ukj

In your CONTRIBUTING.md add a human-first readability rule. Ordinary English accessible to your average person - for extra irony ask the agent to generate the rule content.

When technical language is necessary instruct the agents to use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.

The deep irony in valuing matter more than valuing values is never wasted on me.

You still haven't figured out that "matter" is yet another man-made concept? An abstract idea. A collective noun. Itself a (very useful) "fairy tale".

A substance which posesses "rest mass" in a universe where nothing is ever at rest sure sounds like magical thinking (to me). And what do you even make of point-like particles in physics? They have no volume - so they are not matter. And what about anitmatter?

You haven't yet come to the self-realization that you are committing the reification fallacy by promoting a man-made concept to a totalizing/generalizing/all-encompassing ontological status.

Matter is your God. It's the abstraction you worship.

You are right in saying that we'll never agree; for if I were to agree with you I too would be wrong.

That's why the best strategy is divide&conquer - run the razors concurrently.

Assume complexity then move towards simplicity.

Assume simplicity then move towards complexity.

One of them will succeed sooner than the other. Dialectic...

Obviously you can look at all the parts from whatever perspective you want.

It is your philosophical predisposition to dismantle things and understand how they work.

But when you are done learning you need to put all the parts back together and form one coherent/cohesive whole for a system to function.

It is the same old tension between reductionism, holism and systems thinking in the balance.

You seem to be missing the point. Ignoring for a second that the laws of thermodynamics themselves are based upon a handful of idealizations (the idealization of "thermal equilibrium", the idealization of "perfectly isolated system", the idealization of "perfect zero)...the laws of nature are encoded as formalisms/equations. Symbolic computations.

If you have no formalisms you can't compute any consequences - there is nothing to test. You have no science.

So treating Mathematics and science as "separate disciplines", even though they function as one symbiotic whole - that's the conceptual error.

For much the same reasons as grouping cars and engines separately is erroneous.

It's not really a car without an engine.

Ok… I reject your reality and substitute my own.

In this reality I don’t have to do the mental gymnastics where the formal *sciences* aren’t sciences.

In this reality there is at least one unfalsifiable (not even in principle) true claim: the halting problem

This renders falsifiability as a modal criterion. Useful in some scientific contexts - useless in others.

It's pointless to speak of usefulness without specifying a utility function.

It is just as possible to differentiate as it is to integrate.

If it is determined a priori that unfalsifiable propositions are not useful, then knowing the result of the Halting Problem is not useful. Isn't that silly?

I strongly object to categorizations which discriminate against valid science (knowledge? truth? understanding? reasoning? Useful facts?). Is all.

The human process of trying to udnerstand reality is continuous, not discrete, so it's silly to reason about it in terms of discrete categories. It necessarily leads to confusion; and the sort of gatekeeping and self-justification Carl Sagan is guilty of.

Science benefits much more from being defined too broadly; than being defined too narrowly.

I'd rather be too permissive then ignore the junk; than be too restrictive and never even encounter good ideas which were erroneously discarded as junk.

In the spirit of bullshit-busting and critical thought here's a thought experiment...

Alan Turing: The claims made in the Halting Problem is genrally true, and is therefore unfalsifiable even in principle.

Carl Sagan: Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much.

All computer scientists in synchronized act of distributed consensus: Bullshit.

We who? Don't "we" also need a grouping to make it even clearer that some fields can't produce any falsifiable theories if other fields don't produce at least some unfalsifiable theorems? A terra firma of sorts.

It's like a dependency graph. Or something.

Your insistence on "making a difference" seems to echo the sentiment of many pragmatists:

  It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere – no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one. --William James

Does falsifiability make any difference? If something is only falsifiable in principle (e.g in theory), but not in practice then is it really falsifiable? On pragmatism - it's not a difference that makes any practical difference. And yet you insist on differentiating. Why?

Is "All humans are mortal." falsifiable or unfalsifiable? It sure is falsifiable in theory, but unfalsifiable in practice. Any living human is potentially immortal until they actually die.

Any running process is potentially non-halting, until it actually halts.

If falsifiability doesn't make a difference in practice (and it doesn't!) then I guess we can all get on with whatever scientific discipline we are busy practicing.

So, I'm going to carry on my life knowing at least one unfalsifiable scientific truth: the theorem known as The Halting Problem.

It's not even wrong, because it's right.

Anybody who insists the Halting Problem is falsifiable (even in principle) is welcome to solve it in principle.

Is it the "philosophy of science"? What is now called "science" was once called "natural philosophy"?

Maybe it's the science of science? Maybe it's the philosophy of philosophy? Maybe it's the science of philosophy? Maybe it's the philosophy of science?

Maybe it's all the same under naturalism?

Studying science (itself a natural process) using our computational understanding of what a "process" is and does sure fits the Oxford definition of "science".

You may not see it as exclusionary but many people do. Just look at the comments!

It's precisely the grouping I am talking about.

If you group science in such a way so that logic/mathematics/computer science falls outside the group then isn't that an erroneous grouping?

Isn't that a silly definition?

True and False are idealized logical constructs. It's the idea; and the idealization of the notion that there is a difference between Truth and Falsehood. Or if you want to get biblical - there is a difference between Right and Wrong.

If True ≡ False then... fuck it.

>Not by this definition.

Which is precisely the problem with all definitions I am drawing attention to - they are exclusionary in nature.

Sometimes creating distinctions is useful. Sometimes erasing distinctions is even more useful.

How much physics could you do without Noether's theorem?

Your failure to understand what I am saying is abysmal.

>That is what I said. I showed a mathematical statement and I showed how you could falsify it. >Since you said "mathematics is not falsifiable" I have shown your statement is not true.

You have taken it upon yourself to interpret "Mathematics is not falsifiable" as broadly as needed in order to confirm your own biases; and then proceeded to attack a strawman instead of a steelman. That's the lack of charity...

>You were the one who decided that the distinction between conjectures and theorems is important.

And you were the one who decided that it isn't; so you falsely equated them.

What you have demonstrated is the falsification of the statement "X is a theorem"; not the falsification of "mathematics is not falsifiable." - a hasty generalization fallacy.

Which doesn't demonstrate anything of import or relevance whatsoever. Obviously a non-theorem is not a theorem. This is no more interesting than demonstrating that non-Mathematics is not Mathematics.

This in no way diminishes or falsifies my own claim that theorems are unfalsifiable! And neither is Mathematics.

Because if you do falsify it - then it was never a theorem. By definition. Theorems are true, not false. A false theorem is a contradiction in terms. A misconception. An error in reasoning.

Maybe Euler wasn't a Mathematician either. Who knows? Those sort of questions are undecidable.