Reflections

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY PAINTING BY SALVADOR DALI

• A force is a vector. The laws & phenomenon of the universe can be charaterized mathematically because they are mathematical objects & the math is physical.

• In monist idealism, there is only one unified Mind w/ many localized perspectives. Cons. is that faculty which we all share, which both maintains our individuated state & also unites our localized perspectives by discerning the shared qualities of meaning vis self-awareness.

• I think the only isolated facts that we know with complete certainty, like the existence of our thoughts, are known without any need of argument or proof. They are direct intuitions- Knowledge is simply the process of observing phenomena and discovering their holistic harmony.

• I think a genuine epistemology is also an ontology. We cannot determine the nature of "reality" or "mind" without also determining the nature of "knowing" and "truth" , i.e. the tools we use to investigate the former.

• Searle's experiment doesn't succeed at proving that functionalism is false because the room is not functionally equivalent to an actual Chinese speaker, precisely in its lack of semantic understanding.'

• I have a usual objection to Searle's Chinese room experiment in that while the thought experiment succeeds at proving that syntax isn't enough for semantics.

• The point of computers is that they establish causal relationships b/w the symbols which mimic the semantic properties of those symbols i.e., in a stable representational system. There is some sort of notion of causal alignment.

• Most theories can be couched in First Order Logic (FOL) & theory in FOL has an equivalent computer program i.e., a turing machine which enumerates the theorems of that theory.

• A black hole can be contemplated as a ring of discontinuous space-time curvature, wherein the space bulges hyperbolically. It’s only discontinuous in the centre, everywhere around it is continuously varying.

-Sanj/17.02.2022