punk
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Posts posted by punk
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I think it comes down to intuitive plausibility. There are obviously infinitely many natural numbers (whether you want to define this in terms of potentiality or whatever, and yes I realise I'm glossing over the difficulties), so an axiom of infinity seems reasonable. But the axiom of choice (and its equivalents) have very little intuitive content. In a sense, there are independent grounds for accepting AI, but we only accept AC because we like the things we can do with it.
The problem is intuitions start breaking down the moment you leave the natural numbers.
It starts with the rationals where any notion of successor is gone (since between any two rationals there is another rational, so you can't talk about the "next rational" after a rational A). And then it is all downhill from there.
Perhaps a case could be made for the naturals being the only intuitively plausible infinity, but we really want to work in the other substantially less intuitive infinities.
The axiom of infinity doesn't exist to get us to the set of all natural numbers, but rather to other infinities. In fact I suspect that if the set of all naturals was the only infinity you wanted to allow, you could get it without the axiom of infinity in some acceptable way (potential infinities...yadda yadda), or at least use a weaker axiom of infinity.
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He has responded to me and my friends before.
Really!
I'm impressed with the guy then.
I'd probably ignore that sort of stuff for the reasons I gave.
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First, to be clear, the Axiom of Choice (AC) only exists for dealing with infinite sets. You don't need AC for finite sets. If you reject infinite sets altogether, then AC isn't an issue, you can prove theorems to take its place.
AC is an *axiom* so it is really telling us something about how infinity behaves in the system. If it doesn't make sense you have to pause and think hard: Is my issue really just tantamount to me being concerned that I can't prove the axiom as a theorem?
I find it interesting that AC raises all the problems, but you don't hear much about the Axiom of Infinity (AI) (which, as I indicated above, is the thing that causes us to think we might need AC).
You should consider AI and AC as a paired set of axioms telling us that infinite sets exist and they behave a certain way. If you don't like infinity at all, get rid of both of them. If you think infinity ought to behave differently, introduce other axioms.
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The report said that he believes just war theory is not sufficiently explained. I emailed Chomsky a link to The Objective Standard's article "Just War Theory vs American Self Defence" by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein, and linked to the audio lecture by the same name. I'll let you guys know if he responds, but I didn't pose any questions so he probably won't.
I get the impression that Chomsky gets inundated with stuff like that, given his prominence and all the people gunning for him. I doubt he'll respond for the simple reason that if he responded to people like you it would be a full-time job in itself.
I do know that Chomsky is not a pacificist, he does believe that violence is legitimate in proper circumstances against proper targets.
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As a University of Washington alumnus, I think if the UW should erect a monument to any alumnus it should be Bruce Lee, probably the UW's most world famous alumnus.
In fact I think they should name the hall housing the philosophy department after him. Who wouldn't want to go to classes in "Bruce Lee Hall"?
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It'd be more likely to be affordable to the middle class if he'd build it on the equator.
I'm not sure what the cost difference would be for that latitude though.
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First a couple points:
How we face death colors how we live. The person who has come to terms with death will live more fully than the person who hasn't.
Or as the ancients said: Death is the muse of philosophy.
That is philosophy is about life in as much as brings us to terms with our own mortality.
Once you've really come to terms with death, then you can do anything you want, because you are prepared to die at any moment. Otherwise you are just going to spend your entire life with your tail between you legs hiding from death, until it finally catches you. But then you'll never have really lived.
Back to the topic:
So once you've come to terms with death, you know what life means to you and what it is for that meaning to cease to be. That is you can decide rationally when it is time to call it a day. Suicide is then life affirming, it is saying "that was life", and "this isn't life anymore".
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It is an objection, but not one that a Popperian would accept. The root issue seems to be a nearly axiomatic principle that knowledge is an invalid concept, from their POV.It looks that way, except that I don't know of anything that can budge them from their primary principle, that knowledge of truth is impossible and that at most you can have knowledge that an untruth exists. Since their theory of knowledge is unfalsifiable, of course, I don't know what would constitute a refutation of Popperian epistemology.What kind of rigor do you find lacking in OPAR (specifically ch. 5)? It's true that Peikoff does not give an elaborate case study, because he's presenting a philosophy rather than an account of a scientific domain. If you mean, how do you decide between extensionally distinct theories where the test case is presently beyond our reach and therefore both theories fit the known facts equally, then (1) try to do the crucial experiment and (2) don't decide.
The idea behind a verificationist account is to be able to resolve something along the lines of the following:
1. We have two theories A and B which do not have a do-able crucial experiment (say it is far beyond our current technical level
2. We have a body of data which supports both theories, but actually deviates from both of them in various ways
3. We want to decide nonetheless which theory is better supported by the body of data
The verificationist would want some sort of calculus (which would probably be some sub-discipline of statistics) which would resolve this sort of issue, as well as provide some sort of measure of confidence in a single theory given a body of data.
I guess the key idea here is *confidence* in a theory given the data. There is no such thing as confidence in a popperian account. The theory either guilty or innocent until proven guilty (as it were).
As we established above, the popperian has to say we currently have *NO* scientific theory worth speaking of, as they have all been shown to be wrong by the evidence. Of course we believe all those theories are good for something, the point of verificationism is to give some idea of how good they are.
The alternative you offer to just say "we don't know which one is right" and throw our hands up in the air seems like giving up as well.
An aside:
It just occurred to me that I'm using the term "verificationism" which is a term one usually sees used with some form of logical positivism (where they say that the meaning of a statement is the means of verifying it, which obviously is not at all what I'm talking about). I don't want there to be any confusion that I consider this usage of "verificationism" as distinct from that usage.
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I think it is still problematic, when you have an epistemology that can't come up with anything stronger than "something is wrong". If all you can say for sure is "I don't know if this is false" and "something is false", then you don't have knowledge.Chapter 5 of OPAR gives the basics principles, especially the discussion of "certainty".
You definitely have a much weakened notion of knowledge. That in itself isn't an objection though. The strict Popperian is going to say "Sorry, you're idea of a stronger knowledge is just wishful thinking and unjustifiable. This weakened knowledge is the best we can do." We obviously can't live in a dream world demanding things we can't have.
So the onus is on the person who thinks we can have stronger knowledge to give a good account of that knowledge.
As for a theory of verificationism, I had in mind something with a little more technical rigor whereby I can compare in a strict way two competing theories both of which have some support in empirical data, as well as some data contradicting the theory, and decide which is the better verified. Or maybe given a piece of empirical data I can decide which theory it better supports. I don't recall OPAR doing anything of this kind of elaborated rigor.
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One of the consequences of Popperian nihilism is that you also cannot objectively falsify a theory, leading to the impossibility of knowledge. The idea behind a falsifier is that a certain observation would be made when a theory predicts that there is an X at some place, and then because there is no X you know the theory is false. This depends on the observation, which in science is usually indirect because it involves an instrument. Instruments are founded on scientific theories and they work because the underlying theory is true (or they don't, because the theory is false). But Popperian logic precludes saying that the underlying theory of the instrument is true -- all you can say is that it hasn't yet been falsified. Every supposed falsifying observation is therefore due to the falsity of the theory being tested, or the falsity of the theory of the instrument. Consequently, observations are insecure in Popperworld.We have that.
For measuring instruments:
A strict Popperian would say that we have to treat *all* of the theories that apply to the measuring instrument (i.e. both the theory being tested and the theory of the instrument itself) as a single theory being tested. That is we aren't allowed the luxury of separating the two. So if we don't see what we expect then we know that the theory:
(Theory of operation of the instrument) & (Theory under investigation)
is false although we cannot be sure whether
Theory of operation of the instrument
or
Theory under investigation
or both are false. In fact we shouldn't even presume they can be nicely separated as I have just done above.
So basically this isn't really an objection to a strict Popperian, it might be an odd way of thinking about things to most people, but it isn't problematic in the way you indicated.
The only observations that exist in Popper-world are basically everyday sense observations. So I might set up an apparatus that turns on a red light when the temperature goes above a certain value. I am never observing the temperature, I am always observing the red light. Thus if I set up an experiment that according to theory should cause the red light to turn on in ten minutes (that is in ten minutes the temperature should exceed the bound), my observation is only that the light went on in ten minutes or didn't go on in ten minutes. If it didn't go on then I know that something was wrong with the sum total of all the theories involved.
Of course this might lead to the need to include a psychological theory of the observer into the whole mix and whether they are going to see the red light, or think it was green or whatever.
As for the theory we have:
What verificationist theory do we have?
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I heard about this from my control theory professor. A philosopher named Karl Popper (He's a famous one, as far as I have heard) holds the position that all theories are only 'true' until falsified. In fact he hold that theories are not really true, but that they are hypotheses that still need to be taken with a grain of salt.
He also holds that only theories that could be falsified are scientific. Stuff like 'Intelligent Design', for example, isn't.
My problem with this is: This theory cannot be falsified. It has to be taken on faith.
It seems like a twist of Hume's argument to me: "You can never know the truth, and this is true."
But he says that if you falsify a theory, then you have to discard it, which is reasonable. But still he adds Hume's element of uncertainty into it.
Any thoughts?
Let's take a specific theory: Newtonian Mechanics.
We know Newtonian Mechanics is wrong. We've falsified it. But we don't toss it because it is still useful. Newtonian Mechanics is good enough to get us to the moon and back, and it is good enough for very wide range of applications.
Of course you can't use Newtonian Mechanics for something like the GPS, because it *is* wrong and you have to bring in General Relativity.
Newtonian Mechanics is useful even if falsified.
The actual case is that we know that every one of our physical theories is falsified by some piece of empirical data. We don't take this to mean that we don't have physical theories at all, which your characterization of Popper's theory would require we do.
I suppose we could save Popper's theory by requiring that every physical theory have a range of validity and some sort of specification of error so that as long as the physical data falls within the range of error we'll say it is okay. But Popper is really concerned with some notion of absolute truth and discarding any theory when the first falsehood is found.
What is really needed is some sort of verificationist account where accumulated evidence supports a theory and gives us confidence in its application (which maps a little better to what humans actually do).
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Culture isn't limited to art and music: I was simply abbreviating some of the concretes. The point which you're deftly dancing around is that having a superior civilization is not what justifies invading another nation. Even if that civilization is the continuation of ancient Greek civilization. We may have great respect for the Greeks, but there are limits.
I'm sorry. There was a school of historical analysis that distinguished "civilization" (Zivilization...it was originally German) from "culture" (Kultur). "Civilization" denoted basically technical achievement, and "culture" denoted basically artistic achievement. I thought that sort of thought was what you were getting at.
Heh, you must have added to this just as I was replying to it. I'd say the decline long predated the Ottomans. In general, Islamic learning flourished when there were rulers willing and able to patronize it, just as in other premodern states. One precondition for this was a fairly honest bureaucracy with regular pay that didn't press too hard on the taxpayers, rule centralized enough not to lead to frequent civil wars among local underlings jockeying for power, and rulers who weren't the figureheads of tribal or ethnic factions. It also required a love of high culture, or at least a desire on the part of the ruling elite for the glory of supporting high culture, and thus the fruits of peace and prosperity. The earlier Abbasids managed this (certainly before the introduction of Turkic mercenary armies in the mid-800s), as did the Umayyads in Spain, the Samanids in eastern Persia, and the early Seljuks. Also some of the early Ottomans (to some extent anyway). However, as in all premodern states there was a strong tendency to decentralization, to the rise of mercenary armies, to corruption (such as the rise of hereditary estates in lands meant to support officials only when in office) and vast economic despoliation, and to religious fundamentalism attacking worldly knowledge. These all hampered the preservation and spread of scientific knowledge and the ideas of antiquity.The civilization of the early islamic world is a topic I've been interested in lately, but haven't been able to find a good book on, so my knowledge here is fragmentary.
From what little I know, it seem that most of the great names (including non-Muslims) from this civilization: Al-Farabi, Ibn-Rushd, Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, etc. come from the later part of the pre-Ottoman Muslim Empire, so the impression one is left with is that the rise of the Ottomans at least coincided with the end of whatever produced them.
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(Emphasis added)
Punk, this is a rather silly statement. Having a superior civilization (and for the sake of simplicity, lets qualify this statement to mean greater recognition of individual rights) does not give that civilization a free hand to crush any less civilized neighbour. It does have a moral right to vanquish enemies when they threaten that civilization.
Now in our example, Christianity presented no threat to Islam in the early centuries of the conflict. Islam easily swept through North Africa, the Middle East up to Turkey, and Spain. It was only stopped in the west in southern France and in the east somewhere south of the Ukraine. Christendom was surrounded and cut off from its major centres of intellectual thought and economy within 150 years of Islam's rise in Arabia.
I think according to Objectivist reasoning you would be correct to argue that Islam had a right to drive back the Crusaders (despite the fact that, given the context, the Crusaders were on the defensive), but saying that Islam had a right to conquer all of Europe is nonsensical. Europe no longer proved a threat to the Muslim world. Wars cost money, resources, and lives. A nation does not have a right to spend the resources and lives of its citizens because of higher civilization unless its existence is in danger, and even then, individuals are not the property of government, to spend and allocate how it wishes.
Simply put, only defensive wars can be considered moral, and Islam's was a war of aggression from its birth.
Actually I wholly agree with you.
What I really intended by that statement was a back-handed comment on some of the things the more shrill Objectivists are advocating the US do in the current political situation.
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I found it enjoyable and relaxing to read. However, I already had a very strong mathematics background at the time and already been through the proofs of Goedel's theorems in a logic course, so the ideas weren't entirely new to me.
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Yes, but Iceland had an even greater moral right to invade mainland Europe and drive the more barbarian Christians out of office (they were of course Christian, but politically were more correct that the rest of Europe). And yet, here we are, not speaking Icelandic. I admit that the Icelanders would be at a cultural disadvantage compared to those flourishing under the Golden Age of Islam, but the question is not who has the better art and music, rather it is which government respects the rights of individuals the best. The fact that some culture has crappy music is not what decides whether its government can rightly be deposed by another.
By "culture" was intended the classical civilization, not art and music. The Muslim world preserved Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Hippocrites, Galen, and so on. That is science, mathematics, medicine and all that.
Essentially when the Christians were taking over the Roman Empire and suppressing classical pagan culture people fled to Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Persia (Iran). Compare this to all the scientists that fled Germany to the US when the Nazis took over (moving the US from basically being number 4 in the sciences and science education to being number 1).
Islam of course arose after all this, but took over the areas where the sciences were flourishing and basically let them be. It perhaps even encouraged the spread of the sciences into the Iberian Peninsula.
It seems like it was the take over of the Muslim Empire by the Ottoman Turks which pushed the area into the Dark Ages that it seems to have descended into.
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Time to spice this up...
So far this thread has agreed that the Muslim world of c. 1100 CE was a superior civilization to the Christian European world of c. 1100 CE (i.e. the Muslims inherited the classical civilization and the Christians had driven Europe into a Dark Ages which they were only emerging from by learning from the Muslims). This means the Crusades represented barbarian Christians invading the lands of civilized Muslims.
Now, if we apply the reasoning the Objectivists apply to the current conflict between the civilized West and the barbarian Muslim World, we should conclude that the Muslims not only had the moral right to drive the barbarian Christians from their (the Muslim's) lands in c. 1100 CE, but they also had the moral right to invade and civilize barbarian Europe (i.e. set Christian Europe's house in order).
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One problem with understanding the Crusades is that they are typically separated out from the overall historical context.
In addition to the conventional 10 odd wars that constitute the Crusades in the Middle East there is the Reconquista within which the Christians took back Spain and Portugal from Muslim rule, as well as the crusades in north eastern europe (primarily in Poland and the Baltic) wherein the Christians (primarily Germans) conquered territory from pagan groups. There were also various crusades called within Europe where Christians killed Christians for purely political reasons (the most famous of these is the Albigensian Crusade).
In the case of the Reconquista and the Albigensian Crusade the issue was more backward areas conquering more advanced and civilized areas (in this case Spain, Portugal, and the Provence). In this case a primary result was the civilization of the High Middle Ages (Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard and all that) and ultimately the Renaissance, although the civilization had been expanding into the backwards parts of Europe prior to that.
Also a result of the actual Middle Eastern Crusades was that the Latin Christians put some effort into deposing Eastern Christian rulers and bishops and replacing them with Latin Christians. In addition one of the Crusades consisted of nothing but a sacking of Constantinople and an attempt to make what was left of the Byzantine Empire Latin and subject to Rome.
However the conquest of Spain, Portugal and the Provence resulted in a more advanced and (relatively more) tolerant culture becoming much more hysterically intolerant.
I think one can observe that the Crusades were a part of an overall pattern of a backwards Latin Catholic Europe:
1. Expanding its territories by conquest
2. Eliminating dissent within its territories from Latin Christian orthodoxy
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My understanding of the situation is that this is just another step in the same game the North Koreans have been playing for over a decade. I remember reading a news article from the Drudge Report recently that was right next to an article about Iran. Both article titles read something like "[iran/North Korea] abandons nukes."
Does anyone really believe either country is abandoning its pursuit of nuclear weaponry? I don't. I remember reading another thread in this forum that commented on the assertion by Ahmadinejad that Iran will share nuclear technology, and I think both should be unified under the heading "US Appeasement of Opponents."
The deal that we are pursuing with North Korea is a part of the same diplomatic strategy that the Clinton administration took. It is a Cold War strategy only appropriate to nations that already have nuclear arms. It is debatable whether or not we should conduct negotiations with North Korea now that they have nukes. I am not a military strategist, but I think the US would be able to cripple the delivery capability of North Korea if it were to strike first.
Worse than our situation with North Korea, the US is taking the same "Cold War" strategy with Iran. Unless I am mistaken, our current stance will only lead to a nuclear armed Islamic theocracy. For the record, I think negotiations with either country are doomed. I don't think the current administration has the moral authority to assert our inalienable right to self defense, or the conviction to back that right up with force. Without these, all negotiations are prone to failure.
North Korea and Iran would be insane to *not* develop nukes.
North Korea has been able to deter an American invasion due to its large army and its proximity to Seoul. This is expensive. It would be easier just to have the nukes and reduce the expenditure on the army.
Iran is in a position to become a second Iraq and knows it. At this point its only sure defense against that would be a nuclear deterent.
If I were in charge of either of them I'd be developing nukes as fast as I could.
The point of the nukes isn't to attack the US mainland, that would be ridiculous, and would invite massive retaliation in kind wiping out the entire country. But using the nukes to wipe out an invasion force or a couple aircraft carriers and their task forces, that would probably be enough to deter the invasion.
I don't see why people try to make out the desire of North Korea or Iran to develop nukes to be somehow *pathological*.
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Did the North Korean government follow through on its end? I thought that the US government's "promises" were made conditionally. My recollection could be wrong, of course, and so I would welcome the opportunity to examine whatever backup detail you can present for your position.
Of course, I'm not arguing that our government should have made or kept such a suicidal bargain.
--Schefflera
What's in doubt?
That there was some sort of agreement which defused hostilities a decade ago?
Or that current North Korean demands are related to that past agreement?
Anyway, anything I am asserting is based on my recollection of what I read in John Feffer's "North Korea/South Korea":
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=glance&s=books
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What does everybody think of the new deal with North Korea?
Evidently the six-part talks have an agreement "in principle" for America to semi-recognize the sovereignty of the North Korean dictatorship and not to invade it. We also have to give them massive amounts of energy and some financial aid right away. The dictatorship, in turn, vaguely agrees to abandon its nuclear weapons program sometime in the future with verification processes and timetables very obscure and still to be negotiated.
Personally, I think this is the hardest diplomatic problem in the world.
But that won't stop me from criticizing it! 
The US seems to be bribing a terrible tyrant and giving in to sheer blackmail. We also seem to be wantonly abandoning the 23 million semi-innocents of North Korea who are suffering beyond all description.North Korea wants the US to follow through on the commitments it made back in 1994 (?) under the deal brokered by Carter which probably stopped a second Korean war.
The US hasn't bothered to follow through on most of its promises (which included giving them a light water nuclear reactor).
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I'm a big fan of Terry Gilliam's work, but I do have to say that this isn't one of his best.
If you like Gilliam you'll probably enjoy this (you wont be ecstatic about it, but it'll be a pleasant little time-killer).
If you don't have any strong positive opinions about Gilliam, you'll probably dislike it.
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For a man to act effeminately. I guess its not a popular phrase 'across the pond'.
My understanding of "camp" is to be hip over-the-top theatrical silliness, usually with ridiculous costumes. So:
"The Rocky Horror Picture Show" is camp (which agrees with the above)
The old "Batman" TV series is camp (just silly, but not necessarily effeminate, but I guess with Batman there are always homoerotic undertones)
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A nation is nothing more or less than the individuals that comprise it. Contracts, in the legal sense, are between individuals or groups thereof and are always explicit if they are to serve as an enforcable contract. An 'implicit contract' is a contradiction in terms.
You are simply renaming the vague altruistic concept of "social obligation."
Sure, there are truly and infinite number of things that would be without any group's means to recover from. This risk of 'the ultimate disaster' is something we all face (i.e. a huge "planet killer" meteor) but if a disaster strikes one can only do what one can with the resources at hand.
'Need' is not a means by which resources can be acquired. A contract with an insurance company is.
I believe Ayn Rand indicated that different rules *do* apply in arguable "lifeboat" scenarios.
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The talk show host Niel Boortz had something interesting to say about this (but it wasn't dealing with Katrina; I heard him talk about this a long time ago).
He basically said that the people living in that area are aware of the risk of natural disasters when they move there. Therefore, by living in a hurricane susceptible area, you accept the risk of losing your property from a hurricane. "America" as such owes those people nothing.
I know it sounds cold but I think he's right. The people knew what they were getting in to when they moved there in the first place. Of course, there is nothing wrong with people voluntarily helping out the victims. But as Boortz said, other people don't owe them their help.
Let's see, so everyone should move away from disaster-prone areas...
So we should abandon the gulf coast because of hurricanes.
I guess they could move to california...oh wait there are earthquakes there. I guess we should insist people abandon california as well.
I guess they could move to the pacific northwest...oh wait there are volcanos and a nast fault line off the coast. I guess we should insist people abandon the pacific northwest as well.
I guess they could move to the southern atlantic coast...oh wait there are hurricanes there too. Too bad. I guess we should insist people abandon the southern atlantic coast as well.
I guess they could move to the north east. I don't know enough about there. Maybe there aren't disasters there.
Is C/c++ Still A Worthwhile Pursuit?
in Software
Posted
C++ is still the language of choice if you want to write the fastest software possible, Java and C# are going to be slower. You aren't going to see much(if any) embedded software written in Java or C#. They are fine for desktop applications and internet stuff. But if you are going to write the embedded control software for a piece of hardware, C++ all the way.