I’m reading Unafraid: A Novel of the Possible, by Jeff Golden. It is fun, and as I don’t need to remember it as fact, the reading is faster. But I am afraid I will confuse fiction with fact.
Peter Singer
I’m reading Perter Singer’s Practical Ethics. He makes a strong connection (which I do not accept) between ethics and pleasure vs. suffering. Thus I am (so far) unconvinced by his arguments.
Not recognizing words
For some time, I have noticed I sometimes don’t understand what someone says. The words usually just sound like garbled noises. I have tried to tell people this (doctors and others). I have had two main explanations given. One is that I have trouble with some words (presumably not in my vocabulary.) The other is that I am not paying attention. Often when I ask someone to repeat themselves they refuse. Recently, I got someone to repeat themselves three times. I was intently trying to understand. Then I heard “I was just saying ‘Hello’!”.
New Focus – Philosophy
I heard someone on the radio a few days ago say that you should focus your attention on one thing at a time. I thought first of my differential equation project. I have made some progress on it, but I am having difficulties, and I cannot do much beyond the documents of Chang, which I have made available. Maybe I should release what I have done as well. I do not think I can compete with professional mathematicians.
Instead, I have decided to focus on philosophy. I have read a very great deal of philosophy. I am now writing an outline of my main ideas and will then fill in details, hopefully giving some reasons for accepting those ideas. I am trying a different editor for HTML for this – bluefish. It has built in spell checking. I hope I can define any special symbols somehow as well – I haven’t investigated that yet.
Slow, Steady progress on differential equations
The basic solution part is working. I am having trouble with locating singularities – though I have had that part working in the past. (I rewrote a great deal of the program – to improve its design – is the reason for the trouble.) I find it hard to work on it very long at a time.
Subjunctive Conditionals and Ethics
I’m reading Rawl’s A Theory of Justice. It along with Hare’s The Language of Morals and Freedom and Reason has convinced me a correct account of subjunctive conditionals is needed for a correct theory of ethics. (And I think this requires a correct account of modal logic.)
More progress on differential equations
Reply
I’ve been working some, the last few weeks, on my program and making some progress.
The Republican Nomination
I have a thought that, perhaps, no one will secure enough delegates to secure the nomination on the first round of voting at the convention. Thus resulting in real drama at the convention.
On Logic
If we assume there are a countable number of signs, and any sentence contains a finite number of signs, then there must be an uncountable number of truths of mathematics that cannot be represented, let alone be proved. This is because there are an uncountable number of real numbers. It is true that we can talk about many irrational real numbers such as pi and e, but these can be specified by a finite number of symbols. There must be many more irrationals which cannot be so specified.
One could take an uncountable number of signs as primitive, i.e. by using points on a circle, varying continuously. The points on such a circle can be mapped to the whole real line. If one did this, I think one would have also to have an uncountable number of axioms – how else could the primitive signs enter in?
It is a valid objection that we could not do this in practice. But it is also true that there is some finite limit to the size of sentences that humans (or machines we can build) can handle, so a countably infinite assumption is also only of theoretical interest, it would seem.
Discovered one problem I had with maxima
I found that when I passed a string (passed from another function – but I don’t know if that matters) to printf using ~a, I got an error, but if I put the string inside a “string(…) function it worked. This may have been what was causing the trouble I had with arrays. I was doing both in the same place – using such strings and 2D arrays.