AMath
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AMath has not written any posts yet.
Hello everyone.
Consider this a just-in-case comment that I am making with very limited time before I have to run and do something else, recognizing the fact that I might fail to make one altogether if I do not do it now. How is that for acknowledging my human mental frailty?
Actually I can do one better: I just had to join the lesswrong chat to diagnose a problem with not being able to comment on an article (which was the reason I just signed up after discovering this site), and the problem turned out the stem from my misspelling my own e-mail address when I signed up.
So there you go: two cognitive flaws immediately apparent just from the process of joining this site. I wonder how many more I can discover here...
...and then the first inscription would be false, etc.
If you are pointing out that would be unstable in that way, or 'meaningless', then OK. good point.
(I did specify that I see the statement "Both inscriptions are false" as false rather than just meaningless, though, and the first inscription would be of that same form if the second one were false.)
In any case I still defend the jester's impression that statements have truth values (excluding 'meaningless' ones, as necessary), while still faulting him for something else entirely:
He was (still) modelling his solution after the earlier problem he had constructed (with the frog and the gold), or he was assuming a situation in which none of the statements were 'meaningless'. Neither was warranted.
(That is one step closer to what many commenters have mentioned, but "This box contains the key." is plainly just false, not unconnected to the world.)
All of these comments on the jester wrongly assuming the box inscriptions related to the world seem overwrought to me. I created this account just to make this point (and because this site looks amazing!):
The jester's only mistake was discounting the possibility of both inscriptions being false.
That's it...the inscriptions (both) 'being false'. Not 'pertaining to the real world', not 'having truth values'...just 'being false'.
He figured out that it could not be the case that both inscriptions were true---so far so good. He then assumed that it must be the case that one must be true and the other false, which was only allowing for 1 out of the 2... (read more)