Have it your own way, then. But you will find a lot of other people here think of you more or less the way I do: a tedious obsessive with nothing tangible to say. I am not normally this rude, but you seem quite unusually impervious to recognising how you appear to others. That in itself is reason to question your mental state, in my view. But anyway, that's enough from me.
It's not just the same word in the title (and there may even be one or two that didn't have "reality" in the title) but the subject matter in all of them is the same: spellbound's infatuation with the CTMU - and another "insight" that he claims to have had into the nature of reality. So if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it gets put in the pond with all the other ducks.
There's a rule against posting about Reality? Wow. Hey everybody! Don't dare discuss Reality. Isn't talking about science all the time a form of monomania?
Once again, Spellbound posts a jargon-filled cut-and-paste that he almost certainly doesn't understand, presumably because it sounds "deep" or something. That would be a good objection. This 'CTMU' seems to just be an analogy with human natural language, attempting to turn linguistic principles like 'syntax' into metaphysical principles that supposedly tell us something about the fundamental nature of reality. One can (and should) ask what justifies that metaphysical leap. That just piles incomprehensible jargon atop the original question. "(artificially isolated) within U*-pseudotautologies"? Perhaps Spellbound can explain to us what that means. What's a 'tautology', Spellbound? What's a 'pseudotautology' and how is it different from a 'tautology'? What does it mean for information to be 'isolated within' a 'pseudotautology'? (Isolated how and from what?) What does it mean to say that isolation is 'artificial'? We do?? Ok, that's sorta clear if we assume that when Langan says "the set of all things directly observable by Ui-observers" he's talking about Ui and not U* (what does 'generalized universe' mean?) and 'Ui-observers' means individual observers (human or otherwise). But I'm not entirely comfortable with defining "the physical universe" in terms of observability. "Information-transductive syntax"? Langan seems to be conceiving the epistemic conditions that determine observability in terms of his underlying linguistic analogy. In my opinion it probably makes more sense to look at whether and how the thing observed physically interacts with the observer, and to the observer's conceptual resources. Langan has already said that Ui is what we call physical reality, right up above. Then he defined that in terms of observability. Now we are supposed to understand both in terms of decidability? Is it plausible to say that physicality is a matter of decidability? Isn't decidability something that applies to propositions about physical reality, not to physical reality itself? Decidability seems to be more applicable to identifying and naming what's observed, or deciding whether propositions that make reference to those things are true. The assertion that the physical universe (or the universe of observables) is "mathematically equivalent to the cognitive class itself" seems to me to just be false. It isn't clear what "the cognitive class itself" means, but assuming that if refers to the class of propositions which can possess truth values, it would seem to consist of things like ideas, linguistic and mathematical expressions, not physical objects. It would also include imaginary, hypothetical and counterfactual propositions propositions which have no physical world reference at all. Why? Space aliens can't observe or things or perform cognitive acts? Why name-drop Aristotle here? It's questionable how successful Aristotelian metaphysics is at being a general theory of being itself. Aristotle never gave his metaphysics the deductive form of Euclid's geometry. So it must not be a theory of metaphysics as Langan defines it. It isn't really an 'inferential system'. Since when does a theory of metaphysics have to reduce to a tautology? In formal logic, tautologies are expressions that remain true no matter what truth value assignments are given to their variables. Negating a tautology results in a self-contradiction. So I guess that it's tempting to try to use them as axioms in a metaphysical system. Some philosophers have thought of them as a-priori knowledge and have tried to construct entire philosophies around them. Logicism in the philosophy of mathematics holds that every true proposition of pure mathematics is a tautology. But the classic difficulty with that is that a tautology is true by logical form alone. Since it doesn't exclude any logical possibilities, it is are said to be uninformative. If a tautology's truth is independent of what is true or false about the rest of the world, it doesn't provide us with any information about the world. What does the phrase 'equate inductively' mean? What does it mean for 'specific information' to 'equate inductively' to 'ancestral generalisms', whatever they are? This appears to be a simple assertion of Langan's grand conclusion. It still isn't clear why anyone should believe it. What does 'Ui-indiscernable from T' mean? And how does one get from U* being 'Ui-indiscernable from T' (assuming just for the sake of argument that it is) to equating the universe U* with M and T (which presumably mean Langan's theory)? How does Ui-indiscernable turn into identity? Langan now attempts to argue that there can only be one metaphysical theory (namely his own). Penetrating the jargon, he just seems to be saying that if there are two different metaphysical theories, there has to be some difference between them. Ok, lets accept that. As far as I can see, he's just saying that two different metaphysical theories will say different things about reality and they can't both be right. I don't think that's persuasive. For one thing, it's possible to imagine two theories that produce precisely the same propositions about the observable world, but advance them for very different reasons. They might imagine very different processes at work and posit very different unobservables. If they are mathematical, they may take very different mathematical form. (One is reminded of Schroedinger's wave mechanics and Heisenberg's matrix mechanics. I've heard that Feynman's sum-over-histories method produces the same results too.) Even if we accept the questionable proposition that two different theories can't both be right, that doesn't exclude the possibility that they both are wrong. And Langan produces his grand conclusion like a rabbit out of a hat:
Spellbound: I hope you will reply to the specific points that Yazata has just raised, rather than simply ignoring these issues and continuing to spam this Langan guy's stuff thoughtlessly.
It would be if "talking about it" consisted of repetitive attempted descriptions of science, in meaningless terminology.
The problem isn't the subject so much as it's how that subject is being discussed. Shouldn't posts make sense, shouldn't discussion of any topic consist of people saying comprehensible things about whatever it is? It seems to me that successful threads introduce issues that other people can express their own ideas about. They aren't just massive cut-and-pastes that even the thread-starter doesn't understand. They aren't just oracular announcements of cosmic conclusions that don't make much logical or empirical sense, whose only justification is the thread starter's conviction that he has enjoyed a revelatory mystical experience. It can be. It would be if somebody has fixed, unshakeable and very passionate views about something to do with science and an unwillingness to talk about anything else.
You mean like aliens have been visiting Earth time and time again despite all logic and reason suggesting that such an idea is preposterous?
This is half of one of Spellbound's "reality" threads. I suspect that I posted my comment at the same time as the thread was being merged with all the others, and somehow the forum software got confused and instead of including my post with the merging, it spawned a new thread, with my comment as the new OP?
Yeah, I'd probably just put it down to another quirk of the forum, like the "banned" user group, or the issue with making profile posts a while back.
