The US sits on the world's largest reserve of ground fresh water. We share it with a physically large country of similar culture with a small army and more extensive ice caps. Why on earth would we invade an infrastructure-poor, geographically distant nation for their own dodgy fresh water supply?
Maybe because it is an infrastructure-poor, geographically distant nation and that makes it easy?
Your argument is quite nive, by the way: ever heard of strategics?
Calling Brazil's water supply "dodgy" does show how firm you are into these matters, though, so I guess there is no real point in arguing with you.
Oh yes, our vast push for more open markets and industrialization to provide jobs and expanding economies globally really sucks for all non-US citizens.
Only ignorace of the effects the economic policies pushed by the US have had on other countries can excuse this comment.
Pick any south-american country and come live with us to enjoy the priviledge of living in a US-led open market and industrial revolution.
Honestly: I cannot believe you seriously believe this.
What the poster wishes is that the US stops making the world a worse place (I am quite sure that sentiment is widely held)
He is in no way requesting (and neither is most of the people outside of the US) that the US take the world under its responsability not that it take care of other countries not that it solve anyone else's problems.
Indeed, I guess that in the poster's mind, one way in which the US could stop making the world a worse place is exactly by stop pretending to have the world under its responsability and assuming it has to solve other people's problems. I know for a fact that if that is in his mind, then he is not the only one.
Well, you do not agree with the US foreign policies right now? What about in the last hundred years? The US surely helped make Chile living hell for around 30 years. It greatly helped make Argentina a living hell. It essentially distroyed Vietnam, Cambodia. If you look at the bigger picture, you'll see lots of reasons why people outside the US feel that it tends to worsen things badly.
Of course, the US as a unit and its citizens have also done great things. That does not magically change history not the effects of the bad things done to people.
And you will agree, I am sure, that the only rational way for those people to behave is to take into account what history has taught them, right?
If the rest of the world hates us so much, and our education system is so bad, then stop sending your people over here to go to our universities.
That (some of) the programs at (a few of) the universities in the US are amazingly good does not mean that the education of the average USian is any good. Indeed, it is only an insignificant proportion of the population of the US that is able to enjoy those programs.
I would judge an education system, for example, by the way in which it raises the average common sense. While that is of course quite hard to quantify and make comparaisons, the huge percentages of people that actually bought the idea that Saddam Hussein was related to the 9/11 events because they were told so, say, gives a hint as to the success rate in that respect.
That is the education that counts in these matters.
Iran delights in demonstrating itself to be such a nutbag.
Well, I don't know if the US delights or not in being the nutbag that we see, but that does not really change much: it has been being one since quite a while. By 2001, when the latest wave came, the world had already witness lots of displays of nutbugginess.
That fool Iranian president is the only idiot that actually makes Bush seem sensible.
Not really. Bush is not sensible independently of the Iranian president. Did he magically become sensible at the time of 9/11? I would say exactly the contrary. And, remember, 9/11 actually happened: Iran is, so far, diplomatic exercices gone bad.
Donald Knuth says in the foreword to the "A=B" book by Marko Petkovsek, Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger (which is essentially the solution of Knuth's exercice 1.2.6.63!):
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
SQL is a declarative language, not a procedural one. It is in that aspect related to functcional and logic programming languages.
SQL code describes what you want to get, not how to get it. That is the actual intent of the design.
Well, the few Next buttons you press while installing Windows give you Windows. The few Next buttons I pressed last time I installed Fedora gave me much, much more. Now, I indeed had to edit a few files but by a large margin most of the configuration was donde with nice GUIs.
Oh: none of the machines I take care of, including a couple of ones doing server duties, has one single executable I had to compile myself.
It's been ages since the last time I did much mora than click a few Next buttons to install a distro. I do remember having to guess ModeLines back in the old days and all that, but come one: have you even tried to install FC or Ubuntu lately?
Ah, a positivist mathematician- I'd heard of them, but never communicated with one:-P. Although I remember reading in college that Gauss thought mathematics to be a sort of semi-empirical science. But most mathematicians I have met are, deep down, really Platonists, I think.
Heh. Gauss is not bad company to be thrown with!
You are right about most mathematicians being Platonists. One can argue that Platonism is a very developed stage of a process which starts with people adscribing will and intent to rain and fire, and anthomorphising (?) the sun.
But once these assumptions are made, it is impossible to argue with.
Indeed. But you can argue at the time of making the assumptions. Usually, comments like your original "Many rules of logic and mathematics can't be argued with either" are based on the (mistaken) hypothesis that those assumptions are not made but are "natural".
It is a very subversive idea, that the assumptions are not a given.
reasoning is still involved in making the connection between your axioms and your conclusions. A person whose ability to think has been impaired, by a brain injury say, might still argue with you. So argument is still possible, just unreasonable.
Sure. There are documented instances of what you say and many, many more interesting phenomena. We are amazingly complex things! There is a classic book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" about the subject and people studying cognitive science (like Papert and friends at MIT in the 70s, for example) wrote breathtakingly interesting stuff.
"Unreasonable argument" is quite a contradition in terms, btw!
But probably the most important thing about what's been done is that it is a step in the direction of what's called Thurston's Geometrization Programme, which is a project which would provide an incredible amount of information on manifolds---this is not my subject, so I cannot really explain muche here.
As it usually happens, it is not the actual result that bears the most importance, but the methods developed to solve it, which will be applied to solve further problems.
The result is important because it provides a vital piece of information needed when you are trying to understand certain objects which we mathematicians call manifolds. It is quite hard to explain why one wants to do this, though.
Put briefly, the truthness of the conjecture gives us a rather simple method to recognize a (3-dimensional) sphere when you see one. That may sound like little, but, actually, it's turned out to be a very difficult problem.
I don't claim that it isn't reasonable to believe in causation isn't reasonable. But this isn't the same as saying whether or not causation is metaphysical.
"Being metaphysical" means nothing, in my view. I do not have access to non-physical entities and cannot in any way interact with things that do not have physical consequences, and this to such an extent that nothing at all that I can deal with, that has consequences I can see, depends upon those things that do not have physical consequences existing or not. For all purposes, apart from the rather peculiar purpose of discussing their existence, they can be assumed not to exist.
Many rules of logic and mathematics can't be argued with either. I still don't consider these things to be empirically justified (although I guess some people do, so you might.)
There is nothing in logic nor mathematics that cannot be argued with. That stopped being the case after people realized that not everything had been covered and prescribed by Aristotle and friends.
In general, the impression that in mathematics and logic there are things which you cannot argue only can be adscribed to ignorance of modern mathematics and logic. It sort of comes from the conception of "axioms" as undisputable and undisputed things, and so on; that conception was current at the times of Euclid, and it lasted for ages, but it is long gone.
Everything in mathematics and in logic is judged empirically, for appropriate values of "empirical". Even deduction rules in logic; say, there are domains of reasoning that one is interested in modeling in which the "standard" principle of the excluded third is not useful; well, then when modeling those domains of reasoning, we just do not use that principle.
Even basic things like the axiomatics of geometry (of which there are many, many, most of them conflicting with each other) or the definitions of concepts, are judged empirically with the very strict measure of how useful they are when modeling phenomena (even if those phenomena are purely of mathematical nature)
Ask any mathematician what is sacred in the definition of group, and you'll get an answer similar to "that it is actually very useful in describing things that are there to begin with".
If you asked me (I am a mathematician) that is exactly what I'd say.
By procedural definition I mean an operational definition (that's the correct term, I guess): [...]
I'm personally not sure this is a very natural way to talk about all scientific concepts. What about a quantum wave function? I don't know how much you know about quantum physics, but in case you don't know, you will never see a quantum wave function. It is, in principle, impossible. In fact, we can think of the quantum wave function as, by definition, describing what happens to the physical system between observations. Yet as a practical matter, to do quantum physics, you have to talk about it as if it exists, and a fair number of physicists, I think, would say they believe it exists in some sense.
The condition of being operational is a mostly standard requirement on "scientific" definitions, in various forms and shapes, of course.
What's important of quantum wave functions is not whether they exist or not (I'd say that that question does not even make sense) but whether the assumption of their existance allows you to model the world coherently, to predict things correctly, and what not. Quantum theory is a model of the world. There is no requirement for Hilbert spaces to exist concretely (whatever that may mean) for the model to be useful. (There is a funny footnote in Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes in which he says something to the point of "What confounds physicists is not whether quarks exist or not, but why it is that they are never alone". That phrase very nicely captures a big part of the spirit.)
Using Kant as a source is problematic because he assumed the existence of God, of souls and a wide variety of other stuff on no other grounds but his own disposition.
However, I am not going to directly observe "I" any more than I can directly observe, say, causation.
Sure. But you are neither going to directly observe "I" any less that causation. While causation can be problematic in some instances, it is quite difficult to argue against causation without leaving the domain of reasonable discourse.
By procedural definition I mean an operational definition (that's the correct term, I guess): a definition that allows you to know a soul when you see one, and tell it apart from things which are not souls. That is, a definition which introduces a concept you can work with non-vacuously. (In particular, this is independent fromm intrumentalism)
Non-operational definitions abound in contexts where people want to provide a definition of God, for example; most of their attempts are purely methaphysical ("God is omnipotent", "God is omniscient", etc) conditions, which are by their very nature non-verifiable (nor falsifiable, under the hypothesis of "God has mysterious ways"...) Non-operational definitions tend to "define" things which have the following funny characteristic: if these things did not exist, nothing would change.
The principle of parsimony, the principle of minimum entropy, Occam's razor, and plain old common sense reject non-operationally defined concepts.
I really don't know to what extent "I" remains metaphysical
There is no need for "I" to be metaphysical. Being metaphisical rarely provided any information on anything.
Whatever a "soul" is, exactly, it must be intimately connected with whatever you mean by the phrase "I", and vice versa.
Hmm. No.
"I" stands for a systematic set of observable phenomena, ranging from physical perception to awareness of the separation from the environment; yes, that is a very bad and imprecise way of describing it, but it is a very difficult subject. Whetever the "soul" is defined to be, it is defined to be either something "more" than that set of observable, physical phenomena, or "different in an essential (methaphysical) way" from that set of observable, physical phenomena. In particular, after a few millenia of debating the nature of the soul, no one has been able to come up with a procedural definition of the soul.
You are very mistaken if you think that the position that there is no soul implies the negation of individuality.
Brazil used to have USians fingerprinted and photograhed and pretty much treated just as Brazilians are treated upon arrival to the US, that is, badly (maybe they still do). Of course, it was not very much appreciated by USians, and I have been a witness myself of a couple of the many cases in which USians react indignantly to the affront, and, in one case, start a row leading them to be imprisoned. Fun to watch, a hurt inflated pride.
Slashdot Mirror
And what, pray, gives you the authority to impose such a limitation?
Well, the IMF may be in theory not the United States Government, but in practice things work differently.
Either you do not know at all how the IMF works in real life or you are extraordinarily naive.
Maybe because it is an infrastructure-poor, geographically distant nation and that makes it easy?
Your argument is quite nive, by the way: ever heard of strategics?
Calling Brazil's water supply "dodgy" does show how firm you are into these matters, though, so I guess there is no real point in arguing with you.
A police force is granted its powers. No one granted the US any police powers.
Only ignorace of the effects the economic policies pushed by the US have had on other countries can excuse this comment.
Pick any south-american country and come live with us to enjoy the priviledge of living in a US-led open market and industrial revolution.
Honestly: I cannot believe you seriously believe this.
You are confusing two things.
What the poster wishes is that the US stops making the world a worse place (I am quite sure that sentiment is widely held) He is in no way requesting (and neither is most of the people outside of the US) that the US take the world under its responsability not that it take care of other countries not that it solve anyone else's problems.
Indeed, I guess that in the poster's mind, one way in which the US could stop making the world a worse place is exactly by stop pretending to have the world under its responsability and assuming it has to solve other people's problems. I know for a fact that if that is in his mind, then he is not the only one.
Well, you do not agree with the US foreign policies right now? What about in the last hundred years? The US surely helped make Chile living hell for around 30 years. It greatly helped make Argentina a living hell. It essentially distroyed Vietnam, Cambodia. If you look at the bigger picture, you'll see lots of reasons why people outside the US feel that it tends to worsen things badly.
Of course, the US as a unit and its citizens have also done great things. That does not magically change history not the effects of the bad things done to people.
And you will agree, I am sure, that the only rational way for those people to behave is to take into account what history has taught them, right?
That (some of) the programs at (a few of) the universities in the US are amazingly good does not mean that the education of the average USian is any good. Indeed, it is only an insignificant proportion of the population of the US that is able to enjoy those programs.
I would judge an education system, for example, by the way in which it raises the average common sense. While that is of course quite hard to quantify and make comparaisons, the huge percentages of people that actually bought the idea that Saddam Hussein was related to the 9/11 events because they were told so, say, gives a hint as to the success rate in that respect.
That is the education that counts in these matters.
Well, I don't know if the US delights or not in being the nutbag that we see, but that does not really change much: it has been being one since quite a while. By 2001, when the latest wave came, the world had already witness lots of displays of nutbugginess.
Not really. Bush is not sensible independently of the Iranian president. Did he magically become sensible at the time of 9/11? I would say exactly the contrary. And, remember, 9/11 actually happened: Iran is, so far, diplomatic exercices gone bad.
A strong community is always nice to have. Be sure to get a couple of people who can actual code that wrapper.
Donald Knuth says in the foreword to the "A=B" book by Marko Petkovsek, Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger (which is essentially the solution of Knuth's exercice 1.2.6.63!):
That's a high bar!
SQL is a declarative language, not a procedural one. It is in that aspect related to functcional and logic programming languages. SQL code describes what you want to get, not how to get it. That is the actual intent of the design.
Well, the few Next buttons you press while installing Windows give you Windows. The few Next buttons I pressed last time I installed Fedora gave me much, much more. Now, I indeed had to edit a few files but by a large margin most of the configuration was donde with nice GUIs.
Oh: none of the machines I take care of, including a couple of ones doing server duties, has one single executable I had to compile myself.
It's been ages since the last time I did much mora than click a few Next buttons to install a distro. I do remember having to guess ModeLines back in the old days and all that, but come one: have you even tried to install FC or Ubuntu lately?
Heh. Gauss is not bad company to be thrown with!
You are right about most mathematicians being Platonists. One can argue that Platonism is a very developed stage of a process which starts with people adscribing will and intent to rain and fire, and anthomorphising (?) the sun.
Indeed. But you can argue at the time of making the assumptions. Usually, comments like your original "Many rules of logic and mathematics can't be argued with either" are based on the (mistaken) hypothesis that those assumptions are not made but are "natural".
It is a very subversive idea, that the assumptions are not a given.
Sure. There are documented instances of what you say and many, many more interesting phenomena. We are amazingly complex things! There is a classic book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" about the subject and people studying cognitive science (like Papert and friends at MIT in the 70s, for example) wrote breathtakingly interesting stuff.
"Unreasonable argument" is quite a contradition in terms, btw!
Hm. I forgot a big thing...
But probably the most important thing about what's been done is that it is a step in the direction of what's called Thurston's Geometrization Programme, which is a project which would provide an incredible amount of information on manifolds---this is not my subject, so I cannot really explain muche here.
As it usually happens, it is not the actual result that bears the most importance, but the methods developed to solve it, which will be applied to solve further problems.
The result is important because it provides a vital piece of information needed when you are trying to understand certain objects which we mathematicians call manifolds. It is quite hard to explain why one wants to do this, though.
Put briefly, the truthness of the conjecture gives us a rather simple method to recognize a (3-dimensional) sphere when you see one. That may sound like little, but, actually, it's turned out to be a very difficult problem.
"Being metaphysical" means nothing, in my view. I do not have access to non-physical entities and cannot in any way interact with things that do not have physical consequences, and this to such an extent that nothing at all that I can deal with, that has consequences I can see, depends upon those things that do not have physical consequences existing or not. For all purposes, apart from the rather peculiar purpose of discussing their existence, they can be assumed not to exist.
There is nothing in logic nor mathematics that cannot be argued with. That stopped being the case after people realized that not everything had been covered and prescribed by Aristotle and friends.
In general, the impression that in mathematics and logic there are things which you cannot argue only can be adscribed to ignorance of modern mathematics and logic. It sort of comes from the conception of "axioms" as undisputable and undisputed things, and so on; that conception was current at the times of Euclid, and it lasted for ages, but it is long gone.
Everything in mathematics and in logic is judged empirically, for appropriate values of "empirical". Even deduction rules in logic; say, there are domains of reasoning that one is interested in modeling in which the "standard" principle of the excluded third is not useful; well, then when modeling those domains of reasoning, we just do not use that principle. Even basic things like the axiomatics of geometry (of which there are many, many, most of them conflicting with each other) or the definitions of concepts, are judged empirically with the very strict measure of how useful they are when modeling phenomena (even if those phenomena are purely of mathematical nature)
Ask any mathematician what is sacred in the definition of group, and you'll get an answer similar to "that it is actually very useful in describing things that are there to begin with".
If you asked me (I am a mathematician) that is exactly what I'd say.
The condition of being operational is a mostly standard requirement on "scientific" definitions, in various forms and shapes, of course.
What's important of quantum wave functions is not whether they exist or not (I'd say that that question does not even make sense) but whether the assumption of their existance allows you to model the world coherently, to predict things correctly, and what not. Quantum theory is a model of the world. There is no requirement for Hilbert spaces to exist concretely (whatever that may mean) for the model to be useful. (There is a funny footnote in Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes in which he says something to the point of "What confounds physicists is not whether quarks exist or not, but why it is that they are never alone". That phrase very nicely captures a big part of the spirit.)
From the fact th
Using Kant as a source is problematic because he assumed the existence of God, of souls and a wide variety of other stuff on no other grounds but his own disposition.
Sure. But you are neither going to directly observe "I" any less that causation. While causation can be problematic in some instances, it is quite difficult to argue against causation without leaving the domain of reasonable discourse.
By procedural definition I mean an operational definition (that's the correct term, I guess): a definition that allows you to know a soul when you see one, and tell it apart from things which are not souls. That is, a definition which introduces a concept you can work with non-vacuously. (In particular, this is independent fromm intrumentalism)
Non-operational definitions abound in contexts where people want to provide a definition of God, for example; most of their attempts are purely methaphysical ("God is omnipotent", "God is omniscient", etc) conditions, which are by their very nature non-verifiable (nor falsifiable, under the hypothesis of "God has mysterious ways"...) Non-operational definitions tend to "define" things which have the following funny characteristic: if these things did not exist, nothing would change.
The principle of parsimony, the principle of minimum entropy, Occam's razor, and plain old common sense reject non-operationally defined concepts.
There is no need for "I" to be metaphysical. Being metaphisical rarely provided any information on anything.
Even as a non-USian, I hope in the name of humanity that you be joking.
Hmm. No.
"I" stands for a systematic set of observable phenomena, ranging from physical perception to awareness of the separation from the environment; yes, that is a very bad and imprecise way of describing it, but it is a very difficult subject. Whetever the "soul" is defined to be, it is defined to be either something "more" than that set of observable, physical phenomena, or "different in an essential (methaphysical) way" from that set of observable, physical phenomena. In particular, after a few millenia of debating the nature of the soul, no one has been able to come up with a procedural definition of the soul.
You are very mistaken if you think that the position that there is no soul implies the negation of individuality.
I am quite sure they'll be quite happy to hear about your donation of time/money/whatever.
VB6 and VB.Net are completely different things.
There is no correlation between having a garbage collector and being interpreted. You can use a garbage collector in good old C if you want.
Brazil used to have USians fingerprinted and photograhed and pretty much treated just as Brazilians are treated upon arrival to the US, that is, badly (maybe they still do). Of course, it was not very much appreciated by USians, and I have been a witness myself of a couple of the many cases in which USians react indignantly to the affront, and, in one case, start a row leading them to be imprisoned. Fun to watch, a hurt inflated pride.