John Platko wrote:Now Deutsch just needs to pull that off.

Ooh er Vicar.

archibald wrote:

SafeAsMilk wrote:

archibald wrote:How about......

I can't fly up in the air and I can't burrow down through granite, but if I do both together I can stand on top of Slieve Donard (local granite mountain)?

That would, at least, be generating something of note.

I realise there's a flaw in it though. I'm probably just not doing the first two.

That's pretty much the problem in a nutshell. Let's see if John can figure it out why.

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:But the composite AT⊗BT could be possible.

Ok but an elf and a gremlin might have sex and produce a grelf. If you see what I mean.

Careful, he might get tired of your elf references.

SafeAsMilk wrote:

John Platko wrote:

SafeAsMilk wrote:

John Platko wrote:

I'm not taking the part of the impossible one that is possible and merging it with another, I'm taking part of the impossible one and merging it with another, and creating a new thing which is possible. There's a difference. One could also take an impossible state and mutate it and have it then become possible. A bit of a fallen angel that one.

In the sense that it's pretty much completely meaningless and pointless in the way that you've applied it, yes.

It's neither meaningless or pointless. It's a way to add creativity to knowledge creation without letting impossible knowledge corrupt the knowledge base.

If you need something like that to generate fucking blues riffs, I suggest putting down the guitar and walking away Plus, I was also referring to your angel bullshitting.

Need? More like a fun exercise - and I wanted to demonstrate my evolution of ideas thread. I also was curious to explore if it's possible to define what a certain style of music is. People throw around these terms, blues, jazz, but what does that really mean. I gained a deeper understanding of music in the process.

The angel term was just my having a bit of fun with the terminology. Impossible things than never-the-less help create knowledge, give messages, etc.. When I read the part of Deutsch's CT theory about impossible states helping to make possible state transitions I couldn't resist including it. And I don't find it hard to believe that something like that happens in our mind. Pieces of ideas that could never form an actual idea interacting to from one. Seems very plausible to me.

In a sense the limits are arbitrary,

In the sense of being objectively, observably so.

they could be moved a bit here or there - but they are not completely arbitrary, if I expanded the limits in a certain dimension I would leave the domain of the blues and be clearly in Jazz territory. The exact boundary between the Blues and Jazz is not fixed, but it's not like any random lick will fit the blues. And so, a definite Jazz lick, (although I don't think Miles Davis would agree. ) which is beyond the limits of the Blues, i.e. it's impossible there, could merge with a blues lick and create a new blues lick that reaches an area of the Blues domain previously inaccessible. And that gives the heuristic new freedom to build more licks in that area of he domain.

That sure is a lot of squirming for what essentially concedes my point. There's nothing in there that's anything like whats possible and impossible, you're just swapping out combinations of notes that fit in one arbitrary set or another. You've just slapped a framework on something to which it doesn't really apply in any meaningful sort of way. You're still just taking the notes that are 'possible' from two 'impossible' riffs, and sticking them together. That's not the point of the framework.

That's not what I'm doing. There are definitely limits to what is a blues lick. For example, if my program creates 2 bars of all rest notes - all silence. Then that's not a blues lick. If I went to any blues player and said: wait till you hear the cool new lick I created and then played nothing - well he's thinking - not blues lick. So it doesn't belong in the domain of what is possible for blues licks. But, if I take that angel lick and mate it with another lick - perhaps one that is a bit too busy (high entropy) then a new lick could be created that is well suited for the domain of blues licks.

I don't see what should be controversial about what I'm saying. It's pretty straight forward. It doesn't take much imagination to see how these weird snippets of music wouldn't be a fit for a blues lick (which tend to want to start and end on certain notes, etc. etc.) but they would be useful, when combined with other licks to create something new.

And that's the whole point. Something impossible, in a given domain, can still help create a transformation that is possible.

No shit, it's about as trivial a statement as can be made in most contexts, such as the ones to which you've applied it. And you're right, it doesn't take much imagination.

Perhaps you can point to other examples where you've see this idea being used?

Maybe if you thought about it and gave that idea a chance you could come up with other situations where it could apply.

I'm sure I could sit around and jerk off all day about how it can apply to pretty much anything with negligible results. I'm glad that sort of thing gets you hot, but let's call it what it is.

And what non negligible results are you expecting from that comment? or are you just ...

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:It's like this. √-1 does not exist in the domain of real numbers. However √-1 * √-1 does.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

But strictly speaking, incorrect. The answer only exists if one allows complex numbers at the outset, in which case √-1 already exists.

The answers to this and other problems requiring closure under power operations always were available to be discovered, creating the knowledge of complex numbers just gave us access to that area of the possibility space.

Without wishing to quibble about whether the knowledge was created or discovered......

You might be right, but complex numbers were not, after all, impossible, just as jazz licks aren't.

What is possible and what is impossible is specific to a given constructor.

It is impossible to make real world measurements that include a non 0 imaginary part.

How many feet of rope do you need, Bob. ahh that would be 6' + 5i".

archibald wrote:"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

(Lewis Carroll)

I find it impossible to believe that one can't believe impossible things. There's far too much evidence to the contrary.

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:But the composite AT⊗BT could be possible.

Ok but an elf and a gremlin might have sex and produce a grelf. If you see what I mean.

Maybe Chiara's working on a paper about that.

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:Now Deutsch just needs to pull that off.

Ooh er Vicar.

Well I hope you have a great weekend.

John Platko wrote:

SafeAsMilk wrote:

John Platko wrote:

SafeAsMilk wrote:
In the sense that it's pretty much completely meaningless and pointless in the way that you've applied it, yes.

It's neither meaningless or pointless. It's a way to add creativity to knowledge creation without letting impossible knowledge corrupt the knowledge base.

If you need something like that to generate fucking blues riffs, I suggest putting down the guitar and walking away Plus, I was also referring to your angel bullshitting.

Need? More like a fun exercise - and I wanted to demonstrate my evolution of ideas thread. I also was curious to explore if it's possible to define what a certain style of music is. People throw around these terms, blues, jazz, but what does that really mean. I gained a deeper understanding of music in the process.

The angel term was just my having a bit of fun with the terminology. Impossible things than never-the-less help create knowledge, give messages, etc.. When I read the part of Deutsch's CT theory about impossible states helping to make possible state transitions I couldn't resist including it. And I don't find it hard to believe that something like that happens in our mind. Pieces of ideas that could never form an actual idea interacting to from one. Seems very plausible to me.

What the fuck is "pieces of an idea that could never form an actual idea"? Put down the goddamn pipe

In the sense of being objectively, observably so.

That sure is a lot of squirming for what essentially concedes my point. There's nothing in there that's anything like whats possible and impossible, you're just swapping out combinations of notes that fit in one arbitrary set or another. You've just slapped a framework on something to which it doesn't really apply in any meaningful sort of way. You're still just taking the notes that are 'possible' from two 'impossible' riffs, and sticking them together. That's not the point of the framework.

That's not what I'm doing. There are definitely limits to what is a blues lick. For example, if my program creates 2 bars of all rest notes - all silence. Then that's not a blues lick. If I went to any blues player and said: wait till you hear the cool new lick I created and then played nothing - well he's thinking - not blues lick. So it doesn't belong in the domain of what is possible for blues licks. But, if I take that angel lick and mate it with another lick - perhaps one that is a bit too busy (high entropy) then a new lick could be created that is well suited for the domain of blues licks.

I don't see what should be controversial about what I'm saying. It's pretty straight forward. It doesn't take much imagination to see how these weird snippets of music wouldn't be a fit for a blues lick (which tend to want to start and end on certain notes, etc. etc.) but they would be useful, when combined with other licks to create something new.

And that's the whole point. Something impossible, in a given domain, can still help create a transformation that is possible.

No shit, it's about as trivial a statement as can be made in most contexts, such as the ones to which you've applied it. And you're right, it doesn't take much imagination.

Perhaps you can point to other examples where you've see this idea being used?

Yeah, read up on actual constructor theory and you'll find useful iterations of this idea, situations where "possible" and "impossible" apply in meaningful, non-subjective ways.

Maybe if you thought about it and gave that idea a chance you could come up with other situations where it could apply.

I'm sure I could sit around and jerk off all day about how it can apply to pretty much anything with negligible results. I'm glad that sort of thing gets you hot, but let's call it what it is.

And what non negligible results are you expecting from that comment? or are you just ...

Honesty is its own reward.

John Platko wrote:How many feet of rope do you need, Bob. ahh that would be 6' + 5i".

On the other hand....what about, what shape is fc(z) = z2 + i, Bob?

John Platko wrote:

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:But the composite AT⊗BT could be possible.

Ok but an elf and a gremlin might have sex and produce a grelf. If you see what I mean.

Maybe Chiara's working on a paper about that.

Which one of me or Chiarra is the elf and which the gremlin in this useful imaginary scenario?

Have a good weekend yourself.

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:How many feet of rope do you need, Bob. ahh that would be 6' + 5i".

On the other hand....what about, what shape is fc(z) = z2 + i, Bob?

http://personal.maths.surrey.ac.uk/st/H ... et_c=i.png

Flashback to the 1980s.

A simulation of the reality is not reality. I think I read that in another thread recently.
When I look up to the sky, I am not looking at the imaginary axis.

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:Lightbulbs do not possess free will.

Thank fuck something doesn't. There's hope for you yet.

But plants obviously do. How much do you actually know about plant neurobiology? Perhaps you're also not an expert in that.
I suggest some quality time the fine work of the folks at the The International Laboratory for Plant Neurobiology

Sorry John, but that won't help. Even if plants can be described as having neurobiology, it won't give them any free will, because they won't have any. What they might have is more of what you are incorrectly calling free will.

This is the essential issue concerning the two different things we are talking about. Calling your 'free will' A and 'actual free will' B, no amount of A gives B, because B is a different thing altogether. It's a bit like saying that lots and lots of apple will give us an orange. In that sense, light bulbs, plants and humans are all in the same predicament, of not having any.

You can have varying amounts of A and call it free will if you want.

How are you imagining free will?

John Platko wrote:

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:

archibald wrote:That said, I think john has made a decent point, as regards 'impossible' (or imaginary) numbers being useful, since they are used in many applications. The only caveat might be that there is no transformation from impossible to possible taking place.

Without imaginary numbers there is no closure under the power operator. Impossible real calculations are made possible by using imaginary numbers which are themselves impossible in the domain of real numbers.

Sure, if you divide things up into 'domains', with their own internal rules, similar to your domain of blues.

I think that's a big part of the idea of CT. Divide things up into domains with will defined laws of possible transformations. Using the same constructs across domains and even across different domain levels. So a CT of physics can fit better with a CT of chemistry, which fits better with a CT of biology, which fits better with a CT of neurology. The same explanatory language is being used in many different ways explaining many different levels of reality. Now Deutsch just needs to pull that off.

I got excited when I thought you meant Category Theory. But it applies. The impossible things are Objects A and B and the possible thing, C is the product, with two arrows pointing from C to A and B. Products in Cats are a fine fuckaroo because you have no way of going from A and B to C with one arrow. As much as us programmers want to! It's the same kind of thing here though. You cannot go from A to C or from B to C. Only can you be at C having composed the product of A and B via (Cartesian) Dark Magic.

SpeedOfSound wrote:How are you imagining free will?

The common or garden variety, the sort that even compatibilists agree we don't have.

SpeedOfSound wrote:I got excited when I thought you meant Category Theory. But it applies. The impossible things are Objects A and B and the possible thing, C is the product, with two arrows pointing from C to A and B. Products in Cats are a fine fuckaroo because you have no way of going from A and B to C with one arrow. As much as us programmers want to! It's the same kind of thing here though. You cannot go from A to C or from B to C.

Well, you can, in many cases and in many categories.

I mean, if B is unit, then there is always an arrow from A to C, and, in fact, A and C are isomorphic (in the trivial case of arithmetic, this is just pointing out that if a * 1 = c then a = c).

Similarly, in the category of sets, if there is an arrow f from unit to B (in other words, if B is not empty), then there is an arrow from A to AxB. Just use the function g(x) = (x,f(1)).

John Platko wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

John Platko wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:
I think it typical of how an atheist would imagine god. Now I'm wondering how you do it. Do you imagine a motive being, kind of like a human?

These days I mostly imagine God as a positive force directing the universe - something akin to what we Catholics would call Grace. But when I'm imagining a more personal God, I imagine a connection with all the snippets of knowledge bounding around my brain.

So what I would call prayer is really a dialogue with these snippets of knowledge - most of which I am not conscious of. In practice, this can feel like a real dialogue with a being that is very wise. But even though I know it's me, because what else could it be, at times it feels greater, and other, than me.

Thank you Sir. You have given me new hope for our species. Me, the atheist, and you, the believer, are no different. I am BTW an atheist who prays and almost daily uses the g-word in my practice of recovery from addiction.

Now I am left with the supposition that you just like to play here at pissing people off or am I missing some history?

Well I stumbled upon this place by accident years ago, I was looking for a group that could talk rationally about the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, google sent me here. They were mostly horsing around in that thread but I did eventually get what I was looking for about that.

So once here I thought I'd post a bit and pretty much immediately the forum's immune system kicked in because I identify as a theist. Some rule #3 nonsense. I had never encountered anything like it before, and it took me a while to sus out what was going on. Let's just say I did a few experiments to help me figure it out.

But you didn't seem to have any problem cutting through my posts. You asked a few pointed questions, I gave you a few honest answers. And it is obvious that there isn't much difference between us. As I try to untangle the religious, and other, nonsense that was impressed on my neurons before I was old enough to protect myself from such doings I find it sensible to keep the bits that aren't crap - and that heuristic seems to bug the hell out of some members. Why? Maybe they just want to be able to wave a magic wand and make all that kind of damage go away - but it doesn't work that way.

I identify as an atheist and I have my reasons. My guard immunity comes up when I run into someone who identifies as a theist. With good reason. The other shoe ALMOST inevitably drops. You could be the exception which makes me very happy. My issue with the attack of the a-theists here is that they may have missed a subtle opportunity to look back on their own imaginings and thus reveal new material on both sides of the big Split.

I have understood that I have my own gods imagined conveniently by leaving the details to some undefined higher order function. I believe that I can specify that function fully if given an infinite number of pens and papers and times. I guess what makes me an atheist is that I believe in that possibility and I believe that the process wouldn't involve anything that would surprise or startle me in a super-naturale sort of way.

What you are seeing here is war-wearied individuals who have had the other shoe dropped almost every god damned time. It's an interesting discussion to be had; what that mechanism is and how does it fail to serve. It's the power behind my conviction that all xtians and muslims should be ushered off our planet. I proffer you a provisional exception.

John Platko wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

John Platko wrote:

romansh wrote:I can't imagine why Catholics often think of themselves as such experts on god.

Well - that's a start. Now tell us about something else you can't imagine. Tell us about the God you can't imagine.

Also the charges in the universe appear to balance so there is no net positive charge.

My "positive force" is not the same thing as positive charge. My positive force drives Dissipative Adaptation .

Also if cosmologists like Krauss are right the whole universe adds up to zero energy then gravity has to be considered a negative force.

Well on the off chance that Krauss is right I suggest you don't pray to gravity. (Platko's Wager)

Last night in a group I attend, and earlier with my mentor, the subject of this positive force and doing good kept getting tossed around. I have this concern over how it was decided that good is the positive direction toward which I should goal. I don't like arbitrary things like that. Do you know what I am talking about here?

Is it enough that it just makes me happier overall to do it that way?

I can't speak for what is right for you but I find that I'm not much good, certainly not at my best, when I'm unhappy. The most positive thing I've ever found in being unhappy is that it pushes for change - although not always positive change.

For me, this idea of a positive force, doing good, means helping someone or something grow - maybe myself. Whether or not someone is happy during that process depends on the perspective they take about change and growth. It could make them happy or miserable. If I was growing but long term miserable I would think I should try another direction of growth. I don't find long term unhappiness positive. But if I were happy and not being destructive, I might just stop for a while and enjoy.

That's probably not much help but, there is a certain amount of arbitrariness around what to help grow - it's a choice. It's a lot less arbitrary if you're actually helping something grow or helping it decline - you can see the results.

So here is one place that I have to defer to that higher order unspecified function. My testing on my own behavior has left it clear that I feel better when I do 'good'. I think there must be biological reasons for that. I BELIEVE there are.

I used to question my mom about what 'good' consists of and she would always tell me "mikey, you know god damned well what good is!". She is right but I'll be damned if I know why.

archibald wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:How are you imagining free will?

The common or garden variety, the sort that even compatibilists agree we don't have.

I have always been confused about this FW thing. What is that garden variety again? How are you different to the plant willing his stem to bend to the light?

SpeedOfSound wrote:

archibald wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:How are you imagining free will?

The common or garden variety, the sort that even compatibilists agree we don't have.

I have always been confused about this FW thing. What is that garden variety again? How are you different to the plant willing his stem to bend to the light?

A plant certainly can't choose otherwise? We can always predict that the plant will behave in that manner. Like water seeking its own level. I think the argument over FW where humans are concerned is whether or not they have the ability to choose, or merely the illusion of choice. With no conclusive evidence one way or the other, people are left to choose which one they believe. LOL