ukj

The deep irony in valuing matter more than valuing values is never wasted on me.

You still haven't figured out that "matter" is yet another man-made concept? An abstract idea. A collective noun. Itself a (very useful) "fairy tale".

A substance which posesses "rest mass" in a universe where nothing is ever at rest sure sounds like magical thinking (to me). And what do you even make of point-like particles in physics? They have no volume - so they are not matter. And what about anitmatter?

You haven't yet come to the self-realization that you are committing the reification fallacy by promoting a man-made concept to a totalizing/generalizing/all-encompassing ontological status.

Matter is your God. It's the abstraction you worship.

You are right in saying that we'll never agree; for if I were to agree with you I too would be wrong.

That's why the best strategy is divide&conquer - run the razors concurrently.

Assume complexity then move towards simplicity.

Assume simplicity then move towards complexity.

One of them will succeed sooner than the other. Dialectic...

You seem to be speaking from a place of greatly diminished self-awareness.

Notice how you are constantly appealing to abstract unobservables to make your claims. No shame in that - all science does it. Quantities, numbers, fields, processes etc. etc. etc.

That is precisely the metaphysical woo woo you are busy criticising. Formalism is all about turning that woo-woo into well-defined concepts.

What's a "process"? Show me one.

Only way I know how is to give you more metaphysical woo woo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_calculus

You know all that religious woo-woo about omniscience? We are still talking about it and even using it...

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/principle+of+omniscience

All this religious/devine woo-woo...

  The central dogma of computational trinitarianism holds that Logic, Languages, and Categories are but three manifestations of one divine notion of computation. There is no preferred route to enlightenment: each aspect provides insights that comprise the experience of computation in our lives.

Obviously you can look at all the parts from whatever perspective you want.

It is your philosophical predisposition to dismantle things and understand how they work.

But when you are done learning you need to put all the parts back together and form one coherent/cohesive whole for a system to function.

It is the same old tension between reductionism, holism and systems thinking in the balance.

You seem to be missing the point. Ignoring for a second that the laws of thermodynamics themselves are based upon a handful of idealizations (the idealization of "thermal equilibrium", the idealization of "perfectly isolated system", the idealization of "perfect zero)...the laws of nature are encoded as formalisms/equations. Symbolic computations.

If you have no formalisms you can't compute any consequences - there is nothing to test. You have no science.

So treating Mathematics and science as "separate disciplines", even though they function as one symbiotic whole - that's the conceptual error.

For much the same reasons as grouping cars and engines separately is erroneous.

It's not really a car without an engine.

Ok… I reject your reality and substitute my own.

In this reality I don’t have to do the mental gymnastics where the formal *sciences* aren’t sciences.

In this reality there is at least one unfalsifiable (not even in principle) true claim: the halting problem

This renders falsifiability as a modal criterion. Useful in some scientific contexts - useless in others.

It's pointless to speak of usefulness without specifying a utility function.

It is just as possible to differentiate as it is to integrate.

If it is determined a priori that unfalsifiable propositions are not useful, then knowing the result of the Halting Problem is not useful. Isn't that silly?

I strongly object to categorizations which discriminate against valid science (knowledge? truth? understanding? reasoning? Useful facts?). Is all.

The human process of trying to udnerstand reality is continuous, not discrete, so it's silly to reason about it in terms of discrete categories. It necessarily leads to confusion; and the sort of gatekeeping and self-justification Carl Sagan is guilty of.

Science benefits much more from being defined too broadly; than being defined too narrowly.

I'd rather be too permissive then ignore the junk; than be too restrictive and never even encounter good ideas which were erroneously discarded as junk.

In the spirit of bullshit-busting and critical thought here's a thought experiment...

Alan Turing: The claims made in the Halting Problem is genrally true, and is therefore unfalsifiable even in principle.

Carl Sagan: Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much.

All computer scientists in synchronized act of distributed consensus: Bullshit.

We who? Don't "we" also need a grouping to make it even clearer that some fields can't produce any falsifiable theories if other fields don't produce at least some unfalsifiable theorems? A terra firma of sorts.

It's like a dependency graph. Or something.

Your insistence on "making a difference" seems to echo the sentiment of many pragmatists:

  It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere – no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one. --William James

Is "All humans are mortal." falsifiable or unfalsifiable? It sure is falsifiable in theory, but unfalsifiable in practice. Any living human is potentially immortal until they actually die.

Any running process is potentially non-halting, until it actually halts.

If falsifiability doesn't make a difference in practice (and it doesn't!) then I guess we can all get on with whatever scientific discipline we are busy practicing.

So, I'm going to carry on my life knowing at least one unfalsifiable scientific truth: the theorem known as The Halting Problem.

It's not even wrong, because it's right.

Anybody who insists the Halting Problem is falsifiable (even in principle) is welcome to solve it in principle.

Is it the "philosophy of science"? What is now called "science" was once called "natural philosophy"?

Maybe it's the science of science? Maybe it's the philosophy of philosophy? Maybe it's the science of philosophy? Maybe it's the philosophy of science?

Maybe it's all the same under naturalism?

Studying science (itself a natural process) using our computational understanding of what a "process" is and does sure fits the Oxford definition of "science".

You may not see it as exclusionary but many people do. Just look at the comments!

It's precisely the grouping I am talking about.

If you group science in such a way so that logic/mathematics/computer science falls outside the group then isn't that an erroneous grouping?

Isn't that a silly definition?

True and False are idealized logical constructs. It's the idea; and the idealization of the notion that there is a difference between Truth and Falsehood. Or if you want to get biblical - there is a difference between Right and Wrong.

If True ≡ False then... fuck it.

Not by this definition.

Which is precisely the problem with all definitions I am drawing attention to - they are exclusionary in nature.

Sometimes creating distinctions is useful. Sometimes erasing distinctions is even more useful.

How much physics could you do without Noether's theorem?

Your failure to understand what I am saying is abysmal.

That is what I said. I showed a mathematical statement and I showed how you could falsify it. Since you said "mathematics is not falsifiable" I have shown your statement is not true.

You have taken it upon yourself to interpret "Mathematics is not falsifiable" as broadly as needed in order to confirm your own biases; and then proceeded to attack a strawman instead of a steelman. That's the lack of charity...

You were the one who decided that the distinction between conjectures and theorems is important.

And you were the one who decided that it isn't; so you falsely equated them.

What you have demonstrated is the falsification of the statement "X is a theorem"; not the falsification of "mathematics is not falsifiable." - a hasty generalization fallacy.

Which doesn't demonstrate anything of import or relevance whatsoever. Obviously a non-theorem is not a theorem. This is no more interesting than demonstrating that non-Mathematics is not Mathematics.

This in no way diminishes or falsifies my own claim that theorems are unfalsifiable! And neither is Mathematics.

Because if you do falsify it - then it was never a theorem. By definition. Theorems are true, not false. A false theorem is a contradiction in terms. A misconception. An error in reasoning.

Maybe Euler wasn't a Mathematician either. Who knows? Those sort of questions are undecidable.

I merely attempting to reciprocate/mirror your tone. You are the one (self)identifying it as "rude".

I have some idea about what you do and don't know about definition and definability (in general) given the words you've said so far and the way you've used them.

Prospective theorems are not theorems until a proof is presented. At which point they become retrospective theorems.

All that "falsification" and counter-examples prove is that the so-called "proof" of a "theorem" wasn't. If you have indeed provided a counter-example that's a proof of negation which raises questions: what was wrong with the original "proof" of the theorem? Since proofs are programs - there must have been a bug in the proof. Better type-check that proof/program...

The presence of a counter-example to Sean Hunter's "theorem" simply demonstrates that it's not a theorem. It's a misnomer. Theorems are exactly those Mathematical stataments for which no proof of negation exists.

You seem to be presupposing some particular kind of mathematics. I am talking about all possible Mathematics in general; of which the particular Mathematics you are currently using is just one particular instance. A historical and cultural coincidence.

There's a Mathematical paradigm in which proof-by-contradiction is a valid proof method e.g mathematics founded upon classical logic.

And there's a Mathematical paradigm in which proof-by-contradiction is not a valid proof method e.g mathematics founded upon intuitionistic logic. This is basically what we call Computer Science. It has fewer axioms than Classical Mathematics (e.g the axiom of choice is severely restricted) and so it's a much stronger proof-system. You could even say Intuitionistic Mathematics (which is basically CS) is "more foundational" (it is much closer to the foundations?) than Mathematics.

The fact that you are admitting proof-by-contradiction in your methodology tells me about your choice of foundations, but so what? There's a foundation which axiomatically pre-supposes choice; and a foundation which doesn't.

And in the foundations where choice is not axiomatic "proof" by contradiction is not a valid proof.

The reasoning goes something like this:

1. Choice implies excluded middle. 2. Excluded middle implies all proposition are either true or false. 3. Excluded middle implies that proof by contradiction is valid.

Rejecting 1 results in the rejection of 2 and 3 also.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaconescu%27s_theorem

The problem with all ideas is always their reification. Computers may be deterministic, but humans aren't. The same software/idea produces wildly different understandings; and behaviour in differnt humans.

What always seem like great ideas in theory, innevitably has to cope with the (mis)understanding; (mis)interpretation; and (mis)application of said idea by the mass population.

Hickam's dictum is also provable.

In the domains where simplicity prevails Occam's razor is more probable.

In domains where complexity prevails Hickam's dictum is more probable.

In asking a statement to be falsified (in principle) you are assuming it to be true (in principle).

Is is true? What makes it true?

A concept which will in no way ever make a difference, is meaningless.

So what would falsify this statement? How would you convince yourself that you are wrong?

I am talking about (theoretical) computer science, not (practical) software engineering.

This should've been clear in the context of my question:

"Are the formal sciences (logic/mathematics/computer science) not science?"

I am struggling to spot the charity in all your condescension.

metaphysics /ˌmɛtəˈfɪzɪks/ noun the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity, time, and space.

First principles? Like logical/mathematical axioms? Sprinkle abstraction. Identity? f(x) = x ?

Time? Space? Spacetime? Minkowsky space?

On a fuzzy-match that sounds ludicrously similar to the sort of stuff the formal sciences concern themselves with. Almost as if the distinction between science and philosophy is non-existence given the demarcation problem.

What makes this assertion; or the assertion “If it isn’t disprovable - it isn’t science” true?

The study of being qua being; or science qua science; or mathematics qua mathematics; or X qua X for any X.

Metaphysics.

Or as it is commonly referred to in computer science: function self-application. One example of which being the Y combinator (as in the name of this very forum).

I am applying a tautology in exactly the mathematical sense of a tautology; and I understand my construction just fine.

Had you been more charitable you would’ve addressed my argument; not your strawman of my argument.

Someone should tell you that there is a difference between a conjecture and a theorem.

Theorems are unfalsifiable.

One way to view metaphysics is as the science of science.

So if the science of science is not science - is that not a contradiction?

It is in the nature of definitions to include some things and exclude others.

If the definition of “science” excluded computer science as a science; would you say the definition is correct?

Personally, I am weary of the notion of “actual science” since science is not a well-defined term. The demarcation problem isn’t solved; and philosophers like Fayerabend in his book “Against method” suggest that science is more of an anarchic enterprise than any particular set of methods.

Take any criterion and apply it too strictly and there is some scientific discovery/progress in history which violates the rules and wouldn’t pass for “science” given any definition…

Take any given methodological approach - and you will always find counter examples in scientific history.

Almost like genius isn’t algorithmic.

How can we disprove the hypothesis “If we can’t disprove it - it isn’t science.”?

The scientific metaphysic relies on so many declarative/prescriptive statements which are themselves exempt from the criteria for science and are thus self-defeating on their own terms.

It is so peculiar when scientists are so dogmatic about science.

Are the formal sciences (logic/mathematics/computer science) not science? The testability/falsifiability criterion certainly excludes them from being sciences.

Repeatability and verifiability aren’t the be-all/end-all criteria for knowledge/truth.

Thus is over-selling science as the only avenue to truth/knowledge.

Where does it leave formal/mathematical/theoretical knowledge?

Where does this leave historical and political facts?

Moral truths?

Science is at best instrumentalism.

The fact is you are talking about the meaning of words. Be they English words; or Mathematical words.

If you are going to talk about the correspondence theory in the same breath as you are talking about any language - you need to solve the symbol-grounding problem.

What function/mechanism/relation (or if you don't like any of those words - pick your own) grounds symbols?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem

Correspondence is a relation.

Relations are functions.

Can you tell us more about this function which relates Mathematical concepts to physical reality?