Re: An All/Nothing multiverse model

From: Hal Ruhl <HalRuhl.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 21:20:25 -0500

At 08:48 PM 11/16/2004, you wrote:
>Hal Ruhl wrote:
> > At 05:39 PM 11/16/2004, you wrote:
>>
>>>Hal Ruhl wrote:
>>> > [...]
>>>
>>>>The idea that defining a thing actually defines two things seems self
>>>>evident [once you notice it].
>>>>At least one case of unavoidable definition also seems self evident
>>>>[once you notice it].
>>>
>>>The problem with evidence is that on one side there is no other
>>>known basis to build certainties and on the other it appears to
>>>be very relative [once you notice it]. :-)
>>Here I was not trying to support the idea that "Self-evident" is
>>necessarily a positive characteristic of an idea but rather that Monday
>>morning quarterbacking can make it appear so.
>
>Do you mean that for the particular idea that "defining a thing
>actually defines two things" ?

I mean it in a universal way - it is always the situation.

> > This was in response to
>>the comment I received. I suppose that many ideas originally considered
>>to be "self evident" after near term reflection were ultimately rejected.
>
>Do you consider that this could be the case for this particular
>idea ?

Darwin seems to have felt this way about "Origins" [Stephen Gould's "The
Structure of Evolutionary Theory", page 2] so why should my ideas be special?

>>>Also, (self) evidence that seems so sounds like a pleonasm to me.
>>To me "self evident" is a belief.
>
>OK. Fine.
>
> > The validity assigned to most
>>mathematical proofs appears - as has been said by others - to be
>>dependent on the belief of the majority who examine the proof. In most
>>cases this belief is all that is available so it is not redundant but it
>>is no more than majority opinion.
>
>I agree here. And sometimes, even unanimity fails (there is
>a famous example: Cauchy produced a false theorem about the
>continuity of a series of continuous functions, he taught it
>and it was in class books for years whithout anyone finding
>any problem until some day someone noticed that it fails for
>the Fourier series of f(x) = x; of course, he saved the theorem
>by adding an additional premise but the false theorem had been
>recognized/believed as true in the mean time).
>
>Georges.

Hal
Received on Tue Nov 16 2004 - 21:24:53 PST