Comments

  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    What specific quotation or reference is given by anyone (other than a flagrantly errant poster) that p -> Kp?TonesInDeepFreeze
    Probably none; this was stated by TMF, and the view appears to be held by Olivier5 (haven't caught up here; you've likely already met).
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    And I cannot let it be saidOlivier5
    You have no choice.
    that it is antirealist to point out that propositions have to be proposed...Olivier5
    Have to be proposed in order to... what?
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    In any case,Olivier5
    Wrong battle. I already know your position; you're now proselytizing.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    ↪InPitzotl
    ?
    Olivier5
    You're confusing "antirealist"/"realist" with "unrealistic"/"realistic"... the terms convey completely different things. A realist (in this particular sense) is someone who accepts the reality of something, usually external. An antirealist denies the reality of something. The "something" in this case is English sentences nobody has mentioned. You're objecting to an accurate term describing what you're doing, on the basis of the ill-conceived notion that it was commentary.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    On the contrary, it would be unrealisticOlivier5
    Antirealistic != unrealistic
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    Why is
    q -> Kq
    being stated?
    TonesInDeepFreeze
    Because p -> Kp was stated.
    No one believes that as a generalization for all q.TonesInDeepFreeze
    Apparently some people do. It's an antirealist position; the p doesn't exist until it's proposed, and it isn't true until you say it is, or some such thing.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    Notice that in your example: q = ~p , you used q (~p is true) and not p (p is false).TheMadFool
    p: <- the false proposition.
    q: <- the true proposition.
    q = ~p <- makes true proposition q out of false proposition p.

    Does your proof need a true proposition? Use q.

    What's the problem?

    p→KpTheMadFool
    p is true here, right?

    Let's change labels from p to q. q→Kq. Now q must be true (because we changed labels), right?

    So let's take the case where q = ~p, where p is false. q is still true, right? What did q have to be? True? Okay, well it is true. What did p have to be to extend to falsehoods? False? Okay, well, it's false.

    Now, we can talk about p's that are false. And when you do your proof, you use q's for where you used to use p's. What's wrong?

    We can do the same thing in reverse. Just take p, where p is true, and that's your typical application. To do falsehoods, take p where p is false. But we can't do the typical, we have to convert that to a true proposition. No problem; add a complement; if p is false, ~p. But the proof only works when p is a true proposition. Okay, no problem; relabel p's in the proof as q's, and say q=~p. Now we have a false p, and a proof that uses the fact that q is true. What's wrong?
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability

    Charitably, you take a false proposition p. You extend that by building a true proposition ¬p from it. You then use ¬p as you would any true proposition. I'm not sure your interpretation is charitable.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    Yes, but for Olivier5's argument to work ¬p should be false.TheMadFool
    Which argument are you referring to?
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    If q = ¬p, q is true.TheMadFool
    I think you mean that if p is a falsehood, and q = ¬p, then q is true. So you have a falsehood p, and a truth q. So if there's logic requiring q to be true, you can put your falsehood into p.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability

    I don't think you're quite following this.

    1. Let q=¬p.
    2. Then ¬p→K¬p is simply q→Kq
    3. q→Kq is the same as p→Kp with change of labels.

    1: I'm just defining another variable. Surely I can do that?
    2: When you see "¬p", you can replace it with "q" (per 1). That's just substitution. Do you have a problem with substitution?
    3: Specifically, we're relabeling q as p; what was p, you can call anything else. Do you have a problem relabeling? I seem to recall you actually relabeling for me just earlier today!
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    To both of you
    Incorrect!
    TheMadFool
    What's wrong with it?
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    As I read the article in Stanford, Fitche's Paradox is using the word "truth" in the sense of a statement about the real worldEricH
    I'm fine with that. Here, I've analyzed TMP's latest proofs, and don't have any particular issues with them, outside of the fact that they could probably be made a bit clearer by organizing it a little better.
    Put differently, Fitch is talking about apples and your program is doing math. So not even apples & oranges.EricH
    Understood; the point of the program was just to test certain ideas about what a proposition is. It kind of had to be mathematical, because I wanted it in the post, this makes it short, and that would make it much easier to explain to someone who might not be familiar with programming if need be. I also felt it worthwhile to make the examples concrete rather than hypothetical.
    But that aside, suppose your program were to write each line out to a file and then delete that file before generating the next line? Would you still consider your program to be generating propositions?EricH
    Sure. I'm perfectly happy with counterfactuals, and it suffices for me that "were I to read it, I would classify it as a proposition". I think I apply the same criteria to other things; "were I to see this animal, I would classify it as a fox" suffices for me to call the thing a fox; "were I to see this object, I would call it an ice cube" suffices for me to call it an ice cube, etc.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    As formulated, the statement is a bit unclear because "lexical" means "relating to words or the vocabulary of a language as distinguished from its grammar and construction".Olivier5
    Lexical has another sense: "relating to or of the nature of a lexicon or dictionary". That's closer to what is meant. "Lexically" in this particular sense refers to "how" the strings are prior/successive to each other, i.e., in what sense they are; it's referring to a lexical ordering.

    A lexical ordering is the same as dictionary ordering, and refers to the type of ordering words have in a dictionary.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicographic_order

    It's slightly distinct from "alphabetical order", in that it formalizes the concept of the ordering and generalizes it.
    Assuming you mean something like "comes in alphabetic order before", then the statement could be interpreted as a true proposition.Olivier5
    It's slightly more precise to say "lexical", since that describes what the sorted function does with strings. "alphabetical" works because I'm limiting this to strings containing only capital letters and 8 characters, but then, so does "numerical" with your prior mapping given this description, which is why I didn't bother commenting on it then.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    So who is doing the proposing then?Olivier5
    Not my concern. I'm not bound by your theories that propositions require a proposer, so I don't have to name one. If you can't find one, once again, that's a you problem, not a me problem. If you can figure out an answer, knock yourself out. If you can't, maybe consider giving that up. I don't require it; so I'm all good.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    We've been through thisOlivier5
    No, Olivier5, we haven't been through "this", because "this" refers to what you just linked to. That "this" is a post where I pointed out your bolded "makes no sense to say that" criteria. Not only did I point that out in the reply you're pretending to reply to, but that was the entire point of the post you're pretending to reply to!

    And whereas you are not even trying to employ the "makes no sense to say that" criteria, you're not even going over "this" in your reply.
    A proposition needs to be proposed as a true representation. Otherwise it is at best a sentence. You do all the proposing, your computer none. Your computer is merely your sockpuppet.Olivier5
    None of these are in the form "it makes no sense to say that". What is the thing you're claiming it makes no sense to say? Without that thing, you're not even going over "this" in this reply.

    I'm not in any realistic sense the one who proposed proposition 6. I did technically meet the criteria you called out for in that post, but not in any way you're spinning your wheels arguing... I can call what the computer generated propositions because I know "about" them ("it makes no sense to say that a proposition no one knows about is true"), not because I "proposed" them, or because my computer "knew" them, or even because I knew what they were. I didn't propose prop 6. My computer didn't understand prop 6. My computer didn't know prop 6. My program didn't know prop 6. I didn't know what prop 6 was at 10:03:44pm. But I did know "about" prop 6, at that time, because I wrote the program.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    That you interpret as such. I don't.Olivier5
    That's fine, and I have no problem with that per se, except that you did explicitly appeal to the "makes no sense to say" criteria (which you even bolded, FTR), and it's that which I'm demonstrating. If you can prove it does not genuinely make sense to say what I'm saying, that would be relevant. Otherwise, you cannot appeal to the "makes no sense to say" criteria to defend your own interpretation.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    Because a proposition is a statement that is proposed as a fair or accurate representation of some state of affairs.Olivier5
    On October 1, 2021, I caused a computer to generate statements that are accurate representations of states of affairs. The computer generated those statements at 10:03:44pm on that day.
    At best, your computer is writing a sentence, at worse it is spaying black dots on a screen, which you interpret as a proposition.Olivier5
    You have the same problem classifying strings as sentences... either you don't know these words mean or you're special pleading.

    There are strings I would interpret as propositions, and strings I would not interpret as propositions. This implies that there's a classification of strings I would interpret as propositions:
    it makes no sense to say that a proposition no one knows about is true.Olivier5
    1. It "makes sense to say" that strings that fall into the class of strings I would interpret as propositions, are propositions.
    2. I have sufficient justification to say, before I interpret the strings produced by this program (i.e., at 10:03:44pm), that they are propositions in the sense introduced in 1.
    3. Likewise, there are some propositions which, should I understand them and assign truth values to, I will assign the truth value of "true" to.
    4. It "makes sense to say" (see above) that such propositions are true propositions.
    5. I have sufficient justification to say, before I interpret the strings produced by this program (i.e., at 10:03:44pm), that the "propositions" (see 2) are "true propositions".
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    Then how can it make a proposition?Olivier5
    What do you mean by "then"? The hidden premise here is that in order for the computer to create a proposition, the computer needs to distinguish propositions from garbage. Why would you hold that premise?

    A mother fox and a father fox can make a baby fox. Not one of these things know they are foxes. A computer can generate displays of the mandelbrot set. Computers don't know what mandelbrot sets are. Why should propositions be special?
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    Your computer knows it...Olivier5
    My computer hasn't the ability to distinguish a proposition from garbage.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    If there was a proposition that was not known, what would make it a proposition?Mww
    We just finished this. Proposition 6 was a proposition on October 1, 2021, at 10:03:44pm. At that time, nobody knew what proposition 6 was. But at that time, I knew that it was a proposition. To know S is a proposition, it is not necessary to know S.

    Why is this so difficult? And what is with this obsession to demand that propositions cannot be propositions if you don't know them?
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    ¬p→K¬pOlivier5
    Let q=¬p. Then ¬p→K¬p is simply q→Kq, which is the same as p→Kp (under a change in labels).
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    (edited: obsolete comment)
    Thanks @TheMadFool!
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    (edited: obsolete comment)
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    This is your take. Mine is that they have.Olivier5
    I'm confused. You're now saying my program understands things?

    I think we're done. Clarify your position, then get back to me if you want to engage me.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    Well then, that thing is the proposer.Olivier5
    Sure; I'm fine with that too, so long as we don't suppose proposers understand things.
    That's only because you limit it to very simple arbitrary statementsOlivier5
    Of course. I programmed it to generate true propositions.
    So computers can sort letters alphabetically.Olivier5
    Computers can do lots of things.
    Big deal.Olivier5
    The point is to correct you, not to impress you.
    Try and have your Inspiron 3847 answer questions about real states of affairs, like elephants and castles for a change.Olivier5
    Not to be rude, but my voluntary role in this forum isn't to do tricks for your amusement; especially if you're going to ask for something so banally trivial it's pointless like a coding of a math equation or something complex like a 3d packing problem solver using irregular shapes.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    Not sure where that leads you.Olivier5
    It doesn't lead me anywhere. I already knew all of this stuff. But it implies that a proposition does not need a "proposer". It also implies that a proposition does not need a "proposer" to be a true proposition. All a proposition needs to be created is to be some string that something creates.
    Monkeys hitting randomly at a typewriter could produce English sentences too.Olivier5
    Sure. But they're highly unlikely to do so. By contrast, the program that I wrote is certain to produce true propositions.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    But we mean it, when we do so.Olivier5
    Sure.
    A mere recording or mechanical production of a sentence cannot invest meaning in that sentence.Olivier5
    Mmmm... sort of.

    Person A can write an English sentence on a sheet of paper in the form of a string of some length of English letters, spaces, and punctuation; and "slip this under the door" to Person B in such a way as to communicate meaning to Person B. On doing so, the strings on the slip of paper do not have any inherent meaning; rather, the strings encode meaning in the form of a language... in this case, English.

    Machines can generate strings that have no inherent meaning. Of the strings that have no inherent meaning that machines can generate, some of those are strings that encode meaning in the form of a language. Machines don't need to understand the language or be persons or be proposers or be actors or whatever to produce said strings. The fact that certain strings "are English sentences", some of them "are propositions", and some of them "are true propositions" builds absolutely no fence of any sort preventing machines from generating strings in these categories.
    And a sentence without meaning or intention is not a proposition.Olivier5
    Sure.

    But it does not follow that if a machine produces a string that the string does not convey meaning (e.g., that the string is not an encoding of meaning using the encoding scheme of the English language). Given a particular such string, I can test if it has meaning in English by looking at it and attempting to read it. But this is not the only method I can employ to tell that strings encode meanings in English. Likewise, I can read some statements in English that propose a particular thing to be the case, and on understanding what is being proposed I can test whether the statement actually is true. But once again, this is not the only method I can employ to tell if strings are propositions that are true.

    I've demonstrated another method of doing exactly these two things.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    It's not. It's the core of my argument that by coding in this phrase "is lexically prior to", you created a pattern your computer would followOlivier5
    But that still has nothing to do with whether propositions are true or false. Consider that we humans repeat things humans say all of the time, at the word and the phrase level; it has nothing to do with whether the thing we're saying is true or false. I'm sorry for you that it's your core argument, because this "argument by reusing parts" shtick is DOA.
    to compose sentences that have nothing new in them,Olivier5
    It is unlikely that proposition 6 has been assigned a truth value in human history prior to 10:03:44pm on October 1.
    These sentences are mere recordings,Olivier5
    Proposition 6 is a statement about the relative ordering of the strings "QMCVNBOO", "SHXCBJYN", and "BJJZBYPU". The first time these three strings were lexically compared in human history is very likely on October 1, 10:03:44pm.
    the sentences produced are not actually understood by the machine, and therefore it is hard to say they are proposed by the machine.Olivier5
    That sounds like a you problem, not a me problem. I didn't say propositions need to be proposed by a proposer. You did.
    Rather they are produced mechanically.Olivier5
    Sure. But out of the 10 propositions displayed by the program's output, 10 out of 10 of them permute the strings in the requisite 1 out of 6 ways for each statement to read as a true proposition, and 0 out of 10 of them permute the strings in the 5 out of 6 ways to read as a false proposition. I can be sure before running the program that this would be the case.

    Insofar as I can be sure these would read as propositions, I don't have to wait until I see them to call them propositions; think of this as my having sufficient reason to categorize these "things" as propositions without direct examination. Insofar as I can be sure they will read as true propositions, I do not have to wait until I see them to call them true propositions. Insofar as I can be sure of both of these things, I can generically say of the program that it will generate true propositions. And that conflicts with your claim that there's no sense in which I can say that (at least by one reading, but it seems to be the one you insist on defending).
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    If my sister's doll was not saying "j'ai faim" but instead "This is a random noise" and would then make a random noise (as she was found to do), it would be exactly like your computer.Olivier5
    This must be some new meaning of "exactly like" that I have been previously unaware of. The way I read "exactly like", it means something like "like in all respects". Given there are six permutations of strings in the template I have, only one of which would formulate a true proposition; and there's only one form in your template; these two things clearly are not "exactly alike". The means by which the one permutation of substitutions applied to the template turns out to be the requisite one to form the true proposition is the call to Python's sorted method. But surely if you recognize that the program doesn't know what the proposition is, you should recognize that the program doesn't know it's sorting those strings.

    But the program doesn't have to know that, because the program isn't calling this a true proposition. I am.
    The argument of the recording doesn't hold either, because you did record the phrase "is lexically prior to" in your code, and it's the only meaningful part of the output sentences, just like for the doll...Olivier5
    That is a red herring. No amount of waffling on about meaningful parts of phrases, including these particular ones, and whether those parts are "recordings" has anything to do with the fact that your sister's doll isn't hungry or the fact that "QMCVNBOO" is lexically prior to "SHXCBJYN".
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    So when my little sister's doll used to say "Maman" and "J'ai faim", it was not just playing a recording?Olivier5
    A recording plays back something that happened in the past. Proposition 6 didn't "exist" in any form at all until 10:03:44pm October 1; unless we're appealing to some mathematical sense of existence in which it's a set of the possible set of strings of a certain length of something like that.
    It was actually stating the proposition: "I am hungry"?Olivier5
    "QMCVNBOO" is lexically prior to "SHXCBJYN"; and likewise "QMCVNBOO" is lexically successive to "BJJZBYPU". But your sister's doll isn't hungry.

    You are not even remotely in the ball park of replying to me; you seem obsessed with pinning me on something I explicitly denied in the same post I put the program in. Go back and reread that post.

    In the mean time, let me phrase it this way. At 10:03:44pm, I did not know what proposition 6 was. Nevertheless, I knew it was a proposition, and I knew it was true. So at 10:03:44pm, I can call it a true proposition. None of the things I'm saying in this paragraph have anything to do with your sister's hungry doll or my Dell Inspiron 3847 appreciating English sentences.
  • The important question of what understanding is.
    Are concepts and ideas and models any more harmlessly, less misleadingly identified as the referent of "water" than are phrases like "cool flowing substance"?bongo fury
    Oooooh! What a great question! I think this naturally falls out of our agency. We use our senses to sense the world; as we do so, we create world models. We refer to these world models, in real time even, to "do things". But we also as part of this model "project" it as something independent from us and, well, it winds up that's a good theory of what the world is. I think something along these lines (at least for claims about the state of the external world) is what gives rise to intentionality.

    ETA: Just to close the loop here... when we act in the world, we're not merely using our world models... we're literally using that world. By this I mean that we don't simply imagine ourselves walking to the sink, we walk over there. These interactions are in real time, and they are updated by real time world sensations... any difference between what our world model is and these sensations is updated by deferring to the sensed world. This is the long form of what I mean by "project" here.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    What the machine doesOlivier5
    I still feel like you're playing catch up from your poor reading comprehension skills. You misunderstand even the basic nature of the problem. You keep trying to tell me what the machine isn't doing, as if it solves the problem before you. What you seem to have failed to grasp is that the fact that machine isn't doing things is the problem before you.
    That's a stretch. Your machine-generated "sentences" would strike an odd chord in a natural conversation between people.Olivier5
    You quoted, and therefore are allegedly objecting to, this:
    "awww, what a cute little grammatically correct true English sentence!"InPitzotl
    But proposition 6 (a) is grammatically correct, (b) is English, (c) is true.

    We're still left with a problem. During the minute from 10:03:44 and 10:04:44, there is something that:
    The proposition needs to exist first.Olivier5
    ...it makes sense to say exists (like the fox, before anyone sees it):
    within human experience, it makes no sense to say that a proposition no one knows about is true.Olivier5
    ...that is a proposition, and that is true. This is demonstrated by my ability to meaningfully say that this program generates only true propositions.
  • The important question of what understanding is.
    I was kinda hoping you'd realise you couldn't answer the question. In other words, you'd realise that you can't get a computer to understand things in the way we can.Daemon
    Ultimately that's correct, but the gaps are really in details.
    TheMadFool wrote that, I was quoting him. I'm arguing against him.Daemon
    Sorry, I misspoke here... what I meant was that in the OP that was what you quoted. TMF did indeed write that, but he didn't explain what a referent was too well; the way he explained it, a referent could be interpreted as a phrase... so the proposal could be understood that your CAT tool might understand what "water" is if it mapped "water" to the phrase: "cool flowing substance that animals and plants need".

    But that's not what the word "referent" means. The referent for "water" isn't another word (it's not "agua"); nor is it another phrase (it's not "cool flowing substance that animals and plants need"). There's no set of shape you can squiggle on a sheet of paper that is the referent for water; instead, you're going to have to go turn your taps on, point to the stuff falling from the sky outside, or go find that stuff fish swim in. Humans that know what "water" means map that word to that stuff... and to do that, we form a concept of that stuff that comes out of taps, that stuff that falls from the sky, that stuff that fish swim in. The idea of such things is an abstraction; it's a model of the stuff we're made aware of by, say, seeing it; swimming in it; drinking it; and so on. And it is that model that we map "water" to when we understand it; not more words.
  • The important question of what understanding is.
    I mean, come back to us when there's a camera that can seeDaemon
    You were the one who asked me the question. You were also the one opening this thread with your OP, where you wrote this:
    matching linguistic symbols (words, spoken or written) to their respective referentsTheMadFool
    ...and you were the one talking about CAT tools as if that had anything to do with referents.

    There's a giant difference between responding to "Can you pick up some bananas from the store?" ...by showing me the phrase translated (poorly or greatly) to Dutch; and responding to "Can you pick up some bananas from the store?" ...by showing up on my doorstep with a bunch in your hand.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    You did take what was a bunch of dots on paperOlivier5
    There was no paper. As mentioned, it was a 4K LG monitor. This actually happened; it was not a thought experiment.
    and you did make a proposition out of it by assigning some meaning to it.Olivier5
    Yes, but more than that. I didn't just read gibberish and just say, you know what, let's call that a label, and attach this meaning to it. I read natural English sentences and interpreted their meaning as I would if Bob himself wrote it.

    If I see an animal walking by, I might look at it and say, "awww, what a cute little fox!" When I do that, I do not create a fox. Nor do I, on saying this, make an animal be a fox. Likewise, when I read proposition 6, I could look at it and say, "awww, what a cute little grammatically correct true English sentence!"
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    You think your machine proposed this proposition?Olivier5
    I do? Why then would I write this?:
    Proposition 6 was generated more or less around 10:03:44pm local time on this day October 1, 2021. But nobody proposed it at 10:03:44pm. In fact, nobody read it until it least 10:04:44pm.InPitzotl
    YOU, when you read the output, understands it a certain way, to mean a certain thing.Olivier5
    Yes. At 10:04:44pm.
    You then create the propositionOlivier5
    That's a funny use of the word "create". Incidentally, you also have funny uses of the word "author", "stated", and "phrased":
    Likewise, a statement does not exist before it is stated by some author or another. A phrase does not exist before being phrased.Olivier5
    I did not state proposition 6 at 10:04:44pm. I did not author proposition 6 at 10:04:44pm. I did not phrase proposition 6 at 10:04:44pm. Now, we need not actually interpret the things you say in this quote as being correct, such that we're forced to say the program stated, authored, or phrased proposition 6. You could just be wrong.

    If Bob typed this up:
    11. "PJZVOWMW" is lexically prior to "YEMRBVGD" but successive to "KFJZTEOI"
    ...at 6:51:03am, and I read that at 6:52:03am, I did not create proposition 11.

    What I did at 10:04:44pm is what I would have hypothetically done at 6:52:03am were I to read Bob's proposition 11.
    within human experience, it makes no sense to say that a proposition no one knows about is true.Olivier5
    It makes sense to say that if the program is run at 7:05:00am, it will generate true propositions that no one knows about until 7:06:00am. It makes sense to say this program will generate only true propositions, as opposed to false propositions, as opposed furthermore to all sorts of non-propositions including gibberish.

    It certainly makes a lot more sense than saying that one can author propositions by reading them.

    ETA: Here is roughly what I think I'm doing. You're generally proposing that there's a time relationship here: First, a proposition is proposed by a proposer (and thereby understood). Then, we can ask whether it's true or not. Finally, we can answer it.

    I've arranged a scenario where this is flipped around. First, we can say the propositions will be true. Then, the propositions are created. Only after that, they are read and for the first time understood.
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    But maybe I'm not getting the point (happens on a regular basis)EricH
    The point here is... well, phrased as a challenge, but really... to get Olivier5 to clarify some of his claims about when propositions exist, where they could possibly come from, and whether or not they really do need a "proposer".
  • Fitch's paradox of Knowability
    The seeming paradox is due to adopting a point of view that lays outside of the world of human experience, outside of time and spaceOlivier5
    Hmmm... time... okay:

    Some Python code
    from datetime import datetime
    import random
    import time
    
    random.seed()
    def make_string():
       return ''.join((chr(65+random.randint(0,25)) for n in range(8)))
    
    def generate_samples():
        return sorted([make_string() for n in range(3)])
    
    def generate_proposition():
        x, y, z = generate_samples()
        return f'"{y}" is lexically prior to "{z}" but successive to "{x}".'
    
    def generate_list():
        return [generate_proposition() for n in range(10)]
    
    the_list = generate_list()
    print(f'The current time is {datetime.now()}.')
    time.sleep(60) # Wait one minute prior to exposure to any minds
    for i, n in enumerate(the_list, 1):
        print(f'{i}. {n}')
    


    Its output:

    The current time is 2021-10-01 20:03:44.341319.
    1. "IHLLVJCU" is lexically prior to "VDTSHSGB" but successive to "EPOOTTLS".
    2. "MACVLKEG" is lexically prior to "YGDUUBSU" but successive to "KCQCCFJB".
    3. "RGTVFTLM" is lexically prior to "UHVHSFPG" but successive to "HYQSJOIO".
    4. "MVEXIWWB" is lexically prior to "WWZISWGD" but successive to "HEDIMULP".
    5. "MCCRNUUP" is lexically prior to "RLDYLGBP" but successive to "EMJAPWVJ".
    6. "QMCVNBOO" is lexically prior to "SHXCBJYN" but successive to "BJJZBYPU".
    7. "TDIVFGHM" is lexically prior to "UMJXUXXY" but successive to "JBIVRFWT".
    8. "KEJBOCEO" is lexically prior to "WQKQFLJC" but successive to "HBSLGRPO".
    9. "LIUJYHWQ" is lexically prior to "OUAJAFZK" but successive to "CROCJGNY".
    10. "VCINWCVZ" is lexically prior to "YRLIFYUF" but successive to "NVWXWPXE".

    There are 10 labeled "things" here. I'll pick, I don't know, 6 to talk about. I think 6 is a proposition. I also think it's true. In fact, I'll make a blanket claim. Every time this program is run, if you read what is generated by it, it will be a set of true propositions.

    And yes, I have a mind. And yes, I wrote this program. But I did not write proposition 6.

    Within the boundaries of human experience, a proposition is some statement that someone proposes, at some point in time.Olivier5
    Who wrote proposition 6?
    Within the boundaries of human experience, a proposition is some statement that someone proposes, at some point in time.Olivier5
    Proposition 6 was generated more or less around 10:03:44pm local time on this day October 1, 2021. But nobody proposed it at 10:03:44pm. In fact, nobody read it until it least 10:04:44pm.
    it makes no sense to say that a proposition no one knows about is true.Olivier5
    Why not?
    The proposition needs to exist first.Olivier5
    Not sure what you mean by exist. There is some code that executed at 10:03:44pm. Is that when proposition 6 began to exist?
    Or if you prefer, it could only exist in the mind of God. Or maybe some superpowerful alien... Not in a human mind.Olivier5
    At 10:03:44pm proposition 6 was an encoding of a true statement whose physical form was that of particular stable states of a set of bistable mechanisms. At 10:04:44pm the states began to modulate particular areas of a 4K LG monitor in such a way that a mind belonging to a native English speaker, for the first time, could read it.
    Once it is proposed, then and only then can the question of its truth be asked, and thus be put into existence, and only then, can the question be answered (or not).Olivier5
    I could tell that proposition 6 would be true prior to running the program. I can ask the question of whether proposition 6 would be true of a future run of the program right now. And yes, it will be.
  • The important question of what understanding is.
    Can you tell me how I could get all that stuff about the store shelf and banana bread into my translation memory?Daemon
    I can sketch it out.

    You need some bootstrap capabilities outside of dictionaries... things like what humans have; e.g.:
    A camera does not see.Daemon
    ...the ability to see. Add to that some basic sapience. The general idea is that this should have the ability to interact with reality in real time on scales roughly approximating that of your typical language using naked apes. Some of this interaction would involve exploiting "seeing" (or other kinds of sensations) in the attainment of goal oriented behaviors analogous to how we "intentionally do things"; i.e., at roughly the same levels of abstractions as the "things we do" or, more to the point, at roughly the same levels of abstractions as the "things we talk about".

    Once you have such a thing, we need two more ingredients to make it final: (a) a banana, (b) a shelf. All of this, or something akin to it, would need to be in place before you can have something to map "banana" to and call it understanding.

    I skipped a few steps, but it's not like I wouldn't have had to skip steps anyway at some point; I have never built such a thing.