From: henken@ocf.berkeley.edu (Matthew J. Henken)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Re: *Virtual* Reality
Date: 27 Sep 1992 07:45:11 GMT
Organization: U. C. Berkeley Open Computing Facility
NNTP-Posting-Host: headcrash.berkeley.edu

In article <1992Sep26.210512.28163@cs.yale.edu> yarvin@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin) writes:
>henken@ocf.berkeley.edu (Matthew J. Henken) writes:
>>>The way to "understand" quantum mechanics is to learn how the math works,
>>>not to indulge in intellectual masturbation.  And spare me the crap about
>>>"there's more to it than the math."  The only _hard_ part is the math.
>>
>>The only hard part is the math.  Heh, again.  The math is well understood,
>>by philosophers and physicist both.
>
>What I mean by "hard" is that it is a subject that, in the best of
>circumstances, takes several years to learn properly.  Of course one can
>learn it well enough to lie about it in a month.

How about a better standard of what it means to be tough problem:  The
difficulty the top people in the field have in solving it.  By your standard,
if we finally get a proof of Fermat's last theorem that, once we see it,
seems utterly obvious requiring only basic knowledge of arithmetic, then
you would say that proving Fermat's last theorem was an easy problem even
if it took 1000 years of constant effort to find.  By the standard of
difficulty of solution, the figuring out of what the formulas *mean* is a
harder nut to crack by far than the construction of the equations themselves
(which are, after all, just trivial best-guess summaries of the data).  The
greatest percentage of energy has been spent, as it should have been, on
figuring out what the mathematics tells us about the world.  And in this
job, philosophers have been and continue to be essential.

>> Frege was a philosopher and at the same time
>>developed first order predicate calculus and FOPC was useful

>And your example is extremely weak at best.  Frege merely gave names and
>symbols to certain types of statements which were already extremely well
>known in mathematics.  Now, notation can be quite useful.  But in this case
>mathematicians had been using these statements for hundreds of years,
>without needing notation for them.  I have used this notation.  There is
>very little manipulation that you can do with it; its symbols are basically
>just abbreviations.  So perhaps these abbreviations were invented by
>philosophers.  (I happen to doubt it.  They certainly weren't invented by
>Frege, who used a monstrous and unwieldy system of notation.)  Making
>abbreviations is a trivial achievement.

I'll take your last point first.  By "abbreviations" you are here indicating
systems in which one may make precise and speak rigorously about certain
facts or observations.  Construction of such systems are, according to you,
trivial achievements.  Other than the first order predicate calculus, another
system which matches your and my descriptions is the entire mathematical
apparatus:  The tools for talking about quanitities and their relations,
sets and their relations, etc.  The idea that the predicate calculus is
a trivial invention is akin to saying that the mathematical apparatus
was a trivial production.  Clearly, just by the extreme time and effort
put into each, as well as the far-ranging applications of each, they
are not trivial.  You say that the observations that were made rigorous
and precise by the predicate calculus (in your example, in mathematics)
could have been and were made in some form without the predicate calculus.
Similarly, some discussion of what would later be classified as mathematical
matters was possible before there was any sort of systematic supporting
apparatus.  This fact does not in the least render the mathematical
apparatus that was developed irrelevant, becuase its development allowed for
a thorough and rigorous investigation of the relations of quantities
and the laws of arithmetic replacing the loose sort of idiosyncratic
exposition of intuition that such investigation would be (and was) without
the appropriate support.  In precisely the same way, the prior existence of
desperately unrigorous and troubled ways of expressing some relations
among predicates indicate only the grave need for the development of
these ideas to the point of formalizability.  Wouldn't it be surprising
if it weren't the case that statements of a type X didn't precede the
development and refinement of the ideas involved in statements of type
X?  What in the world would cause anyone to develop and refine the ideas
if they were not already present in some rudimentary form and in dire
need of work by a "top man."  So, if you think that the mathematical
apparatus is useless and trivial, I guess I understand better why you
think that the predicate calculus is also:  You're an imbecile, but a
consistent imbecile.


Matthew J. Henken :-{<So, you're saying that physics is only trivially
		      different from "Uga go fast.">]
henken@ocf.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: alt.peeves