Zompist Bboard Again

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 11:10 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 10:56 am

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 10:44 am The same simulation can execute on multiple, mutually incompatible substrates. The same pattern surfaces when you ignore low level details. See my post if you haven't yet: https://snapshotsofthelabyrinth.photo.b ... imulation/ Any Turing-complete system can execute the Game of Life. This would work even if a low level system implements the Game of Life directly.

Amusingly, it's possible to simulate electronics using gears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrkiJZKJfpY

In that case we are effectively saying the same thing.

My impression is that you are arguing for dualism of matter and math. I'm arguing for monism in terms of matching computations emerging from physical laws. Maybe I misunderstood your point or my post is unclear as written.

My view is that abstractions such as math are emergent from matter, while operating as an abstraction in terms that are independent from the matter from which it emerges, and likewise matter is dependent on abstractions such as math (as the laws of nature operate in mathematical terms). I'm a dualist in the sense that math is independent of matter, and a monist in the sense that I do not think that math can exist without a physical substrate for it to exist upon. (E.g. if the universe ceased to exist tomorrow, math would cease to exist with it.)

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 11:46 am My view is that abstractions such as math are emergent from matter, while operating as an abstraction in terms that are independent from the matter from which it emerges, and likewise matter is dependent on abstractions such as math (as the laws of nature operate in mathematical terms). I'm a dualist in the sense that math is independent of matter, and a monist in the sense that I do not think that math can exist without a physical substrate for it to exist upon. (E.g. if the universe ceased to exist tomorrow, math would cease to exist with it.)

I see math as immanent in the laws of nature: anything is mathematical insofar as the laws of nature are mathematical. There is no outside vantage point from which math is valid. Matching computations are our only standard of judgment.

From the hard monistic perspective, matter is not separate from the laws of nature. Sometimes physical transformations result in eddies of stability. Conventionally, we call these "substances". In reality, "matter" is biconditionally equivalent to the laws of transformation.

I think there is good circumstantial evidence for the "Abstraction as Simulation" hypothesis, but I can't prove the hard monism thesis. There might be circumstantial evidence against it: If there's a law regulating the emergence of particles from quantum foam, we don't know its precise statement. Once you remember that most of metaphysics is about splitting and joining terms, you'll see that whether "particle x emerges at time t" is considered to be part of a largely unknown "law of transformation" is a matter of convention based on human convenience.

Torco wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 9:12 am

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, in a universe where no one says anything -or thinks anything etc- then there are no things that are or can be true. or false. just like there are no things that are, say, illegal. cause there's no laws, cause there are no people writing down laws. just like in a mindless universe there would be no things that are according-to-regulation. or things that are holy.

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 agree about "legal" and "holy", as these are people-oriented. I don't think "truth" is. Perhaps it is if you mean something like "scholarly consensus", but I hope you see that the scholarly consensus is not at all "truth", even if you happen to like scholars.

My own bold position is that math and logic are things that are true of any possible world. If we've done them right, they're true by definition... e.g. you define 4 as the thing that 2 + 2 equals. We can imagine a world where matter is not quantized, but not one where 2 + 2 = 1,471. Some philosophers would disagree, but then I think they're fooling themselves. You can't use logic to reason about a world where logic doesn't apply.

The problem with your stated position is that any statement about a mindless universe would be impossible. If "The are stars and planets and trees and monkeys" has no truth value, then we can say nothing about such a world... including the assertion that we can say nothing about it.

Or to put it another way: you seem to think that society decides that a thing is true, just as society decides that it's legal or valuable or holy. I'd put it to you that that is absolutely not how truth works; it is not a societal consensus, a proposition held by the smartest scholars, an institutional declaration, a contingent linguistic fact, or a strongly held belief. We can hope that those things approach truth, but they very obviously differ from it.

Even more simply: it's possible for every single human to be wrong about something. An obvious example is if you asked people what the fundamental particles were in 1800. Assuredly there are things everybody believes now that are untrue.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 10:36 am

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 9:49 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 9:41 am Math is an abstraction which has an identity and rules independent of the physical substrate; things like 2 + 2 = 4 are not tied to any particular physical representation, whether it is electric charges and currents or grains of sand or thoughts in our heads.

Generalizations over physical laws apply to some realities and don't apply to others. For example, 2+2=4 applies to apples but not to an uncountably turbulent surface of a fluid.

This is different from physical substates for math as an abstraction -- I was referring to doing math with a computer, by drawing in sand, or in one's head.

sure, same happens with doom or the game of life ran on different computers, or with the same book written in different kinds of paper. i think that doesn't mean that doom or twilight are sort of real-immaterial-things. the fact that a thing happens on different media doesn't make us dualist... well, it doesn't make me a dualist, anyway.

I'm a dualist in the sense that math is independent of matter, and a monist in the sense that I do not think that math can exist without a physical substrate for it to exist upon. (E.g. if the universe ceased to exist tomorrow, math would cease to exist with it.)

but like, would math exist without any mathmaking entities? like in the mindless universe zompist posited a bit ago?

zompist wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 5:09 pmWe'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 seems to me starkly monistic, if anything: truth is a feature of utterances, which are things certain material entities do, so it only exists if there are speakers who utter. same with thoughts, and writings, and other such things. scholarly consensus is another thing like holy, an emergent phenomenon that pops up when there are scholars that talk to each other, but it's different from truth yeah.

My own bold position is that math and logic are things that are true of any possible world. If we've done them right, they're true by definition... e.g. you define 4 as the thing that 2 + 2 equals. We can imagine a world where matter is not quantized, but not one where 2 + 2 = 1,471. Some philosophers would disagree, but then I think they're fooling themselves. You can't use logic to reason about a world where logic doesn't apply.

I broadly agree, with the caveat that i dare not venture any meaningful guess as to what worlds are possible or which aren't... who would even know such a thing? a worldsmith? a real one i mean, not us fictioneers. in another way i'm more conservative: maybe some math is not true by definition but by virtue of something else, as i suspect with geometry, and maybe other math is true on account of something else. There's a loooot of math, after all, but with 2 + 2 sure, 1.471 is simply not what we mean by 2+2.

The problem with your stated position is that any statement about a mindless universe would be impossible. If "The are stars and planets and trees and monkeys" has no truth value, then we can say nothing about such a world... including the assertion that we can say nothing about it.

well in a mindless universe there would be no one to make statements, so there wouldn't be any inside of it. if however we could observe a mindless universe, though -let us table the matter of whether such a universe would indeed by a different universe, or mindless- then sure, *we* could make statements about that universe, and *those* statements would either be true, false, or silly, but the mindless universe itself would contain no statements, and so would not contain any true statements itself... those statements would be, i reckon, contained in ours.

Or to put it another way: you seem to think that society decides that a thing is true, just as society decides that it's legal or valuable or holy. I'd put it to you that that is absolutely not how truth works; it is not a societal consensus, a proposition held by the smartest scholars, an institutional declaration, a contingent linguistic fact, or a strongly held belief. We can hope that those things approach truth, but they very obviously differ from it.

i don't think that, no. very much yes we can all be mistaken, and we probably are! hell, It could be the fact that, at least to some degree, all or most statements are false, or at least incomplete. okay maybe not 2+2, but certainly a lot of our past beliefs turned out to be wrong, some less wrong than others: like, sure, miasma theory of disease is false, but it's less false than, say, demon theory of disease. and it's more false than germ theory, which is itself more wrong than, well, a better statement like "some diseases are caused by bad air, like emphisema, some by germs like cholera, and some by problems within the biology of the orgasnism itself like cancer, no direct pathogen" or something like that. society doesn't decide what's true... okay, sometimes it does, like, when we say in england people speak english that's true by virtue of social facts, but otherwise, society doesn't make 2+2!=7 a true statement... like, it's not true on account of convention or consensus. what i do believe is that 2+2=!7 *is* a statement, and so it can only be uttered by lato sensu people, and without utterers there's no statement and thus, there's nothing that can be true or false, so there can't be truths.

so formally, we can say truths require society, but society does not make truths truths, it just makes truths possible. this isn't that weird, said like that: for example cancer requires water to exist, but water does not cause cancer, or make cancer cancer.

edit: so what's truth and how does it work? what do i know, i don't have any good solutions to the field of epistemology. yes, i am sort of philosophically just outsourcing all the work that, for the dualist, real-abstractions-as-such, platonic forms, do

Torco wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 7:04 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 5:09 pmWe'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 seems to me starkly monistic, if anything: truth is a feature of utterances,

Wow, can't agree with you there. Truth is not a feature of utterance; it's a concept, or a feature of states of affairs. It's what makes something a fact and what allows us to talk about anything at all.

The problem with your stated position is that any statement about a mindless universe would be impossible. If "The are stars and planets and trees and monkeys" has no truth value, then we can say nothing about such a world... including the assertion that we can say nothing about it.

well in a mindless universe there would be no one to make statements, so there wouldn't be any inside of it. if however we could observe a mindless universe, though -let us table the matter of whether such a universe would indeed by a different universe, or mindless- then sure, *we* could make statements about that universe, and *those* statements would either be true, false, or silly, but the mindless universe itself would contain no statements, and so would not contain any true statements itself... those statements would be, i reckon, contained in ours.

The mindless universe-- which, I hope you understand is our universe a billion years ago, or whatever number takes us before sentience evolved-- contains no statements, but it does contain entities, photons, planets, states of affairs, facts, quite a lot of things really. I really hope you agree that the universe existed before anyone was in it; but then you agree that it contained things. It was simply a fact that some things existed and some didn't, their locations, etc. It was true that those facts existed, it was true that 2 + 2 equaled 4, and so on. If a rock fell, it was true that it was a rock, that it fell in place X and not place Y, and so on.

This doesn't mean that anything was transcendant, it just means that things existed and worked as they do today. No utterances were involved.

I feel like this is sounding weird, because it's hard to explain things to someone who does not accept that explanations, facts, and reason exist. All these things depend on truth. So this feels like talking with someone who excitedly declares that they do not have a brain, or that no one else exists, or something.

It could be that you simply have an idiosyncratic definition of truth-- it's something decided by a human Ministry of Truth somewhere, written down in a big book, I dunno-- while you'd freely admit that there are facts, their correctness is simply another concept, "blargzard" or something. In which case I'd simply discard your notion of "truth" as uninteresting; who cares if a human uttered it or wrote it down?-- and talk about blargzardity instead. You talked about "objective" reality and "really existing" things earlier, maybe that's your blargzard.

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.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 11:46 am (E.g. if the universe ceased to exist tomorrow, math would cease to exist with it.)

Technically, I don't think all laws of transformation will ever go away.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 2:54 pm 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 obtains such that they spit out "true"?

zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 3:03 pm 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 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 together. Ignoring low level structural deformities, you count one globe, and another (the successor function from Peano arithmetic) and another and another in the left. You notice one globe, and another and another and another in the right. This is s(s(s(s(0)))). This expression has s() applied the same number of times in either box. At this point, a rational agent gives the judgment "true".

1. It is possible for the agent to have damaged senses, be insane, etc., in which case his simulation may not match the computation done by physics.

2. If the problem were formulated differently, the judgment could be "false" (AKA not "true") with the same materials in the two boxes. For example, "equal in number" is a different problem than "equal in weight". In the latter case, we would be doing another operation, not counting.

—

BTW, similar definitions are used in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Brouwer's constructive mathematics and intuitionistic type theory, some form of which is used in all automated theorem provers. Coq uses the Calculus of Constructions. Agda uses Martin-Löf's type theory directly. See the second column of page 7 in the pdf (not the internal page count): https://intuitionistic.wordpress.com/wp ... lof-tt.pdf

However, this is not the only approach in mathematics. Most mathematicians are at least weak Platonists who accept a dualistic world of mathematics. So is Roger Penrose as well as the Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou. Like most Marxists and computer scientists, I'm a materialist.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 3:35 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 3:03 pm 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 together. Ignoring low level structural deformities, you count one globe, and another (the successor function from Peano arithmetic) and another and another in the left. You notice one globe, and another and another and another in the right. This is s(s(s(s(0)))). This expression has s() applied the same number of times in either box.

OK, so far so good. This is what I had in mind, BTW, in saying that you define 4 as what 2 + 2 equals.

At this point, a rational agent gives the judgment "true".

1. It is possible for the agent to have damaged senses, be insane, etc., in which case his simulation may not match the computation done by physics.

Why do you need or want an agent? You go on to say that the agent can get things wrong! That means that there is something for the agent to be wrong about. You already have a procedure for deciding truth, because you're using it to evaluate the agent. Throw out the agent! He's just a capitalist stooge anyway, a supervisor brought in to approve the work of the peons.

2. If the problem were formulated differently, the judgment could be "false" (AKA not "true") with the same materials in the two boxes. For example, "equal in number" is a different problem than "equal in weight". In the latter case, we would be doing another operation, not counting.

Of course. Science requires being pedantically careful with defining the parameters of an experiment.

This is part of why I used examples from quantum mechannics which give integral results. The messiness of everyday objects cannot be generalized to all situations. But you still can't be fuzzy in what you measure. (Nor is there a guarantee that you can measure everything you want, but that's another issue.)

zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 4:14 pm Why do you need or want an agent? You go on to say that the agent can get things wrong! That means that there is something for the agent to be wrong about. You already have a procedure for deciding truth, because you're using it to evaluate the agent.

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. Truth, like other judgments, is an ontological category. "Ontology" contains logos. Logos means word. Words need to be said. The agent is the being that says them.

A box of apples is not the kind of thing that can be true. It can be a fact that a box of apples exists. The sentence "A box of apples exists" is a statement, not a fact. (Online nitpickers call these "claims".) The statement can be true if it's a fact that a box of apples exists. The agent is the person or theorem prover that pronounces this judgment.

This is terminology that's sometimes used in logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_theory_of_truth

zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 4:14 pm Throw out the agent! He's just a capitalist stooge anyway, a supervisor brought in to approve the work of the peons.

Wait, we haven't established he's not an underpaid worker.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 4:14 pm This is part of why I used examples from quantum mechannics which give integral results. The messiness of everyday objects cannot be generalized to all situations. But you still can't be fuzzy in what you measure. (Nor is there a guarantee that you can measure everything you want, but that's another issue.)

Constructive mathematicians accuse Platonists of fuzziness. There have been brilliant mathematicians who used to be Platonists until they found a theorem they were sure was true until it was proved wrong. That precipitated their conversion to constructivism, automated theorem proving or at least the foundations of mathematics. IIRC even Vladimir Voevodsky was one of them.

What makes intuitionistic logic distinct from classical logic is that the former rejects the law of the excluded middle while accepting the law of non-contradiction. The idea is that you can't pronounce the judgment that the statement is true or the statement is false until you see a proof either way. Intuitionistic type theory formulates this as: the proof has the type of its statement. That is, the statement is a type, and the proof is an instance of that type. Examples:

2+2=4 : T
2+2=4 is of type Top (of the lattice). 2+2=4 is one proof that truth exists.

2 : Int
2 is of type integer. 2 is one proof that integers exist.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 12:21 am Wow, can't agree with you there. Truth is not a feature of utterance; it's a concept, or a feature of states of affairs. It's what makes something a fact and what allows us to talk about anything at all.

i think it's the other way around, no? it's facts, or reality itself and its characteristics, that make true statements true.

sure, sure, the mindless universe had broadly the same stuff in it that our has, sauf minds and all the things they do. no, absolutely. assuming we're the first minds in the universe, then the *facts* about the universe are now the same as they were before humanity evolved, plus or minus a few weird things happening in this one planet in the corner. if suddenly all minds disappear the shape of mercury don't change, or disappear, or nothing funky like that. this is platonism: to assume it is the forms that shape the physical reality. but there's no math, there's no fours, there's no sevens or pies or gravity, though of course physical bodies would continue moving as they did before. but their movements is what's basal, not the theories of gravity. mathematics and physical laws and all the rest of it, they're maps we come up with, not the territory.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 5:05 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 4:14 pmThrow out the agent! He's just a capitalist stooge anyway, a supervisor brought in to approve the work of the peons.

Wait, we haven't established he's not an underpaid worker.

It could be…shudder…AI.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 5:05 pm 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.

Torco wrote:it's facts, or reality itself and its characteristics, that make true statements true.

This is like pulling teeth, but there you go, at least. You have something in your ontology called "facts."

Do you need God to make sure that facts exist? I'm sure you'd both assure me that no, that level is unneeded. I'm saying the same about these "agents" that you want to look at the facts. If something is a fact, that's all you need, you don't need a supervisor to confirm them (or, as rotting bones admits, to mess up the confirmation).

This isn't to say that the subjective process is uninteresting. It is, when we come to the problem of knowledge. I would fully agree that to "know" something requires a conscious party, though I'm happy to say that animals can know things.

oops, pressed reply too quick. i'm surprised at how much rotting's take matches my own.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 3:03 pm If an agent is judging something... what are they judging? What condition obtains such that they spit out "true"?

i don't know, i haven't solved epistemology. but yeah, what rotting says is not far from my own take: we say a thing is true when it describes the facts, or the way things go, or the dao, or the monad, reality, well enough. sometimes we think that happens, and we judge true what isn't, sometimes we're right, and we judge true that which is true, etcetera.

Why do you need or want an agent? You go on to say that the agent can get things wrong! That means that there is something for the agent to be wrong about.

sure, he's wrong about the facts. truth is not consensus.

In philosophy, ontics is distinct from ontology. What is is not the same as what is said about it. Fact is an ontic category. Truth, like other judgments, is an ontological category. "Ontology" contains logos. Logos means word. Words need to be said. The agent is the being that says them.

exactly! we may *want* there to be truths-without-utterers, categorical imperatives as it were, but i don't want it bad enough to construct an entire new substance to get them. and we shouldn't believe in things cause we'd like them to be true, not outside the temple, i suppose.

I feel like this is sounding weird, because it's hard to explain things to someone who does not accept that explanations, facts, and reason exist. All these things depend on truth. So this feels like talking with someone who excitedly declares that they do not have a brain, or that no one else exists, or something.

no, it is exactly the other way around. what is true depends on what is the case. and what is the case is, ultimately and to get back to the point, well, the material universe. this is, i think, the prototypical formulation of physicalism.

the difficulty to express seems to me to boil down to this very inversion: people often do it, which is to say dualism is quite common: they say things like that the universe moves the way it does because of the laws of physics, for example. and so, where are those laws? surely in the realm of forms. but it seems to me it has to be the other way around: the laws of physics that we recognize as such as the ones that more or less describe the way the proverbial cookie, in fact, crumbles. is this a thing we say in english? "that's just the way the cookie crumbles" ?

This is like pulling teeth, but there you go, at least. You have something in your ontology called "facts."

almost: the mereology of facts is a mess. the universe, reality, is how it is, which is colloquially to say there are facts, but how many facts are there? is there just one complicated one? is there a fact for every particle, every atom? is there a fact every seven atoms? how about facts about where one atom is in relation to the next? is my name a fact, or is each of my names a fact? i dunno, i tend to think about mereology nihilistically, like, there's no *things* or *facts* as concrete units, there's just... r e a l i t y, which we draw lines on, and those lines either fit or don't fit that reality, and when they do we say something is true. so the notions of facts is not uncomplicated, but i take you to mean not necessarily discrete unitary facts but, rather, that the universe is the way that it is independently of what we say or think, in which case yes, sure, absolutely.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 6:19 pm This is like pulling teeth, but there you go, at least. You have something in your ontology called "facts."

Do you need God to make sure that facts exist? I'm sure you'd both assure me that no, that level is unneeded. I'm saying the same about these "agents" that you want to look at the facts. If something is a fact, that's all you need, you don't need a supervisor to confirm them (or, as rotting bones admits, to mess up the confirmation).

This isn't to say that the subjective process is uninteresting. It is, when we come to the problem of knowledge. I would fully agree that to "know" something requires a conscious party, though I'm happy to say that animals can know things.

I see the various logics as tools you can apply depending on the problem you are facing. For example, are you trying to decide whether someone is behaving rationally? Without the agent, there is no one whose rationality under evaluation. Like numbers, the agent is also an abstraction from possible agents constructed by ignoring low level details. It's there to ensure that whoever the agent happens to be is drawing rational conclusions based on the proofs available.

Torco wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 6:31 pm 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 reassured that you do have a blargzard, you just refuse to call it the truth.

Obviously we both see each other's language as eccentric, but I think mine is closer to the common meaning of the word. When we ask "is it true that there are four apples in this box" or "is it true that eⁱⁿ = cos n + i sin n" or "is it true that Napoleon reached Moscow", we are not asking "did the appropriate supervisor put this in the Big Book", we're asking if it's the case, if it's a fact, if it's how it is.

Now, epistemology is fascinating, and also a series of mind-blowers and pitfalls... ask a philosopher or a scientist or a historian and it will soon be clear that there are big limits on what we can know, though they won't agree on which those are. Note that my notion of truth is no guarantee that the truth can be known.

how many facts are there?

Infinite.

I guess you really really want to reduce everything to matter and energy and somehow deduce all of epistemology from that. Well, good luck, but I don't think it's gonna go smoothly. Obviously we want theories about the physical world, and to know facts about it. But there are other things to talk about, too: imaginary worlds, possible other universes, models of why the physical world behaves as it does, matters of pure math, how minds work. If you think all this can be reduced to physics, I got bad news for you. For one thing, modern physics will not tell you all the answers you want— some things are not just unknown, they're unknowable. For another, philosophy will carefully explain to you that the physical world is a supposition. We hope it's a good one, but you could be a brain in a vat.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 6:58 pmI 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 reassured that you do have a blargzard, you just refuse to call it the truth.

yup, cause i think truth is a predicate of utterances, as i've said. "the truth" supposes a mixture of maps and territory that i think ends up being confusing. as for the naming, to myself i think of it as reality or the monad, mostly, but i don't know how standard that terminology is and i suspect not much. i also agree that your usage is closer to common parlance: as i said people often speak about "the truth" as if it's a thing, which is to say, dualism is common. but i mean people speak about spirits of trees and saints and stuff.

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 hopefully clean of outlandish things like an entirely different realm where self-existing forms drink from the light of the pure idea of good or stuff. plus, material reality you can see and touch and operate on, they show themselves to us. possible worlds and realms of forms only appear to us through speculations, thorough language, through phrases like "it must then be the case than" and like... i don't know, people used to say that obviously orbits have to be perfect circles, cause it is the purer form and how can the sky not be pure? these things, they only appear in the map, see, so it's probably the painter's brushmarks, rather than real features of the territory.

I grant that our knowledge is incomplete and will always be, but i don't think that's a problem. no more than it's a problem that you can't, i dunno, find the last digit of pi.

infinite facts.... maybe, but like, infinite singular facts? are there atomic facts?

Torco wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 10:11 pmare there atomic facts?

for sure: semantic primes...
(only in human mind for matching the infinite singular facts of the world (if its compound is true -if it has a known existing referent)...)

Torco wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 10:11 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 6:58 pmI 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 reassured that you do have a blargzard, you just refuse to call it the truth.

yup, cause i think truth is a predicate of utterances, as i've said. "the truth" supposes a mixture of maps and territory that i think ends up being confusing. as for the naming, to myself i think of it as reality or the monad, mostly, but i don't know how standard that terminology is and i suspect not much. i also agree that your usage is closer to common parlance: as i said people often speak about "the truth" as if it's a thing, which is to say, dualism is common. but i mean people speak about spirits of trees and saints and stuff.

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 hopefully clean of outlandish things like an entirely different realm where self-existing forms drink from the light of the pure idea of good or stuff. plus, material reality you can see and touch and operate on, they show themselves to us. possible worlds and realms of forms only appear to us through speculations, thorough language, through phrases like "it must then be the case than" and like... i don't know, people used to say that obviously orbits have to be perfect circles, cause it is the purer form and how can the sky not be pure? these things, they only appear in the map, see, so it's probably the painter's brushmarks, rather than real features of the territory.

I grant that our knowledge is incomplete and will always be, but i don't think that's a problem. no more than it's a problem that you can't, i dunno, find the last digit of pi.

infinite facts.... maybe, but like, infinite singular facts? are there atomic facts?

Your view of things, though, overlooks the fact that math, and mathematical facts, are constant and infinite (if you doubt that mathematical facts are infinite, consider that there are uncountably many facts that, where x is a real number, x+x=x*2, because there are uncountably many real numbers) regardless of their physical substrate, from which they operate separately. Math does not change regardless of whether you are doing it in your head, with a computer, or with an abacus. Math does not even need a human agent -- computers can readily do it completely independent of human intervention.

Furthermore, the universe operates in mathematical terms, and operated in such terms before there were humans to conceive of math. Yes, you can argue that math is inherent in the universe, and I would agree -- but at the same time I would argue that math cannot be boiled down to matter and energy, so thus you still cannot escape dualism this way.

At the same time, we humans can create arbitrary mathematical systems out of whole cloth, e.g. Conway's Game of Life, and all of these mathematical systems, while embedded as part of the physical substrate, fundamentally exist independent of it (e.g. Conway's Game of Life can be infinitely nested within itself due to the fact that it is a Turing-complete system, something that has no relationship on how it is implemented, whether with a computer or with pencil and paper, even if nesting multiple Conway's Game of Life with a physical substrate of pencil and paper would be highly impractical).

this is exactly what i mean when i say dualism depends on an inversion: math is a thing people do, and does change: what doesn't change is what math is describing, namely the motions of planets etcetera etcetera, that is to say, reality qua such. the planets don't move around the way they do because of math, but rather, the math is how it is because the planets move like they do, and because we mean what we mean by the numbers we use and whatnot. it is we who come up with physical laws to describe how reality operates, they're maps, and so it is a mistake to ask "well, since reality operates governed by these laws, the laws must be prior to the universe itself, where did they come from?" they're not prior to the universe, and they came from us. this is why i don't find useful to posit imaginary things and then use them to prove things, as happens with the kalam ontological argument and stuff like that.

Math does not change regardless of whether you are doing it in your head, with a computer, or with an abacus. Math does not even need a human agent -- computers can readily do it completely independent of human intervention.

the bible is also the same whether you write it down on paper, wood or a pdf: does that mean the bible is also part of a dualistic realm of forms? how about the zompist bboard? presumably we agree we're both looking at the same forum, you in your computer and me in mine. and the times the board, the server has migrated from one computer to the next (which if it's hosted in some cloud presumably it does all the time) it keeps being the same board. all sorts of things operate with some degree of substrate-independence, that's not that remarkable or unique.