Reality Binds Itself Through Telesis

ObservationsO1) My opponent has not stated his/her gender. For economy, I shall henceforth refer to him with masculine pronouns. I beg for forgiveness if I am in error. O2) My opponent appears to have lifted two paragraphs from Langan's paper without context, and added a paragraph of his own. I only have to refute this text. I need not refute all the claims of the CTMU, even if they pertain to the resolution. Judges to the debate are assumed tabula rasa, and can only judge my opponent's arguments through what was written in the snippet and supporting paragraph. O3) As my opponent is making a positive claim, the BOP rests entirely on him to show that reality binds itself through telesis. I only need to refute his claims and establish that he does not meet his BOP. I do not need to provide an alternative explanation of reality. RebuttalsR1) Bare assertion fallacyThis alone is sufficient to display that my opponent has not fulfilled the BOP. He has only described his cognitive model of reality without citing empirical, or even theoretic, support for his claims. Even if the model he presents is not logically contradictory or contradictory to empirical facts, there is nothing to support it, either. We can use Russel's teaport analogy. Russel (1952) argues that if he were to claim there were an extremely small teapot, too small for our telescopes cannot detect, that revolves around the sun between Mars and Earth, others would not have the BOP to disprove him based on the impossibility of demonstrating the claim as false. Similarly, even if we lacked empirical evidence that reality does not bind itself through telesis, it would still be safe to assume that it does not, in the absence of evidence supporting this idea. (1)R2) Fallacy of EquivocationThere are two types of recursion which were equivocated in my opponent's argument. The first one is linguistic recursion, usually applied to syntax (although it's also displayed in other linguistic strata, particularly morphology). I'll use simple rewrite rules to demonstrate. For simplicity, I shall use the exocentric constituent S. S -> NP VPNP -> NNP -> Adj NPVP -> V NPN -> {roses, buses}V -> {like}Adj -> {big, red, evil}We start with a sentence, and keep applying rules until we get a sentence:S -> NP VP -> Adj NP VP -> Adj NP VP -> Adj Adj NP VP -> Adj Adj Adj NP VP -> Adj Adj Adj NP V NP -> Big red evil roses like busesNP -> Adj NP was the recursive rule which allowed us to add so many adjectives (and thus more and more info to the sentence). This is purely a syntactic process without semantic implications. Sure, it allows us to add more adjectives, but until the last step, when I injected the leixcon, there are no Another type of recursion in computer science and mathematics involves a function that calls itself. Refer to the example I've just written, in pseudocode: Here I print the first 6 numbers of the Fibonnaci sequence with a function findFibonnaci that calls itself. Information is indeed created through this process. However, my opponent appears to mix the two, both in his conception of normal grammatical recursion and telic recursion. If telic recursion is indeed a form of syntactic recursion, then how does it make information? R3) Genesis of the SCSPLThe genesis of the SCSPL was not accounted for. Since SCSPL is self-generating, how was it begun? Here's an analogy: where did the S of the sentence above come from? Where was findFibonnaci called? Obviously, the first instance of findFibonnaci cannot come from inside findFibonnaci, and the first S cannot be generated by another rewrite rule. My opponent presents a 'MU form' that serves as the 'seed', but does not explain what exactly it is, so it is essentially impossible to judge whether the genesis of the SCSPL was probable. R4) Problems with infocognition and observer participationSR1) Meaning and perceptionSCSPL handles reality, so a word for 'sheep' in SCSPL would have to have something to do with sheep DNA. Our lay conception of a sheep, something that is [+living], [+white] and [+fluffy], cannot be an adequate meaning of 'sheep' SCSPL, or a fluffy white dog would be a sheep too. We can refer to Hilary Putnam's idea of meaning. He suggested that meaning is external to our psychological state. (2) He cited the example of beech and elm. Someone who cannot tell between the two would merge the two concepts in his/her head, but this doesn't mean beech and elm are actually the same thing. Similarly, if there were a parallel universe where everything on earth is the same except it is not H2O but another chemical compound with identical physical properties XYZ falling from the sky, someone describing this liquid in both universes would have the same psychological state, but the liquid itself would be different. Thus the meaning of water is *not* our lay conception of a [+liquid], [+drinkable], [-colourful] thing, but the chemical compound H2O. Even the greatest biologist can't be 100% sure what the 'actual meaning' of a sheep is, and our lay conception of a 'sheep' is certainly not 'reality'. Does this follow that the 'actual meaning' of a sheep does not exist in reality, and only our lay conception exists? If not, then the whole theory of infocognition being reality falls apart. Similarly, if one were to see this: One would expect to see this upon lifting the rectangle: But imagine that this is the true picture: In the infocognition of the observer, a 'syntactic operator', the second picture is construed as reality. This contradicts the truth, that the third picture is what's actually under the veil. SR2) Problem of nonverbal thought and recursionI shall use Jackendoff's model of the mind (6): Cognition is not bound to to verbal thought. Words and images appear in our conscious mind, but actual thought occurs in the unconscious mind. Many of our thoughts are not verbal or conscious. Babies, feral children and uneducated deaf people with no Sign exposure never learn language, but they are obviously capable of thought and cognition. Babies' linguistic potential aren't even fully developed yet. Are they then incapable of handling SCSPL, and are thus unable to perceive reality? Are our non-conscious, non-verbal thoughts not linked to reality? Similarly, Piraha speakers are capable of language but incapable of recursion. They have no relative clauses, recursive possessors, etc. (3) Under the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, do they then lack ability to perceive reality, and if they do, does this mean the reality is non-existent under the observer participation hypothesis? Plus, language has ambiguities. If someone thinks, 'Everyone saw someone', there are two possible interpretations (Hy = y is human, Sxy = x saw y):∀x(Hx->∃y(Hy&Sxy))∃x(Hx&∀y(Hy->Syx))It's clear which one's going on in the person's head, but not clear in the language. Under CTMU, is cognition (and by extension reality) ambiguous? R5) Syntax and information are tiedSyntax and semantics are inherently tied. The colourless green ideas doctrine does not make a positive claim about the autonomy of syntax; it is merely a methodological precept. (4) Theta roles, which are semantic, played an important role in government and binding theory. (4) Lexical entries subcategorise for phrases of certain semantic categories (5):(a) *She seems out of town. (b) She seems under the weather. The ungrammaticality of (a) must be explained by the ungradability of 'out of town', rather than its syntactic structure (PP). Thus the original 'unboundness' of information and syntax is not perceivably possible. (1). http://russell.mcmaster.ca...(2)http://tinyurl.com...(3)http://tinyurl.com...(4) Collins, J (2008): Chomsky: A Guide for the Perplexed(5) Maling, J. (1983): Transitive adjectives(6) Jackendoff, R. (2012): A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning