Re: ... cosmology? KNIGHT & KNAVE

From: Stephen Paul King <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 14:46:19 -0400

Dear Bruno and Friends,

    After having read Smullyan's wonderful little book and reading these
posts I would like to point out a problem that I see.
    The notion of Knights and Knaves, as Truth and Falsehood-tellers (or
"reporters") respectively, tacitly assumes that these entities are
Omniscient, e.q., that they have access to a list of all Possible
Truths/Falsehoods or what ever is equivalent. No effort seems to be made to
explain exactly how it is that this assumption can be related to the actual
world of experience, a world where information is finite, oracles are often
wrong, perpetual motion is impossible and distributions are almost never
Gaussian nor linear.
    This, I believe, is related to the main problem that I have with the
Platonic approach to Logic, Mathematics and COMP (among others), it grants
"God-like" powers to entities - infinite computational resources, infinite
heat sinks/sources, etc. - and in so doing allows for us to fool ourselves
that very difficult problems, such as found in cosmology, can easily be
solved.

Kindest regards,

Stephen
Received on Fri Jul 23 2004 - 14:54:10 PDT