Zompist Bboard Again

This is something I’ve contemplated once or twice myself. For instance, consider an intelligent being living in the plasma on the surface of a star: perhaps they would come up with some formulation of mathematics in which differential equations were basic and obvious things? Meanwhile, ‘2 + 2 = 4’ ...

i agree that pi is a concept from physics. because it is a concept, it was conceived. i also agree that "something in the material universe must be causing it" leads obviously to the question "okay what", which man, i don't know. I can tell you the thing with parallels has to do...

since pi is not a Thing, there's no way that they produce it. more like, pi is what is it because of some feature of spacetime or of what we mean by pi or some combination thereof: i gran that it's not a great explanation, It's not an explanation at all. What features of spacetime produce pi? Is it...

Most interesting article I've read all week: Cory Doctorow: Will Trump hormuz us into the full Gretacene? Fascinating, and I fully support the name "Gretacene" for the new era. If he's right, it'll cause a fundamental change in the global economy, which gets me wondering: what will the de...

Most interesting article I've read all week: Cory Doctorow: Will Trump hormuz us into the full Gretacene? In short: Petrostates have probably doomed the fossil fuel extraction industry. First, petrostate leader Putin created one oil shock by invading Ukraine. Then, petrostate leader Trump created an...

"Matter and energy, space and time" is an invented abstraction... yes, yes, matter, energy, everything that we can say or think about is an entelechy, a concept, something we come up with. the dao that can be talked about is not the real dao and all that, but that doesn't mean we get cart...

I guess you really really want to reduce everything to matter and energy and somehow deduce all of epistemology from that. guilty, yeah, i'm biased towards naturalism. but not just matter and energy, space and time and stuff like that as well, but yeah, i kinda want to keep my system lean and hopef...

we say a thing is true when it describes the facts , or the way things go, what is true depends on what is the case the universe, reality, is how it is I highlighted various places where you attempt to name your blargzard. You seem to be struggling to name it in a way I don't get, but I am reassure...

Without the agent, there is no one to judge it's true that the statement matches a fact. In philosophy, ontics is distinct from ontology. What is is not the same as what is said about it. Fact is an ontic category. it's facts, or reality itself and its characteristics, that make true statements tru...

If an agent is judging something... what are they judging? What condition obtains such that they spit out "true"? Abstract homology ignoring low level details. For example: You have two boxes. The left contains two pairs of apples. The right contains four apples. You push the pairs togeth...

Truth is a judgment. It's a thing an agent says when two sides of an equation match, like a verbal assertion and an experimental fact. Well, that makes two of you. But at least this formulation invites a follow-up quesiton. If an agent is judging something... what are they judging? What condition o...

We've gotten past many of the disagreements or pitfalls, but I can't pass by this one. I'm not sure you really want to take a position that's starkly dualist. "Truth" is something that only pops into existence once sentience does? I do want to take it, i think: but how is it dualistic? it...

if there were no sentient creatures, would there be no mathematical (or other) truths? Would it not be true in such a world that 2 + 2 = 4? here i gotta bite the bullet: as i've said i think truth is a characteristic of things we say, not a thing out there in the realm of forms or whatever. so yeah...

ure but this all boils down to facts about material reality: it turns out that there's objective ways to reckon certain things, cause it turns out there's actually quantized stuff in material-reality-as-such. or at least so say our best models, sure, but you don't need to come up with an entire new...

Again, sure it can. Did you know programs can be hand-emulated, using pen and paper? The program doesn't know that it's laboriously hand-modeled. You could do it writing on toast with butter. lmao fair enough on waves, but not on toast or notepaper, i think: in the notebook example, it's you who is...

5. Limit Supreme Court terms. Do you think that would be enough? I think the court needs to be greatly enlarged. Why not have the same number of judges as representatives? Sure, it may sound silly to have hundreds (or thousands) of judges in a court room, but people used to say the exact same thing...

for example, sure, you can write the same message on paper or on wood or on steel, but you cannot write it in, say, the ocean, or on a pool of oil. Sure you can. How do you think a radio operates? You set up waves and modify their amplitude or frequency or both. the same code can run on your comput...

I've come to the conclusion that I'm a dualist -- not in the typical Cartesian 'mind-body' sense, but in the sense that I believe that while the physical substrate of reality is 'real' and the realm of ideas and abstractions must be encoded in the physical substrate in one form or another, ideas an...

But alright then, how do you recommend that I call attention to enemy victories and threats without it sounding like praise? Was it necessary to call attention to it? Were you afraid that no one else would see the news and rush to lick his boots? Was it necessary to declare his "victories"...

What in your opinion would count as an unlucky break? Is there *anything* which could happen to Trump which would not result in him becoming ever more popular and omnipotent? Good question. It really did seem like Trump was finally facing a losing streak over the past few months. Between the Epstei...