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Originally Posted by Khan N. Singh philosophers are usually way ahead of the technology curve. |
Oh, "way ahead" are they? I never heard it put that way before.
Businessmen seldom take advice from people who don't comprehend what monetary transactions are; and I don't take my "philosophy" from people who don't comprehend what general relativistic translations are. Ignorance is ignorance and I would expect MY "guru" to answer "all" my questions. But, more important than that, I want to comprehend the answers myself. What was the question again?
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Originally Posted by ldsoftwaresteve My problem is getting that into congruent terminology. |
I am presuming that would be having a congruent concept to what I have when I refer to
A,
B and
C. From that perspective, let's look at the issues again. I am talking about a solution to the problem of understanding the universe from an abstract perspective (that is, I am looking at
the solution from an abstract perspective). If we had that solution, we could explain it. To explain it we would need a language (a collection of concepts capable of expressing our understanding). Without knowing anything about that explanation, I can say a few things about it which have an extremely high probability of being true (perhaps even absolutely true). First, there is a serious probability that the explanation (no matter what that explanation may be) is wrong: i.e., future information may change our opinion.
(Can you seriously fault that?)
We thus deduce that the explanation is based on less than all the information which might become available to us and, furthermore, the actual "information available to us" can change. Since we cannot presume we knew anything when the problem first arose, we can deduce that the "information available to us" is the result of the accumulated changes in "information available to us". So the collection of particular changes in "information available to us" become a very significant "thing" to think about (that would be what I call
B).
B constitutes "Now!" Is that not congruent to a familiar concept in your head?
But, I have no idea what
B is! I do know that, if I had that language (that collection of concepts necessary to express our understanding), I could express what
B is. If I knew those concepts, and wanted to communicate what
B was, I would need a label for each of those concepts (words in a language). So
B can be seen as an instance of a collection of concepts. What do I need to in order to label those concepts? French words? English words? Or perhaps some words from a language not yet conceived of. Since I don't have any idea what those words might be, let me just refer to them as "word #1", "word #2", "word #3" ... "word #n". Ah, but note, it has to be a finite set.
Since the collection of all
B's constitute all the information available to you, the definition of those words must be implied by the collection of
B's themselves (contained in the "information available to us"). One would hope that there is only one interpretation which would make your experiences (the entire collection of known
B's) make sense. What is important here is that the actual symbols used to represent those concepts is
immaterial; language is an artificial construct learned via "changes" in the "information available to us". I can use any collection of labels I want including a simple collection of numbers. (If this bothers you, think of my labeling as a secret numerical code for those words in that universal language created by the people who think they understand the universe; note that, as I said above, they could be wrong.)
Now I don't know what concepts are required to make that coherent explanation, but I do know that (if I happen to have exactly the correct assignment of those numbers: i.e., every time a particular concept appeared as part of a particular
B it would have the same label) I could create exactly the explanation "created by the people who think they understand the universe" (their explanation should be in that collection of "nows" if I have had enough communications). The only difference between us would be the symbols I used for their concepts or my failure to understand them
(think of a collection of ascII codes).
There is an important fact embedded in the above presentation. The fact that the correct assignment of numbers does not require a specific determined set of numbers. Again, languages are artificial constructs, if I had all my numerical labels assigned correctly, then I could do two things: first, given a set of numerical labels, I could express exactly what concepts were included in any specific
B (their meanings are contained in "all the information I know") and I could also specify the expectation that particular
B is consistent with the explanation; i.e., P(
B, t).
Suppose I changed all my numerical labels by adding some number "a" (I am still using that "correct" assignment mentioned above", just adding "a" to each and every word). How does this change anything? I can still deduce the meanings of my new labels (from the complete collection of
B's which constitute "all the information I know") and the change cannot possibly change the probability of any particular
B. Please read the second half of my
post to saviormachine and explain to me what is (in your mind) wrong with my assertion that the total derivative of P(
B, t) must vanish. I hold that this fact has utterly nothing to do with what that explanation is, it is merely statement of ignorance concerning the absolute correctness of a given numerical labeling of concepts.
Now the next step is making sure the explanation works; that one is a lot more fun.
A is the universe (which is the collection of things which are expressed by that collection of concepts which are required to understand the universe);
B is the change in what we know (the present, expressed by the collection of concepts which have been developed in our creation of our current understanding of the universe) and
C constitutes everything we know (the collection of all the "nows" we have become aware of expressed again by the collection of concepts which our experiences have led us to).
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Originally Posted by ldsoftwaresteve I have a question on mathematics. Everything depends on your basic assumptions, your components. If they are accurate, then assuming the rules of mathematics are universal and unchanging, it just becomes a matter of seeing where they lead.
And, isn't it true that the range is dependent on the accuracy of the assumptions? The end of a branch holds less weight and the stress on the assumptions becomes leveraged. |
Yes, I would agree with that, but what assumptions am I making. What I am doing is "working with unknowns"; I have gone far out of my way to make sure nothing is establish as known.
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Originally Posted by ldsoftwaresteve So whenever I am tempted to make the leap, my habit is to put on the brakes because I worry that the chasm over which i'll be flying is an optical illusion. I hate heights. |
The only chasm here is the realization that the collection of symbols used to represent the language is immaterial and you, as a programmer, should understand the truth of that statement (at least from the perspective of the machine language representation of anything).
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Originally Posted by ldsoftwaresteve I can hear him yelling up there but I'll be damned if I can find the road. |
My solution is analytic and not at all intuitive. Right now, what I want you to understand is that first step, way down there at the bottom of the mountain. As someone once said, the longest trip starts with one step. And actually, this trip is not very long. Crazy as it may seem, I think you would love the view from up here.
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Originally Posted by ldsoftwaresteve I know it's just a vague echo of what you're trying to get across here but there is a real connection for me. Ultimately, your process will be limited by the nature of the input to that process. |
Not really my progress. What I am looking at
IS the limits imposed on the process of understanding the universe and generating some very general constraints on that process which turn out to be quite surprising. In much the same vein as Newton's results when he considered the possibility that the moon was freely falling towards the earth. The results of his analysis were not at all what everyone at the time expected.
Have fun -- Dick
Re: Defining the nature of rational discussion! 
his brain's inferior. fool didn't even know about relativity at all, and was so wrong about so many other things.
