221–230 of 252 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amphetamines aren't psychedelics. Like nicotine or caffeine they increase performance.
In large doses over extended periods of time, they do change how someone thinks and perceives the world, perhaps for the worse. See stories of amphetamine psychosis. Those somewhat mirror a type of extended bad experience after using psychedelics, often called dark nights.
Is there a good book that is similar in spirit, but doesn't require the maturity of GEB? I know an 8th grader that would be a great target, but I don't know if they have the mathematical/logical maturity to get through it.
It depends on what you mean by "a similar spirit" I suppose. One thing Hofstadter didn't like about GEB was he felt too many people didn't see his central theme among the many other ideas there. His 2007 book, "I Am A Strange Loop" is a bit of an answer to this. It's mostly the same ideas in GEB about the self and strange loops, but without all the meandering and interludes. It's been a while but I remember it being…
Ah - interesting. It took me several readings to tease-out what I thought the central theme was. As it happens, it led to a position that I objected to (and still object to). So discovering that central theme brought the book down a peg or two in my estimation.
I still think it's one of the most entertaining books of popsci that I've ever opened.
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wait, so you are casually dismissing Gödel's work as a logical "gotcha"? don't premise opinions about complex proofs on other peoples woefully impoverished and misrepresented explanations of said proofs that is disrespectful and very very very short sighted. also, go read up (...on Gödel, Cantor, Turing, Tarski, etc...)
Please try to give the people you talk to the benefit of the doubt, and read carefully what you are responding to. My training is as an applied physicist. We physicists have an interesting relationship with math. Obviously math is essential to the work that we do, but the physical world decides whether the math is right, not the other way around. Our mathematical models technically permit things like negative mass, t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please try to give the people you talk to the benefit of the doubt, and read carefully what you are responding to. My training is as an applied physicist. We physicists have an interesting relationship with math. Obviously math is essential to the work that we do, but the physical world decides whether the math is right, not the other way around. Our mathematical models technically permit things like negative mass, t…
still doesn't sound like you have ever read the proof, nor about it. so aren't you engaged in this discussion strictly by speculation? logical fallacy? just because you have some point to make has no bearing on the work you are adjacent to and not actually discussing. making your own points and arguments about logical gotchas is great, has nothing to do with critically understanding a work you haven't read. asking fo…
Never mind then, I’m sorry I bothered.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
wait, so you are casually dismissing Gödel's work as a logical "gotcha"? don't premise opinions about complex proofs on other peoples woefully impoverished and misrepresented explanations of said proofs that is disrespectful and very very very short sighted. also, go read up (...on Gödel, Cantor, Turing, Tarski, etc...)
I understand precisely what adastra22 meant from the moment I read it. Unfortunately two people now have rushed to unkind characteristics of what that (perfectly sensible) meaning was.
G.E.B is hegelian philosophy without one mention to Hegel and more mechanic than organic Anyone read the Phenomenology of Spirit and notice the same ideas?
> Anyone read the Phenomenology of Spirit and notice the same ideas? Can you elaborate? I've had some friends talk about Hegel with me but I never understood much of it
Hegel and Hofstadter seem to be trying to find "spirit". To keep it simple, spirit can be defined by the "I" aka self-consciousness (but it could also be an ant colony, the Church, the State, the biosphere, etc... all the way up to "God").
Hegel tries to notice the becoming of the notion of the Concept (which could be noticed as the basic thought-tool) into (and through) the notion of the "I".
Hofstadter is trying to do something similar but instead of the Concept as the base (or starting point), he uses the Axiom. Hofstadter then tries to discover if "I" (or "spirit") can emerge from a system of axioms.
Please Note: In order to keep it short I gloss over about 1500 pages of Hegel's & Hofstadter's works.
(Chrome on a Chromebook). Gosh, I yearn for the times when people used HTML to create web sites ...
Certainly everybody believes that Godel's theorems are true. But I wonder if its' Achilles heel is the notion of "stepping outside" of the formal system. Can we formalize what "stepping outside" means? How can we be sure we have done it correctly? When we step "outside" and do reasoning, are we doing it following the formal logic? Which logic? Are there rules as to what kind of inferences are NOT allowed when reasoni…
We can absolutely reason formally from outside a formal system, by embedding it in a larger one, and this is a very standard and normal technique that anyone working seriously in this area does all the time. E.g. you work in ZFC + some large cardinal assumption that allows you to construct a model of ZFC inside that system, and then reason formally about ZFC there. > WE can give an interpretation to formal sentences…
So the term "unprovable" should probably best be always qualified with: in which system.
There are facts about systems which the system itself can not prove. Statements like that can be expressed in some formalized subset of English and proven following the rules of that formalized English. What is that "formalized English" that we use in our reasoning? Or does it not matter?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
wait, so you are casually dismissing Gödel's work as a logical "gotcha"? don't premise opinions about complex proofs on other peoples woefully impoverished and misrepresented explanations of said proofs that is disrespectful and very very very short sighted. also, go read up (...on Gödel, Cantor, Turing, Tarski, etc...)
Please try to give the people you talk to the benefit of the doubt, and read carefully what you are responding to. My training is as an applied physicist. We physicists have an interesting relationship with math. Obviously math is essential to the work that we do, but the physical world decides whether the math is right, not the other way around. Our mathematical models technically permit things like negative mass, t…
That was the belief before the 1800s. But with the discovery of non-euclidean geometry, math has been divorced from the physical world. Math is simply a system of axioms and proofs. Math is purely abstract and logical. Whatever math that physicists use just simply happens to align with the physical world.
Also, the physical world doesn't confirm whether the math is "right". Math is deductive, not inductive. As long as the math is derivable from the axioms, it is right. The physical world/experiments determine whether the mathematical model aligns with the physical world. The physical world has no say in math. Not anymore.
> So I'm trained to actively disregard non-physical, not relevant mathematical implications.
In the past, when a mathematical model predicted something ( relativity to quantum physics to elements ), experiments were conducted to determine whether the models aligned with the physical world. If the mathematical models make predictions that physicists currently can't verify with experiments, should we disregard it? Do we need technology to advance to where we can conduct experiments. Do we need physics to become more abstract? Perhaps model the physical world in the virtual world. Would experiments in the virtual world be applicable to physics? Seems like physics is both at a dead-end and on the cusp of a revolution.