Yes, that's right. I don't think the idea of a "formless existent" is even coherent, really. — Terrapin Station

So whatever exists is formed. I think that's true. And yet:

Imagine a candle melting. The wax had the form of a candle, and now it has the form of a puddle. But it's the same wax. So there's a difference between the wax and any particular form. (stolen from Descartes, obviously). How do you deal with this argument?

I agree with that. So you never sense the uninterpreted or unrepresented. Right?

I could take a stab at the question about how the issue bears on formal logic. Logicians get by with very low ambitions. Ontology tends to be in the background driving questions about reference and the nature of knowledge, but logic, being apriori, doesn't make ontological claims. It can't report on what's natural and what isn't.

And... the point was being made that there are contradictions in our thinking, such as boundaries that are neither something or nothing. But then set theory was brought up in regard to digital being a subset of analog (which makes no sense to me.. but anyway). Set theory is founded on an odd contradictory notion called the transfinite... so nobody has a monopoly on contradiction.

I was talking about representation. How do you see that being related to randomness?

But then there is a further question of how good are we are psychologically at distinguishing the various shades of randomness in the world? — apokrisis

I don't think uninterpreted means random.

I think you're agreeing that everything we encounter has some kind of form. We never encounter anything that's entirely formless.

One way to put it would be this: if that's true, then does that amount to idealism? Are you an idealist?

The idea of fate is pretty common. I don't think education would increase the ranks of determinists because people mainly avoid determinism by means of a strong emotional bias toward freedom of the will.

Related, I like to think of the sensation/emotion that we can conceptualize without being able to actually exhaust in this conceptualization. The idea of red is not redness itself, though we need the idea to point at redness and maybe to give it unity as an object. — Hoo

Right. Another way to explain "noise" is that it's sensation unassociated with any form or idea.

Is it possible to see without interpretation? In other words... if you don't call it red, is it correct to say you've seen it at all?

Where there is the perception of noise, is there necessarily an accompanying idea of the uninterpreted... the unrepresented? IOW... is that the form associated with noise... the formless?

I meant noise as in "noise vs signal"... white noise. It occurred to me that I didn't explain that.

The visual counterpart would be...muddled like a Jackson Pollock.

Or maybe we never sense the unrepresented. We just talk about it.

But no government has a real monopoly on violence. You can be violent in defense of a child. You can kill to save yourself.

And why not define sovereignty as the power to collect taxes?

I suppose I was steering the discussion toward: "What does the capacity for violence have to do with statehood?" or some such.

If you don't like that angle, you could steer it somewhere else. I wasn't trying to de-rail your thread. It just seemed pretty vague and I picked up on what's interesting to me.

Interesting that you talk about the ability to kill as being linked to sovereignty. Medieval Europe's overactive ability to kill kept it from developing stable states for an extended period. The blood lust of war lords acted as a force driving Europe back toward something tribal and possibly nomadic. In many areas of Europe, skills related to building and governing cities were lost.

Revival of the knowledge of governing states was linked to the development of a class of lawyers who could read the old Roman law. They reintroduced the concept of the corporation and in the process set Europe on the trail to forming integrated states of the sort we take for granted.

Could the opposite narrative also be laid out? Sure. What's interesting to me is why a person would magnify one storyline and ignore the other.

Point was that Krishna isn't necessarily friendly. 'I am Time: destroyer of worlds. No matter what you do, Arjuna, the men before you are bound to die.'

I wouldn't use the love your neighbor test on that.

Open your eyes. Look at what you have to accept about yourself to simply claim your humanity. If the Holocaust doesn't challenge you enough... I've got a history of Russia for ya. Six holocausts in a row.

If your soul is pristine enough that you can throw stones.... Be as hard line as you like. You have nothing to teach about unity.

Isn't the difference between an analog and a digital system a digitalization anyway? Either/or you are analog or digital... — darthbarracuda

Ideally, yes. Some effort was being made to show analog as being primal or primary.

If electrons can be either waves or particles, I'm not sure there is a primary.

Or from the possibility of different actions? — John

Sure. The road not taken.

Recall that to institute any digital logic, a continuum must distinguish a part of itself, from itself. In other words, the 'flatness' of the analog must become self-reflexive and thus stratified into 'levels': the object level of the continuum itself, and the meta-level at which the continuum can 'refer' to itself. — StreetlightX

Starting to sound a little mystical here. The snake turns and meets its tail? At the point of meeting, the one becomes the two.

"It is impossible to decide whether [the boundary] belongs to the set A or the set non-A. It belongs to neither, it is both neither and nowhere, and it corresponds to nothing in the real world whatsoever". — StreetlightX

The boundary is a line or plane for spacial boundaries. It's an idea. I pondered this a long time ago.. the origin of the concept of negation. Maybe it comes from craving and aversion.

No. I guess I must have misunderstood. You aren't silly enough to tell people that you're an illusion.

The whole is in the part. Not a new idea. Not threatening. And not any more bizarre sounding that some of the stuff you have appeared to say... claims of not existing at all coming from your direction and what not...

The natural question now is,do you think there is some unifying property that all of these human desires share?If so,then this property could easily be named the goal everyone strives towards. — hunterkf5732

Is it to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior? I hope not, because I totally failed to do that.

How about helping to create a community pottery studio? That's a good purpose.

Yea. You're showing that the paradox doesn't generalize far enough to encompass all knowledge. Some things we do learn empirically.

Was the point of the paradox to generalize that far? Or was it to just say that very fundamentally (for instance in the logic or morality departments).. you can't teach a man something he doesn't already know?

. I know what I'm looking for in the sense that I know that I'm looking for what's in the box, — Michael

I don't think that's on par with looking for the answer to a question. The correct answer will be specific. The content of the box need not be.

I think of it as pointing out that students are not blank slates. In some areas, education is pointing a student to what the student already knows... in logic, some areas of math, some features of morality, etc.

Chomsky would say the knowledge is innate... maybe biological. Plato said anamnesis....you remember the knowledge of the World Soul from which you arose (or maybe a neo-platonist would say that?)

World soul, biology... what's the difference?

All excellent points, Pierre. Thanks!

It seems to me that the analog/digital distinction is not so much about the binary Yes/No nature of digital things, but rather about discrete vs continuous mathematics. Discrete mathematics is about cases where there is a finite or at least countable set of possible states, whereas continuous mathematics - of which calculus is the best-known example - is where there is an uncountable set of states, with a metric over that set to denote distance between states (eg the distance between 2.71 and 3.141 is 0.431). — andrewk

This is true in electronics. DC voltage is quantified discretely (obviously). We use a little calculus to quantify AC voltage. Interestingly, what we're doing when we quantify AC voltage is we're trying to weigh AC against DC... as if quantification is fundamentally a digital thing.

A digital phenomenon is either something or nothing... and when the something is there, it's static.

An analog phenomenon seems to always Be. There aren't any moments of absence.

If it's true that identity requires a moat around the castle.. a gulf between thing and world, then it's true that identity is the offspring of a digital world... a dualistic scene. It could be argued that the primal identity is the self. Where there is a self, there is a POV. POV requires space.. separation between me and the thing I observe.

Is the most important identity of all absent from the "nature" mentioned in the OP?

Actually, the capital of France is Paris. This is an example of aposteriori necessity.

We're so smart to have figured that out. The fact that we aren't examining ordinary language is significant here, Pierre. It means there's an artificial, stilted element to the proceedings. The conclusion is constructed. It's not something that follows from any logic and therefore being able to repeat that conclusion is not a sign of wisdom... certainly not a love of wisdom.

I'm not quite sure why it ended up this way, though. Is it that ordinary language is just too complex to fathom? Possibly. AP started out examining fake languages with the hope that something would be learned in the process.. something that would advance understanding of ordinary language.

It didn't work out that way, I don't think.

Yes. The fact that Soames asks in that essay 'Does the actual operator capture the common meaning of "actual"?' shows that he's not analyzing ordinary language.

Anyway.. "Actually, the capital of France is Paris."

We agree the above statement is necessarily true and aposteriori?

Cool.

Cute.

you're simply never going to achieve a 1:1 correspondence, as a matter of principle. It's like when applying a Fourier transform to an analog wave signal, you can in principle only ever get an approximation, and never the signal itself. — StreetlightX

True. Logically, there can't be a 1:1 correspondence because there are no 1's in a continuum. Maybe infinitesimals, but I think that's a hybrid digital/analog concept.

That's the problem with a continuum. There's nothing to get a hold of... no units. The golf ball can never make it to the hole.

So Dr Linsky is right:

Since adding the actuality operator to a contingent truth produces a necessary truth, and since it is widely assumed that adding it to a truth that is knowable only aposteriori preserves aposteriority, the actuality operator is often seen as a rich source of the necessary aposteriori.........Although these results appear obvious, it is wise to withhold judgment on them until we have a clearer picture of what the actual world-state really is. — Soames' essay, Actually

You actually have to use the actually operator to turn a contingent truth into a necessary one. Why couldn't it just be implied? What Scott Soames is talking about here is not ordinary language use.... that's why.

Bizarre.

LOL Scott Soames senpai noticed us ^_^ — The Great Whatever

What?

BTW.. This is Soames' essay if anybody's interested. It's on his website.

Actually

This is the perspective of Dr Bernard Linsky, professor at U of Alberta.

Dear Ms Dunnagan and Mr Normand, I think that if both "France" and "Paris" are proper names, and hence rigid designators, that
"Paris is the actual capital of France", where that means "Actually, Paris is the capital of France" is clearly a necessary truth, and a posteriori, since we must know a contingent truth about the actual world to know that "Paris is the capital of France" is true in the actual world. Of course, if either "Paris" or "France" is not intended as a proper name, the truth of the assertion will depend on the intentions with which it is uttered. Also, "Paris is the capital of France" (without any mention of what is actually the case) could of course be false in a world where Toulouse is the capital. So, if one just hears that last sentence uttered, there are all sorts of ways of interpreting it, but the standard meaning, in which "Paris" and "France" are proper names, produces a contingent sentence, unless some use of "actual" or "actually" is included in which case it becomes necessary.
Does that help?
Bernard Linsky — Dr Linsky

Uh.. this answer is on the verge of confusing me. I haven't finished Soames' essay Actually. Maybe after I finish it, I'll be able to assess this answer a little better.

Do you mean something along the lines of the Sorites Paradox?

The analog is indifferent to the digital functioning of the thermostat, while the digital, as coarse-grained, can only 'see' a threshold being crossed and is itself indifferent to the continuum of the temperature as such. — StreetlightX

Yea. I used to work in telecommunications hardware engineering.. all up in the A to D and vice versa.

It's true you could say that digital exists because of boundaries we cast. Transistors were originally used only for analog applications. Using it as a switch means picking a threshold. Since the threshold is artificial, digital is fundamentally artificial. I think that's what the author you mentioned was trying to say?

You could look at it that way.... the other way is this: reality is all about consequences.

I think it's actually just different ways of looking at the world (ways that are interdependent)... although I have zero will to argue for my own intuition. Maybe somebody else will.

A way to summarise all of the above is this: to the degree that nature is a continuum, there are no brute identities in nature. — StreetlightX

But the difference between analog and digital has a digital character. It's an opposition in which the poles are interdependent.

Movies seem analog because we aren't fast enough to see that it's discrete frames passing by. Maybe time and space are like that at a fundamental level.... atomic... blinking. If you claim that it's not... how do you know?

WOW.

:)

For some reason it reminds me of "I am Jack's raging bile duct."

I'll toss you for the title. — unenlightened

Proof is in the pudding. Arrogance is the sail on a boat. Unfurl it in the wind and you'll go places you couldn't have otherwise. Unfurl it at the wrong time and you'll find yourself crashed on the rocks.

Don't look to the humble to educate you about timing. They don't know and they never will.

But not so self- aware, it seems, as to see the vacuity of the claim. — unenlightened

If you're everyone and everything, you're no one and nothing.

The folly of arrogance is best explained by the most arrogant one among us.

I am the universe spouting aphorisms.