2011/5/23 Mathieu Bouchard
<matju@artengine.ca>
On Fri, 20 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 05:12:09PM +0200, Bryan Jurish wrote:
If forty-two trees fall in a forest and no one is around to count them, __forty-two__ trees have still fallen.
I am not sure about that. To think is to model small chunks of the universe. Very small chunks, quite inaccurately. The thought itself, the model, exists in the physical universe, as part of a human brain. In the words of Carl Sagan, "we are a way for the Universe to know itself."
You both agree that there _ideas_ that are _made_ and that are kept or rejected on the basis of whether they are useful to talk about reality.
The number «42» exists in nature in this way : it is a pattern that cause human minds to come up with a concept that is the number «42» in order to describe what's going on.
When you look at a Salvador Dali painting, where does it exist? I think it exists physically encoded on the chemical-electrical substrate of your brain. I don't think it exists outside of that.
Dammit Chris, it's a PAINTING. It's made of PAINT.
Even when YOU look at it. ;)
(and non-paint reproductions are made of something else that isn't in the brain)
The painting itself exists as chemicals on canvas, but until someone looks at it, models it, computes it with their brain, the scene it depicts does not exist anywhere in physical reality.
The depicted scene is not the painting itself.
I'm trying to say « the map is not the territory » in another way so that I get understood.
you need to look at this (copy of a) painting instead :
http://lyc71-dumaine.ac-dijon.fr/upi/img/guillaume/tableau_guillaume.jpg
who is Guillaume? isn't this Magritte?
or the modern version on the side of the Royal Victoria College of Montréal :
http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/010/0/3/ceci_n__est_pas_un_tag__by_ben_zen-d36vmd9.jpg
Frankly, I think that's a misinterpretation, it's as if the original would have been "ceci n'est pas une peinture", which is false because it _is_ a painting. (unless it would have been a painting _of_ a painting that says "ceci n'est pas une peinture"...)
uitsmijter:
gr,
Tim
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| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
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