The Most Critical Question!

[AnssiH]

Anssi, goodness. You're going round in circles and it get to be utterly useless. I understand the conceptual distinction between "one's personal past" and an objective notion but you haven't been getting my points and there seems to be no hope of getting them across without you mistaking my meaning as usual.

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Can you fathom the implications of this?

 

Yes I can and I am quite conscious of those complications, and I certainly have no idea what sorts of definitions would get us out from that problem.

 

The reason why I am agreeing with you, and yet I am not using that same argument to defend the point I am making about "the unchanging past", is that I'm really saying something far more trivial. Because I am not even talking about self-coherent set of definitions where time travel is or is not a possibility. I am talking about DD's definition of the "past", which is a definition of the analysis, not a suggestion of a definition found from inside a specific world view.

 

We are simply looking for a way to refer to all the accumulated information, that a world view is based on, with some word. And we call that "past".

 

The information that your world view is based on, does not change "after the fact", i.e. "after it has been received". You just gain "more of it". And that is so regardless of how that world view supposes "time" to work in reality.

 

It is the definition of DD's epistemological analysis, to call the accumulated information "past". Thus, he can say "past cannot change". That does not have anything to do with whether a world view defines time in ways where it's idea of "the history of the universe", can change, so I won't bother to try and defend the validity of such thing. Even if a world view manages to do such a thing, it's terminology - which says "past changes" - arose from some set of information that is in itself not changing.

 

So for the third time, I quite agree with everything you are saying, but "that's not the issue I was referring to".

 

If you think I'm still missing the point, just replace the word "past" with "the accumulated set" and be done with it. It's really as simple as that.

 

-Anssi

[Qfwfq]

As I expected, you aren't following my argument and I can't get it across to you as long as you refuse.

So for the third time, I quite agree with everything you are saying, but "that's not the issue I was referring to".

 

If you think I'm still missing the point, just replace the word "past" with "the accumulated set" and be done with it. It's really as simple as that.

No, it isn't as simple as that. You don't defeat anything by saying that it isn't what you were talking about, when what you are defending is at odds with implications of it. You are simply ignoring implications by not following my argument, a case of ignoratio elenchi in the most literal sense. Maybe the argument is complicated, you need a broad enough visual to follow it, your reply doesn't really address it.

 

So if by "pure apophenia" you refer to the idea that the defined entities of our world model do not exist as things-in-themselves, then yes I would subscribe to what you call "pure apophenia".

 

On the other hand, if you mean "not connected to reality", no I would not subscribe to that.

Neither exactly one nor the other. I was quite sure you meant it as the first of the above two things you say, except that it is not the meaning of mere apophenia (Neither is the second a necessary requisite). The problem is that when you say "literally 'true to reality'" you are really not specifying much at all and certainly not enough to be sure everybody will get your point. Saying "true to reality" could be taken to mean the same as "an excellent (or highly faithful) model" of the reality it proposes to describe, which of course doesn't have to mean that, uhm... say, the "lines of magnetic flux" are an actually existent "object" when they are only mathematically definable constructs. They are definitely not mere apophenia though.

 

Saying "not connected to reality" also doesn't match what I meant. Would you say that the constellations are "not connected to the stars" in any manner? I wouldn't say so but they sure are an example of mere apophenia (or the related pareidolia), good only as a way of naming stars like delta Persei and so on; I give no further bearing to them and don't plan my days according to horoscopes. Nevertheless and regardless of what they suggest to one's imagination, some of those patterns are quite striking and stand out in the sky, even if you have never looked them up in a guide.

 

A French gymnasium pupil's mother is bringing him refreshment while he is studying his lessons. As she approaches, he is reading aloud from a textbook and the first thing she hears well enough to distinguish syllables is the sentence:

 

οὐκ ἔλαβον πόλιν, ἀλλὰ γὰρ ἐλπὶς ἔφη κακα

 

She calls him sharply, before he utters any further words, indignantly thinking "What kind of rot is the adolescent boy reading instead of his lessons!" She has no doubt; to her French ears the kid's words, read with a touch of French phonetics and cadence, had been:

 

Où q'est la bonne Pauline? A la gare, elle pisse et fait caca.

 

If she had let him get on to the next few words even, she would have realized it was a language she did not understand and not what it first seemed; IOW the rest of the data wouldn't even closely meet any of her expectations.

 

In this case, unlike the constellations, the poltergeist isn't a monkey at the keyboard; it is a guy that wrote something with an actual intentional meaning, but lived more than 2 thousand years ago, knew no French, and wasn't writing filth for the amusement of kids. According to a few websites, that sentence appears in Xenophon's Anabasis and means something like they didn't capture the town because they had bad hope of succeding. Actually, there is a slight nexus: the words caca and κακα are the same root, but it means something bad and the author didn't mean that bad stuff we associate it with. Anyway that author is much used for introductory lessons in the Homeric language but professors in French gymnasiums avoid that sentence which would rock the whole classroom. Apparently every French student knows about the sentence. Did you follow the link to the Bible Code in my previous post?

[AnssiH]

As I expected, you aren't following my argument and I can't get it across to you as long as you refuse.No, it isn't as simple as that. You don't defeat anything by saying that it isn't what you were talking about, when what you are defending is at odds with implications of it.

 

Really, I'm not following? Let's step back to the moment I asked, wheter I need to explain better what DD means when he says "past does not change".

 

To summarize the relevant definitions;

 

Undefined information = the information your world view is based on

 

Past = All the accumulated "undefined information"

 

Argument; No valid world view represents changes to this "past", i.e. no valid world view represents/handles changes to the "accumulated undefined information".

 

If you truly believe that the existence of consistency problems within such and such defined world views are in any way at odds with the above argument, please explain.

 

The problem is that when you say "literally 'true to reality'" you are really not specifying much at all and certainly not enough to be sure everybody will get your point.

 

I like to use the word "ontologically" but I didn't because you seem to have a problem with that word. What I mean by "ontological correctedness" & "true to reality" is that someone is assuming, that the defined entities of their world view exist in themselves. I.e. that they are more than just components of their particular world view, which do not exist in other equally valid world views (which generate equally valid expectations for the same exact undefined information).

 

Think about the possibility of taking one self-coherent set of defined entities, and changing all the individual definitions carefully, to reach another self-coherent set of defined entities.

 

A French gymnasium pupil's mother is bringing him refreshment while he is studying his lessons. As she approaches, he is reading aloud from a textbook and the first thing she hears well enough to distinguish syllables is the sentence:

 

οὐκ ἔλαβον πόλιν, ἀλλὰ γὰρ ἐλπὶς ἔφη κακα

 

She calls him sharply, before he utters any further words, indignantly thinking "What kind of rot is the adolescent boy reading instead of his lessons!" She has no doubt; to her French ears the kid's words, read with a touch of French phonetics and cadence, had been:

 

Où q'est la bonne Pauline? A la gare, elle pisse et fait caca.

 

If she had let him get on to the next few words even, she would have realized it was a language she did not understand and not what it first seemed; IOW the rest of the data wouldn't even closely meet any of her expectations.

 

In this case, unlike the constellations, the poltergeist isn't a monkey at the keyboard; it is a guy that wrote something with an actual intentional meaning, but lived more than 2 thousand years ago, knew no French, and wasn't writing filth for the amusement of kids. According to a few websites, that sentence appears in Xenophon's Anabasis and means something like they didn't capture the town because they had bad hope of succeding. Actually, there is a slight nexus: the words caca and κακα are the same root, but it means something bad and the author didn't mean that bad stuff we associate it with. Anyway that author is much used for introductory lessons in the Homeric language but professors in French gymnasiums avoid that sentence which would rock the whole classroom. Apparently every French student knows about the sentence. Did you follow the link to the Bible Code in my previous post?

 

Yes and I fail to appreciate why any of this would be relevant. Unless you are holding the (rather common) naive realistic assumption that reality has got a defined structure to itself, only waiting for us to find it.

 

I'm not sure what is your level of understanding of epistemological issues, but at any rate it shouldn't be a stretch for you to consider that, just because we use some inherent epistemological method to structure reality in our minds, that doesn't mean reality itself is structured the way we have to structure it. Our structuring exists for the purpose of making predictions, after all.

 

I'm specifically referring to the fact that we always have to generate definitions of some "things".

 

Does that mean reality is made of "things" or "entities" in any sense at all?

 

Many people tacitly think that reality must be made of "things" or "entities" because our thoughts are structured via "things", but that's the problem that "undefined information" and the idea of "noumena" is trying to circumvent.

 

Also I'm getting the feeling that perhaps my use of the words "ontological" and "epistemological" are not perfectly understood. I am using them the way that seems to me to be the most common definition;

ontological = "something that actually exists"

epistemological = "method of understanding"

 

Note also the fact that I take "understanding" to exclusively refer to the ability to generate satisfying expectations. I.e, epistemological validity has got nothing to do with ontological validity. And that issue is the root of the concept of noumena and map/territory relationship etc.

 

If you were already up to speed with my terminology, then I'm sure you will feel that I am just not following your argument. In that case, please explain directly what is your argument even implying about the topic, maybe that will help.

 

-Anssi

[AnssiH]

Btw, since you mention star constellations as an example of defined things that are "mere apophenia", maybe this allows me to explain our terminology better.

 

I suppose that "mere apophenia" means to you that it is just some specific collection of things that we decided to have a name for.

 

Are stars more than "mere apophenia"? They are also an specific collection of things that we just collectively refer to as "a star".

 

From an epistemological perspective, each individual star - or each individual anything - corresponds to some collection of information. The translation from that "information" to "a star" is unknown.

 

So if you'd say "a defined object corresponding to some collection of information in some unknown manner" is a case of "mere apophenia", then yes, I would subscribe to "everything is mere apophenia", on the grounds that I can't prove otherwise.

 

The lines of magnetic flux then are also "mere apophenia", because they are merely components of a world view, where all the defined entities arise from some collection(s) of information. I.e. there exists some collection of information that allows one to interpret it in the terminology, where "lines of magnetic flux" exist.

 

And I would make the same argument about "a tennis ball".

 

In your mind, you seem to draw the line between "mere apophenia" and "more than apophenia" on whether some defined thing can have a measurable effect on other defined things. I hope you understand in what sense that is a case of analyzing some set of definitions, where-as I am trying to concentrate on the possibilities in terms of categorizing collection of information whose interpretation method is completely open to anything that provides valid expectations.

 

That is why absolutely anything that is supposedly known about the meaning of the information is always taken as a case of, let's say "mental projection" about some specific recognizable patterns. That way you are not constraining your analysis by pre-defining some entities, and then trying to make other pieces fit accordingly.

 

At least, that's one way to put it.

 

-Anssi

[Qfwfq]

Anssi we are going around in circles as usual, Let's try to avoid it.

 

Really, I'm not following? Let's step back to the moment I asked, wheter I need to explain better what DD means when he says "past does not change".

You seem to be confusing two different things. It is no use repeating about what Dick meant by that when it just isn't the problem. I was talking about things which the conclusions that you draw are at odds with.

 

If you truly believe that the existence of consistency problems within such and such defined world views are in any way at odds with the above argument, please explain.

Let's get something straight about the overall logic so that you might see past the details:

 

Suppose you have said [imath]\cal{A}[/imath] and not only I understand what you mean by it, but neither do I find any issue with it. However, you said it as a part of what you are drawing the uncanny conclusion [imath]\cal{B}[/imath] from. To make it simpler, let's imagine it's the only premise so you are arguing [imath]\cal{A}\Rightarrow\cal{B}[/imath], anyways I disagree with this implication. First of all, do you understand the distinction between this disagreement and disagreement with [imath]\cal{A}[/imath] itself? Now suppose I present one or more complicated arguments which you had not even remotely considered, showing that if we suppose both [imath]\cal{A}[/imath] and [imath]\cal{A}\Rightarrow\cal{B}[/imath] we can get some highly abstruse consequances, at odds with self-consistence. Apparently, those arguments are complicated for you to appreciate and you think you have to insist on [imath]\cal{A}[/imath] again and again and again........

 

I like to use the word "ontologically" but I didn't because you seem to have a problem with that word.

Yeah of course, it's me that has a problem with that word is it? :rolleyes: For one thing we would need to use the same semantics for the words "exist" and "in themselves". Do the constellations exist? Do they exist in themselves? Of course they are no more than a grouping of stars together, to a mathematician they are disjoint subsets, but does this mean they "don't exist in themselves"? I'd simply say the grouping is quite arbitrary. What is the semantics of those words in general?

 

For instance, IMHO we have no idea what the so-called particles, such as electrons, photons or quarks "really are" but I wouldn't put it into the terms that "they don't exist in themselves". The most detailed model is called second quantization (the basis of quantum field theory) and no doubt it doesn't make much sense to talk about indiviluality of each particle, except that in some circumstances the count of 1 may hold in a continued fashion. Also it doesn't make much sense to think of them as dot-like corpuscles with a trajectory, even though in some circumstances they leave a trace that looks like it. Nevertheless, to say that they "don't exist in themselves" is quite devoid of meaning.

 

The mathematical constructs that physicists call particles "exist" and are part of a model which is an excellent description of reality, so there is some reason why these constructs give good results. Whatever that reason exactly is, it seems that reality and the model fit each other well enough. I don't confuse a person's garments with the person, no matter how well they fit and of course there may be different garments that fit the same person equally well, but there is definitely a reason why they fit the person so well and might be even hopless for someone else.

 

Yes and I fail to appreciate why any of this would be relevant. Unless you are holding the (rather common) naive realistic assumption that reality has got a defined structure to itself, only waiting for us to find it.

You said you don't get what I mean by apophenia, you considered two possible senses, neither was spot on and I tried to illustrate the point. :shrug:

 

What did you think about the Bible Code? What kind of things do you base important decisions for your life on? Does it make any more sense for farmer communities to plan their activity according to seasons, than it does to bet all one's property on something according a dream that seemed to relay some cryptic message, perhaps deciphered according to the stars of various constellations?

 

Would you have no fear of diving into the sun in a spacecraft because, like each individual star - or each individual anything - it is nothing but a collection of information and the translation from that "information" to "a star" is unknown? Does the blackbody spectrum of its light have no bearing on how you would fare in that journey? Or do you expect it to somehaow relate to the so-called temperature of things such as molten metals? Some people say that room temperature is around 300 K, boiling water less than 400 K and the surface of the sun more than 6000 K and they don't think it's mere apophenia. Have a pleasant picnic and send us a postcard from there.

 

Does that mean reality is made of "things" or "entities" in any sense at all?

I'm sure reality is made of tagliatelle and tomato sauce. If you really think about it, it's the only ontology that all our experience really fits with, including the successful space journeys that most astronauts came back safe from, everything, but in order to make the fit perfect the tagliatelle must be made with very fresh eggs and extra virgin olive oil and kneaded with all the maternal generosity of signora [imath]Ph(i)Nk_0[/imath] and the sauce must have garlic and good fresh basel, ever so gently simmered in equally good olive oil too. Reality couldn't be made of anything else but these things; the standard model just proves it beyond a shadow of doubt and, mind, it should be eaten before it cools down too much. Some people prefer the stronger flavours of spaghetti all'amatriciana but this just doesn't fit nearly as well with excellent models, including particle physics and general relativity. As someone often used to say here on our site: Az di bobe volt gehat beytsim volt zi geven mayn zeyde.

 

If you were up to speed with my terminology, then I'm sure you will feel that I am just not following your argument. In that case, please explain directly what is your argument even implying about the topic, maybe that will help.

We all bow down to your terminology, even when you define it unlike convention, but you need to be up to speed in order to understand how, if all your arguments were correct, they would have to apply equally well if we took the same "past" and split it into a different sequence of times and that the same world view with the Dirac equation would have to be equally valid. Are you able to demonstrate that this is no problem?

 

I hope you understand in what sense that is a case of analyzing some set of definitions, where-as I am trying to concentrate on the possibilities in terms of categorizing collection of information whose interpretation method is completely open to anything that provides valid expectations.

 

That is why absolutely anything that is supposedly known about the meaning of the information is always taken as a case of, let's say "mental projection" about some specific recognizable patterns.

Yes I do understand and the requisite for those expectations having any whatsoever reliability is for those recognizable patterns to be much more than mere apophenia. Try to think about how you would, empirically, go about trying to make the distinction.

[modest]

...the appropriate expectations still must obey my equation. And modest, that does not imply that your explanations obey my equation. It merely means that, if your explanation is indeed consistent with all the known data, your approximations to that data contain assumed relationships counter to what is actually known.

 

If my "explanation is indeed consistent with all the known data" then there are not "relationships counter to what is actually known" so that seems nonsensical.

 

You should be aware that it is well known by any decently educated person that classical mechanics is an approximation to the known information and does not yield universally valid expectations.

 

What "known information"? Any set of known data? Any data set? Are you saying that classical mechanics is only an approximation to a data set generated by classical mechanics? That would be an interesting assertion... kind of like "blue is only an approximation to blue".

 

~modest

[Doctordick]

This a requested response to Bombadil's post of 19 January 2011.

 

In any case I would defiantly suggest putting all of the information that you have presented on this forum in a single package that could easily be accessed by any one that wants to look at it. I rally don’t think that you would have any issues showing that you where the original founder of the derivations if you where concerned with that. I can’t imagine though that you would mind if your ideas suddenly started springing up in different ways that couldn’t be tracked back to you.

Well I would except for the fact that I don't seem to understand why they can't understand me.

[coldcreation]

This a requested response to Bombadil's post of 19 January 2011.

 

 

Well I would except for the fact that I don't seem to understand why they can't understand me.

 

It would certainly be a good idea to write (if not already written) a paper with an abstract, introduction, main body of text (equations included) followed by a conclusion that encapsulates all the fundamental elements to your thesis.

 

I for one have had difficulty jumping from one thread to the other over the past year or two, and would welcome reading the entire synopsis in a ten page (or so) document (pdf or other format).

 

It may just be a question of copy-pasting all your relevant posts into one document to which everyone interested could refer. After all, some of your OP's are practically complete. Such a document could subsequently be submitted for publishing at Arxiv or other location, for the benefit of readers across all walks of life not necessarily prone to looking at discussions on divers online fora.

 

The advantage of such would be, too, that all the irrelevant issues (stemming from off-topic babble) would be vacated, reducing the time required to digest and making the entire concept easier to understand.

 

Should be fun...

 

CC

[Doctordick]

Boy this thread has certainly gone off subject by a wide margin. I guess Qfwfq and modest have managed to achieve their intentions which I presume were to run me off. I would be gone (and probably will be gone if Polymath shows as little interest in understanding what I say as the two of them).

 

I for one have had difficulty jumping from one thread to the other over the past year or two, and would welcome reading the entire synopsis in a ten page (or so) document (pdf or other format).

It's already there. All you need do is carefully read the opening posts to these three threads:

“Laying out the representation to be solved”, which is concerned with defining the mathematical representation of “an explanation”.

“Conservation Of Inherent Ignorance!”, which is concerned with the tautological consequences inherent in the representation laid out in that first thread.

"a Universal Representation Of Rules", which presents a mathematical representation capable of representing any collection of rules possible.

 

Together these three posts contain the essence of my proof of what I call the fundamental equation.

 

It may just be a question of copy-pasting all your relevant posts into one document to which everyone interested could refer. After all, some of your OP's are practically complete. Such a document could subsequently be submitted for publishing at Arxiv or other location, for the benefit of readers across all walks of life not necessarily prone to looking at discussions on divers online fora.

The problem is that the apparent inability to understand those three posts is almost universal and I do not know how to clarify the issues further. If you want to talk to me about things you can't understand, send me a private message. At least private messages don't trash up the threads. As far as I am concerned, most of the posts on those threads could be deleted without doing any harm to speak of.

 

A while back I was doing some reseacrch into how AIs work. The major problem I came across was the difficulty of reducing input to data. It required either using a number system that is larger than base-2 (binary), so that computer data would go from 1101101111100101... to 2573245376725735464... or something similar, or having a database larder than all the computers in the world combined. (Please don't ask me to cite sources. I researched this quite a while ago.)

 

What you are doing seems, if not completely the same, to share idea(s) that are vaugely similar:

 

It seems that you are trying to change subjective/unsystematic knowledge into objective/systematic knowledge (or at least something similar), like I was trying to find out how to do. However, you seem to take it a step further into causality with the 'solutions to the equation' part of the quote above by trying to explain the concept of all information producing other information. This can be simply (if somewhat innacuratly) expressed by the phrase, "Mathless Equations". If this is taken to its logical conclusion, then it says that, if you have perfect information about the first event in the universe, then it should be possible to extrapolate, using cause/effect relations, every single event in history. Of course, this is impossible in reality due to the Uncertainty Principle, and also practically impossible, for rather obvious reasons, but it is compltely resonable as a theoretical concept.

I think you are missing the point. “Causality” is a characteristic of explanations and not necessarily a characteristic of reality. As I asserted earlier, what I present is not a theory, it is a proof of a mathematical relationship required by the common concept of an explanation. Essentially it is a derivation of exactly what can be deduced directly from the definition of “an explanation” and nothing else. It is certainly not a method of obtaining theories. I hold that the only real route to “theories” is the good old fashion “by guess and by golly” attack used by mankind for eons. What I have presented is a constraint on the validity of those theories. If you can cast the theory's concepts into a form constituting a solution to my fundamental equation then it is perhaps valid. If you cannot, there are two possibilities: it is either invalid or you have simply failed to find the proper assumptions to be made (note that solving a many body equation in general is, at least at this date, an insolvable problem, i.e., assumptions are required).

 

You bring up the issue of definitions.

 

The way I see it, you are being hindered by misunderstandings through terms not being defined the same way by everybody. I think it would help your argument be understood by others (including me) if you would make a list of the terms you use. For example, what is your definition of 'valid'?

Language itself is a theory of meanings. That is what Anssi is referring to when he keeps bringing up the issue of semantics.

 

When I first started posting on this forum, I thought Qfwfq was an intelligent educated fellow who would provide assistance with technical communications; however, his real interest seems to be in confusing issues. He certainly betrays his intentions with this post.

 

Thanks a lot :rolleyes: but you add nothing useful to uphold your case. You show that, as I guessed, you're claiming that it must be so for any set of data, since any candidate data can be "known data" according to this definition, from which follows that your claim could only be true for an absolutely trivial condition. IOW, what is the use of an explanation being such that no data could contradict it?

This statement is simply a gross misrepresent what I said. He omitted the word “known” and replaced the word “can” with “could”. I can only presume this misrepresentation was intentional and, if I were in charge of this forum I would consider severely reprimanding him for such destructive misrepresentation.

 

With those corrections, his comment would read, “IOW, what is the use of an explanation being such that no known data contradicts it.” I doubt Qfwfq is so dumb as to consider such a statement consistent with the meaning of “valid”. If there is any known data that contradicts it, it is certainly an invalid explanation by anyone's interpretation of the meaning of the word “valid”.

 

Thanks Modest for quoting that old post and addressing it and a few other things, saves me a bit of the huge volume of work here. I browsed those posts and, sure enough, what I argued was not what Dick reported me to have said.

Modest's answer to my post of June 7, 2006 is totally and completely thoughtless. What I said was that no matter what answers Newton gave to the example I laid out, I could point out difficulties with inconsistencies I think he could understand. I can not believe Newton was as stupid as modest appears to want to represent him. And there is a lot more to the difficulties than the finite speed of light. Qfwfq's presumption that the difficulties are as simple as that is obtuse to say the least. I don't think either Qfwfq or modest are as dumb as they seem to want to portray themselves.

 

Answering Qfwfq and modest's supposed retorts to my proof is clearly an impossible task as it is quite clear that neither of them have any interest whatsoever in examining what I say. There appears to be no one other than Anssi who has any desire to think about these issues at all. I have neither the patience nor the time to combat the simple minded and totally unthoughtout propositions which they propose as conflicting with my presentation. The idea of analyzing the explanation of some body of information without presuming his interpretation of elements is correct appears to be simply beyond his comprehension or he wants to pretend it is.

 

How he comes to the belief that there can exist a problem consisting of only 81 elements of data such that the only possible interpretation is that it is a sudoku puzzle is totally beyond me.

 

The simplest problems which can be explained require millions of elements before reasonable explanations can even be proposed. (That is why it takes a child some two years before they can begin to understand the simplest problems of ordinary life.) A good example of what I am talking about is the translation of Minoan Linear A. The information available to us, if one includes the circumstances intimate to the discovery of each relevant item, amounts to millions of elements and yet that information is still insufficient to buy success in explaining what the script says. His assertion that something totally representable via 81 elements (and nothing else as of the moment) can be confidently interpreted to be a sudoku puzzle and nothing else is a simple minded and thoughtless conclusion at best.

 

Anssi, I leave these people to you. If you think you can reach them, you have more confidence than I do at this point.

 

If anyone else reads this and would like to communicate with me, use private messages as I doubt I am going to be reading this forum in the future. Private messages do inform me by e-mail that they exist. It is my presumption that this is what modest and Qfwfq intended all along. That is the only explanation of their behavior which makes any sense to me. I really don't believe they are as stupid as they present themselves and conclude their behavior amounts to nothing more than pure “troll” posts.

 

Have fun and so long -- Dick

[modest]

I guess Qfwfq and modest have managed to achieve their intentions which I presume were to run me off.

 

You presume incorrectly. Trying to run someone off looks like this:

 

Why don't you just go away?

 

Thanks Modest for quoting that old post and addressing it and a few other things, saves me a bit of the huge volume of work here. I browsed those posts and, sure enough, what I argued was not what Dick reported me to have said.

Modest's answer to my post of June 7, 2006 is totally and completely thoughtless. What I said was that no matter what answers Newton gave to the example I laid out, I could point out difficulties with inconsistencies I think he could understand.

 

If you can't support what you said then insulting the person who corrected you and repeating the unsupported claim is hardly an acceptable alternative. To synchronize clocks with a signal of finite speed in Galilean relativity use Galilean transformations. Were you to demonstrate inconsistencies with the system you would be the first.

 

I can not believe Newton was as stupid as modest appears to want to represent him.

 

Newton didn't have the information necessary to choose special relativity over his solution. It would be extremely addled to think Newton appears stupid for being unable to perform an impossible task.

 

None of these observations:

• 
   
  
• A person walks at a finite speed.
  
• Sound propagates at a finite speed.
  
• Light travels at a finite speed.
  

are in any way inconsistent with Galilean relativity. This:

 

He has obviously made the assumption that measurements in the direction of travel are the same for both observers. Challenge him to prove that those measurements have to be the same: i.e., that the acceleration to the other frame did not change the characteristics of the measurement devices used by that observer. If he responds that relativity itself requires they be the same then one can shift to the problem of defining time at the various positions in the coordinate system. No matter what he suggests, a problem with his solution can be brought up as it simply is not an internally self consistent solution and I believe Newton would have been able to see that fact.

 

does nothing to prove, support, or even suggest that Newton's solution was "not an internally self consistent solution" to the information he had.

 

~modest

[AnssiH]

You seem to be confusing two different things. It is no use repeating about what Dick meant by that when it just isn't the problem. I was talking about things which the conclusions that you draw are at odds with.

 

Let's get something straight about the overall logic so that you might see past the details:

 

Suppose you have said [imath]\cal{A}[/imath] and not only I understand what you mean by it, but neither do I find any issue with it. However, you said it as a part of what you are drawing the uncanny conclusion [imath]\cal{B}[/imath] from. To make it simpler, let's imagine it's the only premise so you are arguing [imath]\cal{A}\Rightarrow\cal{B}[/imath], anyways I disagree with this implication. First of all, do you understand the distinction between this disagreement and disagreement with [imath]\cal{A}[/imath] itself? Now suppose I present one or more complicated arguments which you had not even remotely considered, showing that if we suppose both [imath]\cal{A}[/imath] and [imath]\cal{A}\Rightarrow\cal{B}[/imath] we can get some highly abstruse consequances, at odds with self-consistence. Apparently, those arguments are complicated for you to appreciate and you think you have to insist on [imath]\cal{A}[/imath] again and again and again........

 

So you understand DD's definitions and thus understand what he means with the (trivially true) argument "past cannot change". Great, that's what I wanted to explain.

 

But then you think something else I said - which you call [imath]\cal{B}[/imath] - was problematic, because it is problematic to reach self consistent ideas about time travel.

 

 

Mind telling me what that [imath]\cal{B}[/imath] was?

 

Yeah of course, it's me that has a problem with that word is it? :rolleyes:

 

It always seems to give you a jolt. It is quite convenient word because of the ambiguities with the word "exists", which you referred to yourself here;

 

For one thing we would need to use the same semantics for the words "exist" and "in themselves". Do the constellations exist? Do they exist in themselves? Of course they are no more than a grouping of stars together, to a mathematician they are disjoint subsets, but does this mean they "don't exist in themselves"? I'd simply say the grouping is quite arbitrary. What is the semantics of those words in general?

 

Ontological existence refers to the idea of something existing over and beyond us "seeing it that way". "In themselves" likewise refers to the idea that something "is so in reality" even when we are not there to "interpret it that way".

 

Take it as "exists in strong sense" if you will. Do you understand why I use the word, rather than just say something "exists"?

 

For instance, IMHO we have no idea what the so-called particles, such as electrons, photons or quarks "really are" but I wouldn't put it into the terms that "they don't exist in themselves".

 

I would though, but not because they are by their definitions complicated by the role of observation, but simply because these defined entities can't be taken as necessary in all the other valid world views. That is what I mean when I say "do not exist in themselves" or "these are arbitrary definitions". Of course they are not arbitrary when looking at them from within a certain world view which requires them (or from certain paradigm as Kuhn would say), but they are certainly arbitrary when looking at all the possibilities, starting from undefined information.

 

The mathematical constructs that physicists call particles "exist" and are part of a model which is an excellent description of reality, so there is some reason why these constructs give good results. Whatever that reason exactly is, it seems that reality and the model fit each other well enough. I don't confuse a person's garments with the person, no matter how well they fit and of course there may be different garments that fit the same person equally well, but there is definitely a reason why they fit the person so well and might be even hopless for someone else.

 

Careful now. It is entirely possible that they are merely a universally valid translation of recurring information patterns (i.e. what DD is trying to point at). I.e. just a valid terminology to represent expectations that arose from any sort of recurring patterns. Which would make them ontologically non-existent. Do you understand what I mean by "ontologically non-existent"?

 

I can't be sure what you mean by "reality and the model fit each other well enough", but if you take the valid expectations as an indication of these defined entities corresponding to actual structure of reality, you are only expressing the belief that prediction-wise validity is an indication of the ontological correctedness of a world view. The point is simply that there exists other definitions that can be used to represent the same information, and in terms of those definitions, these entities might not exist at all. So I would not say they "exist" just because one possible perspective to the situation would say they exist. (Which gets us to the reason I sometimes say "semantical world view")

 

In other words, you can't defend their existence via the validity of your model, because by "validity of your model" you actually mean the validity of its expectations. When the "garments fit", it just means your expectations are valid. That gets us straight back to the OP and the first posts I sent to this thread.

 

Now please don't assume that I am saying all this just to bicker, or just to argue that we might live in a "Matrix", or anything like that. This is exactly the same topic as the "Sociologial history of Quarks", only extended to over all our defined entities, not just quarks.

 

What did you think about the Bible Code?

 

I thought it's a discussion of very specific procedures that give some results that were unintuitive to people. I'm sure most Nascar wins are somewhere in there too. I don't think it's related to this topic.

 

I take it your meaning of the word "apophenia" refers to possibilities of drawing expectations that are accidentally valid, and thus are likely to turn into invalid expectations upon extrapolation. There are no distinctions like these made in the analysis at all, expectations just are either valid or invalid, because accidental validity cannot be known. Thus I don't see any reason to use the word "apophenia".

 

What kind of things do you base important decisions for your life on? Does it make any more sense for farmer communities to plan their activity according to seasons, than it does to bet all one's property on something according a dream that seemed to relay some cryptic message, perhaps deciphered according to the stars of various constellations?

 

Would you have no fear of diving into the sun in a spacecraft because, like each individual star - or each individual anything - it is nothing but a collection of information and the translation from that "information" to "a star" is unknown? Does the blackbody spectrum of its light have no bearing on how you would fare in that journey? Or do you expect it to somehaow relate to the so-called temperature of things such as molten metals? Some people say that room temperature is around 300 K, boiling water less than 400 K and the surface of the sun more than 6000 K and they don't think it's mere apophenia. Have a pleasant picnic and send us a postcard from there.

 

See, I've never made any argument about anything like that. Your world view gives the expectation that "you" will "burn" in the "sun". Of course you follow your expectations. Does that mean, that every single valid world view must include these definitions at all? And if I say it doesn't, am I arguing that you will not burn in the sun?

 

I'm sure reality is made of tagliatelle and tomato sauce. If you really think about it, it's the only ontology that all our experience really fits with, including the successful space journeys that most astronauts came back safe from, everything, but in order to make the fit perfect the tagliatelle must be made with very fresh eggs and extra virgin olive oil and kneaded with all the maternal generosity of signora [imath]Ph(i)Nk_0[/imath] and the sauce must have garlic and good fresh basel, ever so gently simmered in equally good olive oil too. Reality couldn't be made of anything else but these things; the standard model just proves it beyond a shadow of doubt and, mind, it should be eaten before it cools down too much. Some people prefer the stronger flavours of spaghetti all'amatriciana but this just doesn't fit nearly as well with excellent models, including particle physics and general relativity. As someone often used to say here on our site: Az di bobe volt gehat beytsim volt zi geven mayn zeyde.

 

You know, it's funny bit it's not too far from how people actually do defend the existence of their perspectives on reality...

 

Anyway, you were responding to my comment about how our epistemological necessity of categorizing information into "things" does not mean reality must be made of "things". Did you ever think about that? "I understand everything as a set of objects. Why is that? Is reality like that, or is that just a way to understand things?". It is certainly a way to understand things, and obviously it is not possible to tell if it is more. So let's just not use that assumption.

 

We all bow down to your terminology, even when you define it unlike convention, but you need to be up to speed in order to understand how, if all your arguments were correct, they would have to apply equally well if we took the same "past" and split it into a different sequence of times and that the same world view with the Dirac equation would have to be equally valid. Are you able to demonstrate that this is no problem?

 

By far the best demonstration of that is to follow DD's definitions of his notation from the beginning, and consider at each step "does this step place an undefendable requirement onto the properties of undefined information?". If the answer is "no" at each step, it means any self-coherent set of definitions (which were fundamentally based on some recurring aspects of some undefined information) must be representable in his notation.

 

On the other hand, to actually demonstrate an example, by taking some specific circumstances in some specific terminology, and then trying to translate that to his notation, is in most cases practically impossible. It is like demonstrating the flocking behaviour of birds in quantum level; it's just not practically possible. In most cases it's just impossible to tell how to perform that specific translation, even if you can know that no valid possibilities have been excluded.

 

In other words, what can be demonstrated is "IF there exists a self-coherent (remember DD's meaning of self-coherent) way to represent reality in a terminology where the history of the universe is understood in terms of 'different sequences of time', then that representation must be translatable to DD's notation, on the grounds that nothing was ever assumed about the information underlying the explanation".

 

This is very important thing to understand.

 

Yes I do understand and the requisite for those expectations having any whatsoever reliability is for those recognizable patterns to be much more than mere apophenia. Try to think about how you would, empirically, go about trying to make the distinction.

 

If it's possible to recognize recurring patterns, what does it mean that those patterns are "mere apophenia"? If they are recurring under certain circumstances, then you can have expectations that they will keep on recurring under similar circumstances. If that has just been a co-incident and they stop recurring, then your expectations also change accordingly. Maybe you try to recognize the difference in the circumstances etc. Or maybe eventually you come to conclude "this was just a co-incident and I should not expect it to happen again".

 

I don't understand the meaning of using the word "apophenia" there anymore. Earlier, you seemed to say "apophenia" to refer to things that generate essentially invalid expectations. Well, if you find out your expectations were invalid, you just change your world view, so what?

 

Overall, I strongly suspect the whole reason you are thinking about this apophenia stuff is because you believe prediction-wise validity must be an indication of correct set of definitions in one's own world view. I.e. you are trying to argue that our defined entities can't be just a figment of our imagination, because if they were, we would not be connected to reality, or something like that. If that is what you are trying to say, I hope you understand now better that I am NOT arguing that something being a "figment of our imagination" means it is "disconnected from reality". It just means it may be universally valid defined entity, while not having any ontological existence over and beyond us having defined it into existence in our minds.

 

Something being universally valid way to categorize undefined information, does not mean it would yield invalid predictions.

 

-Anssi

[AnssiH]

I said before I would comment on the so-called "hard problem of consciousness", so here we go. Just to recap;

 

It is problematic to explain anything about this if the other party keeps randomly regressing back to the idea that world views must correspond to the true structure of reality in order to be valid. I.e. to the idea that the meaning of the information must be known, before valid predictions can exist, or before it can be perceived "correctly". Some of the most famous philosophical problems exist because of the persistent existence of this exact assumption, hidden inside the problem one way or another...

 

...any set of definitions that can produce valid expectations, is to be considered a valid world view. That is my definition of "valid world view".

 

So my perspective is that a world view constitutes a "mental terminology" for expressing expectations about some aspects of some information (noumena), and the validity of a world view refers to the demonstrable validity of the expectations it expresses.

 

Such demonstration cannot prove that the defined entities of a world view exist in reality, nor can it prove that the rules expressed by a world view are embedded to reality itself. That is, having found a valid terminology does not prove that it is the only valid terminology.

 

It is important to keep in mind at all times, that any subjective experience/perception, and any conscious thoughts about anything, is always a case of mental terminology of some type. That is, we cannot have a mental access to the "pure underlying information", we only have an experience after a translation to some mental terminology has already occurred.

 

That is, whenever we think we "understand" reality, what we really have is a valid terminology (=mentally defined set of rules and entities) for expressing our expectations.

 

The OP of this thread is trying to point out that many people fail to truly appreciate the problem that the above poses to our attempts of understanding reality, and indeed, some of the most famous philosophical problems exist because of that failure.

 

For those who don't know, the hard problem of consciousness simply refers to the fact that, being able to explain our subjective experience in terms of some well defined process (neural or otherwise), does not in any way tell us why or how those processes would amount to a subjective experience. It doesn't matter how you explain these processes, you are still only expressing some things that correlates to subjective experience, but in doing so you cannot point out any reason for the subjective experience itself to exist.

 

The hard problem of consciousness is in itself unanswerable because the problem itself, as it's been phrased, arises from a naive realistic perspective towards our own world views. That is, from the perspective that a valid world view (or the structure with which our world views are constructed), is a representation of reality itself. That perspective causes a lot of people to look for answers from all the wrong places.

 

The same naive realistic assumption is in play when people have in this thread suggested that the most critical question is to understand our "self". What needs to be stressed here is that however we "understand our self" is always a function of our world view. If we come to "understand" our self, we are still just referring to having become able to generate valid expectations about our own behaviour; i.e. becoming able to understand our selves in terms of some sort of mechanical process. I.e. we are really just referring to our ability to think about some aspects of our thought processes in the terminology of our own world view.

 

The circularity of that problem should be quite obvious to all, but most people like to jump out from that circle by assuming that our world view does represent real ontological objects of reality, and thus they are facing this hard problem; any expression of any orchestrated performance of multiple parts of reality, cannot lead to comprehension as to why that orchestrated performance (the entities you defined) would have a singular subjective experience between themselves. And on the other hand, you cannot say that any single part of that whole "system" would have a subjective experience either; if it's a single part, it doesn't have any dynamical properties to itself by definition!

 

Notice that any possible world view is always a set of defined entities/objects, and their associated rules. While that is the "structure of our thoughts", we cannot tell if that is the only way for reality to "exist". The structure of our thoughts only stretches so far; we can't "think" in any other structural form than in the structure of our "thoughts".

 

Even if that is only an epistemological limitation, it has caused the popular stance on reality to be that the defined objects of our world view correlate with objects of reality, i.e. some things with real substance to themselves (one way or another). I.e. that reality is constructed from material substance in some sense (out of some things that carry and contain real identity with themselves).

 

Thus, most people are also aligned to try and define their "self" in terms of material substance (leading to hilarious thought experiments, such as replacement of your neurons with another identical set one by one, and considering what makes your "self" in that picture).

 

The hard problem of consciousness is also intimately tied to the idea that only matter (or its sub-parts) are things that "exist", while the processes that those parts collectively perform are seen as purely human defined aspects of reality; not really substantial, just some behaviours we call with names. Be it a waterfall, a computation, or the neural activity in our heads.

 

But is it really fair to consider our defined entities to be substantial, while considering the processes they perform to be non-substantial? Why would it be invalid to define our "self" as being exactly and merely the process that our so-called neurons perform? Your mental understanding of that very process is certainly just a mental representation of some sort of reality, but why would reality be affected by the epistemological limitations of that representation?

 

Mind you, this doesn't constitute an aswer to the hard problem of consciousness. I am obviously not suggesting that anything that can be seen as "a process" one way or another, also has got a subjective experience of some sort (although it is possible to define the "types of processes" that would, but not demonstrably so).

 

I am merely pointing out exactly where that hard problem comes from, in terms of undefendable naive realistic assumptions that most people are aligned to make, and why it is a quite mis-phrases problem, in so far that we cannot consider our defined entities to be real in themselves anyway.

 

-Anssi

[Rade]

But is it really fair to consider our defined entities to be substantial, while considering the processes they perform to be non-substantial? Why would it be invalid to define our "self" as being exactly and merely the process that our so-called neurons perform? Your mental understanding of that very process is certainly just a mental representation of some sort of reality, but why would reality be affected by the epistemological limitations of that representation?

A nice post.

 

Concerning this comment you made, we have an opposite world view. Let me present mine in opposition to yours. Consider that a rainbow is a defined entity--a thing of color ============ we both perceive and define. But, it is not a defined entity that we consider to be substantial. We consider a rainbow to be a non-substantial entity that is the outcome of a process that we perceive, namely the interaction of photons of light with drops of water moving in a gravitational field. However, we consider both photons and the water drops to be defined as well as substantial (photon and atoms of water as potential particle). Thus the answer to your question is yes. It is fair to consider some defined entities to be substantial (photons, water drops), but the processes they perform (scatter of photons with atoms of hydrogen and oxygen), and other defined entities associated with the process (rainbow and the color red), to be non-substantial.

 

Your second question concerning how we define the self . The reason we cannot limit the definition of the self to being merely the process that our so-called neurons perform, is because the concept of the self requires both a subject (the "I", the one who perceives and acts in an infinite number of ways as a process) and an object (the "me, :hammer: the one to whom the perceptions and acts and processes happen, a finite thing that exists prior to process). Therefore, the self can never be constrained to mere process or mere substance. The is the "I" (the infinite subject as process) united with the "me" (the finite object as existent), and the union forms a dialectic within thought, combining mere process (neuron function) and mere substance (the atoms that compose the neuron) into self. Thus, the reality of the self, as a dialectic of subject and object, can never be affected by epistemological limitations of thought of the representation. Such limitations of knowledge belong to those aspects of thought of self associated with imagination and/or fantasy.

[AnssiH]

whenever we think we "understand" reality, what we really have is a valid terminology (=mentally defined set of rules and entities) for expressing our expectations.

 

The OP of this thread is trying to point out that many people fail to truly appreciate the problem that the above poses to our attempts of understanding reality

...

The hard problem of consciousness arises from a perspective that a valid world view is a representation of reality itself. That perspective causes a lot of people to look for answers from all the wrong places.

...

The circularity of that problem should be quite obvious to all, but most people like to jump out from that circle by assuming that our world view does represent real ontological objects of reality, and thus they are facing this hard problem; The hard problem of consciousness is intimately tied to the idea that only matter (or its sub-parts) are things that "exist", while the processes that those parts collectively perform are seen as purely human defined aspects of reality; not really substantial

 

We consider a rainbow to be a non-substantial entity that is the outcome of a process that we perceive, namely the interaction of photons of light with drops of water moving in a gravitational field. However, we consider both photons and the water drops to be defined as well as substantial (photon and atoms of water as potential particle). Thus the answer to your question is yes. It is fair to consider some defined entities to be substantial (photons, water drops), but the processes they perform (scatter of photons with atoms of hydrogen and oxygen), and other defined entities associated with the process (rainbow and the color red), to be non-substantial.

 

I rest my case.

 

-Anssi

[Kriminal99]

It almost sounds like you are asking what is the algorithm behind human intelligence. A good place to start to understand this is Association rule data mining.

 

If not, and you are talking about overcoming global skepticism, what about Lehr's approach? It might not be the real world we are perceiving, but then what can we do if it isn't? We might as well just go with what we know until we are given reason to question it.

[AnssiH]

It almost sounds like you are asking what is the algorithm behind human intelligence.

 

Yes, you could say that.

 

Although the only thing I was pointing out in the previous post was how some things being "substantial objects" (photons, electrons) and other things being "stable processes" (waterfall, tornado, rainbow) are just semantical man-made categories in our world views. Much like "living things" and "dead things".

 

Ultimately all of these things are just defined things attached on some particular patterns on some "undefined information". Yet we are prone to think of some defined patterns as "real, substantial objects", which we think exist even when we are not there to define some patterns as those objects. And, we are prone to think of some patterns as "processes realized by substantial objects", and say that they only exist because we defined them in our heads.

 

What I'm saying is simply that the hard problem of consciousness arises from the tacit belief, that it is ontologically valid to separate reality in these types of categories. And as long as one thinks so, they must also think that consciousness cannot exist. Simply because our own explanation of "consciousness" must always be a representation of a process realized by a collection of defined persistent entities*; a single entity cannot represent any dynamics.

 

Very many people assume that the hard problem of consciousness will disappear once we manage to explain it correctly. That just reflects poor understanding of the epistemological roots of the problem.

 

Btw, that same undefendable categorization stands behind the quantum mystery as well; The seemingly idealistic features of Bell experiments go away when you realize exactly how those features arise from epistemological circumstances; the (so called) substantial objects reacting to our observation in such idealistic manner, is also a feature of an explanation of undefined information patterns, not a feature of any real entities "out there".

 

If you think about this, you can probably understand why I've been trying to put so much emphasis on the fact that the validity of our world view cannot be taken as an indication of its ontological correctedness, since we are really just measuring the validity of our expectations, not the validity of our particular terminology (set of definitions).

 

--

Now, you were able to connect this to the idea that we are talking about "an algorithm behind human intelligence", and yes, we are essentially talking about the properties of any algorithm that is capable of drawing expectations from some undefined information patterns. Any case of intelligent behaviour is a case of having pulled out valid expectations for some circumstance, and acted accordingly.

 

There are many specific possibilities for doing so (and we are not suggesting a single specific algorithm). But All those possible ways would have certain common properties to their definitions, as long as they don't make undefendable assumptions about the meaning of the information (i.e. as long as the definitions are explicitly attached to some recurring activities via inductive logic; only thing assumed is "the future will resemble the past")

 

An important thing to remember is just that, such an algorithm is already employed by the time we get to any idea that we are perceiving something. We cannot perceive undefined information by definition. On the other hand, we cannot think about/comprehend/perceive anything without having something defined (the definitions are our thoughts).

 

Association rule data mining for instance, it first requires someone to decide what exactly to measure. Before we can even refer to anything of interest inside the information, some decisions had to be made about how some undefined information is to be interpreted.

 

So we are really talking about the first very fundamental steps of that algorithm; something that manages to pull out expectations without knowing at all what some information is supposed to be or how is it supposed to be read. All the possible ways to consciously analyze that data, can only arise after some definitions have been generated.

 

If not, and you are talking about overcoming global skepticism

 

Still wanted to explicitly say that no, that's not what I'm talking about. This should be viewed as a discussion of very real epistemological issues. The problems mentioned above arise from those epistemological issues that we just can't get around because of what "explanation" (or "world view") actually is (i.e. how we measure its validity).

 

A lot of people think those problems arise from our explanations being subtly wrong, which reflects their belief that ontological correctedness is a valid topic, which reflects their poor understanding to the fact that such a thing can never be measured, by the definition of "explanation"...

 

-Anssi

[Maine farmer]

I think we need to hear from some biologists here. Perhaps I'm way off base here and don't understand the question, but I would think instinct would come into play here. A new born calf immediately starts trying to stand, and then suckle without neeeding to be taught. I've always been amazed by the existance of instinct, and I wonder if anyone has discovered the exact mechanisms by which it is possible. Is it encoded in DNA? Can instinct be reduced to a mathematical model?