uncertainty builds on uncertainty: impossibility of “locating” a “living” “sphere”. Revelation 2:26-28, “To the victor, who keeps my ways until the end, … And to him I will give the morning start.”
Isotelesis, you like string theory, right? Does it not involve a simple constant Pi?
http://superstringtheory.com/basics/basic4a.html
what would happen to the maths, and not just of string theory, if this licentious act of induction were remedied?! If the uncertainTIES were carried through the maths, rather then thrown out, a priori as it were?! To be sure, I haven’t tried to do that homework; it is enough for me – at least for now – that I have experienced the light of morning.
Tim
How do the people here perceive metaphysics? This is a question for everyone.
Do you find metaphysics an interesting venture to how reality can be perceived?
Do you consider metaphysics an unpleasant chore, or a dirty job someone has to do?
Are you concerned of metaphysical arguments being used to devalue or even attack something you appreciate?
Do you use metaphysics as an instrument for justifying something that you do?
Or maybe something else?
“But metaphysics isn’t about learning something new, it’s about discovering absolute truth ”
But you start abusing the definition of “truth” by simply talking about possibilities. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s true. Metaphysics doesn’t interest me much for that reason. It’s all interesting possibility, but nothing more.
The “right” idea, in my opinion, is that there are no “absolute truths” but rather high degrees of certainty. We define as “true” what *actually occurs* with some extremely, extremely high probability, and we define truth in self-defined systems. Can we logically figure out why the universe exists, or why there is existence at all? I don’t think you can do that with logic alone because logic tells us nothing about whether or not a multiverse has always existed, or if existence was spontaneous, or if it’s not possible to NOT exist, and so on. There are many “possible” ways to look at the problem, and so picking one and saying “this MUST be true” is just ignoring potential scientific barriers. We have absolutely no idea yet. Logic is something we derive out of the science, not the other way around.
Again, I bring up my analogy to relativity and quantum physics. People could use “logic” (like Aristotle) to arrive at all sorts of conclusions about the world, but turn out to be plain wrong because, well, the science turns out to be deeper than that. Science and logic go together, so you can’t just “start with logic” and then claim truth. All you’re doing is mixing things around in a predefined system and arriving at a possibility. You aren’t developing anything new.
Am I “sure” the lottery argument is the final word? Again, no. I’m not sure, but neither is anybody else, and that’s the point. But that type of unanswered question is ripe ground for cranks to take advantage of, by using confusing language to make it sound like they do have the answer when it’s all just snake oil. Personally, I’m a middle-ground agnostic, but I can’t ignore the science.
I can admit I have no idea what Christopher is really trying to say, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think he’s a bit of a crackpot. The way he speaks/writes reminds me a lot of the Feynman story: It’s needlessly complicated and wordy because it’ll confuse ignorant people and make them think he’s onto something profound. I don’t think there’s anything profound in saying “the universe is a set of all sets” or “reality is a language.” People have said, for years, that the “multiverse” can be thought of as a set of multiple universes, or that reality is described through the language of mathematics, and so on. It’s all really obvious stuff to anyone with a bit of education/exposure, so I don’t understand what Christopher is getting at by repackaging well-known ideas into complicated gibberish.
Great post. As I said to Mark, I actually agree with a good chunk of what you guys are saying, because I’m a rationalist and physicalist by instinct and temperament.
In a way, I’m actually playing devil’s advocate here; but that’s because I’ve been on both sides of this kind of argument. I’ve been on your side being sceptical of metaphysics, but I’ve also, over the years, come to have more respect for metaphysics than I used to.
And now I find myself reading Langan and seeing something of what I’m seeing in the traditional systems of metaphysics.
SHADONIS: The way he speaks/writes reminds me a lot of the Feynman story: It’s needlessly complicated and wordy because it’ll confuse ignorant people and make them think he’s onto something profound.
GEORGE: That’s the thing, I DON’T get the same Feynman feeling from reading Langan. I’m familiar with things I do get that feeling from – particularly post-modernism (Sokal, etc.) and some (though not all tbqh) “New Age” stuff. But I don’t get that from Langan. What I get is something that actually rewards close and careful reading.
Or (as I said in my first post) maybe it just seems to. Maybe I’m just hallucinating the meaning I’m seeing, and importing too much by cross-reference from other philosophies, in my reading of Langan, and just imagining that he’s saying something similar, but rigorously in his own idiosyncratic terms.
I understand what Chris Langan claims to be trying to do. I also understand quite well how miserably he fails at it.
Yes, it was. But I don’t think you have a clue of what that means.
The point is that you’re claiming that somehow geometry has taken precedence over logic in string theory, and that this is somehow a problem. You have, however, neglected to back up that claim in any way, or to demonstrate what the supposed problem with the use of geometry in string theory actually is.
There have been numerous attempts over time to try to describe the universe in computational terms. To cite two popular examples, Minksy did it in the 70s; and Wolfram published his book on the subject in the 90s.
The problem the computational approach isn’t a philosophical issue; it’s a purely pragmatic one. So far, no one has been able to devise one that actually works. Theories like quantum mechanics and relativity do an amazing job of precisely describing what we observe in the universe. The computational models have never come close to that level of precision. They don’t work. That doesn’t mean that there is no computational model that will accurately describe reality – but it is true that no such model has yet been devised.
The basic idea that there could be a computational structure to the univese is extremely interesting – but it’s certainly not something that Chris Langan invented; it dates back to before he was born. Chris’s approach to it isn’t remotely novel. It doesn’t describe anything that wasn’t described by plenty of others before him. And compared to those others, it’s remarkable just how completely vague it is.
To repeat one example: Steven Wolfram published his “New Kind of Science” textbook in 2002. It’s around 1,000 pages of text describing exactly what kind of computing mechanism he believes underlies the universe, how it works, why it’s a good model, and how you could test it. It’s precise, describing exactly what it means. It provides executable code for running simulations of everything that’s described in the book. You can read it – it’ll be somewhat painful because of its length, but when you get done, you’ll understand exactly what Wolfram was proposing.
Contrast that with CTMU, which proposes something which might be the same thing as Wolfram. Is it the same? Can’t tell, because CTMU never defines what it means by language, by processing, by cognition. CTMU never actually presents a real model. It never defines its terms. You can never show that the CTMU is wrong, because it’s presently so vaguely that any refutation can be answered by “that’s not really what it means”.
The CTMU is a pile of crankery and rubbish pretending to be a serious work of scholarship. Comparing it to any serious work shows quite clearly what it lacks.
mereotelic: Are you really a professor at UChicago? I am finding this hard to believe.
Shadonis,
I never claimed to be anything of the sort, I have no idea where you got the idea.
MarkCC,
You basically jumped to conclusions on the CTMU based on prejudice, and have been back-tracking to defend your original feelings, the basis of your whole argument is basically ad hominem…you obviously didn’t do your research, as he quite openly discusses the CAMU and it’s relation to the CTMU. You make a lot of assumptions about people based on appearances I’ve noticed.
“Before we explore the conspansive SCSPL model in more detail, it is worthwhile to note that the CTMU can be regarded as a generalization of the major computation-theoretic current in physics, the CAMU. Originally called the Computation-Theoretic Model of the Universe, the CTMU was initially defined on a hierarchical nesting of universal computers, the Nested Simulation Tableau or NeST, which tentatively described spacetime as stratified virtual reality in order to resolve a decision-theoretic paradox put forth by Los Alamos physicist William Newcomb (see Noesis 44, etc.).”
http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/Supernova.html
You came out of nowhere with this post:
“Character assassination is also unacceptable, especially when presented in a misleading manner or is presented without the necessary context. Physics cannot rely on geometry alone, but needs logic.
http://www.csus.edu/cpns/epperson/”
But a simple Google of “mereotelic” shows that you’re isotelesis anyway, so mystery solved. That initial post gave me the impression that you were a professor, listing a personal page as if it were a signature.
Anyways, I don’t understand how you can be “prejudiced” against the CTMU when all you need to do is read it to see that it’s written poorly and doesn’t really seem to contain anything interesting or novel, nor does it make any testable predictions or new insights.
You came out of nowhere with this post:
“Character assassination is also unacceptable, especially when presented in a misleading manner or is presented without the necessary context. Physics cannot rely on geometry alone, but needs logic.
http://www.csus.edu/cpns/epperson/”
But a simple Google of “mereotelic” shows that you’re isotelesis anyway, so mystery solved. That initial post gave me the impression that you were a professor, listing a personal page as if it were a signature.
Anyways, I don’t understand how you can be “prejudiced” against the CTMU when all you need to do is read it to see that it’s written poorly and doesn’t really seem to contain anything interesting or novel, nor does it make any testable predictions or new insights.
While we’re at it, are you going to give me that lattice theory example yet, or ignore it again?
Shadonis,
I posted that professor’s link so that people would focus on the subject his group researchers as it quite relevant (Whitehead’s Metaphysics) to concepts presented in the CTMU, infocognitive (spacetime) lattices as they relate to process algebras, event structures and concurrent computation is also worth investigating if one is looking for giving context to some ideas Langan presents, since I am not the author I shouldn’t be the one explaining how they’re used however. I think it’s disappointing that people should resort to backbiting, libel and intellectual censorship to prove their superiority or another’s inferiority, it doesn’t serve the public understanding, merely sets a bad example, not that Langan is necessarily a good example for how everybody should express their intellectual creativity, but to discount any possibility for valuable insights to be gained from someone due to splitting hairs over semantics really doesn’t serve the public understanding either.
Geometric Logic, Causality and Event Structures:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/91/HPL-91-119.pdf
“Any pregeometric model can be characterised according to which of the highlighted properties in the previous paragraph it throws out and which it keeps. For example, lattice models discard continuity and symmetry but keep dimension, metric, events, etc. Cellular automata also discard quantum mechanics. Some physicists have played the game of building toy models which throw out all but a few of these concepts, the ones which they feel might be the most fundamental. They might try to keep causality, locality and quantum mechanics for example, because they think these things are of primary significance and must be part of the laws of physics at the most fundamental level. Another feature like topology, a metric or even information might be thrown in just to see what it led to.
Before about 1980 only a rare few physicists had made any serious attempts at this sort of thing. The best examples were Hartland Snyder with quantum space-time, David Finkelstein with his quantum net dynamics, Carl von Weizscker with Ur-theory and Roger Penrose with spin networks and twisters. Then in the 1980s and early 1990s there was a flurry of new speculative ideas. The time seemed right for bold ideas. Chris Isham and others looked at the quantum mechanics of spaces with just a distance metric between scattered points, or topologies of sets or even just random networks of links between space-time events.” Event-Symmetric Space-Time
“Syndiffeonic relations can be regarded as elements of more complex infocognitive lattices with spatial and temporal (ordinal, stratificative) dimensions. Interpreted according to CTMU duality principles, infocognitive lattices comprise logical relationships of state and syntax. Regressing up one of these lattices by unisection ultimately leads to a syntactic medium of perfect generality and homogeneity…a universal, reflexive “syntactic operator”.
…
Cosmic expansion and ordinary physical motion have something in common: they are both what might be called ectomorphisms. In an ectomorphism, something is mapped to, generated or replicated in something external to it. However, the Reality Principle asserts that the universe is analytically self-contained, and ectomorphism is inconsistent with self-containment. Through the principle of conspansive duality, ectomorphism is conjoined with endomorphism, whereby things are mapped, generated or replicated within themselves. Through conspansive endomorphism, syntactic objects are injectively mapped into their own hological interiors from their own syntactic boundaries.
In the language of TD and CF duality, this shifts the emphasis from spacetime geometry to descriptive containment, and from constructive to filtrative processing. As a result, new states are formed within the images of previous states. Nothing moves or expands “through” space; space is state, and each relocation of an object is just a move from one level of perfect stasis to another. This ties conventional motion, in which worldlines are constructively created by additions of state in Minkowski diagrams, to differential endomorphism, in which the internal descriptive potentials of attributes are cumulatively restricted.
A (Minkowski) spacetime diagram is a kind of “event lattice” in which nodes represent events and their connective worldlines represent the objects that interact in those events. The events occur at the foci of past and future light cones to which the worldlines are internal. If one could look down the time axis of such a diagram at a spacelike cross section, one would see something very much like a Venn diagram with circles corresponding to lightcone cross sections. This rotation of the diagram corresponds to conspansive dualization, converting a spatiotemporal lattice of worldlines and events to a layered series of Venn diagrams.
…
In other words, telesis is a kind of “pre-spacetime” from which time and space, cognition and information, state-transitional syntax and state, have not yet separately emerged. Once bound in a primitive infocognitive form that drives emergence by generating “relievable stress” between its generalized spatial and temporal components – i.e., between state and state-transition syntax – telesis continues to be refined into new infocognitive configurations, i.e. new states and new arrangements of state-transition syntax, in order to relieve the stress between syntax and state through telic recursion (which it can never fully do, owing to the contingencies inevitably resulting from independent telic recursion on the parts of localized subsystems).” – Langan
I am replying to the following comment here because of the limits on comment nesting.
“Mark C. Chu-Carroll November 29, 2011 at 8:33 pm
You’re playing exactly the same game as Chris.
*If* Chris is using Cantor’s definition of set, then he’s using Cantor’s naive set theory. If he’s *not* using naive set theory, then he can’t be using Cantor’s definition of set. The two are inseparable – they’re essentially the same thing.”
Mark, you earlier wrote, “Unfortunately, naive set theory doesn’t work: it’s inconsistent.” As Wikipedia puts it, “A naive set theory is not necessarily inconsistent, if it correctly specifies the sets allowed to be considered.” However, there are multiple definitions of “naive set theory”, so the one you get depends on whom you ask. From your comments, it seems you’re suggesting that using Cantor’s definition of a set renders one’s set theory “naive” and inconsistent regardless of the way containment works in that set theory. On the contrary, when one uses two containment relations, it is possible for a set to contain itself in one way while being contained by itself in the other, so that Russell’s paradox does not occur.
Anonymous: That’s just definition-quibbling, though. The point is that naive set theory is widely known as being problematic because of its lack of constraint on what you allow to be inside a set, and that’s what Mark is harping on.
A set can’t “contain itself,” otherwise you get something like Φ={Φ}={{{⋯}}} which is nonsense. Rather any set is a subset of itself. HUGE difference that Christopher seems to misunderstand.
I can have a bag B (which we can think of as a set) of five marbles, where each marble is an element/member of the set. If I take out three marbles, I now have a “subset” of B. Even if I take out all five marbles, that too is a subset of B. I can also take out nothing and hold the null set.
If you say that set B is a member of itself, then that’s like saying this bag of 5 marbles has a bag of 5 marbles which has a bag of 5 marbles, etc, and it results in a paradox that doesn’t make sense because we didn’t put proper constraints on what we can allow inside our set.
If B is a subset of A, then that just means every element of B is also an element of A.
So if you say something like “The universe is the set of all sets,” this is technically naive set theory because you can’t HAVE that. You’re literally creating your own paradox right off the bat instead of wondering if your model makes any sense. This is very, very different from saying something like “The multiverse is the set of all universes,” or something like that, which is like talking about marbles in a bag. All Christopher is doing is saying “Look, here’s a paradox I created, it needs SCSPL and the CTMU to resolve.”
The proposed system to “fix” it is basically a tautological handwave. You may as well call it Paradox-Resolving Logic (PRL). How does it work? Well, it resolves paradoxes, obviously! Do I need to explain how or write anything out? Nope. All you need to know is that it resolves the issue, and it’s a really profound idea. Ever wonder if an omnipotent God can make a burrito so hot that even he can’t eat it? Wonder no more… SCSPL can resolve it. It’s basically another “God did it” type of approach. Do we need to explain God? Nope. All you need to know is that God did it because God is all-powerful and can do anything. Only this time around Christopher is basically relabeling God and passing it off as some sort of mathematical system without actually showing any mathematics, from what I can tell.
Just because you play around with the math doesn’t mean it has any physical meaning. Just because I can say “I ate three oranges” doesn’t mean I can say “I ate negative three oranges” and have it mean anything just because it’s possible to have negative numbers. Similarly, just because you want to model the universe as a set doesn’t mean you can start playing around with sets, arrive at weird conclusions, and then claim that reality must follow suit. This is just as naive.
The short answer is that nobody knows the answer to these big questions yet, and there are many possible answers. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling snake oil.
“A set can’t “contain itself,” otherwise you get something like Φ={Φ}={{{⋯}}} which is nonsense. Rather any set is a subset of itself. HUGE difference that Christopher seems to misunderstand.”
Again, Chris uses two different types of containment. Regular set theory uses one. *You’re* using one, not two.
The set concept itself is not rigorously defined even if specific sets are…
Wikipedia quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_notion
…
“In axiomatic set theory the fundamental concept of set is an example of a primitive notion. As Mary Tiles wrote:
[The] ‘definition’ of ‘set’ is less a definition than an attempt at explication of something which is being given the status of a primitive, undefined, term.
As evidence, she quotes Felix Hausdorff: “A set is formed by the grouping together of single objects into a whole. A set is a plurality thought of as a unit.”
”
…
SCSPL is possibly a powerful generalization of Cantor’s naive set concept, one that resolves those paradoxes that are ignored by ZFC and other conventional formalisms?
Descriptive containment: A primitive example of topological-descriptive duality?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupper%27s_self-referential_formula
quote:
…
”
Tupper’s self-referential formula is a self-referential formula defined by Jeff Tupper that, when graphed in two dimensions, can visually reproduce the formula itself. It is used in various maths and computer science courses as an exercise in graphing formulae.
”
…
MarkCC,
The CTMU argues that the universe itself is not merely computational but protocomputational or self-processing, in which the primary-topological level of processing configures its secondary-descriptive/computational/informational level of processing.
”The currency of telic feedback is a quantifiable self-selection parameter, generalized utility, a generalized property of law and state in the maximization of which they undergo mutual refinement (note that generalized utility is self-descriptive or autologous, intrinsically and retroactively defined within the system, and “pre-informational” in the sense that it assigns no specific property to any specific object). Through telic feedback, a system retroactively self-configures by reflexively applying a “generalized utility function” to its internal existential potential or possible futures. In effect, the system brings itself into existence as a means of atemporal communication between its past and future whereby law and state, syntax and informational content, generate and refine each other across time to maximize total systemic self-utility. This defines a situation in which the true temporal identity of the system is a distributed point of temporal equilibrium that is both between and inclusive of past and future. In this sense, the system is timeless or atemporal.” – Langan
Logic and Games
http://www.phil.pku.edu.cn/cllct/ann_attachments/cuizz1.pdf
And that is, basically, an extremely elaborate way of saying nothing.
That says “it’s a computational device” with a shitload of handwaving, followed by a bit more handwaving that says it’s not really a computational device.
Very informative.
MarkCC,
If Langan is waving his hands, you’re also burying your head in the sand, as if he has been using some kind of voodoo which will destroy all rational thought if one were to take it seriously in any way…You are welcome to wall yourself through exclusivity and ignorance, the CTMU is simply a bit ahead of your time.
“But the CAMU, which many complexity theorists and their sympathizers in the physics community have taken quite seriously, places problematic constraints on universality. E.g., it is not universal on all computational scales, does not allow for subjective cognition except as an emergent property of its (assumedly objective) dynamic, and turns out to be an unmitigated failure when it comes to accounting for relativistic phenomena. Moreover, it cannot account for the origin of its own cellular array and is therefore severely handicapped from the standpoint of cosmology, which seeks to explain not only the composition but the origin of the universe. Although the CAMU array can internally accommodate the simulations of many physical observables, thus allowing the CAMU’s proponents to intriguingly describe the universe as a “self-simulation”, its inability to simulate the array itself precludes the adequate representation of higher-order physical predicates with a self-referential dimension.
…
An important detail must be noted regarding the distinction between the CAMU and CTMU. By its nature, the CTMU replaces ordinary mechanical computation with what might better be called protocomputation. Whereas computation is a process defined with respect to a specific machine model, e.g. a Turing machine, protocomputation is logically “pre-mechanical”. That is, before computation can occur, there must (in principle) be a physically realizable machine to host it. But in discussing the origins of the physical universe, the prior existence of a physical machine cannot be assumed. Instead, we must consider a process capable of giving rise to physical reality itself…a process capable of not only implementing a computational syntax, but of serving as its own computational syntax by self-filtration from a realm of syntactic potential. When the word “computation” appears in the CTMU, it is usually to protocomputation that reference is being made.
It is at this point that the theory of languages becomes indispensable. In the theory of computation, a “language” is anything fed to and processed by a computer; thus, if we imagine that reality is in certain respects like a computer simulation, it is a language. But where no computer exists (because there is not yet a universe in which it can exist), there is no “hardware” to process the language, or for that matter the metalanguage simulating the creation of hardware and language themselves. So with respect to the origin of the universe, language and hardware must somehow emerge as one; instead of engaging in a chicken-or-egg regress involving their recursive relationship, we must consider a self-contained, dual-aspect entity functioning simultaneously as both. By definition, this entity is a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL. Whereas ordinary computation involves a language, protocomputation involves SCSPL.
Protocomputation has a projective character consistent with the SCSPL paradigm. Just as all possible formations in a language – the set of all possible strings – can be generated from a single distributed syntax, and all grammatical transformations of a given string can be generated from a single copy thereof, all predicates involving a common syntactic component are generated from the integral component itself. Rather than saying that the common component is distributed over many values of some differential predicate – e.g., that some distributed feature of programming is distributed over many processors – we can say (to some extent equivalently) that many values of the differential predicate – e.g. spatial location – are internally or endomorphically projected within the common component, with respect to which they are “in superposition”. After all, difference or multiplicity is a logical relation, and logical relations possess logical coherence or unity; where the relation has logical priority over the reland, unity has priority over multiplicity. So instead of putting multiplicity before unity and pluralism ahead of monism, CTMU protocomputation, under the mandate of a third CTMU principle called Multiplex Unity or MU, puts the horse sensibly ahead of the cart.” – Physics and Metaphysics, Langan
More handwaving. The universe is a computational system, only it isn’t a computational system. It’s a language, only it isn’t a language.
In addition, the quoted text makes some pretty serious errors.
One of the fundamental ones: The theory of computation does not define a language as something that can be processed by a computer. That’s so far off base that it’s laughable. One of the main topics of computation theory is determining when a language is computable (meaning when the language can be processed by a computer), vs determining when a language is enumerable (meaning that the language can’t be processed, but can be generated), and non-enumerable (meaning that the language can’t even be generated by a computer).
MarkCC,
It seems you don’t care much for seeing the forest, as the trees are all that matter to you. So by your standards Langan isn’t good with definitions and develops his ideas in such a way that there is no way you’re able to ascertain the underlying meaning to what he says, to you his writing is basically the product of a daft and oafish mind, and therefore no attempt should be made to understand what he really is trying to say.
In my opinion you only want to see the worst in him and consequently are unable to give him any credit for at least being on the right track…perhaps since you want to discredit anyone who tries to combine science and reason with theology and metaphysics.
“The above diagram illustrates the relationship of primary and secondary telic recursion, with the latter “embedded in” or expressed in terms of the former. The large circles and arrows represent universal laws (distributed syntax) engaged in telic feedback with the initial state of spacetime (initial mass-energy distribution), while the small circles and arrows represent telic feedback between localized contingent aspects of syntax and state via conspansion. The primary stage maximizes global generalized utility on an ad hoc basis as local telors freely and independently maximize their local utility functions. The primary-stage counterparts of inner expansion and requantization are called coinversion and incoversion. It is by virtue of telic recursion that the SCSPL universe can be described as its own self-simulative, self-actualizative “quantum protocomputer”.” – Langan
“The classical 1970’s conception of an automaton was as a device for accepting a formal language defined as a set of strings, possibly infinite in the case of so called w-automata. This conception made two automata equivalent when they accepted the same language.
…
This paper is based on a model that is, we feel, a particularly clean example of the state of that art. It has two main sources for its basic structure, the event spaces of Winskel, and the *-autonomous categories of Barr, originally done entirely independently of any possibility of its application to computer science.” – Chu Spaces: Automata with quantum aspects
isotelesis:
So, let me try to boil all that down: “The universe is a self-processing computer. It computes, and was computed by itself, timelessly. It acts as both hardware and software at the same time. It doesn’t need a prior cause because it’s its own cause. Because everything that goes on in a computer can be defined as a processing of a computer language, therefore our reality is a manifestation of a language inside a sort of ‘reality computer.'”
Does that pretty much sum everything up?
More like a self-simulating (self-configuring), self-actualizing (self-processing) quantum protocomputer (self-contained algebraic language). Call Langan cranky or unconventional, but he is not as totally off the wall…there is some meaning behind all those words, whether or not people care to find it is another question.
“Together, these dualities add up to the concept of triality, which represents the universal possibility of consistently permuting the attributes time, space and object with respect to various structures. From this, we may extract a third kind of duality: ST-O duality. In this kind of duality, associated with something called conspansive duality, objects can be “dualized” to spatiotemporal transducers, and the physical universe internally “simulated” by its material contents.
…
Thus, conspansive duality relates two complementary views of the universe, one based on the external (relative) states of a set of objects, and one based on the internal structures and dynamics of objects considered as language processors. The former, which depicts the universe as it is usually understood in physics and cosmology, is called ERSU, short for Expanding Rubber Sheet Universe, while the latter is called USRE (ERSU spelled backwards), short for Universe as a Self-Representational Entity.” – Langan
“You will see self-dual concepts (I mean that X* is the same type of object as X) along the central axis. It includes such things as flat spacetime. As soon as X becomes, for example, curved, which relates to gravity, you stray below the axis, while dual to this above the axis is quantum theory. The two are in a dual relationship in a representation sense.
For physics to be self-dual then you need both; as I see it Physical Reality splits into bits each consisting of sets of representations of the other, what I now call the ‘self-representing Universe’. Moreover, this philosophical postulate of a self-representing universe is not empty — it provides a constraint on the mathematical structure of the ultimate theory of physics. I showed in my PhD thesis many years ago that in the self-dual paradigm of quantum groups something like Einstein’s equations in a baby version can emerge.
And if it is the only constraint, then we will have shown that Physical Reality is dictated by a certain equity between ‘abstract structure’ and ‘experimental representation’, i.e. rooted in the assumptions of being a physicist. Strip away those assumptions, like realising that chess is only a game, and you transcend to a level of awareness in which the material physics world is like the reality of chess. I don’t say ‘illusion’ as in Budhism since as a scientist this material world is the thing of interest. But the philosophy that I get out of this obviously has much in common. I call it ‘Relative Realism’.” – Majid