aleph_0

So I believe that the epistemological understanding of emergence is uncontroversially correct, but that there is no evidence for metaphysically emergent properties, and they may be theoretically undesirable. Here is the most thorough and focused discussion of emergence I have found outside of a text: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/

So the question of emergentism is neutral on which properties and operations you take to be fundamental or elementary. In your example, if what you are describing are the generation of words out of, say, a computer, then your operations would be fundamental. For any word, phrase, or sentence, you could use the alphabet along with a finite list of other characters (like a space, comma, etc.) to generate everything. However, they would not be fundamental if you are talking about the operations that are used to form new words, concepts, sentences. The point is merely that, in a context, once you have settled on what are your most basic operations (or at least some relatively basic operations), you call "emergent" those properties which are caused by a certain combination of these more basic properties, but which cannot be described purely in terms of them. Let's be careful. Emergent properties are more than just those which cannot be predicated of a smaller part. For example, nobody takes this to be an emergent property: One man cannot lift a very heavy object, and another man cannot lift it, but the two together can lift it, thus the two together have the property of being able to lift the object while neither in isolation does. This kind of behavior can be reduced to (relatively) more fundamental operations working in concert, namely, exerting a certain amount of force respectively. So the question is not: Can we say that any one atom or molecule, or brain cell is alive? It is: Can life be described purely in terms of molecules and cells, or at some point, do we need a unique and stratified property which emerges from the more fundamental properties? Your very last sentence suggests that you don't believe in emergentism in the strong sense, while complexity theorists seem to believe in it.

All of these are fair points, but were not the Marine's point. He was saying, "My plan is not yours to allow me to keep," in response to the administration saying, "There may be some confusion over the point, so let's make it clear: We're not taking your plan away." So the content of what the Marine said wasn't really addressing the content of the administration's message. It may have been a warning shot with a good tone, but the content wasn't exactly apt.

Though I'm pretty sure you're not saying this, just to be perfectly clear, you don't mean to say that scientific concepts are entirely mental--that they describe nothing in the objective world, do you? When I define emergent properties as those not reducible to fundamental properties operating in concert by elementary operations, take the example of the ridges that you see in the sand in a desert. This doesn't seem to be a candidate for emergence of this sort because every event that led to the formation of the ridges seems to be perfectly described in terms of the position, velocity, and mass of each grain of sand, molecule of air, etc. Given sufficient information and using Newtonian mechanics, in principle you can explain all of the events from the history to the present. (Forgetting complications of quantum mechanics.) These Newtonian mechanics are the elementary operations (though they need not be the only elementary operations you might consider in the context of some other example). Something which is often suspected of being emergent are the properties of molecules, or human consciousness. It is claimed that the properties of molecules cannot, even in principle, be explained only in terms of the properties of the atoms which make it up--you need new, categorically distinct properties to explain the behavior of molecules.

Yeah, I didn't want to ask a more precise question because I didn't want to ask about one particular theory of emergence. It sounds, perhaps, as though the two of you don't believe there are genuinely emergent properties (emergent in the strong sense, that there are properties which are not reducible to fundamental properties operating in concert by elementary operations). Perhaps you believe only that emergence is a useful way of thinking and organizing information.

All of these have foul language, but hilarious: He's on a boat. **** in a box. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhwbxEfy7fg

I'm wondering if there is a general consensus on whether there are emergent properties here, and if there is some consensus that there is, what is a general account of which properties are emergent (molecular properties not due to properties of the constitutive atoms, consciousness, etc.).

They may or may not think they have the right to change his healthcare plan--in either case, that is not what they are expressing here. Obama repeatedly remarks that you can keep your plan if you want, because he thinks people are either forgetting that they can or are confused about the matter, and not because he is trying to express that he is doing people a favor by letting them keep their plan.

To be fair, the Dems are only saying that you get to keep your medical plan because people are confused about the matter--they're not implying it's a favor or that they have the right to change it. But otherwise, a pretty inspiring clip.

I'm evading nothing, are you? Now, is "Pigs do not have wings" necessarily true? I don't know--you could pin pilot wings on a pig, then it has wings. Or you could do some genetic engineering. Pigs are mammals. That is true by understanding the terms involved. I found out what people meant by the terms through observation, but the truth of the expression is merely contained in the content of that expression. That's not clear at all--I find it clear that you did not express any broader point, if you had one in mind. I already addressed that, go back and read it. I don't recall stating that contradicts only occur in deduction systems. I'm right and you're wrong. <-- this is tantamount to your argument style. Maybe your argument from intimidation works on your soft-brained undergrads who depend on you for a grade, but it doesn't intimidate me. Anyway, I shall return to remedying your errors--probably to no benefit for you. Me and my mother speak English. We form a community. We have a language. Each term and sentence has meaning. The aggregate of these meanings is the meaning of the language. I understand it. I don't agree with it. The meaning of a term is not the set of things it may refer to. Take the word "of", it refers to nothing. The meaning of a sentence is not what it refers to--the meaning of "the cat is on the mat" refers to a cat, but does not mean a cat. Otherwise, you could just say "a cat" and mean the same thing. A less trifling problem with this theory is that the following two nouns (edit: or noun-phrases, if you like) are coextensive and do not have the same meaning: "an animal with kidneys", "an animal with a liver". "Unicorn" has no meaning? "Brown" has no meaning? (I cannot point to brown itself, only brown things.)

I don't think you have a half-decent explanation of logic, since you have no explanation of how you interpret your initial observations without first having logic. And I believe I explained that I come to understand the expression by observation, but once understood, I am dealing with a concept which I need not observe. All I need observation for is to speak the language, but not to think the thoughts which may be communicated by its means. She only taught me manners when regarding people who are polite. What in my name are you rambling about? It is true, un-untrue, and a TRUTH. You have pointed to nothing which indicates otherwise. I only marked that you may be pointing out that sentences like "Not I am a man," are ungrammatical, in which case what I really meant was "It is not the case that I am a man." Now if that's what you've really been getting at, then that is a tremendous waste of your time and mine, since we just take "not-" to be suggestive short-hand. What do you mean by symbolic concatenations? I never expressed that there is anything magical in those particular symbols which guarantee their truth--we could have used other symbols (and in fact I do, since I use a tilde). But otherwise, I maintain that they are necessarily true, when ~ is read as "it is not the case that". Empirically determining the truth conditions for cognitive entities? Where did I say that? I'm searching the records and don't find a thing. I only talked about empirically determining the meaning of a community's language, not cognitive entities.

I'm not complaining, and I'm holding my own just fine. You think the act of understanding an expression--having a thought--is an act of faith or inspiration? Because you can't realize what's false. You might think it though. But to see that it's always false, you merely need understand the expression. For ja and dahje, I can't understand the expression. I'd have to know what the words mean. That might be an empirical discovery, but once understood, the content of the expression itself is not emipirical--it is the content, something like the thought, of an expression. Such sentences are of the form "P or not-P". Unless you're being over-technical with the precise wording, in which case I meant that I know the truth of "P or it-is-not-the-case-that-P", and so I am a man or it is not the case that I am a man. Neither--my first attempt was adequate, but I'll explain if you're still not clear on these points. Yes, such examples are pesky, which is why I general deal in terms of propositions rather than sentences.

I generally don't mind people talking about "contradicting reality", but Tommy was making a pointed philosophical argument about it, and so in that context we cannot allow loose speak. As for A & ~A (who uses a caret, ferreal?), since A is either a propositional constant or a variable, it is a proposition (just not written out in full English) or it ranges over them and so represents the set of contradictions in that form. So in the later case, fair enough, it is not a single contradiction. And yes, I as I said above, anything of the form "P and not-P" is false. I came to believe it by thinking of the schema, and realizing that nothing--in principle--could ever be true of it. An analogy can be made for 1/x. I just think about the expression and realize that the only value for which it is undefined is zero. I need not check all values of x, nor even investigate this by empirical evidence (how could you?). I just think about the meaning and realize that, contained in the meaning of the expression, is that it cannot be understood for x = 0. Likewise, when I think of the meaning of the schema "P and not-P", I realize that for no P will the sentence be true. One example of a sentence of the form "P or not-P" which is always true: "I am a man, or I am not a man."

Again, you're just being ungrammatical. The words you use do not permit the order you put them it. "contradicts reality" is just unintelligible, as contra-DICTIONS regard only DICTIONS--sentences. So you can only contradict a sentence. I'm still not sure I know what you mean. Take any sentence of the form "P or not-P". I will always know that it is true, regardless of the content, so long as P is a proposition. I could use the examples above, replacing 'and' with 'or'. I don't need to check anything empirical to know that such sentences will be true. Now if your point is that modern logic gives no method for coming to know the truth of a single proposition P, that's true. That doesn't mean logicians aren't interested in finding P's truth-value, but that they have no formal way of finding it--and nor do Objectivists, so that's not just a shortcoming of formal logicians. Logicians just say that you can have VALIDITY without reference to the truth-value of the particular propositions, but that in no way implies that you get true conclusions if you don't have true premises. So I don't see what all the fuss is about. They look to the facts just as much as any Objectivist, in this regard.

What fact do you want? It is a FACT that this is what a contradiction means. Your saying you're not writing that sentence contradicts the true sentence (which expresses a fact) that you are writing the sentence. That is what a contradiction is, strictly speaking. Otherwise, you're just being ungrammatical. You misunderstand. I did not say modal logic and standard logic are the same--they are decidedly not the same. What I was saying is that your statements have been about standard logic, and NOT about modal logic. I don't know what you mean by "looking at reality", but I know that any sentence of the form "P and not-P" is false--I need look to nothing empirical to justify my conclusion. If you tell me that a ibdegab is a ruthens and that an ibdegab is not a ruthens, even though I have no idea what those words mean, I know that it is a false sentence (if, in fact, it is a sentence). You could tell me that everything that is in a superposition has indeterminate causal power, and that there is something which is in a superposition which does not have indeterminate causal power. I don't know what those words mean, really, but it doesn't matter. The statement is false. Now that might be closer to rationalism, but it has nothing to do with the invalid argument above. Modal logic doesn't really deal in precise ranges of probability, that's left for probability theory. Modal logic deals more in just the "necessary" and the "possible", qualitatively rather than quantitatively.

To which facts do you want a modal logician to refer? When discussing physical modality, they look to natural science, if that's what you want. But if you're talking about modal systems that account for some notions of possibility, well, they look to reality just as much as any standard logician does--they think about their axioms and write out a system which attempts to characterize them. Again, this isn't modal logic. This is standard logic. Modal logic trades in boxes and diamonds, and accessibility relations. None of that is involved here. In fact, to be blunt, I'm pretty sure you have no idea what modal logic is. Modal logic is nothing more than standard logic with a non-truth-functional unary operator. That is also a rough characterization to which no modal logician would readily acquiesce. Well strictly speaking a contradiction is a statement which is contrary to itself or another statement--"contra" meaning, roughly, "against" and "diction" meaning, roughly, an expression. So it is not even grammatical to say that some statement contradicts reality or a fact. It is only grammatical to say that some statement contradicts a true statement about reality or a fact. So strictly, yes, a contradiction is only a statement and its negation. Now a logician would NOT necessarily say that pigs cannot fly isn't contradictory with true statements about reality. This is not relevant to rationalism, since many rationalists (like in any other branch of philosophy) will have many different notions of truth. This would never carry snuff with any logician, rationalist or not. There is the implicit premise that if something is comprised of another thing, then it carries all of the composite properties (or even some, namely, volition or its lack). This would be extremely contentions for any philosopher, rationalist or not. Ironically, though, rationalists tend to believe in free will more often than many other kinds of philosophers, like empiricists. Look this is silly. A rationalist may or may not believe that man is comprised of matter and has free will independent of all of this, and the same can be said for any other philosopher. If the rationalist believes it, then he will take the argument to be based on false premises (perhaps by denying the antheme), and if he does not believe it then he may or may not accept the argument. Just because a rationalist believes that our most certain truths are truths completely contained in the mind will not influence this subject in any determinate way. Rationalism has nothing to do with these invalid proofs. They're just tests and practices on spotting logical errors.

That's a pretty rough characterization of rationalism which I don't think any rationalist would acquiesce to. As for modal logic, not just modal logicians but EVERY logician would agree that that syllogism is false but valid. That's just from what the word "valid" means. It means that, assuming true premises, the conclusion follows from them. The word valid has no other meaning in logic, and so the syllogism is in fact valid. The word "false" means something different than valid, and here the argument is false because of false premises. That's not modal logic. That's standard logic. And the adjective "logical" is not something formally defined in logic--it's a colloquial term, so I have no idea what you mean by it in this context. Whether this account is Objectivist logic, I don't know, I'd be surprised if anyone said there was such a thing as Objectivist logic--but perhaps many Objectivists dislike this concept of validity, which I think would be unfortunate since it is a good distinction to show a person what is wrong with his argument and what he should be careful of in future arguments.

We all know it's wrong. You identified why with many words, Rud identified it with few, that's all I was pointing out. It is not rationalism since no rationalist (or at least, no non-amateur rationalist) believes you can divide by zero. Descartes, if you'll remember, was the foremost rationalist and one of the greatest mathematicians in history. The person who made it up was not trying to prove a contradiction, I am almost sure of it. The person who came up with it was more likely trying to give a test to make people see what went wrong. In fact, this is how it was delivered to me. Someone wrote the proof and said, "So what's wrong with it?" The point is to train the reader to become good at spotting invalid moves in mathematics. There are many such "proofs". Another less tricky one: 1 = (1)^(1/2) = ([-1][-1])^(1/2) = (-1)^(1/2) * (-1)^(1/2) = -1 ==> 1 = -1. You're not supposed to be convinced by this, you're supposed to find the error.

As Jake pointed out in a long-winded way, and Rudmer pointed out in a brief way, A = B (so they're not both zero, they're just equal). That was in the initial set-up. And so you can't divide by A - B = 0. This has nothing at all to do with rationalism and I don't see an out-right problem with modal logic. It's consistent and provably complete for many of its axiom systems, so it's a pretty fun tool.

So I don't have the time or inclination to read most of this topic, and while I don't have any philosophical objection to set theory (the null set is just defined as that set which is in all sets, and has no members--no big deal, just a definition of a term, a creation of a language-game), if anyone is interested in alternatives to set theory, there is category theory which takes the mapping relation as primitive (I'm not sure how, but whatever) and there is present-day research going into replacements of set theory based on formal ontology. Namely, there is a formal ontology which is trying to reproduce the successes of set theory but without having a most basic element (motivated by the mereological theory in which there is no basic unit of matter but which is instead gunky). That is to say, it effectively does away with the null-set, which in set theory is like a most-basic set. FYI.

So this, too, will be off-topic, and it's an oldie but a goodie: Let A = B, then A^2 = AB ==> A^2 - B^2 = AB - B^2 = (A+B )(A-B ) = B(A-B ) ==> A+B = B = 2B ==> 2 = 1.

The documentary style was, I thought, only mildly annoying but largely forgettable. As for the plot-holes, I don’t think they’re so hole-y as all that. I mean, they dropped down technology that could be used to produce fuel over the course of 20 years. So that would mean that the ship is not necessarily full of fuel. How does it hover? We don’t know their technology, but the idea seems to be that having the ship hover was like making it tread water—it takes energy, but not much relative to the power needed to propel them across the universe to their homes. They rebel and fight because they knew that, though they had more advanced weapons, they couldn’t fight off the whole planet. Moreover, they were starving and needed the food on the planet surface, so they couldn’t just run back to their ship. Once they had the fuel, though, they didn’t need to have the buried ship fly up—that was just the way that seemed best for the character in that situation. When the ship got downed, the next best thing was to have the mothership pull it up, now that it has fuel to go back home. I don’t get the insistence on the fuel thing. They had enough fuel for small functions, not enough to travel far and fast. They probably came down to the surface because they were starving on their ship. Nobody seemed to know that new fuel could be produced except the one guy who was doing—I don’t know why the information didn’t get out. Maybe they didn’t ask him and he couldn’t get in touch with anyone important enough to inform them. That might be something of a plot hole. But once there, people don’t want them to fly off because they want the weapons and bio tech. It’s a little silly that the fuel turned the guy into an alien, but whatever, it’s just part of the fiction, not a plot hole. I don’t see why this would imply anything about fossil fuels. And I don’t know that the guy took pleasure in killing their young—he seemed squeamish about killing any of them, and didn’t think of the unhatched eggs as alive and was just entertained by the popping sound they made when burned. And I don’t think he’s supposed to be innocent and just following orders, anyway. He doesn’t seem to recognize or care about their lives, except as something like lower-life forms, presumably because of the way they live. I thought the stupidity of the people at the party was pretty silly, too. Especially when he was shaking people’s hands and his fingernails were supposedly fallen off. Nobody noticed? What about his dizziness and the fact that he coughed up black gunk? Who coughs up black gunk unless he’s turning into an alien? Everyone should have known exactly what’s going on. As for him “needing” to turn into an alien to feel sympathetic, I don’t think that’s supposed to be a broad statement about humanity, but just that this guy didn’t get it and didn’t feel the need to care, until he was put into that situation himself. I did find it annoying that the film had no characters who were alien-rights activists. You know millions of bleeding-heart liberals would come marching out of the woodwork to South Africa if anything like that story were true. His turning into an alien, though, was more just part of the story. It didn’t happen all at once, so 2/3s into the story, it’s still going on. That doesn’t seem like a problem. I don’t get the point about the mech suit being a fallacy. A movie device for explosion scenes and a really awkward “I’m not afraid of you,” scene, but a fallacy? And I guess the guy couldn’t go along because people were already trying to shoot down the ship. He couldn’t get anyone else on-board. I think the idea was, he goes home, fuels up, and brings back ships that can carry everyone and resist human military forces. I thought the movie was meh. Worth $6 for the fight scenes.

Thanks! I tried finding Berekley's, since I heard about it on other sites, but couldn't locate it.

So MIT led the charge for Open Courseware, whereby anyone can view video lectures of courses offered, for free, through their website (or, now, through YouTube). I've been taking advantage of this quite useful resource, and now other universities are offering similar things. I thought it would be good for others to know about it, and so I've begun compiling a list of other such resources, accessible from my website, www.adamfrank.net.

If it did, conservation was a discovered law. Strictly speaking, the boundary is never open or closed--the figure is open or closed. But anyway, you don't have evidence that the objects around you right now are not open, and I don't see any reason to suppose that it's impossible to tell. Just point-sized objects. That is, having no extension. What would be the problem? I've had conversations with people more mathematically educated than I am, and they've never expressed knowledge of such problems. What infinite precision problem do I have? I just need verifiability, like with atoms.