Clutch

Pixie, thanks for the partial summary of your investigations into Langanism. No, it doesn't. If it means "reality is language-dependent", then it's a complete non-sequitur; the expressive generality of logic entails only that it could describe reality no matter what it turns out to be. There's no dependence implied. But if it just expresses the triviality that definitions are linguistic, then we needed no argument for it. Presumably this is a bait-and-switch, offering the obviousness of the latter interpretation and the weightiness of the former. I think the word you're looking for is "bullshit".
No joke, my six year-old suggested this last year when we were reading the Space section of the atlas together. From her, at age five, I thought it showed a sound grasp of the relativity of some concepts. From Langan, with a barfalgab technical term to lend it some cachet, ...it just reminds me of my daughter when she was five.
Not to presume on your time -- you've gone far above and beyond the call of duty already in explaining this much -- but would you mind clearing up the referents of the pronouns in there? What is both one and two, and what forces whose inclusion? This looks like something that will be astonishingly trivial once Langan's Swedish Chef argot is cleared up.

KC

That piece of his paper gave me the most trouble--I'm still trying to figure out how he does that. However, I think its quite obvious his definition of 'random' is restricted to 'acausal', which is not how the term is used by evolutionary biologists. As Art pointed out early on, there are well-known biochemical and thermodynamic causes of mutations. Langan seems to want to regress back to the underlying causes of the quantum phenomena themselves, which is fine I guess, but hardly useful in understanding evolution.

I still have a problem with Langan's description of telic recursion, which he says is driven by a need to relieve the 'stress' of the primordial state of UBT. I cannot see where he actually justifies this idea that 'stress'is created. Did you see where he does explain that? Or is it simply sitting out there unsupported?

Cheers,

KC

Clutch

A couple more gems from the smartest man in America.
Well, the problem with this is that it's false. (It's the first sentence of the introduction to the C? U MT! model.) Nobody thinks that sets themselves are spatio-temporal. I mean, think of the transfinite hierarchy! I'll bite back another joke about "the smartest man in America", out of respect for my neighbours to the south.

Langan doesn't seem to know the meaning of the phrase 'it follows that". From what he says (true or not), it follows only that reality should be describable set-theoretically. And without this inference, the whole shebang that follows it is pointless.

It's a measure of the creationist realization that Dembski and Behe have been utterly deflated, that some of them are so desperate to jump ship that they'd considering making this guy their new Dear Leader.

pz

One way to look at it is that he does seem to be making Dembski look semi-competent in comparison.

Clutch

pz -- well, maybe. Per impossibile?

But it does strike me as one more turn of the wheel that left Morris and Gish unutterable names, after years of being the great scientific challengers to evolution, as soon as Behe and Dembski came along. I see Langan's acquisition of toadies as a sign that the next turn is simply waiting for one more wingnut to come forward.

wade-w

This guy doesn't know much about set theory or pure mathematicians. First, there are only two "fundamental" or primitive concepts in the most common formulation of set theory, namely the empty set (or null set), and the idea of set membership. Everything else is derived from definitions and axioms.

Few mathematicians that work at this basic a level care one way or the other about "reality".
Its a formal system itself, and its elegance or lack thereof, that concerns most pure mathematicians. They leave descriptions of reality to the applied types.

Consider for example the axioms of geometry. There are basically three systems we can adopt, depending on how we treat the parallel postulate. One can accept the normal intuitive version, that is taught in high school; one can accept the idea that there are NO parallel lines; we can assume that there can be multiple distinct lines that all intersect at one point, but are all parallel to a given line. All three possibilities are studied in depth by mathematicians, and all three geometries are considered equally valid! But obviously they can't all reflect reality. In general, mathematicians don't really care.

Note: There is a fourth possibility, that we simply ignore the question of parallel lines. This is often called neutral geometry, and includes all theorems that can be proven without resorting to one of the parallel postulates.

[ December 11, 2002: Message edited by: wade-w ]</p>

The Pixie

Clutch

An edited cut-and-paste lost something in the process.
This is a relationship that is true of any two objects you can conceive. By the "Reality Principle", to conceive an object is to be affected by it, and thus forces its inclusion in reality. The two objects share inclusion in reality, so we have the sameness, and yet they are two objects, not one, so we have a difference.

KC
The acausal argument is that things appear and disappear without rhyme or reason; this is rejected as nonsense of course (strawman argument). Sure, there is randomness involved, but it is rather more than that. However, this seems to allow him to claim his telic god universe is responsible for quantum events hitherto thought to be random (there may well be more to the argument though).
I missed the stress of the UBT. I thought the universe was striving to maximise "general utility".

Pixie

KC

As I understood it, Telesis itself is driven by the 'stress' between potential (choice from UBT) and actualization, or 'state from non-state'. It could be a part of this 'general utility', but I'd have to wade back through to see.

Cheers,

KC