But maybe it’s a way of saying “experience is analog, symbols are discrete”.
It doesn’t seem likely to me. The quotation contains “continua” twice (I assume that would be the “analog”) but I can’t find anything that could be plausibly interpreted as referring to either discreetness or experience. How did you arrive to your suggested interpretation?
How did you arrive to your suggested interpretation?
The jargon of “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description” comes from Bertrand Russell. Knowledge by acquaintance is “direct” or “experiential” knowledge, such as knowledge of a pain or other sensation that you’re having. Knowledge by description is second-hand knowledge obtained by processing a proposition, e.g. your knowledge of my pain on the basis of what I tell you about it.
What I was picking up on in Tuukka’s statement was that the irrationals are uncountable whereas the rationals are countable. So the rationals have the cardinality of a set of discrete combinatorial structures, like possible sentences in a language, whereas the irrationals have the cardinality of a true continuum, like a set of possible experiences, if you imagined qualia to be genuinely real-valued properties and e.g. the visual field to be a manifold in the topological sense. It would be a way of saying “descriptions are countable in number, experiences are uncountable”.
It doesn’t seem likely to me. The quotation contains “continua” twice (I assume that would be the “analog”) but I can’t find anything that could be plausibly interpreted as referring to either discreetness or experience. How did you arrive to your suggested interpretation?
The jargon of “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description” comes from Bertrand Russell. Knowledge by acquaintance is “direct” or “experiential” knowledge, such as knowledge of a pain or other sensation that you’re having. Knowledge by description is second-hand knowledge obtained by processing a proposition, e.g. your knowledge of my pain on the basis of what I tell you about it.
What I was picking up on in Tuukka’s statement was that the irrationals are uncountable whereas the rationals are countable. So the rationals have the cardinality of a set of discrete combinatorial structures, like possible sentences in a language, whereas the irrationals have the cardinality of a true continuum, like a set of possible experiences, if you imagined qualia to be genuinely real-valued properties and e.g. the visual field to be a manifold in the topological sense. It would be a way of saying “descriptions are countable in number, experiences are uncountable”.