Phlogiston was the cause of fire. It’s a reification error, is all. Like ``power″ in political discourse, which is supposed to be a thing you can acquire, or lose, or contest. Whole analyses depend on it.
Ron_Hardin
Death spiral comes from airplanes and pilot disorientation leading to corrective action making a descending turn progressively worse. Without the disorientation, it doesn’t happen.
Flying blind without instruments leads to disorientation very fast, if you’re doing the flying. If you’re just a passenger, you reorient from what the pilot does; but it’s fatal if the pilot does that, without instruments to reorient himself from.
Disorientation is the key to take away.
Carl Linderholm notes in Mathematics Made Difficult that the next number in 1 2 4 8 16 ? has to be 31, based on just those differences.
Lautreamont on mathematical objects.
95% confidence means that if you repeat the experiment you get the right answer 95% of the time.
That depends on your thoughts because what counts as a success comes up in the repeats.
The experiment itself does not tell you what would have counted as a success. It simply is. No confidence concept applies.
Check out Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason if you like Wittgenstein ; lots on intelligent and empathetic robots too, in looking at what forms skepticism takes in people.
It’s likely to affect your understanding of what Wittgenstein was up to, as well.
I remember a cold call from a stockbroker years ago, wherein he argued that if I didn’t believe that the market was going to go down, then I must believe that the market is going to go up.
Leaving aside the stay-the-same option, that isn’t A or not A.
``Believe″ has its own grammar.
Wittgenstein : 575. When I sat down on this chair, of course I believed it would bear me. I had no thought of its possibly collapsing.
It’s easy to teach a dog what words mean, provided the dog has some interest you can quickly show in the thing meant.
I wrote out on a napkin, one day when she was two, all the words and phrases that my Doberman Susie definitely knew in context, and came up with 200.
All of them were for things that involved her somehow. The most direct naming of things was for toys ; but commands and so forth, and the ever-versitile ``fetch the …″ where … is something fetchable, provided a link to lots of items you could name. Her interest was then in fetching, and indirectly to the name of the thing.
People are no different. To teach what red is, you need some interest in red.
Are vibrations in the air that nobody hears, sound? That’s the question.
It’s not, curiously, a matter of definition.
See Stanley Cavell’s discussion of what is a chair in The Claim of Reason p.71
Wittgenstein goes a little deeper than is imagined.
People can agree about all the facts but argue about what the word means, which question is an empirical one. People don’t know what their criteria are for something being a sound, and can only offer aspects that seem to count for it or against it. You have to try the argument and see if you can see it that way.
Perhaps in the end you can bring out what a sound is.
See Cavell on chairs, op cit. and derivatively Wittgenstein.
The people arguing are not making a mistake; the cognitive scientist is.
Consider Cavell on baseball
It’s called entropy because somebody told Shannon that the same mathematical quantity already existed in thermodynamics, when the question what to call it came up.
I don’t know that there’s any other operational connection.
Like there’s no entropy gradient giving the arrow of time, or system-wide increase.
We have a thousand words for sorrow http://rhhardin.home.mindspring.com/sorrow.txt
I don’t know if that affects the theory.
(computer clustering a short distance down paths of a thesaurus)
I favor taking energy from earth rotation. Put a horizontal gyroscope across a circular track around the North Pole, and let the earth rotate under it. Take energy from the relative motion.
two systems in thermal contact trade energy to maximize the net entropy of the ensemble.
Actually the assumption is that two systems in thermal contact come to some equilibrium state.
Let this equilibrium state maximize something, call it S, and use calculus.
Energy is conserved.
Therefore the energy change in on system equals minus the energy change in the other, and the change in S wrt the energy change in each system has to be equal in both systems at the maximum of total S.
Call that change wrt energy the (inverse) temperature. Two systems in thermal contact come to the same temperature, is then what the assumption of some equilibrium of something comes to, after you rename the derivatives.
Only the assumption of an equilibrium has been introduced to get this.
That’s where
gyroscope
That was actually a joke. Though people would be hard-pressed to guess what happens if you try it.
Gyroscopes are very unintuitive, because people intuitively but incorrectly think that pushing on something changes its position, a mistake that gyroscopes bring out.
But the more important point: Suppose you’ve got an iron flywheel that’s spinning very rapidly. That’s definitely kinetic energy, so the average kinetic energy per molecule is high. Is it heat? That particular kinetic energy, of a spinning flywheel, doesn’t look to you like heat, because you know how to extract most of it as useful work, and leave behind something colder (that is, with less mean kinetic energy per degree of freedom).
Systems in thermal contact (by radiation of nothing else) come to the same temperature. That makes it pretty objective if one of the systems is a thermometer, whether it’s heat or not.
What does a word point to? See an essay on words as labels in Stanley Cavell The Claim of Reason p.175
In the background is always : what is this fantasy about? Meaning in this context the AI fantasy.
Actual robot fantasies begin around p.403
Apple(X) <==> [ Green(X) or Red(X) ] and Edible(X) and Size(X, medium), etc.
The criteria for ordinary language making something count, or fit the case, are ordinary language criteria, not mathematical criteria, of counting or fitting.
That is, ordinary language rules the operation of ordinary language, using the ordinary meanings of count and fit, not the mathematical ones.
Ordinary concepts (nice red apple) are not less precise than mathematical concepts ; but they give precision a certain shape.
The philosopher (not the mathematician!) wants to say that ordinary langauge lacks something that mathematics has. The philosopher however is not curious about why he thinks this.
“If we let ethical considerations get in the way of scientific hubris, then the feminists have won!”
Back when science was fun :
Watson, repeating similar experiments [to Pavlov], noted the
transference″ aspect of such conditioning. Having found that the violent striking of an iron bar produced fear in an infant, he noted that he could give a ``fear″ character to some hitherto neutral object, such as a rabbit, by placing it before the child each time the iron bar was struck; he next demonstrated that this conditioned fear of the rabbit was transferred with varying degrees of intensity to other things having similar properties(such as fur coats or cotton blankets).″Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change p.11
Derrida must have done a thousand essays on how an author trying to be very precise about how language could possibly work, winds up in an infinte loop clarifying a final point that amounts to in effect starting over.
This contributes a lot to an indefinite future, whatever the modulus problem, if you take AI as just such a project.