barrington interview

Jeff Wilson · 12 Oct 2014, 01:54 · from 2014-October.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at clueland.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 20:54:20 -0500
Subject: (urth) barrington interview
In-Reply-To: <BLU175-W28EC70A0E8B092D587DEA8CFAE0 at phx.gbl>
References: <BLU175-W28EC70A0E8B092D587DEA8CFAE0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <d420a1b78d07a34a6022fe37ace9d27b.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>

On Sat, October 11, 2014 08:21, Lee wrote:
>>Jeffrey Wilson: As for Lee, up above he postulates that the actuality is
>> different in
>>places and that will give rise to different concepts to which ours will
>>not relate. However, he still calls these circumstances history and
>>geography, which implicitly means they are relateable to us.
>
>
> Of course, because I am human and have human limitations :- ). This sort
> of makes
>
> the point I was trying to make.
>
>
> I must think in terms of space and time. How could I coherently describe
>
> a scenario which doesn't possess these features?

The catechism writes manage it.

> There are better wordsmiths than I who have attempted it (Wolfe and Frank
> Herbert
>
> come to mind).  There are passages in their books which hint at meaning
> but are
>
> ultimately best described as incomprehensible. What makes them good
> authors are
>
> the hints as much as the sense of incomprehensibility.

Apparently equivocation is part of your limitation. Using, or rather
mis-using a word like "incomprehensible" in a discussison of cognitive
science and then revealing you really mean it in the literary prose sense
is akin to what we in the mathematical community call "abuse of notation".

> But surely there exist some things in some universe somewhere which are
> completely and
>
> without the slightest hint, utterly incomprehensible to the human mind
> (including mathematical
>
> models).

Are you saying there is an unknowable mathematical model somewhere? Of
that  something exists that is unknowable despite the existence of
mathematical models? Or something else?

> In an infinite cosmos, why wouldn't such things exist?

Infinite quantity doesn't imply infinite variety. Even people who
pooh-pooh math as counting stipulate to this because for example, when you
begin counting 1,2,3, and so forth, you can do so for an unlimited series
of numbers without encountering a number less than the one before, nor
zero, nor anything negative, just the next larger integer after the last,
always.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com >
A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
< http://www.tamut.edu/cil >

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