Dear Juergen,
thank you for your 'patient' reply. It is brilliantly worded. Let me try to
"reword" it in a trivial and malicious way to support my point - not so
trivial and malicious, I hope.
"well, even those who don't know everything can look at all possible
alternatives of what that everything might be"
Possible? in their present portfolio. A trivial example: nuclear fission
would not be among possible alternatives in 1875. Yet it was there...
sounds like religion. God(s) are telling and priests are interpreting. Crowd
follows.
"Once they realize that the describable alternatives are restricted, they
can derive something nontrivial from the restrictions."
Meaning: find out something that fits your purpose and use it as "truth".
For a Zeuss believer it was not trivial that the lightning is His anger.
"The algorithmic assumption is that we don't have to consider nondescribable
alternatives"
Describable points to our concurrent capabilities to describe.
We model the part we already know about and call it 'everything'. Like the
flat earth. Organic chemistry. A-tom, not dividable further. Then make it an
enforced science.
"Maybe this assumption is wrong, but then
we could not say anything reasonable anyway, by definition"
A good definition: if you don't know what to say the least you can do is
shut up.
"So we shouldn't give it up unless evidence forces us"
Play around by all means, just don't you call it science. TOE? my foot.
Now the above is something completely out 0f my style. I apologize for it,
but it was too much for me that assumptions are taken for something you can
build on and then forget that it had an assumption for a base. It is
ignorant, as long as you cannot prove that it is impossible to learn it (not
in our present capabilites, however). Even in that case one should not
assume with certainty, just confess to ignorance.
Information IMO is 'difference', not imagined difference.
John Mikes
----- Original Message -----
From: <juergen.domain.name.hidden>
To: <jamikes.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 6:33 AM
Subject: Re: Algorithmic TOEs vs Nonalgorithmic TOEs
Dear John,
well, even those who don't know everything can look at all possible
alternatives of what that everything might be. Once they realize that
the describable alternatives are restricted, they can derive something
nontrivial from the restrictions.
The algorithmic assumption is that we don't have to consider
nondescribable alternatives. Maybe this assumption is wrong, but then
we could not say anything reasonable anyway, by definition.
So we shouldn't give it up unless evidence forces us.
Juergen
> From jamikes.domain.name.hidden Thu Feb 8 23:45:42 2001
> From: "jamikes" <jamikes.domain.name.hidden>
> To: <juergen.domain.name.hidden>
> Cc: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
>
> Dear Jürgen, what you say about TOEs is fine, just one question:
> aren't we supposed to KNOW about everything before we put everything into
an
> equation? (algorithmic or not).
> (first: omniscient, then make equation out of 'it').
> John Mikes
> <jamikes.domain.name.hidden>
> "http://pages.prodigy.net/jamikes"
>
Received on Fri Feb 09 2001 - 07:32:56 PST