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fishfry

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That reminds me of the famous quote attributed to Blaise Pascal, inventor of the Pascal programming language^*, I would have written a shorter letter,...
June 07, 2021 at 02:10
Oh no, @"Metaphysician Undercover" has plenty of that.
June 07, 2021 at 01:54
In the case of a collection of things in the physical world, they have spatio-temporal positoin, but there is no inherent order. How would you define ...
June 07, 2021 at 00:02
Hi, just happened by and have not followed this thread for months, so my comment is completely out of context and only directed at exactly the text qu...
June 06, 2021 at 08:07
No, it's your own private concept of a set that's incoherent. But what I do find noteworthy is that you genuinely believe (unless everything you post ...
June 06, 2021 at 02:45
It's technical to prove that non well-founded sets are consistent. See https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1148634/show-that-there-are-non-well-f...
June 04, 2021 at 05:05
I don't think there are any common or obvious examples, but they are studied. Perhaps there are some clues here, I didn't read through this. https://p...
June 04, 2021 at 03:18
https://i.postimg.cc/T2zFM654/funny-memes-and-tweets-about-bill-and-melinda-gates-divorce.png
June 04, 2021 at 01:04
FWIW I think I've convinced myself that you're right. Under regularity, the collection of sets that are members of themselves is indeed the empty set....
June 04, 2021 at 00:55
A newborn doesn't have a hat but it can acquire one. But the deeper point is that YOUR CONCEPT of a set has inherent order, and that's fine. But the m...
June 03, 2021 at 21:38
I'll try to go through your proof later. I'd prefer it if you'd mark it up but I'll slog through the ASCII later maybe. I think you are making an inte...
June 03, 2021 at 19:32
Yes correct! Exactly. But you are also claiming that "the set of all sets that are members of themselves" exists and is the empty set. That's not cons...
June 03, 2021 at 19:13
Good, thanks. My head hurts but I think I'm right. Let's see what comes next ... Then do so. Let me see it. Writing it in words doesn't help. "The set...
June 03, 2021 at 19:04
It undermined Frege's idea that a set is defined by a predicate, as in "the set of things satisfying such and so." That leads to a contradiction. The ...
June 03, 2021 at 18:58
It formats fine for me, but it took a couple of edits before it did. Is it still bad? Can't do anything about that, it looks right at my end. Then we'...
June 03, 2021 at 18:40
I'll retract that objection and reiterate my point that you cannot form the set \{x : x \notin x\} absent some existing set. Which in your case needs ...
June 03, 2021 at 18:25
Hmmmm. Don't think this can work. If there's a set of all sets that contain themselves, then its complement is the set of all sets that don't contain ...
June 03, 2021 at 18:16
Sorry to hear that, I really enjoy his physics videos. He has one on why nobody has ever measured the speed of light that's most ... illuminating.
June 03, 2021 at 18:02
Second this (almost). Here are the relevant links. Turns out that self-containing sets are an object of interest. However I do not believe there could...
June 03, 2021 at 17:59
I haven't watched the vid, is it any good? Veritasium is usually pretty good but not always. When I saw that he'd done one on this subject my first re...
June 03, 2021 at 17:56
Just yesterday I happened to run across yet another article about the subject. If you want to claim that everyone's been lying -- that there was no on...
June 03, 2021 at 17:29
nevermind posted in error
June 03, 2021 at 04:37
That is not even remotely the point. The point is that in China, it's the State that says how many children a couple may have. They enforce, or enforc...
June 03, 2021 at 00:48
LOL. So I've heard. But the larger point remains, that in the past century math has experienced a loss of certainty. You say that like it's a bad thin...
June 03, 2021 at 00:46
To be fair, Feynman liked to play a wiseass like that; but in fact he was quite a thoughtful philosopher of science.
June 02, 2021 at 04:08
I wasn't born wearing a hat but I can go buy one. The idea that a thing can't gain stuff it didn't have before is false. But I've already shown you ho...
June 02, 2021 at 03:59
Yes ok I think you're right about that.
June 02, 2021 at 03:42
Well I'm a formalist sometimes and a Platonist other times. I made the point earlier to @"Metaphysician Undercover" that while math isn't "true" in th...
June 02, 2021 at 03:08
I think we can defer to Gowers's great essay, The Two Cultures of Math, which he identifies as theory builders and problem solvers. https://www.dpmms....
June 02, 2021 at 02:49
I think we found something to agree on. Nice chatting with you.
June 02, 2021 at 01:51
China had for decades a one-child policy, which was apparently relaxed to a two-child policy, then just this week was relaxed again to a three-child p...
June 02, 2021 at 01:41
I can only go by the published literature on the subject. Perhaps you can point me to references to the contrary, in which case I will thank you for t...
June 02, 2021 at 01:36
It's my general observation that when physicists talk about infinity they usually mean something entirely different than the way mathematicians use th...
June 02, 2021 at 01:24
I wonder why you won't engage with the substantive point I've made against the praise of science. Here's a piece that I just ran across an hour ago by...
June 02, 2021 at 01:18
You seem to want to place math on some kind of pedestal, as if someone is claiming it's absolute truth, then you point out that it's not absolute trut...
June 02, 2021 at 01:08
Isn't "important aspect" weaselly enough? I didn't say "all" or "most," just an important aspect. A lot of the big breakthroughs do involve radically ...
June 02, 2021 at 00:43
Can't speak about Kant. But the physics theory of eternal inflation posits an infinite future. And Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology posits an endl...
June 01, 2021 at 07:50
My understanding is that Tononi's phi is intended to be exactly that. But I only linked to the Aaronson article and haven't paid much attention to IIT...
June 01, 2021 at 07:31
This was in reference to my question, Why don't you treat math like chess, and accept it on its own terms? And I see no answer here. Math is a game th...
June 01, 2021 at 07:03
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivism You know I just happened to learn yesterday that China will now allow married couples to have three childre...
June 01, 2021 at 06:06
You don't credit Trump's Operation Warp Speed with the development of a vax in record time? During most of 2020, Democrats said that no vax could ever...
May 30, 2021 at 06:51
LOL. I thought I made that up myself. Turns out you can buy t-shirts. https://i.postimg.cc/TwSzyhWT/s-l400.jpg
May 30, 2021 at 04:16
"My body, my choice." Where have I heard that?
May 30, 2021 at 02:27
Me too. But I well remember my experience in abstract algebra. At first it made no sense whatsoever, and it was that way several weeks into the course...
May 30, 2021 at 02:24
Ok. I can understand that. But I'm offering you a way out. Just take the position of formalism. There are no numbers, only numerals and the rules for ...
May 30, 2021 at 02:17
I was thinking you'd respond to that with a little self-aware sense of humor. Could there be some unresolved psychological dynamics at play? In any ev...
May 30, 2021 at 02:05
@"Metaphysician Undercover", Found someone else who agrees with your philosophy of math. https://i.postimg.cc/V5yVNm8H/main-qimg-d8626193cbe7beb74fbfe...
May 30, 2021 at 01:27
Famous move w/Spencer Tracy. 7.7 on IMDB. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047849/reference
May 30, 2021 at 00:15
Scott Aaronson debunkificated this a while back. David Chalmers shows up in the comment section. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
May 29, 2021 at 23:55
@"Metaphysician Undercover", What is the inherent order of the points in this set? Can you see that the points are inherently disordered or unordered,...
May 29, 2021 at 23:26