Reflections on Rat Fest ’25
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.My macOS Dictionary app says “aesthetics … (also esthetics)”.
Isn’t ‘esthetics’ just the American spelling and ‘aesthetics’ is British?
From https://nocoaaa.com/blog/aesthetics-vs-esthetics:
Many individuals are confused about the distinction between Aesthetics and Esthetics. The only difference between these two terms is that they are spelled differently. People in European and Commonwealth countries use the term aesthetics. Americans, on the other hand, commonly use the term esthetic.
Justin says the term ‘esthetician’ from the esthetician industry “ruined that”.
Justin says no philosopher would drop the ‘a’, including Tom Hyde, whom Justin calls a serious British philosopher.
Ayn Rand’s book The Romantic Manifesto has 114 matches for the string ‘esthetic’ and no matches for the string ‘aesthetic’. Rand was a serious philosopher who did extensive work on art and (a)esthetics.
There’s also her talk ‘The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age’, though it may have been the Ayn Rand Institute that chose that spelling.
Well, Tom wouldn’t drop the ‘a’ anyway because he’s British.
Contrary to Deutsch, they do not believe that problems are fully soluble; contrary to Popper, they do not believe that we can ever find the truth in any matter.
Isn’t Deutsch a cynic, too? Look for quotes…
@dennis-hackethal, could you expand your argument in Lucas' blog post that self-similarity must entail correspondence?
See here. Lucas had asked:
Can you say more about why we need correspondence to make sense of the concept of self-similarity? I don't see why. And it seems to me that self-similarity is all we need to make sense of the universality of computation.
My response below. For others reading this, Erik has also since started a dedicated discussion on the topic of correspondence: https://veritula.com/discussions/is-correspondence-true-in-cr
The FoR glossary entry on self-similarity from chapter 4 reads:
self-similarity Some parts of physical reality (such as symbols, pictures or human thoughts) resemble other parts. The resemblance may be concrete, as when the images in a planetarium resemble the night sky; more importantly, it may be abstract, as when a statement in quantum theory printed in a book correctly explains an aspect of the structure of the multiverse.
The way I read that, it means the images in the planetarium correspond to the night sky. Otherwise we wouldn’t consider them similar.
From chapter 6, on the universality of computation and how “various parts of reality can resemble one another”:
The set of all behaviours and responses of that one object exactly mirrors the set of all behaviours and responses of all other physically possible objects and processes.
That means there is one-to-one correspondence between the behaviors and responses of the first object and those of all the other objects. This is basically another way to describe the self-similarity property of the universe.
From chapter 10, in the context of mathematics (italics mine):
… the physical behaviour of the symbols corresponds to the behaviour of the abstractions they denote.
(The same is true of the physical parts of a Turing machine harnessing the self-similarity property of the universe to correspond to other physical objects.)
From chapter 14, in the context of the creation of scientific knowledge (which, AFAIK, DD views as increasing correspondence):
The creation of useful knowledge by science … must be understood as the emergence of the self-similarity that is mandated by a principle of physics, the Turing principle.
It’s been ages since I read FoR so I’m relying on word searches in the ebook but it’s full of these links between self-similarity and correspondence.
Thanks. Do you think the aim in abstract fields (such as mathematics) is correspondence as well? (As Deutsch seems to argue with the idea of perfect propositions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ-opI-jghs).
Sorry for the late reply. I don’t know. I don’t think the aim of math is correspondence to physical facts like in science. But maybe it’s correspondence to mathematical facts.