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7 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

Did you learn anything from this video?

I sure did: more on the ways complex analysis is like and different from real analysis (including likeness and difference of R2 and C). I want to watch it again, and I hope to listen also to his part II and part III. The portion starting at about 9:00 was right on our mathematical issue, and I'd expect would be informative to you as it was to me; the part before that is good, but you probably already knew. Are you able to understand each word in that accent? Did you already know it all?

(My favorite college mathematics professor was Indian (ordinary differential equations), and so was my favorite philosophy professor, who had done his advanced degree in Göttingen, then was professor in India, then migrated from the Ganges to the Red River in time to get me going on KrV. I love the accent and get every word, due to all that practice, I imagine.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Have you been exposed to the quaternionic formulation of quantum mechanics (Adler 1995)? I do not yet understand the work of Renou et al. well enough to know whether their result also renders any quaternionic formualation of QM short of adequate. By "adequate" I mean as the meaning of Geroch in Mathematical Physics: 

Edited by Boydstun
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50 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

I sure did: more on the ways complex analysis is like and different from real analysis (including likeness and difference of R2 and C). I want to watch it again, and I hope to listen also to his part II and part III. The portion starting at about 9:00 was right on our mathematical issue, and I'd expect would be informative to you as it was to me; the part before that is good, but you probably already knew. Are you able to understand each word in that accent? Did you already know it all?

(My favorite college mathematics professor was Indian (ordinary differential equations), and so was my favorite philosophy professor, who had done his advanced degree in Göttingen, then was professor in India, then migrated from the Ganges to the Red River in time to get me going on KrV. I love the accent and get every word, due to all that practice, I imagine.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Have you been exposed to the quaternionic formulation of quantum mechanics (Adler 1995)? I do not yet understand the work of Renou et al. well enough to know whether their result also renders any quaternionic formualation of QM short of adequate. By "adequate" I mean as the meaning of Geroch in Mathematical Physics: 

Given the specific formalization of QM as accepted I would suspect other kinds of numbers as operators or coefficients to the so-called “states” would be improper somehow.

I played around with quaternions, more specifically a sort of Mandelbrot generalization to render fractals on a … believe it or not… Amiga computer back in the day.  I believe there are multiple imaginary bases i j and k, each squared is -1 but the product of any two is the other (positive or negative depending on the order of multiplication) 

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1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

. . .

Have you been exposed to the quaternionic formulation of quantum mechanics (Adler 1995)? I do not yet understand the work of Renou et al. well enough to know whether their result also renders any quaternionic formualation of QM short of adequate. By "adequate" I mean as the meaning of Geroch in Mathematical Physics: 

Oops, I got the terms mixed up. Geroch's term was "appropriate," not "adequate." It's his meaning of his term I have in mind: everything in the mathematics has physical meaning and all of the physics one wishes to talk about is describable in terms of the mathematics. Such is an appropriate mathematics for the physics.

Some of our mathematics used in physics, I say, hopefully uncontroversially, is clearly a matter of chosen tool, not the mathematical character of the physical reality. Such would be using base 10 in arithmetic calculations and using various coordinate systems. As fruitful as it was to realize that curves can be described by algebraic equations written with reference to a coordinate system, when it comes to geometric facts of curves in the Euclidean plane, which we may take for planes of the physical geometry around us, the method of Euclid we learn in high school for bisecting a line segment is perfect location and physical; no coordinates lain over things by us and used to describe the curves and their intersections add something physical, which we get directly by synthetic geometry (Euclid's way being an example of synthetic geometry, as distinct from analytic geometry).

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2 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Oops, I got the terms mixed up. Geroch's term was "appropriate," not "adequate." It's his meaning of his term I have in mind: everything in the mathematics has physical meaning and all of the physics one wishes to talk about is describable in terms of the mathematics. Such is an appropriate mathematics for the physics.

Some of our mathematics used in physics, I say, hopefully uncontroversially, is clearly a matter of chosen tool, not the mathematical character of the physical reality. Such would be using base 10 in arithmetic calculations and using various coordinate systems. As fruitful as it was to realize that curves can be described by algebraic equations written with reference to a coordinate system, when it comes to geometric facts of curves in the Euclidean plane, which we may take for planes of the physical geometry around us, the method of Euclid we learn in high school for bisecting a line segment is perfect location and physical; no coordinates lain over things by us and used to describe the curves and their intersections add something physical, which we get directly by synthetic geometry (Euclid's way being an example of synthetic geometry, as distinct from analytic geometry).

Language, concept, number, these we are possessed of and are all part of our grasping of and our relating ourselves to entities.

Entities themselves, however, are not in any way possessed of any of language, concept, or number.

That we "find" them poetic or majestic, of a kind or a phenotype, or multitudinous or stochastic, although somethings of them, something about their identity, is touchable and accessible by our various abstraction apparatuses, those somethings of them are not themselves linguistic, conceptual, or mathematical. 

For those, are only us, as they only ever could and should be.

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On 3/22/2023 at 12:51 AM, StrictlyLogical said:

Language, concept, number, these we are possessed of and are all part of our grasping of and our relating ourselves to entities.

Entities themselves, however, are not in any way possessed of any of language, concept, or number.

That we "find" them poetic or majestic, of a kind or a phenotype, or multitudinous or stochastic, although somethings of them, something about their identity, is touchable and accessible by our various abstraction apparatuses, those somethings of them are not themselves linguistic, conceptual, or mathematical. 

For those, are only us, as they only ever could and should be.

@Boydstun

and as we no longer despair at the terrifyingly silent and sublimely blind universe...

at the thought that there are no supernatural third parties, cosmic parents, approving or protective stellar clergy or teachers... to protect or guide or approve or in any way give us meaning... at the realization that life has no intrinsic meaning.. nor can be any value or cherished thing to an unimaginably infinite roaring silent unthinking universe...

as we come to understand that meaning and value in life and existence are ours and ours alone, no matter how small we may seem, that we make these things in their entirety, in spite of their not being made for us, and indeed because they are not out there... we can find greater meaning in our meanings.  We do so precisely because they are in us, for us, of us.

 

so too, we no longer despair that the crashing, crushing, silent, blinding, bewildering and magnificent universe

is not a perfect Platonic ideal creation of a supernatural perfect consciousness... awaiting discovery by remembrance...

and is not of us, and is outside of our experiences, our values, our thoughts, our meanings.. it is not our possession or controlled by anything we can conceive... only our subject... we paint him or her with loving or despairing strokes, we find beauty and horror, perplexity and simplicity in our re-creations, and yes we make pattern and meaning,

and sometimes we relate by seeing ourselves out there... even in the stars...  the Great Bear, Draco,.... and Orion...and yes the abstractions, the operators, the probabilities, the differentials, the integrals, the sine functions, the vectors, ...we see them too.

Yet, we can find greater love of ourselves in seeing that the beauty, the pattern, the simplicity and even the perplexity... all sublime and full of meaning... are all OF us, and OF our relating that great whirling vastness that IS, to ourselves.

Edited by StrictlyLogical
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SL,

So far as I understand you, I incline to agree with Nozick 1981 on the relation of value to the world (which may coincide with the outlook you expressed). He gave four or five possible relations between value and the world, and among them, he rated as best: We choose that there be value, but what the character of value there is is not up to us. I differ from him on what he took to be the basis of objective value, which was degree of organic unity. I'm with Rand on the basis: life. Indeed the value in organic unity, whether in art or in the making a business, is derivative from the character of life, including its character of organic unity. We choose that there be value in that we choose to make life our conscious operative goal. 

Concerning our relation cognitively to the world, I think it everywhere good (and a joy) to parse what is from the human mind and what lies in the world independently of our thinking about that thing in the world. I mentioned coordinate systems upstream. Our perceptual illusion of the largeness of the sun or moon near the horizon is also a phenomenon humans were able to soundly reason, even before experience of photographs, must be a contribution of our visual system, in whatever unknown way.

In many of my writings published since way back, I have taken set membership to be only a tool of the mind, which can be applied productively to the world. In the world there are members of families, but no members of sets independently of the thinking mind. Then there are in the mind-independent world no members of sets as such along shared qualitative dimensions of things, which is to say that independently of mind, there are no concepts of the Randian form in the mind-independent world. Such sets along noted world-given dimensions are tied to magnitude structure in the world, but they are tools from us for keeping good track of things in the world.

Then too, in my fundamental paper "Existence, We" I have parsed some of what in logic is in the world independently of our thinking logically about the world from what appears only by connection to our minds thinking about the world. There is sameness and difference and similarity and dissimilarity in the mind- and perception-independent world. There is identity in the mind-independent world, though not self-self identity in the mind-independent world. The guide of non-contradiction is of course a guide for us fact-seeking minds and keeping ourselves unified in our fact-seeking. Identity, on which the rule depends, is in the mind-independent world; non-contradiction is not. My most novel insight in this area was that the law of excluded middle is similarly not in the mind-independent world. That is, it is novel when joined with my original proposal that all disjunctions in cognition are descendants from the alternative set up by the phenomenon of life: life or death. Life is the bringer of alternatives into the world scene.

Nothing in the preceding remarks depends on any of the differences between Rand's metaphysics and mine. All of it can be consistently assimilated into Objectivism.

Thank you for the reflections, SL.

Edited by Boydstun
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1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

SL,

So far as I understand you, I incline to agree with Nozick 1981 on the relation of value to the world (which may coincide with the outlook you expressed). He gave four or five possible relations between value and the world, and among them, he rated as best: We choose that there be value, but what the character of value there is is not up to us. I differ from him on what he took to be the basis of objective value, which was degree of organic unity. I'm with Rand on the basis: life. Indeed the value in organic unity, whether in art or in the making a business, is derivative from the character of life, including its character of organic unity. We choose that there be value in that we choose to make life our conscious operative goal. 

Concerning our relation cognitively to the world, I think it everywhere good (and a joy) to parse what is from the human mind and what lies in the world independently of our thinking about that thing in the world. I mentioned coordinate systems upstream. Our perceptual illusion of the largeness of the sun or moon near the horizon is also a phenomenon humans were able to soundly reason, even before experience of photographs, must be a contribution of our visual system, in whatever unknown way.

In many of my writings published since way back, I have taken set membership to be only a tool of the mind, which can be applied productively to the world. In the world there are members of families, but no members of sets independently of the thinking mind. Then there are in the mind-independent world no members of sets as such along shared qualitative dimensions of things, which is to say that independently of mind, there are no concepts of the Randian form in the mind-independent world. Such sets along noted world-given dimensions are tied to magnitude structure in the world, but they are tools from us for keeping good track of things in the world.

Then too, in my fundamental paper "Existence, We" I have parsed some of what in logic is in the world independently of our thinking logically about the world from what appears only by connection to our minds thinking about the world. There is sameness and difference and similarity and dissimilarity in the mind- and perception-independent world. There is identity in the mind-independent world, though not self-self identity in the mind-independent world. The guide of non-contradiction is of course a guide for us fact-seeking minds and keeping ourselves unified in our fact-seeking. Identity, on which the rule depends, is in the mind-independent world; non-contradiction is not. My most novel insight in this area was that the law of excluded middle is similarly not in the mind-independent world. That is, it is novel when joined with my original proposal that all disjunctions in cognition are descendants from the alternative set up by the phenomenon of life: life or death. Life is the bringer of alternatives into the world scene.

Nothing in the preceding remarks depends on any of the differences between Rand's metaphysics and mine. All of it can be consistently assimilated into Objectivism.

Thank you for the reflections, SL.

 

Platonic idealism was truly my second religion, and it has taken a very long time for me to entirely step away from both and fully accept all that entails.

 

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5 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

 

Platonic idealism was truly my second religion, and it has taken a very long time for me to entirely step away from both and fully accept all that entails.

 

What do YOU mean by platonic idealism? Are you accusing some contemporary not your former self of precisely THAT which you mean?

Between wrestling stones making my flagstone sidewalk and going back out to work myself into the ground splitting wood, I took a lot of precious time writing that comment for you this afternoon (after receiving the PM from you indicating you wanted further communication on this topic). And this laconic sentence is all you have to offer in return? And no specific sign of you having read or understood or appreciated or wondered-over anything specifically I worked up for you in that comment based on your earlier posts best I could understand them? Talk some clear specifics, OK? Or I'm finished with trying to communicate with you.

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1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

What do YOU mean by platonic idealism? Are you accusing some contemporary not your former self of precisely THAT which you mean?

Between wrestling stones making my flagstone sidewalk and going back out to work myself into the ground splitting wood, I took a lot of precious time writing that comment for you this afternoon (after receiving the PM from you indicating you wanted further communication on this topic). And this laconic sentence is all you have to offer in return? And no specific sign of you having read or understood or appreciated or wondered-over anything specifically I worked up for you in that comment based on your earlier posts best I could understand them? Talk some clear specifics, OK? Or I'm finished with trying to communicate with you.

To all appearances our exchange, to the extent there was one, morphed into taking turns presenting new and separate quite personal and long held observations…

when things get into a I show you mine … replied with you showing me yours… I have found that keeping a respectful distance between yours is yours and mine is mine… leads to fewer “difficulties”.  

I learned this from a woman (with whom I am no longer) who adamantly pushed back at attempts of mine to analyze “hers” as though it were “ours” … and so although I was a little disappointed in the indirectness or non-response to my (albeit poetic and rambling) post, I nonetheless saw no common speaking points and decided to retain a respectful distance from your personal observations … adding only a note to clarify/conclude my own, which up to now may have been overly sprinkled with metaphor for third parties to directly understand.

Other readers no doubt will take what they may from our separate musings, and I bear no ill will towards your choosing to respond in the way you did… it just did not appear to be a conversational response.

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..speaking of Platonism or neoPlatonic metaphysics, did Stephen Wolfram just 'confirm' the validity of the conceptualization of 'the' aether , and imply the veracity of Chris Lagan's CTMU?

A layman's foray into voyeuristic physics podcasting makes for strange bedfellow-like connections, lol.

The TOE(theory of everything) podcast series recently showed Wolfram at a conference talking of his latest doings , awesome talk , the kind that makes the brain hurt good :)

Edited by tadmjones
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2 hours ago, tadmjones said:

..speaking of Platonism or neoPlatonic metaphysics, did Stephen Wolfram just 'confirm' the validity of the conceptualization of 'the' aether , and imply the veracity of Chris Lagan's CTMU?

A layman's foray into voyeuristic physics podcasting makes for strange bedfellow-like connections, lol.

The TOE(theory of everything) podcast series recently showed Wolfram at a conference talking of his latest doings , awesome talk , the kind that makes the brain hurt good :)

Can you post a link?

Sometimes a TOE (theory of everything) from certain quarters looks more like a TFA ... (Theory For ANYTHING).

 

I can come up with one:

Things don't have properties... things do not have location or occupy space, in fact there are no things, there is only space , and space has latent fluctuating properties which we see as things.

Space can have density, color, electromagnetic fields, weight, etc.  these, many more, and in fact all of the other properties and attributes we see in nature.  We mistakenly associate them with entities.  But, the fluctuations of these properties OF space, in the coincidental combinations which we associate with objects, is an illusion.  There are NO things, just properties of space.... 

All is space whose aspects are simply turned on and off and at various amplitudes at various positions, and which interact and change over time...

See?  SOLVED it!

 

Edited by StrictlyLogical
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1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHPQ_oSsJgg

TOE s and TOA s, especially post Einstein, don't change much in regard my toe and the threat posed to them by an errant bowling ball :)

Have you watched this?  Is it worth my time or is he, like Pythagoras, just a Mathematician who has lost it and is claiming the universe IS... well Math?

Edited by StrictlyLogical
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If these kinds of statements would disqualify him , I’d avoid the video

“Stephen Wolfram has gone as far as claiming that CA may help us to solve longstanding issues in philosophy: 

Among them [the fundamental issues philosophers address] are questions about the ultimate limits of knowledge, free will, the uniqueness of the human condition and the inevitability of mathematics. Much has been said over the course of philosophical history about each of these. Yet inevitably it has been informed only by current intuitions about how things are supposed to work. But my discoveries in this book [A New Kind of Science] lead to radically new intuitions. (Wolfram 2002: 10)”
CA here refers to cellular automata.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cellular-automata/
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23 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

If these kinds of statements would disqualify him , I’d avoid the video

“Stephen Wolfram has gone as far as claiming that CA may help us to solve longstanding issues in philosophy: 

Among them [the fundamental issues philosophers address] are questions about the ultimate limits of knowledge, free will, the uniqueness of the human condition and the inevitability of mathematics. Much has been said over the course of philosophical history about each of these. Yet inevitably it has been informed only by current intuitions about how things are supposed to work. But my discoveries in this book [A New Kind of Science] lead to radically new intuitions. (Wolfram 2002: 10)”
CA here refers to cellular automata.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cellular-automata/

As soon as he can come up with a prediction which is independently verifiable via experiment (assuming he understands the importance of such in science) which comes out of his theories and contradicts the present models…  I will look into his theory of the universe.  

Until then, I cannot take him seriously.

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2 hours ago, tadmjones said:

I thought his name would be familiar, perhaps he is just a ‘pop star’ mathematician/theoretical physicist . Though at least to me his resume seems impressive, enough. Got his PhD in theoretical particle physics from Caltech at 20 , Feynman was one of his advisors.

He could be smart as all heck, but that won't do him any good if, when it comes to philosophy or mysticism, he's out to lunch.  He'll just use his knowledge to rationalize his unprovable claims....

I'm not saying that he actually is doing that, only that being smart in Math or Theoretical physics, even VERY smart, is no defense against the kinds of rationalistic, idealism, and reification, type pitfalls can which assail many specialists in those fields.  Escaping those pitfalls often requires much more broader vision and ability to make wider integrations than is associated with super specialist smartness... in fact sometimes being incredibly narrowly smart can be a hindrance... and with mathematicians ... they swim in it so much every day, everything can start to look like math.

 

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Computational is definitely a word I associate with hearing him mentioned and a word he uses frequently. He made his money in computing, developed a computational nature language based programming language, and currently on his website they are showing the results of his plug in interface working with ChatGPT.

I suppose I thought he was well known enough in the field, perhaps that’s just an effect of the algorithm’s steering me to certain content. Maybe he’s part of the physics ‘dark web’.

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7 hours ago, tadmjones said:

I suppose I thought he was well known enough in the field, perhaps that’s just an effect of the algorithm’s steering me to certain content. Maybe he’s part of the physics ‘dark web’.

Now now...Don't get so cheeky you start to sound like your trolling.   physics dark web... lol

People like him have been around forever...and you know it.

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  • 1 month later...
On 1/16/2023 at 5:52 PM, Doug Morris said:

Intuitive probability involves attempts to assign numerical probabilities to such outcomes as Trump being nominated in 2024 or Ukraine driving Russia out of Crimea within the next 5 years.  It is an overreach and is not really connected to reality.  However, a form of it is implicit in a betting person's willingness to make some bets and not others.

A somewhat related discussion is in today's email edition of the New York Times:

"Probabilistic decision-making tends to be better decision-making, Robert Rubin has learned with help from a yellow pad.  "

 

Edited by Doug Morris
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  • 2 weeks later...

I have to follow in your footsteps. When we built our house I was excited about designing and laying a brick/paver walkway from where the driveway pavement gave way to the front porch 'apron'. I formed the sections and laid under material and tamped the crap out of it , but the job I did only had a two decade 'halflife',lol.

I doubt I'll redo it in brick, just have to figure the elevation change/slope to see how many sections I'll need to pour of cement.

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