Re: Raymond Smullyan

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu Jul 15 07:35:24 1999

Chris:
>In my last and a previous post, I was confusing Raymond
>Smullyan with Stanislaw Lem. I was thinking of two essays
>by Stanislaw Lem in "The Mind's I": "The Princess
>Ineffabelle" and "The Seventh Sally, or How Trurl's Own
>Perfection Led to No Good", and thinking that they were
>written my Smullyan. Sorry, I should have looked it up.
>
>Smullyan also has two articles in that book: "Is God a
>Taoist?", which is a dialog between a Mortal and God
>about free will, and "An Epistemological Nightmare", which
>is a fun story about a guy who gets into Trouble through
>self-reference. They're both very good, but I wouldn't
>have compared them to Jorges Luis Borges.

Wei Dai, you should read cautiously SMULLYAN'S "An Epistemological
Nightmare".
You will understand at once that, with comp, there is no hope to use any
"scientific theory" to build a "decision theory".

With comp, the best decision theory you will ever find is YOU !
Whatever YOU are. Nothing less, nothing more.

BTW I like Stanislaw Lem a lot too. I want also say that Mind's I is my
favorite work by both Hofstadter and Dennett. Although when it has been
published I got depressed thinking my thesis has been worked out
by others. It takes me time to realise it was not the case.

Holliday exercice : there is a proposition P such that Hofstadter
believes P
in his remark on quantum mechanics, and believes NOT P in his
"conversation" with Einstein's brain, (both in Mind's I), which is P ?

Bruno.
Received on Thu Jul 15 1999 - 07:35:24 PDT