Word thinking is better at getting at weird things. Weird or not, it’s there.
Another way I think of it is, imagine a function f(x), that is unique for all values, which returns the same value for x=3 and x=10.
That’s sort of like… Okay… So there is some function with two properties that imply the other cannot exist. What does it mean?!
I think lots of these philosophical problems were very reasonable to discuss when they were first brought up. I can’t prove this, since it’s based on lots of general concepts I’ve found in old books or academic papers, but those ideas seem related to the same idea of the human brain as mystic, and language an expression of that mysticism. Rather than an evolved mechanism to filter patterns from reality and communicate them to one another. In that anti-mystical view, which views words and math as the same subset of pattern classification and information, poorly defined thought experiments are as interesting as “what if 2+2=5”.
Also, I want to speculate on an idea I have with near zero proof that I half stole from/half conceived from reading “Godel, Escher, Bach:” We know computers cannot process undefined statements. When humans try to process undefined statements we don’t crash. Instead we conceive something that seems like it could be meaningful, even if it’s inconceivable. I can ‘conceive’ of 2+2=5, or it feels like I can, but maybe that’s just the error-catching subroutine of my brain. We then sort of interpret this inconsistency as meaningful and call it a ‘thought experiment’—when the inconsistency is just our brain’s way of saying “does not compute.”
When humans try to process undefined statements we don’t crash. Instead we conceive something that seems like it could be meaningful, even if it’s inconceivable.
Physics is consistent. Humans are physics. “What a human would predict from this inconsistent set of statements” is often consistent and unambiguous as most communication. I think this is a necessary tool for thinking about law.
Another way I think of it is, imagine a function f(x), that is unique for all values, which returns the same value for x=3 and x=10.
That’s sort of like… Okay… So there is some function with two properties that imply the other cannot exist. What does it mean?!
I think lots of these philosophical problems were very reasonable to discuss when they were first brought up. I can’t prove this, since it’s based on lots of general concepts I’ve found in old books or academic papers, but those ideas seem related to the same idea of the human brain as mystic, and language an expression of that mysticism. Rather than an evolved mechanism to filter patterns from reality and communicate them to one another. In that anti-mystical view, which views words and math as the same subset of pattern classification and information, poorly defined thought experiments are as interesting as “what if 2+2=5”.
Also, I want to speculate on an idea I have with near zero proof that I half stole from/half conceived from reading “Godel, Escher, Bach:” We know computers cannot process undefined statements. When humans try to process undefined statements we don’t crash. Instead we conceive something that seems like it could be meaningful, even if it’s inconceivable. I can ‘conceive’ of 2+2=5, or it feels like I can, but maybe that’s just the error-catching subroutine of my brain. We then sort of interpret this inconsistency as meaningful and call it a ‘thought experiment’—when the inconsistency is just our brain’s way of saying “does not compute.”
Physics is consistent. Humans are physics. “What a human would predict from this inconsistent set of statements” is often consistent and unambiguous as most communication. I think this is a necessary tool for thinking about law.