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alcontali

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There is this widespread view of a long mathematical winter between Greek antiquity and the 12th century AD, i.e. a millennium-long standstill: Is tha...
February 01, 2020 at 06:42
Stephen Wolfram wrote something very relevant in that regard: Being knowledgeable of say 1% of these 5 million theorems, i.e. of 50,000 theorems, is p...
February 01, 2020 at 06:04
Totally agreed. While René Descartes is rightfully revered as an indisputable grandee in mathematics, through his highly influential work on coordinat...
February 01, 2020 at 02:58
It works exactly the other way around. According to the Dunning-Kruger study, intelligence is defined as: Knowing when you do not know. Intelligence h...
February 01, 2020 at 02:16
Not really. In fact, not at all. Trust is exactly what fuels deception. The more there are who people trust, and the more blindly they trust, the more...
January 31, 2020 at 18:52
This belief is deeply ingrained but not at all justified. In fact, it is even a dangerous belief. As a matter of fact, we must never "trust" service p...
January 31, 2020 at 15:21
My current understanding is that there exists indeed a detailed description of the infinite model(s) for real numbers but at this point I am unable to...
January 31, 2020 at 14:41
Formal knowledge are sentences for which "the paperwork" containing their justification can (conceivably) be verified mechanically. Paperwork concerni...
January 31, 2020 at 13:02
If you need formal knowledge in order to discover new formal knowledge, how do you get hold of the very first formal knowledge? How do you get the pro...
January 31, 2020 at 05:52
If I understood the explanations correctly, Löwenheim-Skolem applies to the theory of real closed fields (=first order theory) but not to to the theor...
January 31, 2020 at 05:48
I see. ;-)
January 31, 2020 at 05:35
Religion, more specifically, Islam is strongly opposed to usury: I strongly dislike corporations, especially the banksters, because they are usury-inf...
January 30, 2020 at 11:55
This is incredible. I didn't know that this was possible. It is so unlike the models of PA: Well, yeah, I wasn't aware of the fact they behave so diff...
January 30, 2020 at 10:43
Well, the undue influence on the culture and laws of society by corporations is considered evil by religious people, while both left and right are not...
January 30, 2020 at 06:25
Because of this post, I started reading up on the axiomatization of real numbers, and of course, I have run into issues that I do not properly underst...
January 30, 2020 at 05:28
The advantage of using a religious regulatory framework for morality, such as Jewish or Islamic law, is that left-wing versus right-wing does not even...
January 30, 2020 at 04:48
It only applies to some human thought processes, i.e. the ones related to reasoning within or about a formal system. Since the human mind does not onl...
January 29, 2020 at 10:54
The affinely extended real number system simply adds infinity as two real numbers in a Cantor-like approach: According to the explanations this extens...
January 29, 2020 at 10:32
Provability is the property of a number. It is a definable predicate. Given Gödel's semantic completeness theorem, all provable numbers are also seman...
January 29, 2020 at 04:13
January 28, 2020 at 23:42
Totally agreed. Mathematics is only about abstractions expressed in language. Cantor's work is really interesting in this regard. Countable infinity a...
January 28, 2020 at 15:03
The same theory will say that the earth did not always exist. How can something that still needs to come into existence be flat or not flat? Furthermo...
January 28, 2020 at 14:16
In my impression, in logic it certainly is. Other arbitrary, non-logic data can be transformed to logic sentences. For example, the arbitrary statemen...
January 28, 2020 at 10:25
Completely agreed!
January 28, 2020 at 04:39
The use of the term "proof" outside the context of mathematical proof is wrong and misleading, because the mere evidence itself could be wrong or misl...
January 28, 2020 at 04:21
I have just watched a youtube video, entitled, "Population Control Isn't the Answer to Climate Change. Capitalism Is", that revolves around something ...
January 25, 2020 at 07:15
U(x)f(x) : (\forall x \in D)f(x) or even U(x,D)f(x) ?(x)f(x) : (\exists x \in D)f(x) or even ?(x,D)f(x) Explicitly mentioning domain D is important, b...
January 25, 2020 at 06:16
According to proof theory, Descartes' views do not constitute "proof" in any fashion: Like many philosophers in western philosophy, Descartes' argumen...
January 25, 2020 at 05:45
Love is overrated, and romantic love is very dangerously overrated. It makes sense to get along with people you do transactions with. That is why we a...
January 25, 2020 at 05:30
Yes. Unicorns exist in their imaginary world. You can construct an imaginary world by describing it. For example, the imaginary world of Star Wars. Th...
January 24, 2020 at 06:45
If it matters who says it, then what he says cannot possibly matter. The reason why a statement is sound knowledge is because there is paperwork to ju...
January 24, 2020 at 06:33
It works until it doesn't anymore. ;-)
January 24, 2020 at 06:28
The reference section in Wikipedia's page on the diagonal lemma is quite good. I never really read his other work, as mentioned in Carnap's biography ...
January 23, 2020 at 22:48
Now you assume that some kind of incentive psychology that would govern the behaviour of all experts. How do you justify that? Where is the paperwork ...
January 23, 2020 at 22:34
My own intuitive belief is that the abstract, Platonic worlds of mathematics exist regardless of humanity, which only discovers them. Concerning exist...
January 23, 2020 at 22:18
What Kant said, sounds very similar to what Carnap's diagonal lemma suggests about a legitimate existence predicate: it would need to be possible to d...
January 23, 2020 at 16:40
Well no. If the quote from wikipedia is not attributable because it should be considered original research, then it will probably already have been fl...
January 23, 2020 at 15:00
Well, it is still clearly his field that would need to make such connection, because mathematics itself will certainly not make any. He may indeed hav...
January 23, 2020 at 14:39
Well, they are not being "reconciled". Science uses the language of mathematics to maintain consistency in what it says. Mathematics does not tell sci...
January 23, 2020 at 10:30
The liar paradox is not used in the proof strategy for the undefinability the truth. The main consideration is Carnap's diagonal lemma: There will be ...
January 23, 2020 at 06:18
I personally think that Tarski's convention T is an elegant and adequate workaround for the undefinability of truth. The video below explains conventi...
January 23, 2020 at 05:02
Mathematics has no direct empirical take on the world. Its models are always abstract Platonic worlds. It is through its influence on empirical discip...
January 23, 2020 at 04:56
Well, rather: extrapolate them to how we perceive the real world. Stephen Hawking lectured the following on the subject:
January 22, 2020 at 21:05
It took me quite a bit of irritation to understand the gist of model theory. Initially, it appeared to me as nonsensical and absurd. So, in the meanwh...
January 22, 2020 at 15:00
It could have an impact somehow, but that would have to be investigated/discovered by an empirical discipline. The requirement to maintain corresponde...
January 22, 2020 at 14:53
Agreed, but the terms syntactic and semantic have unusual definitions in mathematical logic: If you can derive a new rule, i.e. theorem, from other ru...
January 22, 2020 at 14:35
There is no need for it, but it is also not even possible. Even a redundant existence predicate would be a problem. It would not be merely redundant b...
January 22, 2020 at 13:32
You are trying to use the meaning of the term predicate to determine if a particular property can be a predicate. I just use a purely syntactic proced...
January 22, 2020 at 12:22
Given Tarski's undefinability of truth, any system has no other choice but to receive its fundamental truths from a higher meta-system. Tarski beautif...
January 22, 2020 at 10:31
And there is also an important unmet need for that. For example, there are all these scientific publications supposedly backed by experimental testing...
January 21, 2020 at 14:55