anthropic principle - yes. thanks. and - a separate point.. I wasn't very clear about translating. About that giant dictionary of concepts with the labels used by different disciplines. Here's a quick example with a single term. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Someone says he'll guess whether an integer you're thinking of is positive or negative. "Positive!" he says. "Actually, no. I was thinking of -2." "No fair!" he says. "You have to think of a number greater than zero." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - OK. Something is going on. What do you call it? A philosopher (logician?) might use the confusing term (in my opinion) "begging the question." But what would a set theorist call this? A programmer? Someone using boolian logic, set theory.. etc. You can cobble together IF statements to structure this. (Rich's IF statement question had me think about this.) Am guessing you'd get a particular kind of circular reference error. What do programmers call this particular logical error (if anything) to distinguish it from other circular reference errors (if that's, in fact, what it is)? They don't call it "begging the question." Maybe there's no special term in programming for it. But if so I would include in the dictionary in the "programming" column for this concept. On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Some modern physicists have already started to give up on "causality", as a result of EPR experiments showing that "spooky action at a distance" does indeed happen.
So "causality" may indeed be an illusion that results from our (vastly imperfect) "memory" system. This is essentially a version of the anthropic principle: we see what our minds & memories allow us to see.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
Szilard/Maxwell/Bennett found that the baseball umpire's rule is true: there aren't any balls or strikes until the umpire calls them. Translation: there is a large energy cost to nailing down a memory; the cost may not show up, however, until you _clear_ the memory to zeros.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_information_theor...
At 12:00 PM 3/26/2011, Bill Gosper wrote:
In freshman Humanities, we had to read Hume's
1. *An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding*<http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/david_hume/human_understanding.html>
**wherein he concluded causality was essentially illusory. Or so I gathered. In his gedanken mechanics, the terminology was so muddled and in conflict with modern terminology that I boggled. --rwg
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