On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 11:54:14AM -0800, Tom Carter wrote:
> Russell - > > I'm with you on this . . . I tend to push the "don't reify!" side > perhaps a bit too hard, but mostly because I see so much of the > reification habit out there, together with its attendant traps . . . > > On the "free will is an illusion" issue . . . an interesting read > on that topic is "The User Illusion : Cutting Consciousness Down to > Size," by Tor Norretranders (Norretranders is a "Science Reporter" > rather than an actual scientist, so I recommend taking a salt shaker > with you when you read this, but it does raise some interesting > issues . . . Libet's work plays a significant role, if you are > familiar . . .) > > tom > Reminds me of the wag who said "Schroedinger: cutting quantum mechanics down to psi's" I'll see if I can get hold of the book. Cheers -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics 0425 253119 (") UNSW SYDNEY 2052 R.Standish at unsw.edu.au Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2
OK -- on my Big Bang skepticism thing -- this is the big heinous rant I canned.
(fair warning, I canned it for a reason.) On 12/10/05, Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote: > It seems to me that "The Road to Reality" as a title invites one to > see "The Road" as something that might go on and on, require rerouting > on occasion, require maintenance, and not necessarily ever reach or > even be capable of reaching its intended destination. Yet most of > this criticism seems to assume an ultimate reality implicit in > Penrose's book that has already been invalidated by one empirical > observation or another. yes, also, if he says that he can put us on the road to reality, where exactly does he think we're starting from? Arkansas? > It it relevant to quibble with his platonic views if you're going to > end up using the same mathematics to describe reality in the end? this is really the major question of freshman year at St. John's. I started ranting about this but my rant didn't make sense so I deleted it. short answer: I personally believe that the great thinker of classical Greece was Euclid, and Plato was just a commentator. most "Platonic philosophers" are in reality neither Platonic nor philosophers. they don't even read Plato correctly. Plato wrote in dialogues. plenty of philosophers since then have read Plato as prose. if you want to realize just how incredibly stupid that is, read something by Shakespeare, then go see that same work performed on stage by actors. or, to make it more obvious, read a cookbook without ever setting foot in a kitchen. it's a dialog. reading it as prose leads to parsing errors. it's like trying to eat a sweater, or drive a sofa to work. one of Plato's classic dialogs is the Meno. the Meno is named after a guy called Meno. Socrates doesn't want to talk to Meno at all, but Meno chases him all over the place until Socrates agrees to talk. so Socrates talks to Meno about thought. lots of work of "Platonic" philosophy is based on what Socrates says to Meno, and Socrates uses motion as a metaphor for thought frequently in the Meno while talking to the guy called Meno. the word Meno, in Ancient Greek, means "I don't move" or "I remain" (or even, in a coding sense, "I persist"). so if thought is motion, and you're talking to a guy whose name means stillness, what are you saying? most of Socrates' metaphors in the dialog, and in fact every single word he says in the dialog, can be modelled as pure old-fashioned aggravated sarcasm. so you got one sarcastic philosopher two or three thousand years ago making fun of this one persistent moron (in more senses than one), and literally thousands of years of bad philosophy following after that from people who couldn't tell that Socrates was being sarcastic, but could tell that he was smarter than they were. there are entire schools of philosophy which are based on taking various sarcastic comments which Socrates made at various times and interpreting them literally. the theory is, if Socrates said X, X must be smart, because everybody knows Socrates was smart, therefore any ridiculous idea I can come up with which follows logically from X must also be smart. if Socrates had made jokes about Muppets, today we'd have an entire school of thought revolving around serious Platonic theories of the ideal Muppet. personally, I don't even believe in the Big Bang. because the thing is, Penrose is one of the major figures in that world, and if you're going to put yourself forward as a philosopher, and you're going to further identify yourself as a Platonic philosopher, but you're not going to bother to read Plato in the original Greek, that's like declaring yourself a fan of a particular team without being able to identify which sport they play. somebody who does that sort of thing might not look like the smartest person in the world. they might say a few things that are about as reasonable as driving a sofa to work. and if you've got this gigantic philosopho-mathematical edifice which is built by a sofa-driver in his spare time, then it's entirely possible that when it comes to his main gig, defining the history of the universe, that he drives a sofa to that job too. it is, after all, entirely possible for mathematicians to waste their entire lives building castles in the air, and it is, after all, entirely possible for emperors to walk around naked without anybody saying a thing. now to each his own. nobody's clever enough to be always right about everything. certainly Penrose is incredibly bright. he does much harder math than I do. and certainly there is something interesting going on with the whole "Platonic ideal forms" thing. but for me personally, I take Platonic philosophers with a grain of salt. more than just a grain. I take a Platonic philosopher with an entire salt lick. these people read dialogues as prose, then they hop in their sofa, realize it isn't moving, and figure it must be out of gas. so they sit down to figure out what to do, and decide to have a nice snack of sweaters and guacamole. btw, speaking of driving sofas, http://www.cummfybanana.com/cars/car_casuallofa.htm I guess this turned into a rant anyway. my bad. -- Giles Bowkett = Giles Goat Boy http://www.gilesgoatboy.org/ |
On 12/18/05, Giles Bowkett <gilesb at gmail.com> wrote:
> OK -- on my Big Bang skepticism thing -- this is the big heinous rant I canned. A pretty good rant, all in all. > yes, also, if he says that he can put us on the road to reality, where > exactly does he think we're starting from? Arkansas? I expect that he thinks we're on the same road that all of mathematics and natural science has been working out, how to make operational predictions about the world and learn from our mistakes, a road that started in prehistory. > > It it relevant to quibble with his platonic views if you're going to > > end up using the same mathematics to describe reality in the end? > > this is really the major question of freshman year at St. John's. I > started ranting about this but my rant didn't make sense so I deleted > it. short answer: I personally believe that the great thinker of > classical Greece was Euclid, and Plato was just a commentator. Okay, so Penrose is a vulgar neoplatonist who wouldn't know a greek joke if it bit him on his rosy fingers at dawn. Or I wrongly ascribed such a view to him. But if Penrose's mathematics is good for understanding reality, does it make any difference whether he thinks the mathematics is part of reality instead of a clever trick we use to organize our experience? Or that he thinks or believes that he can tell the difference between the two situations? -- rec -- |
> > OK -- on my Big Bang skepticism thing -- this is the big heinous rant I canned.
> > A pretty good rant, all in all. cheers. > > yes, also, if he says that he can put us on the road to reality, where > > exactly does he think we're starting from? Arkansas? > > I expect that he thinks we're on the same road that all of mathematics > and natural science has been working out, how to make operational > predictions about the world and learn from our mistakes, a road that > started in prehistory. fair enough... > > > It it relevant to quibble with his platonic views if you're going to > > > end up using the same mathematics to describe reality in the end? ... > But if Penrose's mathematics is good for understanding reality, does > it make any difference whether he thinks the mathematics is part of > reality instead of a clever trick we use to organize our experience? > Or that he thinks or believes that he can tell the difference between > the two situations? in both cases, isn't the question kind of just a matter of whether or not you can take a pragmatic, philosophy-free view of math? I think the lesson of "Platonic" philosophers is that you **have** to take a pragmatic view of math. look at cause and effect. cause and effect **may** be a logical organizing principle which exists throughout all of reality. it may also be a **model** intrinsic to our brains, which exists as a **reflection** of some **real** organizing principle (etc.). so cause and effect may be "real," but they may just be as close to real as we are able to perceive. the thing is, if it is so close to real that we are never able to perceive any differences between it and what is **genuinely** real, then we have to just shrug and be like "hey, it's real enough." that's why I feel Euclid is the real great thinker there, and Plato, along with every one of his descendants, including Penrose, can really only be seen as commentators. I've really never seen anything in Platonic philosophy that can pass by Occam's Razor. the most I can say for Platonic philosophy is that it does give you a very interesting viewpoint to discuss those weird "spooky" corner cases when cause and effect don't actually seem to explain things. also, on the whole Big Bang thing, I really don't have the patience to handle physics, and I know most physicists are much better at math than I am, so I kinda feel like my disbelief is kind of bold of me. it all started with a book called "The Big Bang Never Happened," and that book has two parts. one part is physics, and I have no idea if the arguments in that part have any genuine validity or not. the second part is what sold me, and it sold me completely. it's an intellectual history that shows similarities between the Big Bang and a bunch of other schools of thought throughout history which all proved invalid. the author basically goes through and says, every time people talked about their ideas in this specific way, those ideas turned out to be baloney. you could look at it as a sort of heuristic based on the history of the philosophy of math. for me it really comes down to "street smarts." if you can smell the baloney, but you can't find it, that doesn't mean it isn't there. it might just mean the structure it's contained within is too intricate for you to isolate the baloney without spending years studying the structure. -- Giles Bowkett = Giles Goat Boy http://www.gilesgoatboy.org/ |
Oh dear oh dear. How can anyone talk about "cause and effect" and
"philosophy" without quoting Hume? Honestly, what do they teach youngsters these days... Robert P.S. And remember, unless you read Hume in the original Scottish, it doesn't count. On 12/19/05, Giles Bowkett <gilesb at gmail.com> wrote: > > <snip> > look at cause and effect. cause and effect **may** be a logical > organizing principle which exists throughout all of reality. it may > also be a **model** intrinsic to our brains, which exists as a > **reflection** of some **real** organizing principle (etc.). > > so cause and effect may be "real," but they may just be as close to > real as we are able to perceive. the thing is, if it is so close to > real that we are never able to perceive any differences between it and > what is **genuinely** real, then we have to just shrug and be like > "hey, it's real enough." > > that's why I feel Euclid is the real great thinker there, and Plato, > along with every one of his descendants, including Penrose, can really > only be seen as commentators. I've really never seen anything in > Platonic philosophy that can pass by Occam's Razor. the most I can say > for Platonic philosophy is that it does give you a very interesting > viewpoint to discuss those weird "spooky" corner cases when cause and > effect don't actually seem to explain things. > <snip> > -- > Giles Bowkett = Giles Goat Boy > http://www.gilesgoatboy.org/ > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at Mission Cafe > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20051219/6d1e6315/attachment.htm |
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In reply to this post by Giles Bowkett
I can't resist: Here is a great pointer I got from Tim -- Big Bang,
MC Hawking Style! http://backspaces.net/files/03BizBizang.mp3 -- Owen Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org |
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