09.29.08
Posted in language, philosophy, science, technology at 11:40 am by nogre
Perhaps there is magic that some people have and others do not, and cannot, have. I do not know. However there is more than one way to skin a cat.
Consider the maxim, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” What does ‘sufficiently advanced technology’ mean? The words ‘sufficiently advanced’ imply there is something futuristic about this technology, but this is not a necessary requirement; the technology needs to be different from what is known, but not futuristic. Any unknown technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Of course there are plenty of technologies that I am unfamiliar with that I do not count as magic. The upshot is that knowledge is not the determining factor in distinguishing magic because any one of us may be ignorant of a particular technology, but, if we desired to, we could go find out how the unknown technologies work. Magic requires that we cannot simply pick up a book and read how a something happens.
Therefore a more accurate description of magic is: Any unexplainable technology is indistinguishable from magic. If some technology is unexplainable then how it works cannot be written.
We now have a question of technology and meaning: if some technology is unexplainable, then what is the purpose of calling that thing technology? To ascribe a property to some unknown object is begging the question and hence the use of the world technology in this instance is misleading:
Anything unexplainable is indistinguishable from magic.
This description of magic may seem like a non-starter because it would be impossible to learn something that is unexplainable by definition. However, magic only requires a special kind of unexplainability: magic cannot be explained in terms of science. So magic is not completely unexplainable, only scientifically unexplainable.
As broadly construed as possible, science is a description of the world in terms of objects made up of other objects according to some process. Physics tries to find the smallest objects that, when combined by some process, make up all the biggest objects in the universe. Biology looks to find the fundamental objects and processes that make up ecosystems and life.
To get around science we would need something that necessarily cannot be described in terms of another object according to any process. This might seem impossible because of the open-ended ‘according to any process’ clause but, compositional accounts of natural language have consistently failed in certain circumstances. Therefore, if you wish to look for magic, I suggest understanding why this happens.
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09.26.08
Posted in random idiocy at 9:46 am by nogre
here
Much thanks and goodwill towards Tyson foods. Via Cooking With Amy
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09.24.08
Posted in epistemology, game theory, logic, philosophy at 11:11 am by nogre
What are quantifiers? Quantifiers have been thought of things that ‘range over’ a set of objects. For example, if I say
There are people with blue eyes
this statement can be represented as (with the domain restricted to people):
∃x(Bx).
This statement says that there is at least one person with property B, blue eyes. So the ‘Ex’ is doing the work of looking at the people in the domain (all people) and picking out one with blue eyes. Without this ‘∃x’ we would just have Bx, or x has blue eyes.
This concept of ‘ranging over’ and selecting an individual with a specific property out of the whole group works in the vast majority of applications. However, I’ve pointed out a few instances in which it makes no sense to think of the domain as a predetermined group of objects, such as in natural language and relativistic situations. In these cases the domain cannot be defined until something about the people involved are known, if at all; people may have a stock set of responses to questions but can also make new ones up.
So, since the problem resides with a static domain being linked to specific people, I suggest that we find a way to link quantifiers to those people. This means that if two people are playing a logic game, each person will have their own quantifiers linked to their own domain. The domains will be associated with the knowledge (or other relevant property) of the people playing the game.
We could index individual quantifiers to show which domain they belong to, but game theory has a mechanism for showing which player is making a move by using negation. When a negation is reached in a logic game, it signals that it is the other player’s turn to make a move. I suggest negation should also signal a change in domains, as to mirror the other player’s knowledge.
Using negation to switch the domain that the quantifiers reference is more realistic/ natural treatment of logic: when two people are playing a game, one may know certain things to exist that the other does not. So using one domain is an unrealistic view of the world because it is only in special instances that two people believe the exact same objects to exist in the world. Of course there needs to be much overlap for two people to be playing the same game, but having individual domains to represent individual intelligences makes for a more realistic model of reality.
Now that each player in a game has his or her own domain, what is the activity of the quantifier? It still seems to be ranging over a domain, even if the domain is separate, so the problem raised above has not yet been dealt with.
Besides knowing different things, people think differently too. The different ways people deal with situations can be described as unique strategies. Between the strategies people have and their knowledge we have an approximate representation of a person playing a logic game.
If we now consider how quantifiers are used in logic games, whenever we encounter one we have to choose an element of the domain according to a strategy. This strategy is a set of instructions that will yield a specified result and are separate from the domain. So quantifiers are calls to use a strategy as informed by your domain, your knowledge. They do not ‘range over’ the domain; it is the strategies a person uses that take the domain and game (perhaps “game-state” is more accurate at this point) as inputs and returns an individual.
The main problem mentioned above can now be addressed: Instead of predetermining sets objects in domains, what we need to predetermine are the players in the game. The players may be defined by a domain of objects and strategies that will be used to play the game, but this only becomes relevant when a quantifier is reached in the game. Specifying the players is sufficient because each brings his or her own domain and strategies to the game, so nothing is lost, and the domain and strategies do no have to be predefined because they are initially called upon within the game, not before.
I don’t expect this discussion to cause major revisions to the way people go about practicing logic, but I do hope that it provides a more natural way to think about what is going on when dealing with quantifiers and domains, especially when dealing with relativistic or natural language situations.
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09.04.08
Posted in SEO, marketing, metaphysics, philosophy, preterphysics at 2:09 pm by nogre
I’ve made some progress on my metaphysics; enough to think about writing a monograph.
Today (Sept. 2 ’08) I tried thinking of a name for this monograph. My thought process was to call it something with metaphysics but I couldn’t think of anything good. First of all the word metaphysics is inherently confused, so it is hard to use well. Its history, so I’ve been instructed, can be traced back to a librarian organizing Aristotle’s books on the shelf. The untitled book that contained what was to become Aristotle’s Metaphysics was sitting in front of Aristotle’s Physics, so the librarian called it ‘before physics’, Metaphysics. I know little of how words come into existence to pass judgment, but I am sure that I want to avoid all the baggage that this word has accumulated since then.
I thought about the Tractatus. ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ is sufficiently meaningless such that it would be hard to regret calling it that later. I mean really. Of course it is a treatise, what philosophical text isn’t? And it’s on some logic and philosophy, ooo so descriptive. So even if W. changed his mind about any of the content, the title would still hold up.
So I began to wonder if it is worth it to have a particularly descriptive title at all. Then the hyphenation caught my eye. ’Hypermetaphysical’, ‘Pseudometaphysics’ and other prefixed monstrosities ran through my thoughts but I finally came upon pretermetaphysical. It is just too damn long. Preterphysical is less long, is meaningless though suggestive, and preter- means nearly the exact same thing as meta-.
No baggage either. Google returned 3 results for preterphysical and 0 for preterphysics. Of the 3 that came up for preterphysical, one was a cached reference to one of the other pages and 404ed when I tried to view it and the other 2 used the word one time each and only in passing. That sealed it. I am writing The Preterphysics.
Now no one steal my cool name. I claim it!!!!!!
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[For anyone who wonders why this was filed under SEO and Marketing, one of the goals of this post is to claim the name "The Preterphysics" for myself. In less than 3 days of publishing this post I'll likely be #1 in Google for a search for "Preterphysics" and "Preterphysical". (UPDATE: I am #1 now, only 6 hours after publishing) By having a blog and posting regularly (and no spam) Google and the other search engines regularly scan this site for new content. Granted, these words are made up and so there aren't other people who are using them, so there is no competition for becoming #1. However, this is irrelevant to my purposes: I am trying to claim some intellectual property space and being first counts for something. I am still 3, 4 and 6 in Google searches for "relativity biology" because of these posts months ago. One of the purposes for this blog is to be a record of things I have written and, since I am outside of academia, having a public record of when my work was published goes a long way in establishing a timeline of ideas (showing that the ideas were mine). At this point it would be hard for someone to make a claim to any of my philosophy of biology since it has been public domain for a good while now (and philosophy carnivalled). Sure I could try to get my work into a journal -all considering it would hit my target audience a bit more than this website and provide an even more secure record of my work- but journal publishing is much about being an academic (and takes forever and I'd probably not make the cut anyway). I'm concerned with getting my ideas out there, claiming the intellectual space for myself, and making it available to anyone who is like-minded. This post (even as silly as it is, making fun of Wittgenstein for titling his book as he did, completely deflating any meaning from my own words, and harping on hyphenation) does all of that because of the established internet machinery.]
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09.01.08
Posted in mind, philosophy, science at 11:19 am by nogre
Back in January I wrote up a post on what I believe to be a major problem in the study of consciousness. Now, with the introduction of Consciousness Online (started by the estimable R. Brown), I feel my dilemma should get some renewed attention.
Here’s the argument:
- Assume someone knows what consciousness/mind is.
- If someone knows something, then it is part of his or her consciousness.
- If someone knows what consciousness is, then his or her consciousness has a part that contains consciousness.
- Therefore someone has a consciousness that contains consciousness.
Up until this point I am willing to grant that all this is possible. Our consciousness may be able to contain itself within itself. But could we write it down?
- We can only write or say finite things.
- If someone’s consciousness contains consciousness, then their contained consciousness contains consciousness itself and so on ad infinitum; this person’s consciousness has a self referential infinite regression.
- Writing down what consciousness is would require us to write something infinite.
- Therefore we cannot write down/ say what the consciousness is.
One might think that we would still be able to figure out pieces and put them together to get the full picture, and use terms like ad infinitum to represent some infinite, but comprehensible, process. However this would require us to know that the picture that we were putting together was an accurate one. The only way to know that we were putting together an accurate picture would be to already have an overall theory of consciousness that we knew to be correct. Hence the piecemeal approach begs the question.
With no bottom up method possible, nor any top down method available, even if someone were to discover what consciousness is, she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone. Therefore we will never have a full understanding of our consciousness.
So the dilemma is to come up with a story about philosophy of mind (and associated disciplines) while necessarily lacking a story about consciousness. Anyone have anything to say?
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