Comments

  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    ↪RussellA
    Changing notation does not remove the fact that π is an irrational number.
  • Kicking and Dreaming
    ↪J
    of course it could also be restless leg syndrome or Periodic Limb Movements of Sleep (PLMS)

    Cannabinoids can help.
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    There are infinitely more irrational numbers then there are rational ones — T Clark
    Oh, far more than just that... :nerd:
  • Australian politics
    While Rupert Murdoch struggles to give his fail-son the company that runs Australian politics, Kerry Stokes’ attempt to swoop in and take over WA has ended in a humiliating defeat with the Liberal Party losing in a landslide.
    The Channel 7 boss tried a different tactic to Murdoch’s style of just backing whoever will win, by instead trying to back a dying political party and install former employee Basil Zempilas to a leadership position. A plan based on 7 media’s extensive experience in completely backing unlikeable men.
    Barely incoming MP Zempilas, took a break from spending the entire election talking over his female party leader to centre himself and literally yelling over the top of a female panelist during 7’s election coverage after she suggested he had a problem with women, to claim that the reasons people dislike him were unfounded.
    “Clearly the reason our party lost is because of the amount of recourses the other side had,” claimed Zempilas after years of free promotion from a media company with a stranglehold on the state.
    “It was a conspiracy against me and my party by weaponising the things I have said and done in my time as Lord Mayor.”
    Voters have now questioned why Seven Media chose to push such an unlikeable Sunrise host instead of the Cash Cow.     — Channel 7 loses WA election
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    To my circle of thinking that ends in . .. circles... of thinking...... — Moliere
    Appropriate, given the topic...

    Second page, and still no pi/pie joke...
  • Australian politics
    Albanese says 'unjustified' US tariffs on Australia poor way to treat a friend

    Well, mate, just wait until you ask them for a submarine...
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    ...it'd be right to point out those difficulties in relation to a philosophical question. — Moliere
    I agree, but feel like I shouldn't...
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    That's just blatant idealism. — frank

    How rude.

    :smile:
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    ↪DifferentiatingEgg
    The joke wasn't for you, so much as on you... :wink:
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    Does that sound rational to you? — frank

    Yep. It's an extension of "the world is all that is the case".
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    ↪DifferentiatingEgg
    Sad, that you think that worth writing.
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    ↪frank
    Well, tell us something particular that we cannot know...

    ↪Janus
    :wink:
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    ↪Banno You're right, we can perhaps know some things completely. But we cannot know everything. so 'everything' should have been there instead of "anything completely". — Janus
    Interesting thing is that while we cannot know everything, there is (arguably) nothing in particular that we could not know.
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    Funny thing is, if I'd started a thread that said we can know pi in its entirety, you would have said that ridiculous. :confused: — frank

    :lol:

    True, that.
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    ↪frank Wasn't it already obvious that we could never know anything completely? — Janus
    You are completely correct...

    or not.
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    It's not a joke. It goes on forever, so you can never know it completely. — frank

    Yeah we can. the ratio of the radius to the circumference of a circle; that is it exactly and entirely. There are other ways to say the same thing, such as the aforementioned mentioned smallest positive number where the sine function is equal to zero or π=ln(−1)/i from Euler's identity or Cd/2LP for Buffon’s Needle or any number of other neat-o calculations.
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    ↪Moliere
    Which joke - that π is beyond our grasp or that Nietzsche is difficult?
  • Ukraine Crisis
    A neat little article explaining why Ukraine has so much of what the ridiculous orange emperor calls "raw" earth...

    What’s so special about Ukraine’s minerals? A geologist explains
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    ↪Moliere
    Indeed, I think we could go on for another few pages at least.
    ↪DifferentiatingEgg
    doesn't appear to have seen the joke, for a start.
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    ↪Moliere
    Indeed, what is it that we do not grasp? That we might not know the trillionth digit? (Wolfram was no help...) But knowing that Pi is the smallest positive number where the sine function is equal to zero - that's cool.

    What else could "grasping" consist in such that we don't grasp pi in the manner @ucarr says above? — Moliere
    Yep.

    I'd suggest we stop at the point we are satisfied, while knowing that the procedure can carry on. — Moliere
    Stop which - the calculation, or the thread?
  • Is the number pi beyond our grasp?
    Is the number pi beyond our grasp? — frank

    Well, here we are, talking about π - so, no, it is not beyond our grasp...

    At least for some of us.

    And what that AI describes as "the philosophy of Pi", isn't - any more than are the outbreaks of verse that sometimes litter these fora. Fluffy nonsense, like knowing the millionth digit of Pi. (5, according to Wolfram Alpha).
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    2) Presumably there can be a possible world in which “that cloud” occurs but I do not. Does the cloud remain rigidly designated? There seems something odd about this. Do we want to say that, because I appear in a different possible world to baptize the cloud, my action carries over in some way to a world in which I never did so? There must be a better way to understand this. — J

    Similarly, perhaps the reference still works in your absence becasue the reference is communal. "That cloud" remains a rigid designator. I doubt Kripke would agree with this.
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    So now we are in a position to perhaps address this:
    1) Is the “origin story” here simply a matter of my pointing and declaring? Doesn’t that seem the same as simply declaring a proper name, which Kripke says is circular? Then, if the “independent determination of the referent” is something else in the case of “that cloud”, what is it? Do we have to start talking in terms of molecular structure? But that is very un-Kripkean; that would be like “using a telescope” to identify a table; it’s not how we designate things. — J
    A name is successful if it is used consistently and coherently by a community, and this regardless of the origin myth. The “independent determination of the referent” is the use in the community. Or if you prefer, and I think this amounts to much the same thing, we could use Davidson here, and say that the correct use of a name or a demonstrative is that which makes the vast majority of expressions that include it, true.
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    If one was determining the referent of a name like ‛Glunk’ to himself and made the following decision, “I shall use the term ‛Glunk’ to refer to the man that I call ‛Glunk’,” this would get one nowhere. One had better have some independent determination of the referent of ‛Glunk.’ This is a good example of a blatantly circular determination. — Naming and Necessity, 73

    This occurs as part of an extended discussion. Kripke does offer the causal theory as a solution, but there are problems.

    I'd take a different track in characterising the failure to name Glunk as "Glunk" here. The issue at hand is what it might be to have effectively named an individual. It is worth stating something that is I hope quite obvious, but which tends to get lost in these considerations. A proper name works only if those in the community agree as to it's use. If a proper name does not in our conversations pick out an individual unambiguously, then it has failed to be a name.

    The problem isn't the circularity - circular arguments are not invalid, just unsatisfactory, unconvincing. An individual might well decide to use "Glunk" to refer to that individual they call Glunk, but then they would be subject to the difficulties noted by Wittgenstein - yes, private language. Kripke is quite right that we need something else to "better have some independent determination of the referent of ‛Glunk’". But that determination need not be the origin story, as Kripke suggests. We might just as well depend on the community in which "Glunk" picks out Glunk. If we agree that "Glunk" picks out Glunk, the presence or absence of an origin story is irrelevant.

    Here I am departing from agreement with Kripke.

    Here I am using much the same argument that I have used to reject Kripkenstein.
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    A proper name, according to Kripke, is a rigid designator. It picks out the thing named in all possible worlds. This does not mean, of course, that the thing named occurs in all possible worlds. It merely means that, if Banno exists in a world, the name must designate him and not some other. — J
    We need to be clear that, in those possible worlds in which I do not exist, "Banno" does not refer to anything.

    Now go back to
    To be a bound variable in modal logic is to entail a choice of some necessary predicate(s)" — J
    In standard possible world semantics, the domain will be different in some possible worlds. In those worlds there need not be an x that is P. That is, ∃xP(x) would be false. It would not be the case that in every possible world something is P. If the domain is fixed - the same in all possible worlds - then a bound variable might have necessary properties; we might have ∃xP(x) in every possible world.

    When the domain varies, quantification does not necessarily imply that x has any essential properties, since x may not exist in all worlds.

    So in the varying domain of standard modal logic, to be a bound variable does not entail a choice of some necessary predicates.

    But I can see where this may come from. The Barcan formula, ∀x □P(x) → □∀x P(x), also relies on a fixed domain.
    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    may also be implicitly making use of a fixed domain - it is hard to say.

    Kripke is not using a fixed domain.

    Hence the need to note that there are possible worlds not blessed with my presence.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Benkei
    well, let's wait and see.
  • Kicking and Dreaming
    ↪J
    One of the curious things about confabulating is that folk do not realise that is what they are doing - the confabulation is, for them, quite genuine. We might picture dreams as the confabulated result of an attempt to make reasonable and coherent the more or less haphazard triggered events of a sleeping brain. That is, we need not choose between dreams being either lived in real time or a confabulated memory created on waking - these are not mutually exclusive. perhaps they a re some combination.

    This by way of an explanation for your (3) in the OP.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Yes. — frank
    Ok. :rofl:
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    When it comes to trade, Americans are much more heavily regulated that Europeans, or really just about anybody else in the world. — frank

    Seriously?


    But again, the question I asked was not if Trump might control the markets, but the extent to whciht he markets might control Trump.

    The ongoing slump in Wall Street, the result of policy chaos.
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    ↪sime
    I might reply to this by going back to the point I made a while ago, that there is a difference between probability and possibility, in terms of what we are doing. See if you agree.

    Supose we put the beads in the image above in a bag, and pull out a bead. We know, since we know the number of beads, that there is one chance in three of the bead we pull out being red.This is classical, a priori probability. If we did not know the arrangement of the beads, we might apply some probability theory to an experiment in which we pull out a bead and return it to the bag, and over time we see that one in three of the beads we pull out is red. This is frequentist probability. A third, related approach might be to decide that there is a fifty-fifty chance of picking out a red bead, then to pick out and return the beads, adjusting one's estimation of the probability of picking out a red bead on the basis of the result. This is the Bayesian approach.

    These are the sorts of things we do when reasoning about probability. We go out and experiment on the way things are, and describe the result one way or the other.

    When we reason about modality, we do something a bit different. We stipulate, rather then experiment. We say things like "Supose you pull out a red bead..." We are not concerned with how the world actually behaves, but with how it might behave.

    The similarity in models between probability and modality may lead us not to notice that what we are doing in each case is somewhat different. The one is an activity of discovery, the other an activity of stipulation.
  • On eternal oblivion
    I'm not sure they do. — bert1

    Ok. Others will be. :wink:
  • On eternal oblivion
    ↪Paine
    We are still on that topic.
  • On eternal oblivion
    ...re-birth could consist in the continuation of one’s moral concerns and commitments in future personas. — Wayfarer
    ...which may well happen without any recourse to mystical notions... those with whom you have interacted may carry on in kind; see Hofstadter's I am a strange loop, an odd but quite appealing little book.

    But that is not what you are gesturing towards, is it? Again, if that is all you are saying, then there is little with which I might disagree.
  • On eternal oblivion
    the deeds of the most heinous criminal and those the most altruistic philanthropist are all equally negated as there are no consequences for them — Wayfarer
    So Indian religion is an elaborate confabulation from the yearning for justice? Fine - as Lennon sang, whatever gets you through the night, it's alright.



    There's more than just the Tractatus, from where your quotes come, to consider. We make it so with the games we play. What we value is - well, valuable. We are the source of value. And the "we" is intentional, not the "I" of Nietzsche.
  • On eternal oblivion
    ↪bert1
    If it's not my consciousness that continues, what is the point? Other consciousnesses will continue after you are dead - is that the recompense? But we don't need reincarnation for that.
  • On eternal oblivion
    In Western culture there is no such belief, instead it is thought that living beings are aggregates of material elements which are born as a consequence of physical processes which cease when those comprising physical elements disperse at death... However from the ‘eastern’ viewpoint it is a nihilistic attitude. — Wayfarer
    So is it nihilistic? I don't see that it is. That "aggregate of material elements" is the very source of value.
  • On eternal oblivion
    The concern about the quality of one's rebirth, given that in Buddhism at least, the reborn person is not you, seems completely incoherent. Why would I be more concerned about the quality of life my reborn person enjoys than I would be over the quality of life your reborn person enjoys, since neither of them have any conscious connection to me? — Janus

    Nice. Yes, this is the issue with reincarnation. It is at best a very minor consideration.
  • What should the EU do when Trump wins the next election?
    ↪ssu


    A recent piece from Slavoj Žižek, Trump’s Oval Office clash with Zelensky killed diplomacy. A few philosophical ideas are drawn in to the analysis, which sets out the impossible position of Ukraine, and suggests, perhaps only half jokingly, an alliance between Europe andChina.
  • On eternal oblivion
    ↪Janus
    A nod back to
    ↪Wayfarer
    .

    Given that I was oblivious to much of what occurred last night, only finding out about it after I woke, I'm not too concerned about oblivion.

    So I find the Wittgenstein's approach amiable, especially as it fits in with other ideas as to the nature of measurement - the official metre rule in Paris and so on. One's death is not a part of one.
  • On eternal oblivion
    When there is no mind to perceive, is eternal oblivion possible? — Corvus

    This again is the problem of confounding what you believe with what is true. That you will not know that you are oblivious does not mean you are not oblivious... Rather the opposite.
Home » Banno