Your reason for taking up arms might then be gone, indeed, but not your enemy's. — baker

That's because they haven't looked at our differences from all sides - anekantavada failure.

Right, Jains. People who make a point of eventually slowly dying of starvation. — baker

Any hard evidence for this?

Sure. But what is the use of this? It's not as if understanding that things look differently from different perspectives is going to bring about world peace. — baker

:up: Jainism's Anekantavada.

Anekāntavāda (Hindi: अनेकान्तवाद, "many-sidedness") is the Jain doctrine about metaphysical truths that emerged in ancient India. It states that the ultimate truth and reality is complex and has multiple aspects. Anekantavada has also been interpreted to mean non-absolutism, "intellectual Ahimsa", religious pluralism, as well as a rejection of fanaticism that leads to terror attacks and mass violence. Some scholars state that modern revisionism has attempted to reinterpret anekantavada with religious tolerance, openmindedness and pluralism. — Wikipedia

Once you realize that disagreements, the seedbed of all violence, including wars, arise from looking at issues from only one side and not from all sides, including your enemy's your reason to take up arms will be gone. World Peace!

BTW, for those interested, in spherical geometry there are square circles but no contradiction because their definitions have been adapted to the sphere's surface.

Insistence on the same perspective was part of the meaning of a contradiction already in ancient Greece:

Aristotle's law of noncontradiction states that "It is impossible that the same thing can at the same time both belong and not belong to the same object and in the same respect."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contradiction
(emphasis mine) — litewave

We're talking past each other. I agree with you that real contradictions are impossible. If someone claims a contradiction as real, say p & ~p, all we have to do to resolve it is to say p from one angle, ~p from another angle but not the case that p & ~p from the same angle. The p & ~p was only an apparent contradiction.

Even in physics, Euclidean distance is only a special case of a more general way of defining distance. — fishfry

Didn't know that! :up: There's more than one way to skin a cat although it escapes me why anyone would want to do that.

You can still formulate a genuinely contradictory proposition by insisting on the same perspective but such a proposition would not correspond to any object in reality — litewave

That's wordplay. "genuinely contradictory proposition" and "such a proposition would not correspond to any object in reality" is a contradiction. Impossible! Nevertheless, from different viewpoints both are true.

In the space with taxicab metric that fishfry mentioned. You may object that that is actually not a circle but he did use the standard definition of a circle: a set of points with a fixed distance from some point. — litewave

He messed around with the definition of distance - the way a taxicab moves around a city, a well-planned city with all roads at right angles to each other.

A genuinely contradictory object cannot exist so any object in reality can be only seemingly contradictory. — litewave

There are no genuine contradictions. That's the law :point: The Law of Noncontradiction ~(p &~p), only apparent contradictions that can be resolved with anekantavada (many-sidedness/perspectivism).

However, apparent contradictions could be shadows of higher truths in higher realities from different perspectives, projected onto our world.

In Euclidean space they are mutually exclusive and I tacitly assumed this kind of space. — litewave

In what kind of space are there square circles? I'm curious.

But a circle and a square are NOT defined as each other's opposites, nor are they mutually exclusive at all. People should stop using square circles as an example of a contradiction, because in fact there are square circles. — fishfry

Interesting post. For once I understood some math, weird math to be precise.

However, I believe that squares and circles are mutually exclucive unless you want to demonstrate the existence of a square circle and mind you, not by tweaking definitions as you've done with the so-called taxicab metric.

I'm glad that you brought up the matter of mutual exclusivity vis-à-vis contradictions. There's another side to the story of a proposition p and its negation ~p that needs to be taken into consideration viz. p and ~p are also, in addition to being mutually exclusive, also jointly exhaustive i.e. between p and ~p, all there is must be either p or ~p, the residue being the null set { }.

Why I felt comfortable with a square circle as a contradiction is because a circle is not a square and thus I assigned squares to S and circles to ~S. S and ~S and voila, we have a contradiction (mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive). Too, a contradiction is defined as false in all possible worlds and a square circle is also false in all possible worlds given we stick to standard definitions.

Square circle as a genuinely contradictory object would look like a square and like a circle from the same perspective (and at the same time and under all other same circumstances). Such an object cannot exist. — litewave

I did some reading up and what my OP is about matches what Jains had to say about truth 2,500 years ago (yeah! that's how old my idea is). Jainism has a concept called Anekantavada (many-sidedness) which your posts echo. According to anekantavada, contradictions can be, in a sense, resolved, with the help of perspectivism. Given a contradiction p & ~p, we can say that p from one angle and ~p from another angle and not p & ~p from the same angle.

Thanks a million!

As for the claim that a square circle is a contradiction, all I can say is it's a square from one standpoint and a circle from another standpoint (like a 3D cylinder) but not both a square and a circle from the same standpoint.

This is what leads me away from reading your posts.

A square circle would be a regular polygon with four sides, the perimeter of which is equidistant from a given point on the same plane.

Draw me one of those. — Banno

Many thanks for the challenge. The point I' making is that there are only apparent contradictions, not real ones. If given a contradiction, p & ~p, we can very easily extricate ourselves from this rather painful predicament by saying p from one point of view and ~p from another (apparent contradiction) and not from the same point of view (real contradiction).

Can you go through the addendum I appended to the OP. There are some critical changes.

Square circle as a genuinely contradictory object would look like a square and like a circle from the same perspective (and at the same time and under all other same circumstances). Such an object cannot exist — litewave

Indeed, how right you are. It is the same perspective - a 2D perspective of a 3D proposition.

Shannon reduced information to a binary code — apokrisis

Imhotep: The language of the slaves machines. I may have use for you. And the rewards...will be great!

Thus, go further than reality could be. — javi2541997

:up: I suspect people are bored with reality and what it puts on the table. They thirst for more and if you look at extreme sports and how popular they are, I'd say people are willing to pay the ultimate price just to get that adrenaline rush. If you like bungee jumping, why not just cut to the chase and go skydiving! That's how some of us seem to approach the issue. I'm all for it despite the many funerals that have been/are/will be held on this account.

I see two problems:

1. Radical Islam, assuming there's another version of Islam

2. The Global Policeman, Uncle Sam, seems to get involved and stay involved in something only if there's profit to be made. Bad doggy! Bad, bad doggy!

As Kenny Rogers put it...

You've got to know when to hold 'em
know when to fold 'em
know when to walk away
know when to run — Bitter Crank

:fire:

We should've met when I was younger. Just my luck!

A contradictory proposition affirms that something has and does not have the same property. But a proposition that affirms that something looks like a circle from one perspective and does not look like a circle from another perspective is not a contradiction because the property of "looking like a circle from one perspective" is not the same property as "looking like a circle from another perspective".

Sometimes it is said for emphasis that a contradictory proposition affirms that something has and does not have the same property at the same time, and/or in the same sense, but these additions can be seen as already included in the meaning of the phrase "same property". — litewave

There's no contradiction here.

↪litewave Yep. Nothing to see here. — Banno

Please read my addendum to the OP.

Yeah — litewave

What's impossible to you?

Yes, unless neutrinos in create some kind of disruption in the fabric of spacetime that the being can perceive as its own "mirror-image". It's a good example — Pantagruel

Nice try!

It disappointed me a bit the fact dogs failed the mirror test — javi2541997

They have poor eyesight and so the mirror test is N/A.

What's interesting though is what do we, indivdually possess, those attributes that are aspects of our selves, that can't be reflected back at ourselves thereby preventing those aspects of our selves from being integrated into our sense of self?

Suppose there's a being that's made of neutrinos. Neutrinos pass through anything and everything or, conversely, everything passes through neutrinos - there's nothing that reflects off of neutrinos. If so, no reflection can be generated. No reflection, no self-awareness of any kind.

The former being an exact and the latter (because of the admixture of the physical) an inexact or approximate science. — Pantagruel

I never would have guessed!

I'm at a loss as to how language can be syntax-less.
— TheMadFool

The claim is that it lacks recursion. It does have a regularity of word order - a general subject-object-verb organisation.

So the basic narrative structure is there. But it is a simpler language that doesn’t make it easy to construct nested hierarchical statements - long sentences with multiple clumps of sub clauses - much like the way I write, to general bafflement and annoyance.

All this reflects bigger philosophical battles. Chomsky is some variety of a structuralist (like me) who has tipped over into frank Platonism about rational structure. He drew some silly lines in the sand over the genetic innateness and biological determinism of grammar as hardwired neurology. The Continental types hated this naturalism mixed with extreme structuralism and hyper rationalism. They want grammar to be utterly arbitrary and cultural - rainbow diversity with no one’s system better or worse, more evolved or more primitive.

Linguistics became its own little private shit show for many years. It also was entangled with the shit show debate between the cognitivists arguing thought precedes language and the constructionists who argued language precedes thought. — apokrisis

I see. If one considers language as a mode of communication, it needs to be about reality and that invariably requires language to capture causality. Causality, as we all know, true or not, is permutationally sensitive (order matters). In fact, all human enterprises seem to be wholly cause-effect oriented.

Causality and other sides to reality in which order matters requires this order (sequence) to be adequately reflected in language. Is syntax just that? A way of representing those facets of reality wherein permutation plays a (major) role.

Take the sentence, dog ate dog (world :grin: ). Order doesn't matter in this case as swapping subject and object makes no difference. There's no need to create a syntax structure that's sensitive to order. However, the sentence, man ate dog is not the same as dog ate man because there's an order in which the event takes place, causally speaking as the subject is a cause that acts and produces an effect in the object.

Man ate dog.
Man dog, ate.
Dog, man ate.
Dog ate, man.
Ate dog, man.
Ate, man dog.

Poetic license! A comma is just another way of expressing order.

As I said, I think that all possible worlds are just as real as our world because I don't see any ontological difference between possible and real worlds. — litewave

Modal Realism! I quite like it that there are more worlds out there populated by unicorns, fairies, angels but what scares me are vampires, ghosts, werewolves, zombies.

Every consistent description of a world corresponds to a real world. — litewave

Isn't that begging the question? By the way if a world has to be qualified with real as you do in "...a real world", it suggests that worlds can be unreal. Care to expand and elaborate.

I had the idea it was with land title claims and the tallying of agricultural output in Sumeria and Egypt. Land holdings had to be calculated across very irregular shapes, There was a recent discovery about this https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/mathematics/babylonian-tablet-trigonometry-pythagorean-triplets/ — Wayfarer

To simplify the discussion, let’s use a right-angled triangle with shorter perpendicular side s, longer perpendicular side l, and diagonal d, such that s² + l² = d² .

Columns two and three of Plimpton 322 simply contain values for s and d respectively for the series of Pythagorean triples. Column four is just a list of the numbers 1 to 15, so we can remember which row we’re up to. But column one represents the ratio d² / l², and since we’re given the value of d in column three, we can calculate l, and voila … a complete Pythagorean triple (s,l,d) is revealed! — cosmosmagazine.com

3, 4, and 5 are a pythagorean triple: 3² + 4² = 5²

The yield of the land corresponds to its area.

Imagine you had 9 square units of land (3²).

Suppose now, that new land is cultivated and the ratio of the total yield to that of the new land cultivated is 1.5625 (roughly one and a half times). This is basically the ratio of the total area of land that's cultivated to the area of the new land cultivated = d²/l².

We can now calculate l = sqrt(d²/1.5625) = 4 units. The new land cultivated can be thought of as a square 16 square units with sides 4 units. The area of land you began with (3²) + the area of the new land cultivated (4²) = Total land cultivated (5²). From how the yield scaled up (× 1.5625), we could determine the area and dimension of the new land cultivated. I dunno!

I understand, I just meant to point out that if all possible (logically consistent/coherent) universes are equally real as the one we live in, correspondence theory of truth becomes identical to coherence theory of truth — litewave

How?

it is so impressive. — javi2541997

You're joking, right? :lol:

defense habits — javi2541997

An important, very apposite concept. Humans are very defensive about what's within the sphere of their self, stuff like spouses, children, family, friends form the inner circle of the ego's (self's) territory and personal property, work colleagues, etc. lie just outside, these being what a person would describe, fondly, as my so and so, the word "my" a marker of self-awareness (I).

Animals also, in a similar fashion, mark their territory and fight to the death to repel trespassers. Perhaps, this is self-awareness of some kind, at some level, since it necessitates the notion of a my - this is my turf so to speak.

As I tried to clarify but failed, the paradox as described in the OP comes in two flavors:

1. Strong version of the paradox: The body is self-aware (the immune system can tell the difference between itself and pathogens) but the mind isn't (fails all tests of self-recognition including the mirror self-recognition test)

2. Weak version of the paradox: Yes, the body is self-aware at the cellular level - the immune system attacks foreign/alien microbes but not its own cells. However, mental self-awareness is present (e.g. animals can recognize their own scent) but it's partial/incomplete e.g. failing the visual mirror self-recognition test.

The point is that an organism must be able to recognize its own reflection, be it in smell form, auditory form, tactile form, etc. If reflections in all sensory modalities are identified as the self, we have complete self-awareness.

Come to think of it, I haven't heard of humans being capable of picking out their own clothes from a jumbled pile of clothes that includes the apparel of others using just smell. :chin: Assuming of course that each one of us has a unique scent.

Isn't there a difference in kind between these two types of recognition though? — Pantagruel

A good point. Allorecognition takes place between cells i.e. one cell recognizes another as being part of the same group just like a wolf knows that the other wolves are part of the same pack.

A single cell, therefore, isn't self-aware in the same sense that a human is when fae looks in the mirror and sees faer reflection.

Nevertheless, when we take the entire body as a unit, the cellular allorecognition can be safely interpreted as the body being self-aware.

Even though many descriptions of a universe by mathematicians don't correspond to our universe, they correspond to other possible universes. And what is the ontological (existential) difference between a possible universe and a "real" universe? I think none, so all possible universes exist and descriptions of all possible universes correspond to reality. There is no difference between correspondence theory of truth and coherence theory of truth. — litewave

My reading of the correspondence theory of truth requires two essential components:

1. An actual reality. Call this R
2. A proposition about that actual reality. Call this P

When P matches R, there's a correspondence and then we can claim P is true.

If you wish to include possible worlds/realities, my advice would be to coin a new word and for the match between propositions and such worlds to avoid confusion.

Of course there's the matter of whether or not every possible world is actual (modal realism) or not but, speaking for myself, I'd like to retain the distinction between possible and actual. It's useful not to believe some things are actual.

I had the idea it was with land title claims and the tallying of agricultural output in Sumeria and Egypt. Land holdings had to be calculated across very irregular shapes, There was a recent discovery about this https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/mathematics/babylonian-tablet-trigonometry-pythagorean-triplets/ — Wayfarer

Thanks for the link. I'll read it and get back to you if I find anything interesting.

Linguistics devotes much of its energy to disproving Chomsky’s claims about universal grammar. The lack,of syntax in the Piraha Amazonian Indians is the celebrated challenge. — apokrisis

I'm at a loss as to how language can be syntax-less. What about ambiguity like the one I talked about? One way could be if Piraha world is a highly stable, highly-ordered system. For example if dogs never eat men only men eat, the "sentence" man dog eat = man eat dog = dog man eat = dog eat man = eat man dog = eat dog man. Syntax is no longer required for disambiguation for there's no ambiguity in the first place. I wonder if the Piraha language is the closest human language to Shannon's language of bits.

But these days, such theorising would be forbidden as racist. — apokrisis

I was worried about that. No offense was intended, I hope none was taken.

The way math began, if mathematical historians are right, suggests that math subscribes to correspondence theory of truth. Given numbers are abstractions of the natural world, they, in a sense, correspond to an aspect of reality (patterns).

However, at some point math broke free from reality - this happened when mathematicians realized that there really was no need for math to correspond to anything at all. From then onwards, mathematicians began tinkering around with the foundational axioms of math that did correspond to reality and developed entire mathematical universes that have no real-world counterparts to correspond to. Nevertheless, physics seems to be at the forefront of applied math and I'm led to believe that many such mathematical universes seem to, intriguingly, match how reality is i.e. there's a correspondence there!

I can't wrap my head around the fact that democracy is considered the best form of government and that there's a fallacy called appeal to the majority aka, ironically, democratic fallacy.

Syntax/grammar isn't then as I thought it was, a completely arbitrary set of rules. There's a rationale, a logic, to it which becomes essential to semantics. The rules of grammar seem to geared towards disambiguation of meaning e.g. if English were without snytax this "sentence" is ambiguous: John George kill. Did John kill George OR did George kill John OR did both John and George kill (somebody)? The point? Syntax plays a critical role in reducing uncertainty as captured by the disjunction bolded above. Claude Shannonesque if you ask me - the idea is to narrow down possibilities to a point wherein we're left with only one, the correct one, the message and its meaning.

It's worth noting here that the "sentence", John George kill sounds like something that a person just learning the English language would say - I've seen many such "sentences" being attributed to African tribes in old comics like Tarzan and Tintin. Is there anything worth investigating here?

Broken English

I see. Your point is the boundary between syntax and semantics is fuzzy with the former having some kind of effect on the latter e.g. take the two sentences, M = The man ate the dog and D = The dog ate the man. M and D have different meanings because of syntax - the order of the words, a grammatical feature, changed the semantics.

If I catch your drift, you mean to say that a theory of information must include syntactical elements such as the one described above. Right?

Can I make assertions extrapolated only from the duration of the time taken? Are they equally as valid. — Cheshire

Why not? If a particular activity (here vaccine development) was/is done faster than usual, some standards must've been flouted and therein lies the rub. I'm not saying the Covid-19 vaccines are duds but there definitely is a difference between them and other vaccines that were developed as per well-established procedures.

If you've done design and manufacturing work; then you are aware a lot of the progression can be derived from the initial setup or concept. Suppose whoever made the prototype knew what they were doing. The lack of changes and reevaluation to an original design also makes for quick output. — Cheshire

I suppose the process (vaccine development) can be sped up if the standard duration (longer) is due to logistics issues and not due to biological factors that have to do with the pathogen (Covid-19) or the test animals/humans. Good point!

It's not as simple as I thought it was! :up:

:up: Good luck!

Right, but if you are playing on the poetic aspect of semantics it is a treatment group. It is a preventive treatment; a specific test. — Cheshire

Let's be candid here. Vaccines usually take much longer than the 1 year Covid-19 vaccines have been developed within. My hunch is fast-tracking the process like this a realy bad idea - shortcuts, I'm told save time but there's a tradeoff here between speed and safety/efficacy which everyone, oddly, seems to be ignoring.

Treatment group — Cheshire

Test vs Control. Classic Experimental Set up.

We test for mental content all the time (tests, quizes, exams) so in practice we ackowlegde mental content exist. I'm wondering if it's falsifiable or unfalsifiable... not sure. — Mark Nyquist

Turing test? Mimicking consciousness to a T maybe possible. That's the nub of the Turing test. Of course, we may not be able to tell if the AI that passes the test is actually conscious (mental content +). P-zombies?

it solves the logic problem of how the physical can interact with the "non-physical" — Mark Nyquist

I don't see any explanations on how the laws of science aren't violated.

The only benefit of anti-vaxxers is the default position as a self-selected control group with minimal loss to the aggregate IQ of society from remaining untreated. — Cheshire

Yes, and those who comply are the test group.