I just got out of a long and heated argument with someone who claimed he was an EE and told me that digital synthesizers use CVs. I tried to explain to him that if they did, it would be ONLY a numerical conversion so he was wrong and he still insisted that digital synthesizers used CVs. Has anyone had this kind of experience?
On 2011-05-08 10:46, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Sat, 7 May 2011, Josh Moore wrote:
I just got out of a long and heated argument with someone who claimed he was an EE and told me that digital synthesizers use CVs.
What's CV ?
Control Voltage. Analog synthesizers use it to control things like oscillator frequency and amplifier volume.
At least some digital synths use software-generated CVs to control analog oscillators and filters because it takes less processing to generate control waveforms than the actual output waveform.
Martin
On Sat, May 07, 2011 at 02:31:57PM -0800, Josh Moore wrote:
I just got out of a long and heated argument with someone who claimed he was an EE and told me that digital synthesizers use CVs. I tried to explain to him that if they did, it would be ONLY a numerical conversion so he was wrong and he still insisted that digital synthesizers used CVs. Has anyone had this kind of experience?
Yes, I have also had this experience of feeling frustrated by people claiming to be engineers.
Cheers,
Chris.
On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 7:51 PM, Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx wrote:
On Sat, May 07, 2011 at 02:31:57PM -0800, Josh Moore wrote:
I just got out of a long and heated argument with someone who claimed he was an EE and told me that digital synthesizers use CVs. I tried to explain to him that if they did, it would be ONLY a numerical conversion so he was wrong and he still insisted that digital synthesizers used CVs. Has anyone had this kind of experience?
Yes, I have also had this experience of feeling frustrated by people claiming to be engineers.
Cheers,
Chris.
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I have come to the conclusion that all audio is discrete. probably everything measureable in the universe is discrete for that matter. There is no such thing as continuous only in our experience when we can not discern the difference between a change from one value to the next do we think of something being continuous. Imagine if you will a tuning peg with notches fitted in a notched hole. Now imagine a whammy bar fixed with the smoothest bearings and axle known. Now imagine the atomic structure of the axle and bearing. Isn't the whammy bar going to stop at little steps at the flat spots where any 2 atoms of the bearings line up with any 2 atoms of the axle? Would this not be discrete. Only our perception of sound hears the whammy bar as being continuous. If we had a fast enough sample rate we could slow down the recording of the use of such a whammy bar and see that it is indeed discrete.
On 2011-05-09 13:08, Billy Stiltner wrote:
I have come to the conclusion that all audio is discrete. probably everything measureable in the universe is discrete for that matter.
sqrt(2) ? exp(1) ? pi ?
... certainly each of the "usual suspects" has a discrete specification, but I've always been a bit suspicious of the hardcore constructionist approach to irrational numbers (while at the same time finding it extremely attractive to my engineering/hacker instincts). ok, so these are probably not "measurable" in the sense you mean either, but they are *thinkable*, and that (I think) is the whole point (or as it were, the whole hypotenuse, curve, circle, etc) ;-)
uncountably infinite marmosets, Bryan
On Mon, 9 May 2011, Bryan Jurish wrote:
sqrt(2) ? exp(1) ? pi ? ... certainly each of the "usual suspects" has a discrete specification, but I've always been a bit suspicious of the hardcore constructionist approach to irrational numbers
Of course, infinitely long patternless sequences of digits make a lot more sense (???).
(while at the same time finding it extremely attractive to my engineering/hacker instincts). ok, so these are probably not "measurable" in the sense you mean either, but they are *thinkable*, and that (I think) is the whole point (or as it were, the whole hypotenuse, curve, circle, etc) ;-)
or rather, it's the whole tangent that gets you away from the topic ;)
There are lots of facts about the universe that are not knowable.
Analogue audio theory is made with «Real» numbers because that's what fitted best to explain the experiments that had been made. Irrational numbers are an artifact of our manners of thinking, and uncountable sets of «Real» numbers are even more so artifacts.
It doesn't mean that those artifacts don't exist in the physical world, it means that we had to invent those concepts by ourselves because we can't perceive them from the physical world.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 12:12:04PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
It doesn't mean that those artifacts don't exist in the physical world, it means that we had to invent those concepts by ourselves because we can't perceive them from the physical world.
At the very least they exist physically encoded in the brain chemistry of somebody who is thinking about those concepts. Brains are part of physical reality, right?
Cheers,
Chris.
----- "Chris McCormick" chris@mccormick.cx a écrit :
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 12:12:04PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
It doesn't mean that those artifacts don't exist in the physical
world,
it means that we had to invent those concepts by ourselves because
we
can't perceive them from the physical world.
At the very least they exist physically encoded in the brain chemistry of somebody who is thinking about those concepts. Brains are part of physical reality, right?
Yes it's like licorns, they have existed since a long time...
Cheers,
Chris.
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On 11/05/11 08:16, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 12:12:04PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
It doesn't mean that those artifacts don't exist in the physical world, it means that we had to invent those concepts by ourselves because we can't perceive them from the physical world.
Numbers are like words, they are part of a language for talking about some kinds of things, some kinds of concepts. Rational numbers either exists or not, depending on what you mean by exist. Irrational numbers are in the same boat. If you want to talk about what number you get when you divide an integer by another one, then you won't need irrational numbers and rational ones are just the thing. If you want to talk about how far apart two points are then rational numbers are inadequate in certain ways ... there are distances that are not fully described by dividing two integers, and you can always find a gap between any two points on a line described by rational numbers, but irrational numbers can describe the points in this gap. Real numbers, that is both rational and irrational numbers together, are continuous in a way that rational numbers are not. All this is about describing things - making a model which you can work with and communicate to others (who know the language you are using) very clearly ... and which you may compare with things you observe, and use to help understand, interpret and predict these things you observe. If you do it well, and remember that it is a description, then this can be very useful indeed.
But what you mean by the word 'exists' will determine whether you say a model exists, or a word exists, or a number exists.
Simon
On Wed, 11 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 12:12:04PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
It doesn't mean that those artifacts don't exist in the physical world, it means that we had to invent those concepts by ourselves because we can't perceive them from the physical world.
At the very least they exist physically encoded in the brain chemistry of somebody who is thinking about those concepts. Brains are part of physical reality, right?
Yeah, but the map is not the territory.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 12:38:37PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Wed, 11 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 12:12:04PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
It doesn't mean that those artifacts don't exist in the physical world, it means that we had to invent those concepts by ourselves because we can't perceive them from the physical world.
At the very least they exist physically encoded in the brain chemistry
of somebody who is thinking about those concepts. Brains are part of
physical reality, right?Yeah, but the map is not the territory.
I am not convinced they are different in the case of things that "we can't perceive ... from the physical world."
Cheers,
Chris.
On 19/05/11 12:59, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 12:38:37PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Wed, 11 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 12:12:04PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
It doesn't mean that those artifacts don't exist in the physical world, it means that we had to invent those concepts by ourselves because we can't perceive them from the physical world.
At the very least they exist physically encoded in the brain chemistry of somebody who is thinking about those concepts. Brains are part of physical reality, right?
Yeah, but the map is not the territory.
I am not convinced they are different in the case of things that "we can't perceive ... from the physical world."
Which numbers can be perceived in some way that isn't a mathematical model?
That is which numbers are directly perceivable, without some more abstract mathematical mapping to guide us?
Certainly most people can look at four matches on a table and see that there are four, without doing any counting at all. There are a few people who can tip a matchbox full of matches onto a table and see immediately that there are 51, or 53, or whatever in the same way ... no counting involved. There must be some point where this is no longer possible for anyone ... is 1,549,364 anything other than word in the language of mathematics?
In some languages, where mathematics hasn't become part of the language, and the words for numbers are pre-mathematics, counting goes something like "one, two, three, four, many" so I guess that backs up the idea that the first few integers are perceived directly, but every other number - counting numbers past that, zero, negative integers, the rest of the rational numbers, the rest of the real numbers, the rest of the complex numbers, ... and so forth are all just constructs in the language of mathematics which all happen to have some quite useful mappings to things we can observe around us. Most integers do not have any more 'existence' (however that may be defined) than complex numbers.
Simon
On 2011-05-19 14:01, Simon Wise wrote:
That is which numbers are directly perceivable, without some more abstract mathematical mapping to guide us?
Zero ;-)
Certainly most people can look at four matches on a table and see that there are four, without doing any counting at all.
That's "four matches", not "the number four". If by "number" you mean the characteristic property of all sets of 4 elements, you're perceiving something (the matches) which has that property, but you can't directly perceive the property itself (i.e. its `intension'), because it's a function (in the mathematical sense) from all possible entities (let's ignore possible worlds for now) to a truth value indicating whether or not that entity is a set-of-four. This view is pretty unsatisfying for a number of reasons (for one thing, it doesn't work well for anything other than positive integers), but I hope it suffices to show that "the number four" can't be perceived directly. The same sort of argument goes for other "simple" qualities like volume, mass, density, color etc -- this stuff has had epistemologists tearing their hair out for centuries. There are 2 main camps, and I'm more or less solidly in the one that says "numbers exist" :-)
In some languages, where mathematics hasn't become part of the language,
huh? do you happen to know of one specifically?
and the words for numbers are pre-mathematics, counting goes something like "one, two, three, four, many"
... many one, many two, many three, many four, many many, ... many many one, many many two, many many three, many many four, ... LOTS
[courtesy of Terry Pratchett] ;-)
so I guess that backs up the idea that the first few integers are perceived directly,
Again, I take issue with the details, but yes: there's a lot of empirical evidence that human cognitive/perceptual apparatus does some specialized handling for small sets, including counting. How we get those sets to be __sets__ (as opposed to arbitrarily co-occuring random perceptual data packets) is quite another matter, and im(ns)ho a much more interesting one.
but every other number - counting numbers past that, zero, negative integers, the rest of the rational numbers, the rest of the real numbers, the rest of the complex numbers, ... and so forth are all just constructs in the language of mathematics which all happen to have some quite useful mappings to things we can observe around us. Most integers do not have any more 'existence' (however that may be defined) than complex numbers.
I'll agree that integers and complex numbers have the same sort and degree of existence, but I don't believe they're `constructs'. If forty-two trees fall in a forest and no one is around to count them, __forty-two__ trees have still fallen.
marmosets, Bryan
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." These models work as long as reality concurs with them, e.g. as long as predictions made about the universe happen in reality too. That predictive power is maybe why we evolved intelligence, because of the advantage the ability to model and predict gives our genes to propagate. Of course, there is nothing to stop there being models of things that don't exist in the real universe, but those models still exist in the physical universe on the chemical and electrical substrate of somebody's physical brain. 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. 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 physical painting is a zipfile containing a program that you run on the chemical computer inside your head.
So when 42 trees fall and there is someone to perceive them, what happens? A piece of the universe, chemicals and electricity inside the perceiver's physical head, models another part of the universe - what it calls the "42 trees falling". The model is informed by incoming data from the senses, but it is still a model. Part of that model is an encoding of the concept "42" into the brain chemistry. If there is no physical brain to model the concept of 42, then there is no 42. When the trees fall, something is happening on the space time manifold, but I don't think it's accurate to say without the computational aparatus to perceive it that "42 trees are falling".
It gets semantically complicated because sitting here writing/reading an email about 42 trees falling and someone perceiving [or lack thereof] that event, you have to model the whole thing - perceiver and trees - by default, and so you get fooled into thinking that model exists somewhere outside your head. It doesn't. This email is a zipfile containing the "42 trees falling with possible perceiver" program that you run inside your head when you read it and think about it. The 42 trees at that moment exist on the physical substrate of your own brain, but nowhere within the scene being modelled.
Well, that's my current rather crap and innaccurate model of reality anyway. It's crap but I think it's less wrong than yours, where there is some nebulous flying spaghetti monster called "42 trees" floating around outside of physical reality. ;)
Information, Matter, Energy - all just crude models for something we probably can't ever truly know.* Also, physicists probably have much better models.
Cheers,
Chris.
On 2011-05-20 07:01, 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.
...
Of course, there is nothing to stop there being models of things that don't exist in the real universe, but those models still exist in the physical universe on the chemical and electrical substrate of somebody's physical brain.
Sorry, I don't buy that. My two main problems with that sort of hardcore empiricism are (in a nutshell) ego (aka "consciousness") and will. To paraphase the ol' p-ant hisownself, 'where does the "I think" come from which can be prepended to any proposition or perception I'm currently entertaining?' And if thoughts are just phsyical processes in brains and brains are just physical objects subject to physical laws, you run into determinism pretty darned fast, which is often taken to be a bit of a bummer. The really insidious problem (afaic, and the one that's most germane to the present (way way way off-topic by now) discussion) is that of inductive "knowledge", and I'm more or less professionally obliged to come down on the rationalist side of that one.
The physical painting is a zipfile containing a program that you run on the chemical computer inside your head.
... but the __process__ that runs (whether on wetware, some massive parallel neural net, a suitably configured universal Turing machine, or whatever) is something distinct from and independent of the hardware it runs on, not to mention the location of that hardware, the time interval for which the process runs, and the physical laws of the universe in which it's running. The kind of existence and independence that process has is the same kind of existence and independence all formal objects have, imho.
but I don't think it's accurate to say without the computational aparatus to perceive it that "42 trees are falling".
I do :-)
Well, that's my current rather crap and innaccurate model of reality anyway. It's crap but I think it's less wrong than yours, where there is some nebulous flying spaghetti monster called "42 trees" floating around outside of physical reality. ;)
... I think we're probably bound to to disagree on this, and that's fine by me, but just to be precise here:
No, in my version there's an FSM called "42" floating around __independently__ of physical laws and processes. "Outside of" is locative, and I'm not talking about location (which I'm sure you know, I'm just trying to set the record straight here). And "outside of physical reality" is just polemics -- I'm saying not all that is real is (always) phyiscally realized.
Information, Matter, Energy - all just crude models for something we probably can't ever truly know.*
See above re: inductive knowledge ;-)
Also, physicists probably have much better models.
Knowing a few of them, I kind of doubt it.
http://mccormick.cx/news/entries/inherent-limitations-of-a-computational-mod...
That's a pretty twisted take on Gödel you've got there. By your logic (if I'm reading it right), there can be no such thing as a universal Turing machine *because* its ability to simulate itself prevents its very existence. But a universal Turing machine is really not all too hard to define (Turing, 1937): sure, we can't say whether or not it __terminates__ for itself, but that's a problem with *computability*, not with existence. We may at some point actually define a `perfect' computational model of reality, we just won't be able to prove it, since at that scale the map will have become indistinguishable from the territory.
marmosets, Bryan
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."
Ok. You guys are confusing « construct » with « mere construct ».
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
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_be...
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
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."
Ok. You guys are confusing « construct » with « mere construct ».
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_be...
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: http://www.theonion.com/video/warcraft-sequel-lets-gamers-play-a-character-p... gr, Tim
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
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On Thu, 26 May 2011, tim vets wrote:
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?
Some dude whose favourite painting is that one. I found it using Google Images.
isn't this Magritte?
yes.
Frankly, I think that's a misinterpretation,
you are right.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
Alan Watts, and to some extent Pierre Grimes analysing Plato, gave me some good thoughts on this.
If we weren't neural networks, prone to classification, the question might be, are there different kinds of intelligence? Or is what we do, (throwing boundaries around things and concepts), intelligence by definition only?
On Fri, 20 May 2011 13:01:54 +0800 Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx 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
When the trees fall, something is happening on the space time manifold, but I don't think it's accurate to say without the computational aparatus to perceive it that "42 trees are falling".
On 2011-05-26 14:58, Andy Farnell wrote:
Alan Watts, and to some extent Pierre Grimes analysing Plato, gave me some good thoughts on this.
If we weren't neural networks, prone to classification, the question might be, are there different kinds of intelligence? Or is what we do, (throwing boundaries around things and concepts), intelligence by definition only?
I'm not at all sure what `intelligence' is, but I don't think that matters too much. The really tricky terms (at least for me) are things like "logical consistency", and of course the ubiquitous "truth" and "reference" (I suppose intelligence plays into it if you think that only intelligent beings can appreciate such things). Since we're trading snappy quotes, here's one:
"... there is the question which is hardest of all and most perplexing, whether unity and being, as the Pythagoreans and Plato said, are not attributes of something else but the substance of existing things, or this is not the case, but the substratum is something else"
- Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book III
marmosets, Bryan
Picking this great thread up again, hope that's okay;
I have a feeling that logical consistency didn't bother the ancients quite so much Bryan. My guess is that's more of a rational, Enlightenment hangup.
If Socrates played language games with "truth" it was a playful poking mankind with sharp sticks, not an anxiety about nature itself. All those pre-Socratics (Anaximander, Thales etc) were on a very confident footing about the world, basically; as for Wittgenstein much nearer our own time, "the world is whatever is the case" (where the case may vary from time to time). The concern back then was more about human values and representations, after such terrible wars the basis of everything fell into question.
What Plato tried to address in thought, like Godel in logic was that we are "incomplete", if there is universality, a one, a good, and there is an I to observe it, but still be of the one, it must invoke a third concept, an existential relation. And that's where the tear begins. Here in the 21st Century the wound still bleeds. Extending Korzybski's map and territory, the system is not the society, the sample is not the sound... etc
a.
mystical ways, qualities of the one.. axes or poles, like light and dark, but
On Fri, 27 May 2011 10:09:02 +0200 Bryan Jurish jurish@uni-potsdam.de wrote:
On 2011-05-26 14:58, Andy Farnell wrote:
Alan Watts, and to some extent Pierre Grimes analysing Plato, gave me some good thoughts on this.
If we weren't neural networks, prone to classification, the question might be, are there different kinds of intelligence? Or is what we do, (throwing boundaries around things and concepts), intelligence by definition only?
I'm not at all sure what `intelligence' is, but I don't think that matters too much. The really tricky terms (at least for me) are things like "logical consistency", and of course the ubiquitous "truth" and "reference" (I suppose intelligence plays into it if you think that only intelligent beings can appreciate such things). Since we're trading snappy quotes, here's one:
"... there is the question which is hardest of all and most perplexing, whether unity and being, as the Pythagoreans and Plato said, are not attributes of something else but the substance of existing things, or this is not the case, but the substratum is something else"
- Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book III
marmosets, Bryan
--
Bryan Jurish Deutsches Textarchiv Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Jägerstr. 22/23 10117 Berlin
Tel.: +49 (0)30 20370 539 E-Mail: jurish@bbaw.de
On Mon, 20 Jun 2011, Andy Farnell wrote:
What Plato tried to address in thought, like Godel in logic was that we are "incomplete", if there is universality, a one, a good, and there is an I to observe it, but still be of the one, it must invoke a third concept, an existential relation. And that's where the tear begins. Here in the 21st Century the wound still bleeds.
Is it bleeding or is that just something said from the perspective of innocence, as if in a previous world, logic would have been complete ?
If a complete and consistent self-referential logic system is impossible, then this is something that has to be accepted as having been always true, and our conception of the world has to be rebraided according to that truth. It's not useful to keep holding an old ideal of universality that looks like a measuring stick with which we assess an increasing rift between our fantasies and the consciousness of our own limits.
Gödel in the Garden of Eden bites into the fruit of [...] and it all went downhill from there. ;)
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 09:15:01PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jun 2011, Andy Farnell wrote:
What Plato tried to address in thought, like Godel in logic was that we are "incomplete", if there is universality, a one, a good, and there is an I to observe it, but still be of the one, it must invoke a third
concept, an existential relation. And that's where the tear begins. Here in the 21st Century the wound still bleeds.Is it bleeding or is that just something said from the perspective of
innocence, as if in a previous world, logic would have been complete ?If a complete and consistent self-referential logic system is impossible, then this is something that has to be accepted as having been always true, and our conception of the world has to be rebraided according to that truth. It's not useful to keep holding an old ideal of universality that looks like a measuring stick with which we assess an increasing rift between our fantasies and the consciousness of our own limits.
Gödel in the Garden of Eden bites into the fruit of [...] and it all went downhill from there. ;)
Oh I just Kant take any more of this.
Chris.
On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 09:51:23AM +0800, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 09:15:01PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jun 2011, Andy Farnell wrote:
What Plato tried to address in thought, like Godel in logic was that we are "incomplete", if there is universality, a one, a good, and there is an I to observe it, but still be of the one, it must invoke a third
concept, an existential relation. And that's where the tear begins. Here in the 21st Century the wound still bleeds.Is it bleeding or is that just something said from the perspective of
innocence, as if in a previous world, logic would have been complete ?If a complete and consistent self-referential logic system is impossible, then this is something that has to be accepted as having been always true, and our conception of the world has to be rebraided according to that truth. It's not useful to keep holding an old ideal of universality that looks like a measuring stick with which we assess an increasing rift between our fantasies and the consciousness of our own limits.
Gödel in the Garden of Eden bites into the fruit of [...] and it all went downhill from there. ;)
Oh I just Kant take any more of this.
Look, I know it's a terrible joke but at least Immanuel.
Chris.
On Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:15:01 -0400 (EDT) Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
Is it bleeding or is that just something said from the perspective of innocence, as if in a previous world, logic would have been complete ?
If a complete and consistent self-referential logic system is impossible, then this is something that has to be accepted as having been always true, and our conception of the world has to be rebraided according to that truth. It's not useful to keep holding an old ideal of universality that looks like a measuring stick with which we assess an increasing rift between our fantasies and the consciousness of our own limits.
Gödel in the Garden of Eden bites into the fruit of [...] and it all went downhill from there. ;)
It's not the noble savage thing I'm arguing there Mat,
Few things that come to my mind....
It's not downhill. Okay, my "wound" poetic was a bit strong, maybe I should have said the box couldn't be closed or something. A better metaphor is to say it's uphill all the way, that as we climb higher the mountain gets narrower until one day you are standing on a peak with nowhere to run.
Secondly it's unthinkable, by definition. How to contemplate the ineffable price we paid for reason and language, using reason and language?
Lastly I would be most inclined towards Rousseau in regard to rebraiding, not a return to a state of nature "to live with lions and bears", but to move beyond mere instrumental reason to a kinder more compassionate position that subsumes logic, with all its flaws, into it.
a.
Another great quote, I apologise for reading it again, I am always bringing this one out because it's elegant, is Quine who restates Shannon and Weaver in a way:
"The notion of information is indeed clear enough... it is central to the theory of communication. It makes sense relative to one or another pre-assigned matrix of alternatives... You have to say in advance what features are going to count."
No pre-conception, no conception. Otherwise its novel, and a confusing jumble until some ordering, naming and searching of existing patterns has taken place. The next time, maybe then it's okay for those sensible impressions to become worthy of a symbol, like the number 42. In that case there are necessary conditions for the perception of 42 trees falling, other than the physical fact itself.
On Fri, 20 May 2011 13:01:54 +0800 Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx wrote:
chemicals and electricity inside the perceiver's physical head, models another part of the universe - what it calls the "42 trees falling".
moin Andy,
On 2011-05-26 15:15, Andy Farnell wrote:
Another great quote, I apologise for reading it again, I am always bringing this one out because it's elegant, is Quine who restates Shannon and Weaver in a way:
"The notion of information is indeed clear enough... it is central to the theory of communication. It makes sense relative to one or another pre-assigned matrix of alternatives... You have to say in advance what features are going to count."
A good one indeed! Do you recall where it's from? Sounds to me like he's talking about (something like) Shannon's "message" as the necessary condition for information, but I'd have to dig into it some more to get a clearer picture....
No pre-conception, no conception. Otherwise its novel, and a confusing jumble until some ordering, naming and searching of existing patterns has taken place. The next time, maybe then it's okay for those sensible impressions to become worthy of a symbol, like the number 42. In that case there are necessary conditions for the perception of 42 trees falling, other than the physical fact itself.
As far as language (or symbols) are concerned: yes, of course. But if I'm reading it right, there's nothing which says that the "features" (which may or may not "count" as information content) rely for their ontological status only on their use (or non-use) in a Shannon-esque "message" (although I admit that just that kind of assertion would be consistent with Quine).
On Fri, 20 May 2011 13:01:54 +0800 Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx wrote:
chemicals and electricity inside the perceiver's physical head, models another part of the universe - what it calls the "42 trees falling".
To clarify (again): my emphasis was on the cardinal "42" (determiner of the subject NP), not on the whole subject NP ("42 trees"), the predicated state ("are falling"), or the non-constituent "trees are falling". Further, I'm talking about the semantic content of the cardinal we write "42", not about its syntactic or pragmatic properties. In particular, I mean the sense of "42" as a natural number, i.e. the same sense in which it is used in mathematical equations like "42=6*7". I used the koan-esque natural language example of falling trees because Chris was emphasizing the perception of physical phenomena, and it seemed appropriate.
Maybe you're taking issue with the (essentially arbitrary) lumping together of whatever physical processes we English speakers call "42 trees falling" into the constituents [42 trees] and [falling]. In particular, you might well take issue with the [42 trees] part: are what we call [42 trees] really in fact 42 distinct separate quasi-independent objects in their own right (a la Aristotelian `substance'), or are they just an arbitrary bundle of data/matter/processes which we happen to call [tree] of which the number of instances for which the predicate [falling] holds happens to be 42? If so, I think the objection is entirely justified: I don't particularly care for the notion of Aristotelian substance and I suspect there isn't anything physically realized at all which is in fact a quasi-independent object in its own right.
My point being (again) that the 42' part is independent of how we happen to carve up physical reality / perceptual data / physical processes intoobjects', and also of how (or whether) our language
happens to divvy that up into nouns, verbs, adjectives, and what have
you (although I think many of the interesting abstracta tend to wind up
as function words' --the', is',42', etc.). In this sense, if you
take our conventional semantics for [42], [tree], and [falling], even if
no one is around to construct or interpret the utterance, the associated
semantic proposition still holds. A less complicated example is the
equation: "42=6*7" holds whether or not there is anyone around to
evaluate it.
marmosets, Bryan
On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 09:58:04AM +0200, Bryan Jurish wrote:
Chris was emphasizing the perception of physical phenomena, and it seemed appropriate.
I'm not just emphasizing it - I'm saying that there are no things which aren't "physical phenomena".
I think we are tricked into thinking there are because we occupy the physical computational machinery that does the contemplating of abstraction and therefore take it for granted as always being there.
even if no one is around to construct or interpret the utterance, the associated semantic proposition still holds. A less complicated example is the equation: "42=6*7" holds whether or not there is anyone around to evaluate it.
Define "still holds". In what way does it "hold" in the situation you have described?
I don't think it holds. I don't even think it exists without a brain to physically compute it. I think that the only place it "holds" is inside a brain, and as "physical phenomena" at that.
Ok, I'm getting repetitive. Will shut up now. :]
Cheers,
Chris.
i like how the first post starts with, "I just got out of a long and heated argument...."
:D
On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 05:52:04PM +0900, hard off wrote:
i like how the first post starts with, "I just got out of a long and heated argument...."
:D
To me this discussion is so chilled it's superconducting. ;)
Cheers,
Chris.
On Fri, 27 May 2011, Bryan Jurish wrote:
As far as language (or symbols) are concerned: yes, of course. But if I'm reading it right, there's nothing which says that the "features" (which may or may not "count" as information content) rely for their ontological status only on their use (or non-use) in a Shannon-esque "message"
Shannon's information theory assumes that there is a single stream of information that is all of à priori equal value except that unlikely outcomes are considered more remarkable. However, to explain human perception, you have to take into account pre-established notions of importance of information, and what's the flow of attention-span, among a lot more things.
(I wrote this message 6 months ago and forgot to click Send. Still trying to exorcise myself out of this habit. In the meantime, it makes filler for a slow week on pd-list. ;-)
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On 19/05/11 23:12, Bryan Jurish wrote:
On 2011-05-19 14:01, Simon Wise wrote:
That is which numbers are directly perceivable, without some more abstract mathematical mapping to guide us?
Zero ;-)
My point is that it is not zero, that looking at a pile of things and saying that it is a pile of one or two or three is something that can be observed without a mathematical model, without even counting or any more elaborate language than these few words for these small quantities. But they have become so wrapped in the rest of our words for numbers that it is difficult to make the distinction. Think about of what words like pair mean, is pair a number? is it a synonym for two? or is it a directly observable quality which is quite different from either a single thing or a few things? Or thinking about the distinction between singular and plural forms of words. This is why the languages I mentioned are so interesting in this context.
Certainly most people can look at four matches on a table and see that there are four, without doing any counting at all.
That's "four matches", not "the number four". If by "number" you mean the characteristic property of all sets of 4 elements, you're perceiving something (the matches) which has that property, but you can't directly perceive the property itself (i.e. its `intension'), because it's a
this is the core of what I am saying - that three or four are something other than the result of counting the members of a set, and that for some unusual people quite surprisingly large numbers are perceived directly, independently of the process of counting. Occasionally the different status of these 'numbers' in language can be seen, they can be seen as words for some observable quality rather than as the first few of an infinite series of integers, used to describe a characteristic of sets of things.
function (in the mathematical sense) from all possible entities (let's ignore possible worlds for now) to a truth value indicating whether or not that entity is a set-of-four. This view is pretty unsatisfying for a number of reasons (for one thing, it doesn't work well for anything other than positive integers), but I hope it suffices to show that "the number four" can't be perceived directly. The same sort of argument goes for other "simple" qualities like volume, mass, density, color etc -- this stuff has had epistemologists tearing their hair out for centuries. There are 2 main camps, and I'm more or less solidly in the one that says "numbers exist" :-)
I am also in this camp, models do 'exist' in the way I use the word exist, but there are other ways to use this word, and so discussion gets tricky. I was suggesting that small counting numbers are a different kind thing to the other quantities listed here. They are observable in a different way, without the constructs that other measures require. They fit into a much narrower definition of exist than the others.
What I am saying about numbers is referring to your earlier remarks about pi and sqrt(2) in the context of discrete v continuous. Sqrt(-1) has a very practical and useful place in talking about physical spaces, it exists in exactly the same way the 1,734,834 exists. If you leave irrational numbers like sqrt(2) out of your model for describing lengths, and limit the non-integer numbers you talk about to those you can construct by divide two integers, then you get into trouble because those 'rational' numbers are not continuous, there are gaps between each one. Whether the possible values of 'length' is a continuous thing or a series of discrete possible values depends hugely on context, but models using continuous values are very useful all the same.
But I think that very small counting numbers do have a directly observable nature, the quantity four is recognisable without using some way of counting in a way that larger numbers are not. This becomes much more noticeable with the rare person who can just see a pile of 51 things as the same as another pile of 51 things, and different from a pile of 52 things, without counting them or calculating or constructing the number in some way. The numbers here are not derived from counting the objects, but are some quality recognised directly in the pile as a whole. The words for numbers in the languages mentioned seem to suggest that those words may be referring to this observable quality of a group, rather than being part of a counting system and a way of talking about numbers more generally. I think I read about the person who could 'see' 52 in one of Oliver Sacks books, and maybe elsewhere as well.
In some languages, where mathematics hasn't become part of the language,
huh? do you happen to know of one specifically?
I can't recall the details of the examples given, but there were a number of languages with this kind of counting, that is with no words to quantify sets of things with more than a few elements, the biggest number before 'many' varied - I recall something like 3 and 5 in the ones described. Unfortunately this was a book I read a long time ago, and my books are thousands of kilometres away in Sydney. Obviously they were languages spoken by people without the kind of accounting and writing of records which some suggest were the motivation for some of our earlier numbering systems. There are many many languages spoken in the world, and in places like New Guinea there are groups who first met or heard of anything outside their very local area in the last 80 years. I have a remarkable set of oral history tapes, a series produced 20 or 30 years ago by the ABC here, called Time Belong Masta I think, with the recollections of many people who where the first outsiders to visit these places and some of these language and similar issues are discussed.
For a sense of how isolated a group can be in this kind of countryside one story was about a person who had travelled for the first time outside their valley, when the group reached a river not very far away this person had never seen or heard of water existing in such quantities, he had no words for it and it was completely beyond anything that his society had any knowledge of. The examples above may have been from New Guinea, but certainly somewhere as isolated as this.
and the words for numbers are pre-mathematics, counting goes something like "one, two, three, four, many"
... many one, many two, many three, many four, many many, ... many many one, many many two, many many three, many many four, ... LOTS
[courtesy of Terry Pratchett] ;-)
The ideas we are talking about are interesting - the language used for numbers crops up in lots of speculative fiction - sci-fi, fantasy etc for exactly this reason.
I'll agree that integers and complex numbers have the same sort and degree of existence, but I don't believe they're `constructs'. If forty-two trees fall in a forest and no one is around to count them, __forty-two__ trees have still fallen.
yes, they have, and the number that fell is not dependent on someone counting them, but as the numbers get higher or more sophisticated then the ways to assign numbers become more abstracted, more dependent on the mathematical language. The quantities exist, the numbers that we use to describe them exist, the connections between these things often requires a model, this is what I mean by 'constructs'. There may well be better words to use for this.
Simon
On 2011-05-20 16:05, Simon Wise wrote:
On 19/05/11 23:12, Bryan Jurish wrote:
On 2011-05-19 14:01, Simon Wise wrote:
That is which numbers are directly perceivable, without some more abstract mathematical mapping to guide us?
Zero ;-)
My point is that it is not zero,
Sorry; that was intended as a joke -- a deliberate ambiguity between zero ("the number zero"), zero ("the set with zero elements"), zero ("false"), and zero ("number of numbers which are 'directly perceivable'"). It was late, I thought it was funny.
Think about of what words like pair mean, is pair a number? is it a synonym for two? or is it a directly observable quality which is quite different from either a single thing or a few things?
"Pair" is a word of English, and a highly ambiguous one at that -- it might be an ordered pair, an unordered pair, a pair of pants, a pair of aces, 'a pair' (aka "couple"), or whatever. Yes, it's semantically and pragmatically complex. The (abstract) number "2" plays a pretty heavy role in all of its sense I can think of at the moment, though.
Or thinking about the distinction between singular and plural forms of words.
What about them? They're usually related by quite simple and obvious rules (e.g. 'add/delete an "s" at the end') except for a very few high frequency lexemes. I agree it's interesting that number (the grammatical feature 'number', i.e. singular/plural) is explicitly encoded in the vast majority of human languages (even in English, which encodes almost nothing else from the known spectrum of grammatical features), and that it usually plays a role not just in morphology (word formation) but also in syntax (sentence structure -- think subject-verb agreement in English); but I'm not sure what you're getting at. Do you mean the semantics usually associated with the feature (singleton vs. non-singleton set) -- it's kinda cool that zero tends to get lumped in with plurals in English (but usually not in German); not sure how other languages go about that one (but I have solicited some references from an acquaintance who worked on numbers and number features pretty intensively a few years ago...)
Certainly most people can look at four matches on a table and see that there are four, without doing any counting at all.
That's "four matches", not "the number four". If by "number" you mean the characteristic property of all sets of 4 elements, you're perceiving something (the matches) which has that property, but you can't directly perceive the property itself (i.e. its `intension'), because it's a
this is the core of what I am saying - that three or four are something other than the result of counting the members of a set, and that for some unusual people quite surprisingly large numbers are perceived directly, independently of the process of counting. Occasionally the different status of these 'numbers' in language can be seen, they can be seen as words for some observable quality rather than as the first few of an infinite series of integers, used to describe a characteristic of sets of things.
I think I see what you're getting at, but I'm not sure where it's going. I'll accept the "directly perceivable" term for current purposes, but there's whole heckuvalot more going on in our heads (brains & associated processes) when we look at and identify a small set of like items as a set-of-N than I'm accustomed to calling "direct", and that's just the stuff we know about...
function (in the mathematical sense) from all possible entities (let's ignore possible worlds for now) to a truth value indicating whether or not that entity is a set-of-four. This view is pretty unsatisfying for a number of reasons (for one thing, it doesn't work well for anything other than positive integers), but I hope it suffices to show that "the number four" can't be perceived directly. The same sort of argument goes for other "simple" qualities like volume, mass, density, color etc -- this stuff has had epistemologists tearing their hair out for centuries. There are 2 main camps, and I'm more or less solidly in the one that says "numbers exist" :-)
I am also in this camp, models do 'exist' in the way I use the word exist, but there are other ways to use this word, and so discussion gets tricky.
It's a unary predicate, i.e. an intransitive. It takes a single argument. It returns a truth value; albeit in at least one common sense of 'exist' that value depends on the evaluation index (possible world / place and time of utterance / speaker / etc). I'm talking about the kind of existence which is independent of the current index, i.e. __necessary__ existence: existence in every possible world.
Sorry, that was probably annoying. Yes, different people use the word in different ways with different connotations.
I was suggesting that small counting numbers are a different kind thing to the other quantities listed here. They are observable in a different way, without the constructs that other measures require. They fit into a much narrower definition of exist than the others.
They're a different sort of thing for us (humans) certainly: we experience them differently ('direct perception'), quite likely for pretty mundane evolutionary reasons -- there are a lot of sets-of-2, 3, and 4 to deal with in the world, and not so many sets-of-327.
What I am saying about numbers is referring to your earlier remarks about pi and sqrt(2) in the context of discrete v continuous. Sqrt(-1) has a very practical and useful place in talking about physical spaces, it exists in exactly the same way the 1,734,834 exists. If you leave irrational numbers like sqrt(2) out of your model for describing lengths, and limit the non-integer numbers you talk about to those you can construct by divide two integers, then you get into trouble because those 'rational' numbers are not continuous, there are gaps between each one. Whether the possible values of 'length' is a continuous thing or a series of discrete possible values depends hugely on context, but models using continuous values are very useful all the same.
Yup.
But I think that very small counting numbers do have a directly observable nature,
Warning Will Robinson Danger -- I think what's special about small numbers is special to humans, and not to the numbers as such (i.e. as abstracta). I think 2 (e.g. as the cardinality of the set {0,1}) is pretty special from an abstract standpoint as well (binary numbers simulating alphabets of arbitrary finite size, that darned Turing (1937) again), but I'd guess that the ease of small-number recognition is probably just a contigent human-specific brain-related phenomenon along the lines Chris sketched...
In some languages, where mathematics hasn't become part of the language,
huh? do you happen to know of one specifically?
I can't recall the details of the examples given, but there were a number of languages with this kind of counting, that is with no words to quantify sets of things with more than a few elements, the biggest number before 'many' varied - I recall something like 3 and 5 in the ones described. Unfortunately this was a book I read a long time ago, and my books are thousands of kilometres away in Sydney.
Bummer.
Obviously they were languages spoken by people without the kind of accounting and writing of records which some suggest were the motivation for some of our earlier numbering systems. There are many many languages spoken in the world, and in places like New Guinea there are groups who first met or heard of anything outside their very local area in the last 80 years. I have a remarkable set of oral history tapes, a series produced 20 or 30 years ago by the ABC here, called Time Belong Masta I think, with the recollections of many people who where the first outsiders to visit these places and some of these language and similar issues are discussed.
Data pending... unfortunately the guy I know who would probably be able to help me out is probably himself wandering around Australia collecting that kind of data at the moment...
For a sense of how isolated a group can be in this kind of countryside one story was about a person who had travelled for the first time outside their valley, when the group reached a river not very far away this person had never seen or heard of water existing in such quantities, he had no words for it and it was completely beyond anything that his society had any knowledge of. The examples above may have been from New Guinea, but certainly somewhere as isolated as this.
There's a thing I feel obliged to point out here which aspiring linguists get to know as the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" (unrelated to Start Trek): basically it states that `if you can't say it, you can't think it', and it's been pretty much totally discredited by now; i.e. just because you don't have a word for it doesn't mean you can't perceive it / think it / know it / talk about it (indirectly).
I'll agree that integers and complex numbers have the same sort and degree of existence, but I don't believe they're `constructs'. If forty-two trees fall in a forest and no one is around to count them, __forty-two__ trees have still fallen.
yes, they have, and the number that fell is not dependent on someone counting them, but as the numbers get higher or more sophisticated then the ways to assign numbers become more abstracted, more dependent on the mathematical language. The quantities exist, the numbers that we use to describe them exist, the connections between these things often requires a model, this is what I mean by 'constructs'. There may well be better words to use for this.
maybe constructs' = 'referring expressions'? The crux beingreference', i.e. the correspondence (or lack thereof) between a symbol
(word) and the thing-in-the-world? That's a tough one, right enough...
marmosets, Bryan
On 22/05/11 06:22, Bryan Jurish wrote:
On 2011-05-20 16:05, Simon Wise wrote:
On 19/05/11 23:12, Bryan Jurish wrote:
On 2011-05-19 14:01, Simon Wise wrote:
That is which numbers are directly perceivable, without some more abstract mathematical mapping to guide us?
Zero ;-)
Sorry; that was intended as a joke --
yes of course, but it also seemed a good place to rephrase some of the ideas I was trying (perhaps not so clearly) to articulate!
It is also interesting to consider the fact that words for zero as a number are so recent in languages that we can try to identify when and where they first came to be used. It puts another slant on the distinction between numbers and other ways of expressing some simple quantities. "Nothing" isn't a number, "Zero" is, because we have included it in our numbering system. Likewise the words in the languages I mentioned for "one" "two" "three" "many" may be more like the word "nothing" than the word "zero".
"Pair" is a word of English, and a highly ambiguous one at that -- it might be an ordered pair, an unordered pair, a pair of pants, a pair of aces, 'a pair' (aka "couple"), or whatever. Yes, it's semantically and pragmatically complex. The (abstract) number "2" plays a pretty heavy role in all of its sense I can think of at the moment, though.
yes, this complexity and how closely it relates to the number "two" compared to how a kind of paired-ness can be thought of, and perceived, as something distinct from "two", is exactly what I am trying to think about.
Looking at a group of three things they also form a triangle, something which is also closely related to the number "three", yet also is not a number. Does the word "three" in the above language have more in common with "triangle" than "3"? It would take much careful and interesting research to begin to answer this.
How large an integer can we perceive in a way analogous to these? It seems to that for most people it may be five or six, but for some unusual people it is well over 50.
but I'm not sure what you're getting at. Do you mean the semantics usually associated with the feature (singleton vs. non-singleton set) -- it's kinda cool that zero tends to get lumped in with plurals in English (but usually not in German); not sure how other
yes, in the sense that singular it is the way of representing one thing as opposed to not-one, a counting that goes "one" "many". The German usage spoils this idea a bit, as singular in this case does not mean "one of". Quite a few languages, at least from this region, can form the plural by doubling the noun.
I think I see what you're getting at, but I'm not sure where it's going. I'll accept the "directly perceivable" term for current purposes, but there's whole heckuvalot more going on in our heads (brains& associated processes) when we look at and identify a small set of like items as a set-of-N than I'm accustomed to calling "direct", and that's just the stuff we know about...
That is why looking at the language structures is interesting, I am suggesting that sometimes looking at what is encoded in the most basic, oldest parts of human language may help think about what is directly perceivable in the sense I am thinking about, and it is exactly the presence of language forms addressing small numbers that suggest they are something else than small positive integers, add that to the "52"example and it seems that "small" in this case may be larger than I would have expected.
It's a unary predicate, i.e. an intransitive. It takes a single argument. It returns a truth value; albeit in at least one common sense of 'exist' that value depends on the evaluation index (possible world / place and time of utterance / speaker / etc). I'm talking about the kind of existence which is independent of the current index, i.e. __necessary__ existence: existence in every possible world.
Sorry, that was probably annoying. Yes, different people use the word in different ways with different connotations.
not annoying at all, different more or less precise usages get in the way and a few definitions certainly help decide whether a disagreement is about the meaning of the question or the answer.
Warning Will Robinson Danger -- I think what's special about small numbers is special to humans, and not to the numbers as such (i.e. as abstracta). I think 2 (e.g. as the cardinality of the set {0,1}) is pretty special from an abstract standpoint as well (binary numbers simulating alphabets of arbitrary finite size, that darned Turing (1937) again), but I'd guess that the ease of small-number recognition is probably just a contigent human-specific brain-related phenomenon along the lines Chris sketched...
I am suggesting that the size of small sets are not only describable by numbers, they can also be described as a named patterns. No things, A single thing. A pair of things. A triangle of things .... when these descriptions do not need to form a potentially infinite series of counting numbers, they don't even need to be ordered. They just need to be recognisable as a quality of the set. How big a set has a perceivable distinct pattern certainly depends on the brain doing the recognising, my point though is that these patterns, words, whatever, do not need to be ordered to have useful meaning. They do not need to be labelled by numbers. Numbers are of course a very useful way to map those patterns, so useful it is easy to forget and abandon any unordered set of descriptions for these patterns in groups.
Data pending... unfortunately the guy I know who would probably be able to help me out is probably himself wandering around Australia collecting that kind of data at the moment...
sounds very interesting discussion could result
There's a thing I feel obliged to point out here which aspiring linguists get to know as the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" (unrelated to Start Trek): basically it states that `if you can't say it, you can't think it', and it's been pretty much totally discredited by now; i.e. just because you don't have a word for it doesn't mean you can't perceive it / think it / know it / talk about it (indirectly).
yes, I certainly was thinking about this as I wrote that, and was going to say that it wasn't only the language that was being described, for example the story about the river and the isolation went into various other details, and the isolation between nearby groups of people was very striking in many ways.
Certainly wandering way off-topic here ... though ordering, numbers, their mapping to quantities and the encoding of these quantities and the interpretation of them is very much on-topic for pd in general.
Simon
On Sun, 22 May 2011, Bryan Jurish wrote:
"Pair" is a word of English, and a highly ambiguous one at that -- it might be an ordered pair, an unordered pair, a pair of pants, a pair of aces,
Most pants are quite ordered...
'a pair' (aka "couple"), or whatever. Yes, it's semantically and pragmatically complex. The (abstract) number "2" plays a pretty heavy role in all of its sense I can think of at the moment, though.
In French, it's much more exciting : the word «pair» is pronounced the same way as the word «even» (number), «peer», «father», «blue-green» (eye colour), and some conjugations of «to lose».
Do you mean the semantics usually associated with the feature (singleton vs. non-singleton set) -- it's kinda cool that zero tends to get lumped in with plurals in English (but usually not in German)
In French, I think zero singular is most common, but zero plural isn't so unusual. In Quechua, 'two' (pair of) has its own grammatical number.
I think I see what you're getting at, but I'm not sure where it's going. I'll accept the "directly perceivable" term for current purposes, but there's whole heckuvalot more going on in our heads (brains & associated processes) when we look at and identify a small set of like items as a set-of-N than I'm accustomed to calling "direct", and that's just the stuff we know about...
Despite the numbers zero, one, two, three, four, five, and perhaps a few more, are quite directly perceivable (as in everybody can count potatoes instantly), along the years, people have had very various conceptions of what those things are, such as zero not being a number, one being non-plural, four being written as IV (one less than five), all those numbers being part of «N», if you exclude 0 you call it «N*», or three being written as {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}} in some axiomatic theories of everything-is-a-set. Regardless of all the various thoughts that happened around numbers, it remains that someone can see three or five potatoes in a single step.
I'm talking about the kind of existence which is independent of the current index, i.e. __necessary__ existence: existence in every possible world.
I don't think that you or anyone is qualified to talk about all possible worlds. I'm not quite convinced that anything that did not happen was really possible at the moment that it did not happen at. It only looked this way before the fact. ;)
"Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis": basically it states that `if you can't say it, you can't think it', and it's been pretty much totally discredited by now; i.e. just because you don't have a word for it doesn't mean you can't perceive it / think it / know it / talk about it (indirectly).
Make that a sentence, or any number of sentences... it doesn't have to be a word, no ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Thu, 19 May 2011, Simon Wise wrote:
Which numbers can be perceived in some way that isn't a mathematical model? That is which numbers are directly perceivable, without some more abstract mathematical mapping to guide us?
What's a mathematical model, what's sufficiently abstract to be disqualified, and why do you think of it this way ?
Certainly most people can look at four matches on a table and see that there are four, without doing any counting at all. There are a few people who can tip a matchbox full of matches onto a table and see immediately that there are 51, or 53, or whatever in the same way ... no counting involved.
Is there any evidence that those people don't do some really speedy counting, for example by seeing groups of 5 or 7 at a time, and remember where's the border between the counted matches and the non-counted matches, all this in a very small number of seconds ?
In some languages, where mathematics hasn't become part of the language, and the words for numbers are pre-mathematics, counting goes something like "one, two, three, four, many"
Isn't that the near-extinct language of some obscure tribe who has some kind of religious disgust for numbers ?
so I guess that backs up the idea that the first few integers are perceived directly,
How about that those are the numbers that you can't possibly do without even if you wished very strongly to not use « numbers » ?
is 1,549,364 anything other than word in the language of mathematics?
well, it's also the sum of squares of 292 and of 1210... ;)
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On 23/05/11 02:00, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Thu, 19 May 2011, Simon Wise wrote:
Which numbers can be perceived in some way that isn't a mathematical model? That is which numbers are directly perceivable, without some more abstract mathematical mapping to guide us?
What's a mathematical model, what's sufficiently abstract to be disqualified, and why do you think of it this way ?
It was an idea that struck me in something I read a long time ago, and this thread reminded me of it. Basically I am interested in the notion that we could recognise groups of the same size having in some way the same pattern, without going on to map these patterns onto a series of numbers. It certainly is useful to map these patterns to numbers, but all the same they are recognisable simply as patterns. Two things together seemed interesting in this regard.
First the ability of some people to recognise quite large groups directly, without counting. The description of this process did seem to suggest that it was something other than clever, quick shortcuts to counting ... there was quite a lot involved because that was an obvious possibility and the discussions and tests led the researcher to conclude that it was not done this way. That may of course have been wrong. I am fairly sure that the example I recall was described by Oliver Sacks in one of his books, in reasonable detail, and would have been documented more fully elsewhere, so the data should be there to re-examine if desired.
Second was considering how small numbers are incorporated into spoken language.
Isn't that the near-extinct language of some obscure tribe who has some kind of religious disgust for numbers ?
Certainly the languages would have been near extinct, more complex ideas are useful often, and it is probably easier to learn a language that has the vocabulary to expresses them than invent a new vocabulary and syntax to add to an old language. The examples I recall described were not about a disgust for numbers ... perhaps it was just they had found no need to communicate the idea of numbers, it was enough to be able to name a few patterns recognisable as shared between groups of say four things.
How about that those are the numbers that you can't possibly do without even if you wished very strongly to not use « numbers » ?
I'm wondering more about how these things can be described other than mapping to numbers, since - to pull back to Pd - we often do the opposite in computers, and map an unordered set to a series of integers just because it is convenient to deal with integers, eg passing messages around in lists (which are still ordered, even if the order is meaningless except by convention, and accessed by their integer index). Numbering is very useful in practice, but it is interesting to consider what can be done without it.
is 1,549,364 anything other than word in the language of mathematics?
well, it's also the sum of squares of 292 and of 1210... ;)
That is neat, it was derived as a string of the first digits my fingers hit on the keyboard. So its square root (probably an irrational number) is the length of the diagonal of a rectangular piece of paper with sides 292 1210. Assuming of course that our space is actually Euclidian. Numbers do have lots of nice properties.
Simon
On Mon, 23 May 2011, Simon Wise wrote:
Basically I am interested in the notion that we could recognise groups of the same size having in some way the same pattern, without going on to map these patterns onto a series of numbers. It certainly is useful to map these patterns to numbers, but all the same they are recognisable simply as patterns. Two things together seemed interesting in this regard.
If there's some part of brain lobe that can recognise patterns made of N similar things, those patterns are usually called numbers anyway. That's merely a difference of terminology (but differences of terminology do matter a lot).
First the ability of some people to recognise quite large groups directly, without counting. The description of this process did seem to suggest that it was something other than clever, quick shortcuts to counting ... there was quite a lot involved because that was an obvious possibility and the discussions and tests led the researcher to conclude that it was not done this way.
I hope that it's better than what survey houses do. They ask people « which political leader do you prefer ? » and then they report « 471 people out of 1003 prefer XYZ » rather than « 471 out of 1003 people claim that they believe that they prefer XYZ ». You'd like to think that scientists would want to accurately report their findings... and not look like they are gullible vis-à-vis their respondents.
Next morning, anyway, major newspaper conglomerate headlines « 532 out of 1003 people reject XYZ », which is even more false.
Anyway... I haven't read Sacks.
Certainly the languages would have been near extinct, more complex ideas are useful often, and it is probably easier to learn a language that has the vocabulary to expresses them than invent a new vocabulary and syntax to add to an old language.
That sounds like a colonialist perspective. You have no idea how easy it is for people to add words to their own language. The hard part is to decide to do it.
The examples I recall described were not about a disgust for numbers ...
Replace "disgust" by something equivalent such as the impression that a life without any numbers is more noble or authentic and that numbers are superfluous concepts brought by foreigners for no good reason.
perhaps it was just they had found no need to communicate the idea of numbers,
how about a reasoning like "such and such requires numbers, therefore we don't need it" ?
How about that those are the numbers that you can't possibly do without even if you wished very strongly to not use « numbers » ?
I'm wondering more about how these things can be described other than mapping to numbers, since - to pull back to Pd - we often do the opposite in computers, and map an unordered set to a series of integers just because it is convenient to deal with integers, eg passing messages around in lists (which are still ordered, even if the order is meaningless except by convention, and accessed by their integer index).
When I pass « this is a sentence » as a plain list, $4 = sentence, and without doubt, sentence is the 4th word of the sentence, but it doesn't mean that I thought about « 4 » when saying « this is a sentence » : the number only has to be inferred from the data that « this » is the first word, that the next one is the 2nd, the next one is 3rd, and next one is 4th. 4th only means next of next of next of first... in other words, s(s(s(s(0)))). Words are naturally ordered because they have to be said one after the other, in time, and time is a totally-ordered dimension at that scale.
Numbering is very useful in practice, but it is interesting to consider what can be done without it.
is 1,549,364 anything other than word in the language of mathematics?
well, it's also the sum of squares of 292 and of 1210... ;)
That is neat, it was derived as a string of the first digits my fingers hit on the keyboard. So its square root (probably an irrational number) is the length of the diagonal of a rectangular piece of paper with sides 292 1210. Assuming of course that our space is actually Euclidian. Numbers do have lots of nice properties.
Yes, the square root is an irrational number. However, you can rotate that square root in the complex plane, to get to (292+1210i), which is rational (and integer). The rotation angle is arctan(292/1210).
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Thu, 2 Jun 2011, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
Yes, the square root is an irrational number. However, you can rotate that square root in the complex plane, to get to (292+1210i), which is rational (and integer). The rotation angle is arctan(292/1210).
or rather, arctan(1210/292)...
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Thu, 19 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 12:38:37PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Wed, 11 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
At the very least they exist physically encoded in the brain chemistry of somebody who is thinking about those concepts. Brains are part of physical reality, right?
Yeah, but the map is not the territory.
I am not convinced they are different in the case of things that "we can't perceive ... from the physical world."
All this to be able to cleverly claim « Santa Claus really exists » with a big satisfied grin on your face ? ;)
There's a practical reason why people make a difference between a rock, a brain thinking about a rock, a brain thinking about a brain thinking about a rock, and a brain thinking about the set of all possible brains thinking in all different manners about all different kinds of rocks... even though each of those cases must be embodied by some part of the physical world... and even though all of those cases are referring to rocks.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 01:37:19PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Thu, 19 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 12:38:37PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Wed, 11 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
At the very least they exist physically encoded in the brain chemistry of somebody who is thinking about those concepts. Brains are part of physical reality, right?
Yeah, but the map is not the territory.
I am not convinced they are different in the case of things that "we
can't perceive ... from the physical world."All this to be able to cleverly claim « Santa Claus really exists » with a big satisfied grin on your face ? ;)
Of course Santa Claus exists. I'm not interested in being smug about it though.
There is no guy in red riding a sleigh across the sky delivering presents to children. Instead the Santa Claus entity exists as millions of copies inside the minds of humans everywhere. Millions of people running the Santa Claus program on their brains. We should pay attention to this real entity because it has a huge effect on the GDP of countries in the western world, every year. To dismiss Santa Claus as just a silly children's story is to underestimate it.
I'm not being smug. I think it's a mistake that very intelligent people make in dismissing things that are "just ideas". For some reason people think that ideas are something independent of the physical world, but they are not. Ideas physically occupy people's brains and make people change the world.
There's a practical reason why people make a difference between a rock, a brain thinking about a rock, a brain thinking about a brain thinking about a rock, and a brain thinking about the set of all possible brains thinking in all different manners about all different kinds of rocks... even though each of those cases must be embodied by some part of the physical world... and even though all of those cases are referring to rocks.
Of course a rock is different to a brain thinking about a rock, is different to a brain thinking about a brain thinking about a rock etc. The ways in which those things occupy the material world is completely different. A rock manifest in matter does not look anything like a rock manifest in somebody's brainchemistry. I am not saying that they are the same or that we should treat them the same.
I don't think human thought takes place in some magic fairy land. I think it takes place in the same physical reality that we all occupy. I'm not really sure why this idea is contraversial.
Cheers,
Chris.
On Mon, 23 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
Millions of people running the Santa Claus program on their brains. We should pay attention to this real entity because it has a huge effect on the GDP of countries in the western world, every year.
But gift-giving on Christmas was common well before Coca-Cola introduced Santa, isn't it ?
I think it's a mistake that very intelligent people make in dismissing things that are "just ideas". For some reason people think that ideas are something independent of the physical world, but they are not. Ideas physically occupy people's brains and make people change the world.
But I'm not saying that ideas are something independent or unimportant !
I don't think human thought takes place in some magic fairy land. I think it takes place in the same physical reality that we all occupy. I'm not really sure why this idea is contraversial.
Is it controversial ? Perhaps it's a matter of stating that concept in a way that it doesn't get taken for something else.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 01:37:19PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Thu, 19 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 12:38:37PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Wed, 11 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
At the very least they exist physically encoded in the brain chemistry of somebody who is thinking about those concepts. Brains are part of physical reality, right?
Yeah, but the map is not the territory.
I am not convinced they are different in the case of things that "we
can't perceive ... from the physical world."All this to be able to cleverly claim « Santa Claus really exists » with a big satisfied grin on your face ? ;)
There's a practical reason why people make a difference between a rock, a brain thinking about a rock, a brain thinking about a brain thinking about a rock, and a brain thinking about the set of all possible brains thinking in all different manners about all different kinds of rocks... even though each of those cases must be embodied by some part of the physical world... and even though all of those cases are referring to rocks.
Ok wait, I see what you are saying and you are quite right.
My perspective is that in the case of e.g. sqrt(-1) the "territory" does not exist. There is merely the map that is inside our heads and that map can be used to correctly predict real and observable things that happen in reality. The things that happen in reality should not be mistake for actually being sqrt(-1) though. They are merely observations that are predicted correctly by the map most of the time.
I don't think sqrt(-1) exists independently of the hardware (brains) to run it.
Bryan and I took the other conversation off list so as not to bore people. I would be quite happy to do that here as this is very OT!
Cheers,
Chris.
On 23/05/11 12:21, Chris McCormick wrote:
My perspective is that in the case of e.g. sqrt(-1) the "territory" does not exist. There is merely the map that is inside our heads and that map can be used to correctly predict real and observable things that happen in reality. The things that happen in reality should not be mistake for actually being sqrt(-1) though. They are merely observations that are predicted correctly by the map most of the time.
I don't think sqrt(-1) exists independently of the hardware (brains) to run it.
I think sqrt(-1) is in the same position as 3/4 here, both rational numbers and complex numbers require an understanding of the language and the models that define them to be understood, both have some very direct mappings to measurements, distances and such. For example rational numbers can be mapped to some of the lengths we can ask about, but they don't describe all the lengths that we can think about, while complex numbers can be mapped in a very straightforward and useful way to not just any distance along a line, but also to any position within a plane, representing the distance and direction in 2 dimensions. They prove very useful in dealing with these quantities, and have as much existence as any other number, once they are part of your vocabulary.
Simon
On 23/05/11 12:21, Chris McCormick wrote:
Bryan and I took the other conversation off list so as not to bore people. I would be quite happy to do that here as this is very OT!
Well ... I for one am enjoying the conversation, and there are a few regulars on the list contributing.
The thread was started as a theoretical question about CV in digital synths, and a dispute with an engineer ... which was about discrete v continuous quantities and where one or the other was used in practice. Counting numbers, real numbers, complex numbers and the representation and interpretation of them is on-topic for that question. And for pd in general, I think.
Simon
On Mon, 23 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
My perspective is that in the case of e.g. sqrt(-1) the "territory" does not exist. There is merely the map that is inside our heads and that map can be used to correctly predict real and observable things that happen in reality. The things that happen in reality should not be mistake for actually being sqrt(-1) though. They are merely observations that are predicted correctly by the map most of the time.
Claiming « sqrt(-1) is not in the territory » is an axiom. It's a definition. You are defining sqrt(-1) as meaning something that is not in the territory. The question is whether that's more useful than claiming that sqrt(-1) is a pattern that appears in the territory.
Same goes for any other number, actually. sqrt(-1) is not in a special situation here.
There are other ways to explain anything that uses complex numbers. In math that's called an Isomorphism, and there's a lot of abstract algebra that is about those equivalences. Especially the Representation Theory. It doesn't make sqrt(-1) any more virtual than any other numbers. If you go through enough algebra, you will see every number and every numeric operation has plenty of equivalences of any kind... that doesn't make them more virtual, that makes them more existent.
Bryan and I took the other conversation off list so as not to bore people. I would be quite happy to do that here as this is very OT!
Bryan took it to pd-ot where no-one ever writes. I had to subscribe to it in order to be able to reply. pd-list's volume is very much under its average, too. Bored people can hit the Delete key quite easily.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Mon, 9 May 2011, Billy Stiltner wrote:
I have come to the conclusion that all audio is discrete.
But the topic was about whether voltages were still being used to modulate the sound effects. The answer is that one may do it sometimes, but most digital-to-digital connections use a big stack of PCM protocols, such as MIDI, or RS232 or Ethernet/TCP/IP, the latter two in combination with ASCII-based or binary-based integer and float formats, etc. So in the end, the relation between voltage/timing and the effect is not the kind of thing that is obvious with an oscilloscope ;)
probably everything measureable in the universe is discrete for that matter.
In the set of all possible frequencies of photon particles, are things discrete ? I've never read that ever.
If we had a fast enough sample rate we could slow down the recording of the use of such a whammy bar and see that it is indeed discrete.
The interference in the sensor, the cable and the ADC, and the irregularities in the construction of the sensor and the ADC, will completely submerge any quantum effects that you'd like to perceive. Is that right ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On 09/05/11 19:08, Billy Stiltner wrote:
I have come to the conclusion that all audio is discrete. probably everything measureable in the universe is discrete for that matter. There is no such thing as continuous only in our experience when we can not discern the difference between a change from one value to the next do we think of something being continuous. Imagine if you will a tuning peg with notches fitted in a notched hole. Now imagine a whammy bar fixed with the smoothest bearings and axle known. Now imagine the atomic structure of the axle and bearing. Isn't the whammy bar going to stop at little steps at the flat spots where any 2 atoms of the bearings line up with any 2 atoms of the axle? Would this not be discrete. Only our perception of sound hears the whammy bar as being continuous. If we had a fast enough sample rate we could slow down the recording of the use of such a whammy bar and see that it is indeed discrete.
The noise in the system made with many atoms and electrons etc is probably inevitably much bigger than the inevitable discreteness imposed by atoms and electrons in the axle. The discreteness imposed by the discrete nature of most physical things is on a very small scale indeed in most circumstances and is only observable in very noise free situations which also amplify the discreteness. Is an unmeasurable theoretical discreteness in a measurable quantity a discreteness in that quantity? Lots of semantics and definitions here.
Simon
On Mon, 9 May 2011 07:08:18 -0400 Billy Stiltner billy.stiltner@gmail.com wrote:
Now imagine a whammy bar fixed with the smoothest bearings and axle known. Now imagine the atomic structure of the axle and bearing. Isn't the whammy bar going to stop at little steps at the flat spots where any 2 atoms of the bearings line up with any 2 atoms of the axle? Would this not be discrete.
If the whammy was long, a finite, discrete change of angle would make the end of the bar move several inches. Since it could not exist in any position between two discrete angles the end would have to move instantaneously (infinite velocity) between two positions in space.
This would lead to sore fingers.
Whatever the model you'll get a Kantian muddle. A (phenomenon) "out there", and its corresponding notion (noumenon) inhabit different worlds, and through that dark glass entirely discrete or continuous models are quite as absurd as each other with a moment of thought. Talking of moments, what's good for space is good for time right? The symbols on the paper and the patterns in your mind are tools, predictive utilities with more or less ability to predict the behaviour of a third, ineffable thing. Einstein, Podolski and Rosen took a lot of symbols, and Mr.Heidegger had to chop a lot of Black Forest wood to say what George Carlin does so brilliantly in a short sketch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M5eG-aywZQ
On the topic of CVs; Many devices in the 1990s used hybrid technology in the overlap of analogue and digital ages. Digitally controlled oscillators were common for a while. But that is little known developmental history, most people would not use the term "control voltage" in the context of a digital synth. Maybe they would say "control signal", to delineate its function, but not "voltage".
On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 5:06 PM, Andy Farnell padawan12@obiwannabe.co.ukwrote:
On Mon, 9 May 2011 07:08:18 -0400 Billy Stiltner billy.stiltner@gmail.com wrote:
Now imagine a whammy bar fixed with the smoothest bearings and axle known. Now imagine the atomic structure of the axle and bearing. Isn't the whammy bar going to stop at little steps at the flat spots where any 2 atoms of the bearings line up with any 2 atoms of the axle? Would this not be discrete.
If the whammy was long, a finite, discrete change of angle would make the end of the bar move several inches. Since it could not exist in any position between two discrete angles the end would have to move instantaneously (infinite velocity) between two positions in space.
This would lead to sore fingers.
I didn't think it through very well.
On Tue, 10 May 2011 13:02:19 -0400 Billy Stiltner billy.stiltner@gmail.com wrote:
I didn't think it through very well.
Best to figure it out at the theoretical stage before you hurt yourself trying.
;) a.
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 07:57:37PM +0100, Andy Farnell wrote:
Best to figure it out at the theoretical stage before you hurt yourself trying.
Tennis players get Tennis Elbow, programmers get RSI, but only Pd users can suffer from finite quantum whammy fingers.
Chris.
On 19/05/2011 06:57, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 07:57:37PM +0100, Andy Farnell wrote:
Best to figure it out at the theoretical stage before you hurt yourself trying.
Tennis players get Tennis Elbow, programmers get RSI, but only Pd users can suffer from finite quantum whammy fingers.
Chris.
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Love it !
On 10/05/11 05:06, Andy Farnell wrote:
If the whammy was long, a finite, discrete change of angle would make the end of the bar move several inches. Since it could not exist in any position between two discrete angles the end would have to move instantaneously (infinite velocity) between two positions in space.
This would lead to sore fingers.
more likely a very long whammy that bends a little and doesn't move much at all, if it is fingers doing the pushing ... it would have quite a bit of inertia.
simon
what about, if you had a wammy bar as long as an aircraft carrier, and then you struck it with a large chunk of dark matter?
That reminds me of a brilliant quote by Mathieu, a while ago:
"If you throw a 44100 Hz soundcard in space at 259627884 metres per second, it will appear to run at 22050 Hz."
On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 2:28 PM, hard off hard.off@gmail.com wrote:
what about, if you had a wammy bar as long as an aircraft carrier, and then you struck it with a large chunk of dark matter?
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Dark matter is just any old stuff in the dark.
What you want is a lump of this stuff;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star
It's just light enough not to collapse space. Ignoring that it wouldn't exist out of context, you couldn't separate it from the collapsed star, and no surface on Earth would support it against just sinking into the core, you could have a lot of fun, like posting a bit collect paid in an envelope to people you don't like.
On Wed, 11 May 2011 22:28:21 +0900 hard off hard.off@gmail.com wrote:
what about, if you had a wammy bar as long as an aircraft carrier, and then you struck it with a large chunk of dark matter?
Ice cream, man. You all should be thinking about ice cream. It's sunny outside in most parts of the world, get out there and find you some!
D.
On 5/11/11 4:15 PM, Andy Farnell wrote:
Dark matter is just any old stuff in the dark.
What you want is a lump of this stuff;
My favorite example of a continuous sound is saying the word continuous:
the
"uou"
part of it.
J
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