rowsdower

A while back I read a book of essays on Ayn Rand and some academic was complaining how she didn't just go the distance and equate words with concepts. (The book contained many other mistakes, wish I remembered the name.) I thought, how ridiculous this is! But then I found the quote: "With the exception of proper names, every word we use is a concept" (aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/concepts.html).
Well, this simply isn't true. Consider the sentence:
 
You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
 
"You" is a deixis (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/deixis) and isn't quite a proper name or a concept (okay, this one is nitpicking and You can consider it a proper name if You want to.)
"are... to be... by" rearrange the sentence. It is grammatically equivalent to "Likely, a grue will eat you.". (We can do this deductively without considering the meanings of the words rearranged.) The sentence isn't really about what you are (where "are" is the concept of being).
"a" grue distinguishes it from "the" referred-to-before grue, but the only concept describing our entity so far is "grue". You might say, "but I distingish it from a group," but then realize that you had to say a group. It's just grammar.
 
Similarly, you certainly have concepts about the use of these words. But this does not mean that the words are concepts. I have a concept of a period, and a period aids in transmitting meaning, but it is not itself a concept.
 
Don't go thinking grammar is bound in a well-defined way to meaning, as our very own page (wiki.objectivismonline.net/Concept) seems to. Grammar is a fickle mistress and will confound you at every step.
 
P.S. If you choose a random entry in a dictionary, you will almost certainly find a concept.
 
P.P.S. If you found this post too easy, try and count the concepts in "It would have been done earlier had it not been delayed until later by what he had been doing to it."
 

I'm afraid that your posts must be treated as if nothing is said, as without a 'greater semantic set' your outlook can not be treated as a proposition, and being inherently mathematical, it it can't be treated as anything else.
 
 
This requires more psychological distinctions of 'belief'. We can supposedly do all of these separately:
1) say something is true
2) act as if something is true
3) think something is true
4) pretend something is true (for drama, gaming...), but not really act as if it was true (you can pause)
5) consider a hypothetical (or listen to a story)
 
But you can't fully think something is true and at the same time fully think it isn't true, so I think this would be #4. You probably root for the Lakers for the same reason you root for fictional characters.

">>O.K. why not? [is every idea a logical proposition]"
The burden of proof should be on you, because I don't know how you came to the conclusion that propositional logic describes all outlooks.
An ill-defined idea (such as God) is not suited to formalization. And propositional logic itself could hardly be called a proposition.
 
">No, this is frustrating, I do say God is Reality. That sentence was still trying to get across this concept of an ultimate superset of all Reality."
I would disagree that reality is a set at all, but if so, is God a strict superset of all reality? If so, God is not reality.
 
"So, the union of any set with its complement is God.
>>No, I never said ANY set, reductionist logic."
The union of any set with its complement is the set of everything, AKA God.
A set of everything is simply a set that always says "yes, I contain this." Or formally, { x | ⊤ }. It is the complement of the nil set (Satan?).
 
">> My last reading of latest and greatest in the study of physics sure looks like nature is pretty mathematical to me."
The ability to use math does not mean that things are made out of math.
Just like the ability to describe ideas using propositional logic does not mean ideas are propositional logic, or that reality is nothing more than a set of propositions.
Just like the ability to talk about things does not mean that they are made out of words.
 
Objectivists try to be rational, but not rationalist.

No, it's not.
 
 
No, it's not.
 
This just makes no sense.
 
So, God by your definition would have to be conscious, and is the infinite set.
So, the union of any set with its complement is God.
def GodContains(x:Any) = true
This Scala code for the infinite set certainly isn't conscious.
Later on you act as if God exists in a much different sense than mathematical constructs exist.
 
Nature is not.
 
You can't talk about your outlook and claim to be outside of it. That would certainly be inconsistent of you.
 
Hardly. It is about math.
 
There must be some reason you don't say, "God is reality;" is God above reality?
 
You claim to be Objectivist, but your idea of "is" is awfully strange. Now we distinguish between God, reality, and nature, where God is über reality, but God exists (most things exist in reality, not above it); God is nature, but nature is not God.
 
...the hell?
 
No, it's not.
 
No, it's not.
 
I think the rationalists would be cool with everything you've said.
An outlook is a logical proposition? ✔
Über reality? ✔
God is an infinite set? ✔
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem proves God? ✔
God is a mathematical concept? ✔
"Your mind is too small"? ✔
 
EDIT: I may not know whether P = NP, but I'm sure not going to ask God.

Let's say I have two “plus balls”.

I take one ball and see what I can do with it. After some experimenting, I discover that it can roll on the ground, bounce against the wall, and squeak when I squeeze it in my hand.

Done playing, I put the ball back on the shelf next to the other ball. They push each other apart.

According to Wikipedia, “Strong emergence describes the direct causal action of a high-level system upon its components; qualities produced this way are irreducible to the system's constituent parts.”

So, someone might say that this pushing apart is an emergent property that can not be explained in terms of explanations the individual balls (which involve rolling, bouncing, and squeaking).

This emergence is described epistemologically (in terms of reduction); let's look at it metaphysically. It's a relationship between two balls. Does the relationship exist outside of the balls? No. So how can the relationship's explanation exist outside that of the balls? Every explanation about a ball describes its potential to have relationships; with the ground, the wall, my hand. The system isn't some third party that also gets a say. Saying that it is in control, but not its parts, would be some kind of reification.

Applying this to people:

If you say that a person has a strongly emergent property not reducible to their parts, what are you saying? Like before, the person doesn't exist outside of the parts, so what of the explanation of the person? Would you be suggesting the person may cause their parts to do something that the parts are not individually explained to do? Then the explanations of the parts are incomplete; the parts also have the capacity to have a person-relation.

But not every part is directly related to every other part; the entire relation is based on many smaller relations. This is reduction.

In short:
~Strong emergence says the system can't be explained by the explanations of the parts.
~But the system is the relations the parts.
~The explanations of the parts must include these relations.
~So, the behavior of the system must be explained by the explanations of the parts.

So, strong emergence makes no sense to me.