Jason wrote:So how do you personally categorize them? Are they true/truth? Are they knowledge? Are they certainties? Do they have predictive power? What are they and what qualities do they posses?
They are
tools which enable very useful predictions and models. That's as far as i am willing to go.
Philosophy of math is a very difficult topic which, I frankly, never paid much attention to. I am already chasing a dozen different intellectual disciplines all at once. Four different areas of philosophy just about do it for me philosophy-wise.
Simply to allow for induction and prediction there must be something occurring from moment to moment. What is this something?
See, this is what you are missing. You are still thinking in the 19th-century way.
Consider this:
To allow for relativistic measurements, there must still be something to measure. The observed object must have some velocity. What is that velocity?
What i am suggesting is that measurements and observations are the only thing we can talk about; that the measurements, and the predictive models we utilize them in,
are the content of observations -- kinda like how i spoke earlier of math being the content of QM; anything else is just a salve for our maladjusted intuitions. You are trying to say "yeah, sure, but what is
really under the hood?" -- and i am trying to say that you can't meaningfully answer, or even ask, that question. Whether you realize it or not, you are still looking to find noumena, you are still questing for things behind perceptions -- the ideal forms apart from their sensible aspects.
I know it's a tricky cognitive shift to attain, because it took me a couple of years to do it, though I was doing it all on my own. Try, however, to think in terms of perceptions not being the front of things, but being all there is to things. Even if you don't adopt this view, it's a very entertaining intellectual trick, kinda like looking at those pseudo-3D prints full of swirly colors, then crossing your eyes the right way, and all of a sudden -- POOF! -- a 3D image pops off the page at you.
To illustrate what I mean, consider this example (and assume, for argument's sake, that strong AI is possible).
Imagine we have a strong AI, named Bob. it performs some suitably sophisticated intellectual task -- say, writing the Great American Novel. This process exemplifies its intelligence. However, the writing of this novel was a sequence of computer commands, which can be printed out. This huge printout in fact represents Bob writing the novel. It is Bob writing the novel -- and yet it's also a static pile of paper. Somehow, this paper represents an intelligent process; it represents cognition. We can observe the cognitive process in it the same way we could observe the same cognitive process when Bob was actually in the process of writing the novel; it's as if Bob'e universe got frozen in time, and we, observers, stand outside time and look into it like gods. Nonetheless, the intelligence is there.
However, let's take this one step further. We take the huge printout, and scramble the sheets.
Where is Bob?
Introspection? What introspection? You mean you're certain that there's introspection going on? (I'll check out Quining Qualia.)
yeah, you do that;
then let's discuss the issue of certainty and cognition.
So is it certain that these past uncertainties existed?
Yeah, sure, whatever. <rolls eyes>
