At 14:46 23/07/04 -0400, Stephen Paul King wrote:
>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.
Still postulating a physical universe I see ...
But to justify the "physical" universe without postulating it is one of our
(at least mine) goal.
When you say <<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>>, you seem to abstract away my thesis, for which
FU is a preliminary. See my current post to Jesse for yet another attempt
for a short description of that "effort".
> 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.
Ok, but then (arithmetical) platonism is among the postulates of the comp
theory. Nobody ever ask you to believe the theory.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Sat Jul 24 2004 - 10:56:24 PDT