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Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

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Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#71

Post by kleiba »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #49
cwyers wrote: post #37

The name alludes to the Ship of Theseus, a thought experiment where, over the course of many repairs, every piece of a ship is eventually replaced. Given that, I found it interesting that this is applied to a novel greenfield OS effort, instead of a project to rewrite an existing OS in Rust piece-by-piece.

It's such a silly “thought experiment”. The simple answer is that “identity” is pseudoscience and does not exist; it's a man-made delusion created by the human mind to simplify reality and deal with it more easily. “identity” does not even apply to truly atomic particles, because there is no way to say that they aren't “different” in a next instance of time. There are far too many “thought experiments” and “quæstions…

“identity” is pseudoscience and does not exist

I'm going to try that argument with the customs officer next time I travel.

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#72

Post by danbruc »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #62
ganafagol wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering philosohy "pseudoscience" is what's silly. Without the human mind, there is no meaningful concept of "reality".

I made no claim as to the entirety of “philosophy”. I made a claim as to the dealing in identities and the assumption that they can actually be reasoned about. They have no definition and it's merely fuzzy human gut feeling what is and isn't a different identity and different men can't always see eye to eye on it either. One thing I remember well is that I watched a television series as a child that had an magical ob…

You are using identity yourself all the time. You just mentioned philosophy, this TV series, gold, that ship and that plank, and on close inspection there would probably be a thousand more cases in your last post where you relied on identity.

Identity is one of the most fundamental concepts, without it you would have a hard time splitting the universe into more than one distinct piece in order to reference and talk about them. You can only refer to this TV series because it is an entity with identity, equal to itself and not equal to any other thing in the universe.

And yes, it is a very hard problem, as Theseus illustrates one can not simply define identity using the atoms or some other kind of parts something is made of in the general case to define identity. But that just shows the difficulty of the problem, not that identity is a useless idea.

I am not a philosopher but it seems to me that without a notion of identity or equality you can not have more than one distinct thing. Well, probably someone has spend his entire life thinking about that, so maybe there are alternatives to identity and equality?

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#73

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #60
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that. BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "abstraction" you'll probably see how it makes a lot of sense. Every abstraction is a delusion by definition, is it not? Because the abst…

> By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that. And they are, and they might help you, but trying to ask scientific or metaphysical quæstions about it, is an exercise in futility. > BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "…

You seem to assume that any process reasoning or thinking has to be scientific to be useful. A very dubious proposition.

Given your example, thinking about who is beautiful and who isn't (not "Scientific Study", just thinking) would be pointless is well, and in reality, in practical objective reality of a lot of people, isn't.

> quickly leading to reductions to the absurd such as here.

That is the whole point of the original thought experiment, it shows exactly that.

But it leads there by showing not that the question itself is wrong. But by showing that if you try to apply scientific thinking to everything, you end up with absurdity. That there are many areas of life where intuition is a much more suited, practical, and result-rich method of thinking.

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#74

Post by nathell »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #60
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that. BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "abstraction" you'll probably see how it makes a lot of sense. Every abstraction is a delusion by definition, is it not? Because the abst…

> By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that. And they are, and they might help you, but trying to ask scientific or metaphysical quæstions about it, is an exercise in futility. > BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "…

What does "foolish" mean to you?

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#75

Post by Blikkentrekker »

danbruc wrote: post #72
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made no claim as to the entirety of “philosophy”. I made a claim as to the dealing in identities and the assumption that they can actually be reasoned about. They have no definition and it's merely fuzzy human gut feeling what is and isn't a different identity and different men can't always see eye to eye on it either. One thing I remember well is that I watched a television series as a child that had an magical ob…

You are using identity yourself all the time. You just mentioned philosophy, this TV series, gold, that ship and that plank, and on close inspection there would probably be a thousand more cases in your last post where you relied on identity. Identity is one of the most fundamental concepts, without it you would have a hard time splitting the universe into more than one distinct piece in order to reference and talk a…

> You are using identity yourself all the time. You just mentioned philosophy, this TV series, gold, that ship and that plank, and on close inspection there would probably be a thousand more cases in your last post where you relied on identity.

And none of those are scientific inquiries where I proffer rigorous methodology.

> Identity is one of the most fundamental concepts, without it you would have a hard time splitting the universe into more than one distinct piece in order to reference and talk about them. You can only refer to this TV series because it is an entity with identity, equal to itself and not equal to any other thing in the universe.

Yet various exact scientific inquiries work very well without assuming it's existence or that there be a difference between same and different identity.

> And yes, it is a very hard problem, as Theseus illustrates one can not simply define identity using the atoms or some other kind of parts something is made of in the general case to define identity. But that just shows the difficulty of the problem, not that identity is a useless idea.

It is a very simple problem. The answer is: “identity is a pseudoscientific concept that is “not even wrong”.”.

It is so vague, so bereft of any definition that the claim of whether that two references share the same identity is “not even wrong”.

> I am not a philosopher but it seems to me that without an notion of identity or equality you can not have more than one distinct thing. Well, probably someone has spend his entire life thinking about that, so maybe there are alternatives to identity and equality?

And that is why the various models of exact sciences typically to not require that such arbitrary lines be drawn of what is and isn't a different “thing”.

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#76

Post by Blikkentrekker »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #73
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that. And they are, and they might help you, but trying to ask scientific or metaphysical quæstions about it, is an exercise in futility. > BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "…

You seem to assume that any process reasoning or thinking has to be scientific to be useful. A very dubious proposition. Given your example, thinking about who is beautiful and who isn't (not "Scientific Study", just thinking) would be pointless is well, and in reality, in practical objective reality of a lot of people, isn't. > quickly leading to reductions to the absurd such as here. That is the whole point of the…

> You seem to assume that any process reasoning or thinking has to be scientific to be useful. A very dubious proposition.

No, in fact, I clearly said that they were useful but not scientific.

My problem with The Ship of Theseus, is that it prætends to be scientific, whereas it is merely a futile quibble of semantics.

> Giving your example, thinking about who is beautiful and who isn't (not "Scientific Study", just thinking) would be pointless is well, and in reality, in practical objective reality of a lot of people, isn't.

Indeed it isn't. Now imagine the existence of some thought experiment by a philosopher who tries to use deductive logic to decide what is and isn't beautiful absent any rigorous definition of beauty and thus indeed ends up stuck.

I would indeed call that a very futile exercise, so I called The Ship of Theseus.

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#78

Post by tpoacher »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #60
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that. BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "abstraction" you'll probably see how it makes a lot of sense. Every abstraction is a delusion by definition, is it not? Because the abst…

> By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that. And they are, and they might help you, but trying to ask scientific or metaphysical quæstions about it, is an exercise in futility. > BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "…

You guys realize you're simply arguing about preferred definitions of the word, right?

Here, let me join the party. I disagree with both of you, because mathematically it should be the case that applying "identity" to x should yield back x for all x.

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#79

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #76
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to assume that any process reasoning or thinking has to be scientific to be useful. A very dubious proposition. Given your example, thinking about who is beautiful and who isn't (not "Scientific Study", just thinking) would be pointless is well, and in reality, in practical objective reality of a lot of people, isn't. > quickly leading to reductions to the absurd such as here. That is the whole point of the…

> You seem to assume that any process reasoning or thinking has to be scientific to be useful. A very dubious proposition. No, in fact, I clearly said that they were useful but not scientific. My problem with The Ship of Theseus , is that it prætends to be scientific, whereas it is merely a futile quibble of semantics. > Giving your example, thinking about who is beautiful and who isn't (not "Scientific Study", just…

> The Ship of Theseus, is that it prætends to be scientific

How? Doesn't seem to me that most people think of it that way, but maybe I am not aware of some things. How can it even pretend be scientific when even the basic category in which it's placed is "a thought experiment"?

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#80

Post by ikurei »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #49
cwyers wrote: post #37

The name alludes to the Ship of Theseus, a thought experiment where, over the course of many repairs, every piece of a ship is eventually replaced. Given that, I found it interesting that this is applied to a novel greenfield OS effort, instead of a project to rewrite an existing OS in Rust piece-by-piece.

It's such a silly “thought experiment”. The simple answer is that “identity” is pseudoscience and does not exist; it's a man-made delusion created by the human mind to simplify reality and deal with it more easily. “identity” does not even apply to truly atomic particles, because there is no way to say that they aren't “different” in a next instance of time. There are far too many “thought experiments” and “quæstions…

> It's such a silly “thought experiment”.

> The simple answer is that “identity” is pseudoscience and does not exist; it's a man-made delusion created by the human mind to simplify reality and deal with it more easily.

I agree, identity doesn't exist really, not in the physical, natural sense of existence...

Which is what the "silly thought experiment" is pointing at. He wouldn't have taken it that far, but the philosopher was trying to make a point in that direction.

Just because you reached such a level of enlightenment without silly thought experiments is no reason to be dismissive of the ladder that takes others to enlightenment. /s

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