Thanks James. Based on your last clarification I'm taking you to be saying that maths is like a black box the output of which is as philosophically sound as the input. You don't have to accept the conclusions unless you accept the definitions and axioms, which you probably don't.

The example you keep giving us is that you don't like the definition of infinity. Out of interest, do you have any other examples in mind? Or is this all because you're hurting that your own personal definition of infinity got chewed up?

Any time you want to explain your own take on infinity I promise I won't tell you it's wrong because it's not the mathematician's definition, OK? I promise to evaluate it entirely on its own merits.

jamest wrote:None of this is important. What's important is that maths is maths and philosophy is philosophy and that if and when I come to define significant concepts, from now on I shall have reason to discard the views of mathematicians.

Concepts like infinity, for example? You, and you alone, think that you've made anything like a convincing case that you can simply discard mathematics in this context. As with the time you tried to redefine solipsism, claiming that nobody other than you had the correct definition, don't expect to be taken too seriously.

logical bob wrote:Thanks James. Based on your last clarification I'm taking you to be saying that maths is like a black box the output of which is as philosophically sound as the input. You don't have to accept the conclusions unless you accept the definitions and axioms, which you probably don't.

The example you keep giving us is that you don't like the definition of infinity. Out of interest, do you have any other examples in mind? Or is this all because you're hurting that your own personal definition of infinity got chewed up?

Yes, 'one' and 'nothing' have been mentioned - which are of course defined by maths. Perhaps there are others - I'd need to give it more thought.

Edit: 'singularity' also, or is that a definition spawned from physics?

Any time you want to explain your own take on infinity I promise I won't tell you it's wrong because it's not the mathematician's definition, OK? I promise to evaluate it entirely on its own merits.

Thankyou. That's all I've ever wanted.

jamest wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:
I think you missed quite a bit of the analogy here. You have not focused this thread on the meaning of your philosophy but rather it has been on math.

No, the focus has been upon meaning - and not my own, at that.

I have encouraged you to hoist up a specific bit of your concern to see if you can be a little bit more clear about it.

I will get to 'indivisible oneness' et al as soon as I've contented myself in knocking mathematicians from their philosophical perches. Then, the playing field will be level.

Not going to happen. Your arguments are not sound.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

jamest wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:
I think you missed quite a bit of the analogy here. You have not focused this thread on the meaning of your philosophy but rather it has been on math.

No, the focus has been upon meaning - and not my own, at that.

I have encouraged you to hoist up a specific bit of your concern to see if you can be a little bit more clear about it.

I will get to 'indivisible oneness' et al as soon as I've contented myself in knocking mathematicians from their philosophical perches. Then, the playing field will be level.

Not going to happen. Your arguments are not sound.

How do you know until I've presented them? Do you need a bit of grease for that lid?

logical bob wrote:
Any time you want to explain your own take on infinity I promise I won't tell you it's wrong because it's not the mathematician's definition, OK? I promise to evaluate it entirely on its own merits.

I take this to mean that when the word infinity is offered by the philosopher that the philosopher will explain exactly what he means by the word, if not the mathematical meaning.

I just find it difficult to get some of those critters to explain exactly what they mean in these offerings.

jamest wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

jamest wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:
I think you missed quite a bit of the analogy here. You have not focused this thread on the meaning of your philosophy but rather it has been on math.

No, the focus has been upon meaning - and not my own, at that.

I have encouraged you to hoist up a specific bit of your concern to see if you can be a little bit more clear about it.

I will get to 'indivisible oneness' et al as soon as I've contented myself in knocking mathematicians from their philosophical perches. Then, the playing field will be level.

Not going to happen. Your arguments are not sound.

How do you know until I've presented them? Do you need a bit of grease for that lid?

Maybe you are thinking about the wrong jar here? Which argument do you think I was referring to?

Come to think of it the only arguments I have heard in the last year are:

a. you need some grease for your lid
b. math is bad, don't do math...philosophy is good.

jamest wrote:Who created/uses ML? People.

People. And what do people do? They sometimes wear hats. And you can wear a hat to keep off rain. And if you don't keep off rain, you might catch a cold.

That's right, jamest. You're failing to do better than banal word-association.

Rather, people that know what it is and how it works. How do you learn what ML is and how it works? You cannot, except through a meaningful process which will transform the individual from clueless to clued-up.

Doesn't cure colds, though, does it?

ML, upon first glance, might not look like natural language, but it surely has its origins in it.

It has its origins in Lisp. But what begat Lisp, and did John McCarthy ever catch a cold?

Don't blame me for thinking that all of mathematics reduced to logic given by an operational semantics in a self-bootstrapping programming language is more interesting and profound than saying "you can't explain what a set is without using words."

You cannot isolate maths or programs from meaningful language. If you could teach somebody what ML is or what it does without using 'natural language', you'd have a point.

Reread the quote and tell me what point I was making. All I said was that I think the stuff I was saying is far more interesting than your word-association.

Teach someone ML without using natural language? How about trying to produce a clued-up ML person who's never once caught a cold? That's got to be significant.

OP,

Yes, but it has its limitations. The material implication doesn't accord all that well with how we use conditionals, for instance.