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Paul,
Sorry about my slowness to respond. I just wanted to make sure I don't say anything to lead you towards a misunderstanding. I don't think I have any real argument with you as to what you say but I do believe there are some unsaid things which you are assuming. Nonetheless, I will proceed from your paragraph 108.
Ref 108: Just as an aside, my formalism stands even if there exists no other person. Such a state is entirely consistent with my analysis; you could indeed be a complete figment of my imagination. That issue has not been approached in my analysis but it is clearly a possibility which is included in my attack. Only actual examination of reality can clarify the question. What is significant here is that my deductions precede any actual analysis of reality: they constitute nothing except an organization of my thoughts as to how I will proceed to examine reality. So it is that we have not agreed on 1) and with regard to 2) our ability to communicate is in great doubt particularly with regard to language. I would say rather that the only possible channel of communication open to us is the fact that we have some part of reality in common.
Ref 109. Ok! Ref 110. Ok!
Ref 111. I think you have a handle on the problem. Ref 112. Formal mathematics is usable because the concepts and notation are fairly well defined. As I have said earlier, I regard the field of mathematics as building and examining of all possible internally self consistent systems. That would be internally self consistent systems of "definitions and relations". That is how logic itself comes to be in the realm of mathematics.
As an aside, Harv seems to be blind to the fact that definitions, in general, change from generation to generation if not from conversation to conversation. A rational person must realize that definition exists only in the minds of communicating individuals and is a very hard thing to pin down. I am afraid I have given up on most all of the people on these forums: I have concluded Harv's thinking is straight out of the dark ages - the concept of abstract logic is totally outside his ken. Alex is totally blind to the fact that he just has an alternate "religious belief". Yanniru is just hung up on the fact that current "science" is correct (which, by the way, he does not have a good understanding of). Alan has no concept of logic at all. Aurino and Mario are both very rational and very logical people; but neither of them have any interest in "mathematics" and without that, one cannot understand what I am saying.
I have been reading your comments to Harv and, to improve our communications, I think it is reasonable to comment on your dialog. In Harv's note to you he asks the question, "why should things move from not quantified, to quantified, to extremely quantified by math unless there is [mathematical] order to the universe?" Why? Because we have figured out a convenient way of cataloging reality. What is central to my presentation is that the quantification he refers to exists in a rational attack on the problem prior to any examination of reality: i.e., I move entirely from "not quantified" to "extremely quantified" before beginning any examination of reality. The position ends up being "the fact that these mathematical laws hold" has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with our model of reality. We must recognize that fact before we can make any rational examination of reality.
Back to your post. Ref 114. Ok! Ref 115. Thank you.
Ref 116: please see "More on the abstract concept of Reality" under "To Harv on Truth".
Ref 117. I think I am stronger in my position on this issue than I was Feb 15th 2000.
Ref 118. Ok! On Ref 119, I hold that if that is indeed the case, you certainly cannot communicate the concept to me! I can not see that anything which you *know* which I cannot come to know can be useful to me. Ditto, Ref 120.
Ref 121, 122. I am afraid you cannot arouse my interest in that perspective as I have some additional things to say which are achieved directly from the mental picture developed from my work (based on exactly what I cannot come to know) but I will discuss that later.
Ref 123. One reason you cannot yet see the elephant is that you still refuse to step back to the perspective of your awareness itself: i.e., from an abstract perspective that the success of your subconscious at solving the problem of modeling the universe is, in no way, support for the correctness of that model (please don't get your back up, I will get to this again later).
Ref's 124, 125, 126, & 127. Maybe so, but we can't talk about it rationally! Any rational aspects of it become communicable concepts and become part and parcel of "reality" as I define it.
Ref 128. "God (the Great Original Dilemma) only knows" is something I think of as a very rigorous required aspect of reality; but I certainly won't tell you anything about it, for it consists of that which I do not know! That is, as opposed to those who *know* God (now I am being humorous).
Ref 129 and 130. I would put my awareness in the category of unexplainable but I would not put my subconscious in that category. My subconscious is part and parcel of explainable reality. Once reality is modeled, it is entirely conceivable that my subconscious and its functioning will be explained. In fact, based on the widely held standard model of reality, scientists are well on the way towards explaining the function of our subconscious. I see my demand, that one use only an internally consistent rational model of reality, as not constraining that endeavor at all.
Finally, we reach 131, the paragraph to which I would like to speak.
I am of the opinion that the source of the schism you refer to is a subtle consequence of an aspect of reality completely ignored by science. If you can step back for a moment from the mental image of reality your subconscious has created for you, I think you might begin to comprehend the circumstance. That is, step back from your intuition, your emotional feelings of what is true and what is false: i.e., your central concept of reality itself. Instead, think about what you know as abstract information molded and massaged by your subconscious, an unbelievably powerful data modeling machine.
I have shown explicitly (including a specific method for constructing such a model) that absolutely any internally consistent collection of information may be modeled in such a way that we can guarantee most all of physics is absolutely valid. What is important here is that I have presented no proof that the model I present is the only possible solution to that problem. One is being rather presumptuous to assume that the set of all possible *models* of reality consists of a single possibility.
Remembering that fact, consider the following fundamental problem embedded in any attempt for two people to communicate. When the problem is looked at from an abstract perspective, the aware individuals are both separated from reality by their senses (which are part and parcel of their respective models) but the fundamental communication takes place in reality (essentially out of direct reach of our analysis).
Thus one is lead to the conclusion that the two people trying to communicate may have totally different models of reality (models which you can not even begin to conceive of because you *believe* the model presented by your subconscious is the only possible model). However, no matter what my model of reality is, my impact on reality (when I try to communicate) will be perceived by you after your subconscious has translated that impact into your mental model of reality. What I am getting at is that when you hear my descriptions of my mental model, those descriptions themselves are expressed by your subconscious in its model.
If both models were 100% internally consistent, there would be no problems (the situation consistes of nothing more than two valid representations of reality); however, that is not the situation confronting us. Our subconscious has created a mental model which any rational person must admit has to contain errors. Both subconscious mental models (yours and mine) were created to explain the *real* information we are aware of. They both surely have areas of internal consistency and areas of inconsistency.
Once you realize that it is entirely possible that the respective mental models bear no resemblance to one another at all, you have to recognize that the mapping performed by our subconscious translation could easily be mapping areas of consistency in one to areas of inconsistency in the other and vise-versa.
Thus I come to the conclusion that the schism you refer to should be an expected consequence of a lack of a complete internally consistent set of concepts to work with. The fundamental problem is that people do not worry about the vagueness of the sum total of their mental model of reality because they think that their model is the only possible model and you are working with the same model. There exists no proof that anyone’s mental model is even similar to anyone else’s.
On the other hand, I have shown that, within any internally consistent model of reality, the information may be seen as obeying physics. Thus it is that the truth of physics (which is in fact nothing more than an internally consistent way of viewing any possible information), is taken erroneously as prima-facie evidence of valid mapping of mental models.
We do have one plus working for us: anytime we restrict ourselves to definitions and relations which are 100% internally consistent with one another, a valid mapping is possible. With regard to those definitions and relations, it makes no difference how those concepts fit into the remainder of either of the personal mental models. If the mapping is constrained in both cases to only 100% internally consistent concepts: the concepts and any logical conclusions deduced from them will be 100% internally consistent in both models. And that is why we agree so easily when it comes to math and physics.
Notice how I can logically deduce and discuss the characteristics of things I cannot even begin to imagine! Now that is the power of abstract logic.
Have fun -- Dick |
