Stephen P. King (stephenk1@home.com)
Mon, 05 Jul 1999 10:13:45 -0400
Dear Robert,
ca314159 wrote:
> Stephen and Matti,
>
> Stephen please adjust the maximum on your line widths.
> I'm still using stone-henge for a computer.
I adjusted the wrap to 70 characters. Does this work for you?
> * Context switching:
> Be careful when shifting contexts. If you are talking about
> bosons it is not correct to say: "Your ideas don't seem to apply
> to fermions, so they must be wrong."
>
> When switching contexts, metaphors have to be re-mapped;
> re-interpreted.
I agree, you critique is very good! I find that our words act like a surface
that intersects the volume that is our contextual content, e.g. our "meanings". But,
it is easy to forget that a set of words for one individual can have an entirely
different contextual content as compared to another. The problem is that we can
never compare these directly, all we have available are the surfaces generated by
intersections between the two.
> ship
> * Analogy vs Logy:
>
> Buddhist, Taoist, etc. try to help people get comfortable
> with both analogical and logical thinking.
>
> Two lawyers:
>
> One says: "Oh you idiot, it's open and close !
> It's the same as McGlue vs. Feigenbaum"
> the other nods. No need for logic when using analogy.
> To confuse logic with rationality is common.
> The more two people know in common, the more compressed their
> communications can be. Sort of like that Saturday Night Live
> comedy where they all speak in short codes:
>
> "How is your 28?"
> "Oh 43, but did you 98 yet with your 345? "
>
> The economy of jargon.
Thus analogy elates to identity of content, but only within the context of the
common surface! The compression of information is a trade of for the increase in
contextual content volume! The fact that Fisher information is a surface type
quantity and Shannon information is a volume quantity, I think, is involved!
> I've mastered two-stepping down a flight of stairs, so now
> its actually painful for me to one-step down stairways.
> If I master three-stepping, ... ultimately infinite-stepping
> will I no longer walk down them at all and find great pain
> in doing so ?
>
> I think this is what causes many scientists and philosophers
> to wander out of contact with all but a few people. I've tried
> my best to keep everything I learn in compressed form to begin
> with so that this does not happen to me and that I can always
> single-step when needed, but it isn't easy. Aphorisms are popular
> to stem this tendency.
It is helpful to have a good understanding of how pattern recognition works! :-)
Or, at least a good predictive model of it, which is really all we can have. :-)
> * Context can be continuously variable:
>
> "It is very worrying, because if you have exceptions every day,
> then we no longer have exceptions. They are the rules"
> -- HK legislator Emily Lau speaking of HK's government by China
>
> * Know the intermediates in the context of extremes:
Yes! :-)
> Stephen:
> > I am saying that it is the other way around! The so-called "independent"
> > aspect of the "physical world" is based on our ability to communicate with
> > each other. Those properties that we say are "objective" are so merely
> > because those are the properties that we can communicate effectively about
> > to each other. Remember I said over and over: each observer has his/her/its
> > own subuniverse!
>
> This is a perfectly valid viewpoint. But it is a viewpoint of a dualism.
> Why then do we prefer then the sol-centric model over another 'equally valid'
> geo-centric viewpoint ? Economy of metaphors ?
What are the alternatives? We have the same epiphenomenalism problem for
monisms. At best, we can support a "neutral monism", which is kind of what I have in
mind, since Existence is One, not dual...
> This viewpoint has inconvenient some problems: if we find a person who is
> totally autistic without any of the senses that person cannot communicate
> with anyone else. That person will have a subjective and objective world
> quite distinct from ours. But that person's life will, in our universe,
> depend on us for survival. That person cannot exist in our universe
> without our god-like intervention on its behalf.
>
> Helen Keller was intermediate and learned alot about the objective
> world enough to communicate about it with others.
>
> Your perspective suggests that objective reality results
> from communication. But I can lie, then what will you do ?
>
> You will have to refer to objective reality as if it existed
> a priori to 'prove me wrong' even though I knew I was lying
> and actually agreed with you !
>
> In maintaining your viewpoint, of a posteriori objectivity
> you would be forced to accept my lie and just say: for Robert,
> it is a true representation of his distinct objective world,
> I cannot argue with his assertions about the objective world.
Umm, you shifted contexts on me and generated an obvious straw man! I am
proposing that communication is "two-way" interaction. The idea that our common
experiences are generated by our interactions does not imply that lying necessarily
causes my reality to collapse! This would only be the case if you and I were the
only entities that existed!
BTW, the Liar paradox reveals subtleties that are reasons why I posit that
finite subsets of the Universe are dualistic! See Pratt's paper!
> For this reason the 'a posteriori objectivity' viewpoint is
> too solipsist.
It is solipsistic only for the Universe in it-self, since it is One. The
infinity of its subsets, of which we are included, avoids this. The problem of
"other minds" is an illustration. Each LS, be it simple like an electron, or complex
like a galaxy, is a solipsistic system, but only in the sense that it can not have
"direct" contact with the other LSs. We can only interact via the commonalties of
our experiences. Thus my point remains.
> > Why is this so difficult? It is so frustrating!
> > It can be proven that there is no "objective reality" having definite
> > properties independent of particular observations. An observation is
> > a communication between a given entity having an ensemble of possible
> > properties acting as a measurer and a given entity having its own ensemble
> > of possible properties acting as an measuree. The key point is that any
> > such observation or measurement or whatever it is called is a mutual act.
> > I look at an electron and it looks back at me. I measure it reducing its
> > ensemble of possible properties relative to my ensemble and it does the
> > same back. A communication, interaction, measurement, whatever, it is
> > a two-way act of definition.
> It is not difficult to understand:
> Observations and measurements are projections of higher dimensions.
> The caged lion responds to the cager.
And the cager to the caged lion. Both the objects and subjects could be modeled
as projections of higher dimensions, that is the point of Hilbert spaces. But it is
the "surface of interaction" that is 3D! That is what I mean when I say that
space-time is a construction, like a stage. But it does not have properties of its
own independent of the actors. See W. Schommers' books! He nails this point on the
head!
Space and Time, Matter and Mind : The Relationship Between Reality and Space-Time
by W. Schommers Hardcover - 163 pages (October 1994)
World Scientific Pub Co; ISBN: 9810218516
Symbols, Pictures, and Quantum Reality : On the Theoretical Foundations of the
Physical Universe (Series on the Foundations of Natural Science and Te)
by W. Schommers, Hardcover (April 1995)
World Scientific Pub Co; ISBN: 9810220561
> Perhaps what's frustrating for you is that you are 'working against
> the grain', so to speak. The cat may like having it's hair brushed
> backwards but it is not the same as brushing the fur forwards :)
Indeed! It is easier to just assume that we all have one and the same reality,
and thus do no have to deal with the fact that we each have our own unique causal
context. It is far more blissful to have a god that defines one's reality for a
person that for each to have to be responsible for our own!
> Nature demands that certain perspectives (projections) are more
> useful in specific contexts than in others. While your posterior objective
> perspective may be very comfortable to your mode of thinking it
> is 'geo-centric' with regards to the objective world. The consequences
> of what you say, taken to the extremes will not map easily to nature.
I agree! But this is due to the assumption built into our language! We assume
that "Tree for you" = "Tree for me", in most situations this is the case, but to
make such an absolute universal equality is "not even wrong!" What we know about
"Nature" is filtered through our linguistic base, this colors it in way that are
very difficult to allow for. The linguists that you have mentioned to us in the past
seemed to grasp this.
> What indicates this is how many metaphors your view can sustain.
>
> This is the dual complement of Occam's razor. Occam looks for
> the simplest and most general logical representation but the
> simplest logical representation will have many interpretations
> and many metaphors. So analogically it will be the -largest-
> representation whereas logically it will be the -shortest-.
>
> That's HUP in philosophy, because the more you are analogically
> constrained the less you are logically coherent and vice versa.
>
> Analogy and logy are dual toolsets of rationality.
> (One must learn to live with the inadequacy of language when
> describing what one sees in a house of mirrors to someone else.)
>
> You and I can only reach any agreement based on the commonality
> of our perspectives. That does not mean that objective reality
> does not exist a priori because obviously we can move our perspectives
> to find commonality. Then we can also reverse that action and
> not have commonality again. The fact that we have this choice
> gives a strong impression that physical reality is invariant
> with regard to subjective observers, both those living now and
> those long since dead.
No, no, no! Its "existence" is not my point. An "objective reality" has as much
existence as an electron prior to observation! It just has no properties in it-self.
Duh! The ability to shift perspectives, is not reversible! We can only "undo"
observations in the sense of the quantum erasure experiments! Quantum entanglement
generates the equivalent of a memory, that is subject to revision. The key duality
that I and Pratt are proposing is one between Time and Logic. But it is applied to
each system individually, not to the whole kit and caboodle of the "so-called'
objective universe. Look carefully at how Hitoshi defines the decomposition of LSs!
> Now if you decide to say objective reality does not exist a priori
> then you will have to explain why there is so much coherence in
> recorded history indicating that those before us saw the same
> relationships between objective things. Those relationships where
> invariant over recorded history suggesting that objective reality
> was invariant despite our inability to communicate with the dead.
As I have said: Event A causes event B if and only if the information content of
B entails the information content of A. This is the key relation that Pratt is
talking about. Peter and others call it an infomorphism. There is no a priori or a
posteriori status to an "objective reality" if we are talking about a universe that
we imagine all living in having properties that are independent of
observation/measurement!
> If one person stubbornly refuses to find commonality
> then of course that person is considered 'insane' or at the very
> least slightly 'neurotic'.
This is a straw man! I am not implying that the "commonality" only holds at the
human level! Please. See 12 Monkeys, the movie!
> We discard such people from our 'mob'. Write them off. That doesn't
> mean our mob is 'correct' in doing so. The background objective reality
> ultimately determines the sanity of the individuals not by how
> well they agree with the many, but how well they agree with objective
> reality. So the 'insane' person as declared by the mob may be the
> only sane person alive, but ultimately nature will resolve this
> discrepancy and we see over the course of history that indeed
> the crazy Tesla was right about at least using AC for distributed
> power despite Edison's 'sane' suggestion of using DC because it
> 'seemed safer'.
We have to be a bit more subtle in extending physics to ethics!
> > To say that the elephant has properties independent of the blind men is
> > tacitly positing that there is someone else that the blind men could
> > communicate with that is not blind! There is no GOD out there to observer
> > the Universe and define it, if we were to try to say that there is,
> > such a Being would have to be the Universe itself, and as such would
> > be deaf blind and dumb as it could never percieve itself.
> Most of my earlier writings were about non-orthogonality.
> So two blind men may overlap their areas of poking the elephant
> and agree to some extent on the properties of the elephant in
> that area. Then later one of the other pokers tells the others
> to "feel for creases" and they start to overlap their area
> of projection to agree on how "creases" should be defined
> and then ... they have a language to define what they can
> agree upon while poking the elephant. The language comes after
> the elephant not the elephant comes after the language.
> Why ?
>
> Because the elephant can't survive based on only what we
> observe from it. If I feel only an ear then I must declare
> that the ear exists of itself. And then you have to say
> why ears exist of themselves. Further if I discover a toe
> separate from the ear. They may seem to quantum jump around
> if the elephant starts walking.
This is a "chicken or egg" question! A language is an agreement between
communicators, the linguistic properties to the elephant are not ontologically
exterior to the language! But, you may argue that this situation is more of a "map
versus territory" analogy. Well, yes, in a way, but again, the properties of either
are not independent of interactions. The "survival" issue is irrelevant! The concept
of "continuous existence" died when we discovered "quantum jumps"! Your last
statement about ears and toes implies that a single observer decides "existential"
status. NOT! Actuality is tensed, existence is not.
Perhaps my wording is the problem... I'll work on it.
> That's enough for right now. My back is hurting.
>
> (see the SPR thread on "There is no 'now'"
I have been following it! :-) Richard Crew's last post is very similar to my
thinking... Time as an operator, can we talk about that soon? "-)
> -Robert
>
> --
>
> http://www.bestweb.net/~ca314159/
Later,
Stephen
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