[ExI] Meaningless Symbols

Spencer Campbell lacertilian at gmail.com
Sat Jan 16 17:34:03 UTC 2010


On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 5:03 AM, Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com> wrote:
> To claim that the complex thing does not differ in any important way from the simple thing is, I'll say it again, totally ridiculous.

(Stefano responded to the very same thing shortly before I could
finish this. But I like my version better anyway! Click. Send.)

Gordon was careful to specify: "any important PHILOSOPHICAL way".
Philosophy is notoriously vague and broad, with a marked proclivity
for blurred distinctions. I haven't found much to agree with in what
Gordon Swobe has written since my admittedly-recent subscription, but
here I find myself firmly on his side.

A solar system doesn't differ in any important philosophical way from
a hydrogen atom. I almost convinced myself that it did, but it
doesn't: both are held together by about four fundamental forces in
varying ratios, both can be divided into smaller parts, both are
observable in physical reality, both are composed of... wait! There is
a distinction! Solar systems have more distinct species of particle
than hydrogen atoms. They're loaded with neutrinos,
strange/charm/top/bottom quarks, and dark matter. That's a basic
ontological difference by my book, and all ontological differences are
philosophical differences.

But, "hello world" is not different from, say, Firefox. An obvious
counter-argument would point out that Firefox can connect to the
Internet, and engages in a complex interaction with at least one human
being. But to the computer, people are just random number generators.
Accuse me of the pathetic fallacy at leisure; it is just too
convenient as shorthand to avoid.

You are a computer. Let's say you run Linux. The particular
distribution is unimportant. To you, there is no important
philosophical difference between humans and /dev/urandom, nor between
the hard drive and the Internet. "But the Internet changes independent
of CPU activity", cries the devil's advocate! To which I say: how do
you know? Maybe the hard drive just changes more slowly. I could bring
cosmic radiation into the mix here, but I won't. It's a cheap shot.
The fact is, you can check the same file as many times as you want,
but you can never prove that it will still be the same file the next
time you check it.

There are plenty of practical differences between the very simple and
the very complex, but if there are philosophical differences I haven't
found them. Complexity is just another scalar, no more philosophically
pithy than volume or velocity.

Unless you take the directional component of velocity into account.
Then it's a vector, as far removed from the lowly scalar as
hypothetical man is from hypothetical God.



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