Some of the flip flops are dedicated to memory storage, others are dedicated to input processing; some to internal systems regulation, and yet others are dedicated to pattern recognition. Any single flip flop doesn't know anything about the whole contraption.

But when my wife walks into the room, the groups of flip flops associated with my input processing cause my pattern recognition flip flops to search through memory. Upon finding a match -- hey, hon -- a bunch of other groups of flip flops come online and I think, "shit, I forgot to take out the trash".

A programmer is required to flick existing switches to represent analog phenomena. Every last analog word that Siri discretizes into bits and matches with existing bits was placed there intentionally. Your state machine wife has “hey hon” from some analog element, not another bank of switches.

Where did “nature” get the original definitions for your (and wife’s) base reference switches? She can’t possible be a discrete state machine too, because no bank of switches can represent other banks without an innate differentiator based on some kind of non contraptional elements. “No idea” does not work here.

 

A programmer is required to flick existing switches to represent analog phenomena.

The machines we use were designed for some specific purpose. CPUs are rather special in that they were designed to be general purpose, capable of doing a few tasks that can be strung together to perform pretty much any kind of task. This makes computers vastly more powerful than, say, screwdrivers.

A program is a specific recipe that a CPU can follow. There are an unlimited number of possible programs. One day, we may find a program that can pass any Turing test we care to throw at it. Maybe.

Colloquially, we say that organisms are designed by nature. What we mean is that certain molecules have a physical affinity for combining into more complex forms. Some fundamental physical imbalance -- likely energy/entropy -- drives this process. Over billions of years, this complexification process can lead to a stunningly diverse array of molecular organization that we call "organisms".

The "design" of these organisms is found through trial and error, weighed against a simple utility function: how successful an organism is at reproducing. "Programming" occurs at the molecular level, and its effects bubble up the complexity hierarchy. The gamut of organisms compete for resources, creating a biosystem feedback loop. Life has dynamics.

A human brain is a particularly powerful solution to these dynamics. The "base reference switches" are the simple entropy-increasing interactions that started the whole mess. There is a vast difference in complexity between "I love you" and a hydrogen bond, but they are fundamentally the same thing.

 

Over billions of years, this complexification process can lead to a stunningly diverse array of molecular organization that we call "organisms".

Again! You want to talk Harry Potter, his immediate family, and cousins!? That statement has more nebulosity in it than holes in my shower head! As a "state" machine, you don't even know what "passage of time" is outside your own clock cycles that you didn't even set!

I thought nature was a state? A "state" is a representation of something... what is the something it's representing independent of the "state??" You're using a bevy of these complex interrelated wave forms that are reflective of vibrations of things somewhere outside yourself with further analog waves that represent them. You'd want me to agree to their existence as "objective truth." What are these things that are vibrating that represent the states? You must be ultra specific!! You do not know what those things are outside yourself! Van Halen can't be a bag of states, their music a bag of states, but also "vibrate" Panama to you? That which is "digital" is a "digitization" of the analog vibration of something. There is a complete disconnect here between the states and what they "mean." Meaning is separate from states. Digital states don't mean anything without representation of a REAL or REALITY-based something!

And how do you know the difference between "complex and simple and simple over this thing called years?" Like an adder knows how many switches it has or what they represent???????

 

LOL. Still, even if it's just 3% of the population, that's still hundreds of millions of people. It is an incredible understatement to say that perception is fallible.

Understatement?? You really need to use more emoji to indicate when you're being sarcastic, because LOL on the equality of "defect" with "alternate perception" here! We got 100,000 CMYK inkjet printers, and 97,000 of them have full ink in each cartridge to print a photo of a dog in 300 DPI color. The other 3,000 printers have some combination of missing inks — some magenta, some black, yellow, cyan, etc. It causes them to print the dog incompletely and with streaks. Do those printers have an "alternate way of printing the dog?" No: They have an incomplete way of printing the dog. The ink is the missing cones in the eyes. They're not rendering the photo incorrectly because they have an "alternate take" as if it's equally legit. If your friend could have gotten a quick drive-through surgery in 2070 to fix his color-blindness in 5-minutes at McLasiks, you think he'd "pass it up" because he's interested in holding on to his "other perception??"

I think you're missing the point. Even if The Dress is the most extreme example, there's an enormous sh!t load of extreme examples of sensory WTFness. Given how gullible and ridiculously unreliable our perceptions are, I don't understand how anyone would want to use them as the starting point for truth!

"Truth," he says! You mean when order internally is reflective of the order externally? What is that order again?

Seriously, there has never, ever, ever, ever, been anything even remotely near that dress (or audio recording), as on the order of confusing traffic lights via the entire worldwide population to the point where families were split up due to the abject madness created.

I clarified that point on the senses... I'm talking about internal sense irrespective of the sensors. There is an optimal order system within the mind that is the reference plumb line. A C major triad is a resonant reference within every human being. It is objective. A 1-4-5 progression is objective. It is "truth" in music. One uses his ears vs. the inner standard to know the difference. RGB mixtures of color is the "truth" in imagery. It is objective. One uses his eyes to know the difference.

 

So Hector, there’s a very, very good reason I’m “base 2” or bust as the fundamental.

Because when you got your ticket for going 80 in a 55 in that thing called REALITY back then, which is “something” outside your truth states that you insist on saying independently exists with a thing called “truth” that objectively reflects things IN it, and that you insist I also agree to, and that you insist your states align with, there were only 2 options:

You either showed up in court (TRUE) or you didn’t (FALSE).

Even the court’s very existence is separate from the TRUTH state denoting whether or not it does, or if you showed up, in the like manner that damn “dog exists in the light” independent of the state that registers this fact, which is attestable by living sensorial observation independent of your truth state circuits. It EXISTS, AND it’s TRUE that it exists. Two different things. There is not a TRUSE, or FLUE, or some other combo. Even if states are correlated, there are still two discrete fundamental states in existence. The brain is not a truth state housing truth states. It exists. It is TRUE it exists, but that’s separate from its existence.

To insist the logic states in Siri concerning the weather are “knowing about the weather” vs. your cognition makes just no sense.

You and every human are insistent on converting strings of truth state binaries back to abstractions to derive meaning. You use a table to do that. 10101010101010100001101 = partly cloudy, 86° in Miami. The latter symbology consciously correlates to REALITY to you, the former does not!

But she (componental “it”) on the contrary, is “insistent” on converting the same abstractions to binaries for her “sense” because that’s all she’s got!

If I insisted on telling you truth state 0101011010010101110110 is the weather, you’d say, “get REAL — what do you MEAN.” To her, there is no conversion necessary to “grok” because she doesn’t know OR grok. She matches, compares, and computes using truth states only. You do more than that, or binaries would be sufficient on input, processing, AND output to have MEANING.

Why? Because 011100011011 is ONLY CODE FOR the weather, not the weather itself. You demand the CODE to be converted to spatial reality forms internally to have “meaning.” Truth states have ZERO meaning to you unless you ALSO know what they correlate to in yourself vs. reality. It’s the reason why there’s even the possibility I could convince you mathematical objects are stand alone phenomena! The very possibility of this making “sense” is plenty evidence they do!!

You know 010101011010101 is different than “partly cloudy” — the real, observable elements in REALITY. She does not, and never will, because she is not alive and doesn’t know what reality is that her binary truth states correlate to in REALITY.

“But what about the switch with 6 possibilities?”

The switch’s 6 possible states are not existentially fundamental. The switch’s EXISTENCE is. The 6 states of the switch only exist because the switch does. The switch exists, or it does not. Configurations of the switch are symbolic form transformations, not elementary existential states.

I’m WELL aware that ocho and 8 are symbolic elements for the stand alone thing we’re referencing, but I argue even the stand alone thing “NUMBER” is itself a spatial abstraction.

So there are two fundamental observable states in existence: exists, or doesn’t. Event happened, or didn’t. A voltage is sufficient to flick the switch or it is not. I build the concept of numbers off this “presence or absence” element. Trits, quats, and sh!ts are all abstractions beyond the most elementary of dual states. A bit is a QED’d fundamental quantity for that reason. It is defined as exactly two logical potentialities. It a quantity and ALSO a truth state potential. We can then map unique symbologies to denote concatenated combinations of these truth states. Those unique amalgamating symbologies we call numbers.

Base 1 doesn’t work to denote a thing being “there” or “not” with respect to the voltages in a digital system. We need two fundamental states to get logic gates to evaluate two different truth state possibilities in a system that we can create logical computation within it, that we program to have “meaning” to ourselves when mapped to our internal, objective abstractions.
Again, sufficient voltage or insufficient voltage to flick a switch and yield a flip-flopped state.

101011101 is code for C major, and C major is code for the 3 fundamental waves that existentially compose it. We can ENCODE the primary wave and change one waveling to G# and have Caug. But again, the truth states represent the waves, and then we convert them back to continuous analog for meaning to US, not the DAW and plugin that did it! The bits are kept discrete in the system until the final DA conversion. No one bit-processing part in the system is aware of the final conversion that yields the meaning.

And we can do any computation with them that yield new truth state bit sequences that can be abstracted further into “magically” (read: consciously) amalgamated numbers. There are no numbers in Siri. There are bits. There are bits AND numbers in you and every other living being.

I’m not entirely ok with “logical” for internal sense for that reason, because that’s the church talking again, insisting logic truth states alone are the basis of sensical meaning in a living human being and they are positively not as demonstrated.

It is from this base phenomenon in REALITY that “1” or “0” stands for TRUE OR FALSE that something is or isn’t, that there is presence or absence. I therefore equate presence with a fundamental quantity or absence with a fundamental quantity.

1 is a number and truth state.
0 is a number and truth state.

Other numbers do not directly qualify because they are symbolic amalgamations beyond the simplest, elementary ontology, unless they are simply equated with 1 or 0’s duality in the end. And it is why I propose “master set” O {0, 1} for the ontology of all numbers.

 

What’s denoting the rules of symbological transfer from one number to another?? Not MORE NUMBERS!! It’s an innate order!

 

As a "state" machine, you don't even know what "passage of time" is outside your own clock cycles that you didn't even set!

I don't understand what exactly you're disputing. "Passage of time" is a CONCEPT, an association of general changes in state with the CONCEPT of periodicity. We design clocks to mark time by COUNTING radiation emmition in cesium atoms, which are periodic events. Nature designed us to mark time by COUNTING solar transitions, as the Sun is the most obvious periodic event on Earth. What's the problem?

I thought nature was a state?

Nature is a set of states. Typically, "nature" refers to the subset of the universe (the set of all states) that seems to have a more direct influence on us, i.e., "Earthly states".

A "state" is a representation of something... what is the something it's representing independent of the "state??"

No. A state is a particular configuration of information. An infromation processor may subsequently interpret the information as representing something, but the information itself -- the raw material, as it were -- has no absolute representation.

A simple example: by some physical process (which we can elucidate, but it's irrelevant here), a subset of the state of a RAM chip can be configured into a particular sequence of high and low voltages. We may interpret this sequence as the bit string "01000001". A computer may interpret the sequence as the number 41, or as the ASCII symbol "A", or as a sample value in an audio recording corresponding to the magnitude "0.16016 V".

None of those interpretations is the "right one", because there is no absolute representation. Information is reference-agnostic.

You're using a bevy of these complex interrelated wave forms that are reflective of vibrations of things somewhere outside yourself with further analog waves that represent them. You'd want me to agree to their existence as "objective truth."

No. I've repeatedly said that I don't believe we have access to "objective truth" (outside, perhaps, of math), so how could I possibly want you to agree to the "existence" of any such thing?

What are these things that are vibrating that represent the states?

Acoustic information is transferred by modulating air pressure. This is achieved by supplying energy to a local group of air molecules. Molecules, of course, are little state machines, and they are comprised of even smaller state machines. But we don't need to get into quantum field theories because, at the air pressure level, the air is a state machine, with each of its molecules holding a small slice of its state. The acoustic wave is nothing more than a periodic change in the air's states.

Van Halen can't be a bag of states, their music a bag of states, but also "vibrate" Panama to you?

Of course. EVH is a complex state machine, and Panama is particular sequence of states.

That which is "digital" is a "digitization" of the analog vibration of something.

Analog and digital are CONCEPTs. We can use them to help us describe the world around us, but that doesn't mean that the world around us is fundamentally analog and/or digital. This becomes clear once we realize that any process that we label as analog has an equivalent process that we would label as digital.

In information theory, we express this with the theorem that an analog computer with noise has the same computing power as a digital computer. Fundamentally, there's no difference between analog and digital -- it's all conceptual. We only make the distinction at much higher levels of complexity, where some things tend to be easier to process in analog terms and other things tend to be easier to process in digital terms. It's much easier to calculate fluid turbulence with analog/continuum mathematics. Likewise, it's much easier to implement 96th-order filters digitally.

And how you do you know the difference between "complex and simple and simple over this thing called years?" Like an adder knows how many switches it has or what they represent???????

Complexity is well-defined. We can quantify a system's complexity by the amount of resources required to process or simulate it. Alternatively, we can quantify a system's complexity by its computational power. In this view, we treat everything as a machine (huzzah!) and characterize it by the simplest machine that can simulate it. For example, a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) is powerful enough to recognize regular languages (a formal language with a very restrictive grammar, like regular expressions), but not powerful enough to recognize context-free languages (a more expressive grammar, like HTML). Push-down automata (PDAs) can recognize context-free languages, and so are more powerful -- more complex -- than DFAs.

Turing machines trump them all. A Turing machine can simulate any DFA, PDA, etc. Indeed, any Turing machine can simulate any other, and so a Turing machine can recognize whether another machine is a DFA or whatever. Human brains are at least as powerful as Turing machines, therefore, human brains can recognize the difference between simple and complex systems.

How do we recognize complexity over the history of Earth? Machines from the past leave remnants in the fossil record that we study. We have a pretty good notion of how life complexified over the past 4 or so billion years.

 

We got 100,000 CMYK inkjet printers, and 97,000 of them have full ink in each cartridge to print a photo of a dog in 300 DPI color. The other 3,000 printers have some combination of missing inks — some magenta, some black, yellow, cyan, etc. It causes them to print the dog incompletely and with streaks. Do those printers have an "alternate way of printing the dog?" No: They have an incomplete way of printing the dog. The ink is the missing cones in the eyes. They're not rendering the photo incorrectly because they have an "alternate take" as if it's equally legit. If your friend could have gotten a quick drive-through surgery in 2070 to fix his color-blindness in 5-minutes at McLasiks, you think he'd "pass it up" because he's interested in holding on to his "other perception??"

I don't understand your point. Are you saying that there is one true perception (one true photo of a dog), and that anyone who doesn't perceive it exactly the same is like a printer with missing ink? How do you even know what the true perception is? Majority rules? How would you differentiate between perceptions? What if my royal blue is more like your navy blue?

There's no such thing as objective perception; it's a contradiction in terms.

Seriously, there has never, ever, ever, ever, been anything even remotely near that dress (or audio recording), as on the order of confusing traffic lights via the entire worldwide population to the point where families were split up due to the abject madness created.

Again, even if it is indeed the Supreme Perceptual Aberration, which I do not believe it is, so what? The fact that people can watch a video of a basketball game and NOT SEE a gorilla run across the screen is all the evidence I need. Any other of the myriad aberrations are just icing on the cake.

I clarified that point on the senses... I'm talking about internal sense irrespective of the sensors.

If you don't mean sense as in external sensory data, then please don't use the word "sense", else we'll keep circling confusingly down semantic drains.

There is an optimal order system within the mind that is the reference plumb line. A C major triad is a resonant reference within every human being. It is objective. A 1-4-5 progression is objective. It is "truth" in music.

We recognize a 1-4-5 progression because it has become a cultural standard. This is a matter of aesthetic taste, not absolute truth. A 1-4-5 progression would very likely sound weird to an ancient Roman, and utterly boring to a listener from 15th century Japan.

More to the point, consider your C major triad. Prior to the 17th century or so, it would have been played on an instrument tuned with just intonation, where each interval within an octave is defined by integer ratios of frequencies. This is the simplest resonance possible, which made Pythagoras very happy. But these simple ratios are physically impossible to maintain over more than a single octave. If you tune a piano to just temperament, you'll find that all of the other keys are progressively out of tune as you go up the scale.

So, we had to compromise. Now we use equal-temperament tuning, where we force octaves to retain their simple integer multiples of 2:1 ratios, but sacrifice the tuning of every other interval. Indeed, the distance in frequency between any two notes is an irrational number! Your C triad in 1584 sounded very different than it did in 1884.

Please answer this: Which triad was the "true" one?

RGB mixtures of color is the "truth" in imagery. It is objective. One uses his eyes to know the difference.

No. Consider how RGB color actually works. On a computer screen, each pixel is comprised of three tiny LEDs, one red, one green, and one blue. The LEDs in a pixel light up according to the magnitude of three numbers, one for each LED. By varying the numbers, most colors can be produced on the screen.

But how is the magnitude mapped to the LED brightness? That's dependent on both the LED itself and the monitor manufacturer's circuit. In other words, the color shown is device dependent. More still, given the various sources of physical error -- noise, component tolerances of LEDs, circuit variations, manufacturing tolerances, detoriation over time, etc. -- the probability is zero that two pixels will show the same color given the same RGB magnitudes. And this speaks nothing of the viewing environment or the human perception factor!

So, where is the "truth" in any given RGB color? Is it in the color shown (which varies), or the RGB magnitudes themselves (which map to a spectrum of colors), or in the wavelengths coming out of the monitor (which vary according to the ambient light), or in the perception of the person looking at the monitor?

 

Let’s concretize one definition at a time.

POINT An immeasurable thing (unbounded) that can be made measurable (bounded)

?

 

I don't understand your point. Are you saying that there is one true perception (one true photo of a dog), and that anyone who doesn't perceive it exactly the same is like a printer with missing ink? How do you even know what the true perception is? Majority rules? How would you differentiate between perceptions? What if my royal blue is more like your navy blue?

There's no such thing as objective perception; it's a contradiction in terms.


Again, even if it is indeed the Supreme Perceptual Aberration, which I do not believe it is, so what? The fact that people can watch a video of a basketball game and NOT SEE a gorilla run across the screen is all the evidence I need. Any other of the myriad aberrations are just icing on the cake.


If you don't mean sense as in external sensory data, then please don't use the word "sense", else we'll keep circling confusingly down semantic drains.


We recognize a 1-4-5 progression because it has become a cultural standard. This is a matter of aesthetic taste, not absolute truth. A 1-4-5 progression would very likely sound weird to an ancient Roman, and utterly boring to a listener from 15th century Japan.

More to the point, consider your C major triad. Prior to the 17th century or so, it would have been played on an instrument tuned with just intonation, where each interval within an octave is defined by integer ratios of frequencies. This is the simplest resonance possible, which made Pythagoras very happy. But these simple ratios are physically impossible to maintain over more than a single octave. If you tune a piano to just temperament, you'll find that all of the other keys are progressively out of tune as you go up the scale.

So, we had to compromise. Now we use equal-temperament tuning, where we force octaves to retain their simple integer multiples of 2:1 ratios, but sacrifice the tuning of every other interval. Indeed, the distance in frequency between any two notes is an irrational number! Your C triad in 1584 sounded very different than it did in 1884.

Please answer this: Which triad was the "true" one?


No. Consider how RGB color actually works. On a computer screen, each pixel is comprised of three tiny LEDs, one red, one green, and one blue. The LEDs in a pixel light up according to the magnitude of three numbers, one for each LED. By varying the numbers, most colors can be produced on the screen.

But how is the magnitude mapped to the LED brightness? That's dependent on both the LED itself and the monitor manufacturer's circuit. In other words, the color shown is device dependent. More still, given the various sources of physical error -- noise, component tolerances of LEDs, circuit variations, manufacturing tolerances, detoriation over time, etc. -- the probability is zero that two pixels will show the same color given the same RGB magnitudes. And this speaks nothing of the viewing environment or the human perception factor!

So, where is the "truth" in any given RGB color? Is it in the color shown (which varies), or the RGB magnitudes themselves (which map to a spectrum of colors), or in the wavelengths coming out of the monitor (which vary according to the ambient light), or in the perception of the person looking at the monitor?

The problem is, everything you are arguing is assuming a standard to argue against!

If there were no absolute reference points outside your states, imbued in you from God/Nature, you’d be in a looney bin.

The truth is symmetry, balance, and equality, period.

It is hypocritical for us to try and come to QED’s about existence and then say, “but they don’t really exist!”

If I hit a snare drum, label it a snare hit, anyone with ears will agree that waveform, with a margin of tolerance for deviation, is a SNARE hit. That is the truth. Same with any chord on any modern instrument. People with perfect pitch can hear the note and label it.

See this kid?

Perfect polyphonic pitch. He can hear any complex polyphonic chord played with ANY timbre and tell you the TRUTH about what chord it is. It’s very simple. This never changes. The chordal names of them might, depending on language, but the underlying phenomena does not.

The piano exists in reality, he exists in it, he hears the continuous-phenomena notes which resonates the reference “tuning forks” in him, and his discrete logic states ALSO register the phenomena as true or false independent of the underlying natural world phenomena. Anything else is the very objective truth called madness. QED.

And for the record, this kid does NOT have a brain-based database of every conceivable combination of notes and timbres. He could hear a combination of unique timbres and fourier transform the hell out of those waves and utterly waveling you across the room with every discrete one, including individual note names and closest timbre profile, because of his absolute reference point to reality. This exists elsewhere in the being from the material brain. The “senses” stand alone from the material sensors, and hold “Nature’s” reference points of beauty and order with which we can distort to create derivative reference points.

 

You either showed up in court (TRUE) or you didn’t (FALSE).

On table there's a large drinking glass with water. Please answer this question with a binary TRUE or FALSE response: The glass is full?

Even if states are correlated, there are still two discrete fundamental states in existence.

Not if they have quantum correlations. As I described in a recent post, entanglement leads to states which cannot be described by independent EITHER/OR characterizations. This is an empirical fact of our universe, and any ToE must be able to account for it.

The brain is not a truth state housing truth states. It exists.

I don't know what "exists" means other than the empty statement "is a member of the set of all sets". But I agree that the brain is not a truth state, though we can certainly represent it as a (very complicated) set of truth states.

To insist the logic states in Siri concerning the weather are “knowing about the weather” vs. your cognition makes just no sense.

It makes more sense than ascribing magical properties to "cognition".

10101010101010100001101 = partly cloudy, 86° in Miami. The latter symbology consciously correlates to REALITY to you, the former does not!

Absurd! What makes the symbols "partly cloudy" any different from "10101010" or whatever? You are mistakenly inferring that just because you can parse the symbols "partly cloudy", that it has some inherent connection to "REALITY" (whatever that is). Siri can parse "101010101" just as well as you can parse "partly cloudy". You have symbol bias, that's all.

But she (componental “it”) on the contrary, is “insistent” on converting the same abstractions to binaries for her “sense” because that’s all she’s got!

So far we have been assuming that Siri gets her weather report from the internet (just like I do). I've argued that we are doing the same thing, and know the same thing about the weather. You might say that I can go outside and "see and feel" the weather. But this is just sensory data. If Apple put a thermometer in its phones, and included an app that used the camera to compare images of the sky, Siri could "see and feel" the weather, too!

Just like with symbols, you are showing an anthropocentric bias toward our sensory modalities, placing them on exalted status. But we have no reason to so do. In fact, if we want to be as intellectually honest as possible, we must assume the opposite. Coming from a neutral place, we can rightfully ask, What is the difference between a human's experience of weather and a chimp's, or a fruit fly's, or a bacterium's? Thinking about it, the only difference I see is one of degree of complexity of the experience.

I can imagine the bacterium experiencing the weather something like "fine, fine, fine, fine ... too hot, too hot, too hot ... fine, fine, fine" which drives its response to the environment. My experience is more complex, but not entirely different: "Gee, it's kind of warm, let me turn up the A/C. Ah, that's better."

Now, you may claim that Siri doesn't care about the weather she reports, and that's all the proof we need: she's not responding to her environment. But I'd disagree. She truly does respond, though not in the ways we associate with organic life. If there is a dangerous weather situation, she alerts me. She knows the difference between good weather (display cartoon image of sunshine) versus bad weather (display cartoon image of rain clouds). It would even be easy to program her to respond more like organic life. Equipped with a moisture sensor, she could complain whenever she got wet.

"Knowing" the weather only means having states that are associated with environmental conditions. We have 'em, bacteria have 'em, and so does Siri.

If I insisted on telling you truth state 0101011010010101110110 is the weather, you’d say, “get REAL — what do you MEAN.” To her, there is no conversion necessary to “grok” because she doesn’t know OR grok. She matches, compares, and computes using truth states only. You do more than that, or binaries would be sufficient on input, processing, AND output to have MEANING.

Sweet lord. If I told you the weather in Swahili, you'd also say "what do you mean?" Symbols are symbols regardless of the language. It's just a matter of learning how to parse them.

Why? Because 011100011011 is ONLY CODE FOR the weather, not the weather itself.

Um, what do you think "partly cloudy" is? It's CODE for the weather, it is NOT the weather itself. How can you not recognize this?

Base 1 doesn’t work to denote a thing being “there” or “not” with respect to the voltages in a digital system.

Base-1 may not fit your model nicely, but it certainly works. It is mathematically indisuptable that a given number base is equivalent to any other. This literally means that, whatever we can do in one base, we can do in any other. Unary (base-1) computers have exactly the same computing power as binary (base-2) computers.

You're not recognizing it, but you are trying to force a binary pattern onto everything. Repeating "existence versus non-existence" over and over doesn't clarify or prove anything. In fact, let's get to the heart of your belief and find out what "non-existence" means.

Describe to me non-existence.

We need two fundamental states to get logic gates to evaluate two different truth state possibilities in a system that we can create logical computation within it, that we program to have “meaning” to ourselves when mapped to our internal, objective abstractions.

Patently false. Repeating myself, but computation is not synonymous with binary logic. We can make equally powerful computers with any number of logic states, including a continuum of them (analog computing). Again, for the hard of hearing: we do not need two logic states to perform computations.

Your prized 2-state ideal is just one example of an infinite number of ways to do/see/reason about things. Until you accept the indisputability of this, you'll be spinning your wheels in half-baked mud.

101011101 is code for C major, and C major is code for the 3 fundamental waves that existentially compose it. We can ENCODE the primary wave and change one waveling to G# and have Caug. But again, the truth states represent the waves, and then we convert them back to continuous analog for meaning to US, not the DAW and plugin that did it! The bits are kept discrete in the system until the final DA conversion. No one bit-processing part in the system is aware of the final conversion that yields the meaning.

There is no "meaning" until the final bit-processing part -- the brain of the listener -- processes it and gives it "meaning". In all its forms, from waves to voltages to neurons, the fundamental thing was information -- the information of the instrument playing what we call a C major chord. A third-year music student would find different "meaning" than a little old lady. The music student processes the waves and thinks "C major triad in first inversion". The little old lady hears it and thinks "that sounds nice, I miss my grandkids" or whatever.

I’m not entirely ok with “logical” for internal sense for that reason, because that’s the church talking again, insisting logic truth states alone are the basis of sensical meaning in a living human being and they are positively not as demonstrated.

You're the one insisting that everything is logical truth state. I believe that logical truth states are an arbitrary, unprivileged form of representation with no ontological significance. Logic states are your church, not mine.

I suggest LOGIC for "internal sense" because that's exactly what logic is -- an internal recognition of causal necessity. But whatever we call it, for chrissake, we need to stop using "sense" for it. Case in point: you said "truth states alone are the basis of sensical meaning", and I have absolutely no idea if you mean "sensical" in the internal or external way. We need to pick one and be done with it.

It is from this base phenomenon in REALITY that “1” or “0” stands for TRUE OR FALSE that something is or isn’t, that there is presence or absence. I therefore equate presence with a fundamental quantity or absence with a fundamental quantity.

So "1" stands for TRUE, i.e., is a symbol that can represent TRUE. Great. What about "5", can that stand for TRUE? For C compilers, surely it does:

if (5) { printf( "TRUE!\n"); } // will print "TRUE!"

So, what is so special about "1"?

1 is a number and truth state.
0 is a number and truth state.

No, you had it right just above. "1" is a symbol that can represent a number or a truth state (or a whole bunch of other stuff). "1" is neither a number nor a truth state, it is a SYMBOL. "TRUE" is also a SYMBOL.

Other numbers do not directly qualify because they are symbolic amalgamations beyond the simplest, elementary ontology, unless they are simply equated with 1 or 0’s duality in the end.

Prove it. Prove that 5 is a "symbolic amalgamation" whereas 1 is not.

Otherwise, it's just church-talk: You are annointing {0, 1} as the Chosen.

 

What’s denoting the rules of symbological transfer from one number to another?? Not MORE NUMBERS!! It’s an innate order!

I don't understand what you mean by "symbological transfer".

 

Let’s concretize one definition at a time.

POINT An immeasurable thing (unbounded) that can be made measurable (bounded)

?

Yikes, that definition needs to be taken out back and buried.

Seriously, I have no idea what that's supposed to convey. Take 2?

 

The problem is, everything you are arguing is assuming a standard to argue against!

Exactly the opposite, I'm saying that there is no absolute standard. Perception is subjective, not objective.

If there were no absolute reference points outside your states, imbued in you from God/Nature, you’d be in a looney bin.

Why?

The truth is symmetry, balance, and equality, period.

Now you sound like a mathematician.

It is hypocritical for us to try and come to QED’s about existence and then say, “but they don’t really exist!”

In a way, I believe that everything exists. To me, non-existence is far weirder than existence.

Here's how I conceptualize it: if a state or a set of states is a member of the total set of states (the universe), then that state or set of states EXISTS. Therefore, everything EXISTS.

If I hit a snare drum, label it a snare hit, anyone with ears will agree that waveform, with a margin of tolerance for deviation, is a SNARE hit. That is the truth.

So truth is a consensus? Consensus is weird, because groups of people are often very wrong about what they think they know. Just saying.

See this kid?
Perfect polyphonic pitch. He can hear any complex polyphonic chord played with ANY timbre and tell you the TRUTH about what chord it is. It’s very simple. This never changes.

I happen to be familiar with that kid, as I watch his dad's vlog from time to time. Being a musician and an engineer, I also happen to be pretty familiar with the phenomenon called "perfect pitch". So allow me to burst your bubble: there is no such thing as perfect pitch.

Most musicians, including me, have a good sense of "relative pitch". Play me a note and I can sing you the major third above it, or the minor seventh, or whatever. Play me three notes and I can tell you what their intervalic relationship is. But I cannot reliably name the notes, just their relationships.

Some people, however, have a remarkable ability to remember pitch. Play the third A above middle C and they'll tell you exactly what note you played. Lay your arm down on 10 keys on a piano and they'll spell out each note. Impressive! But not perfect pitch as you seem to be describing it (truth!).

First, all pitch is fundamentally relative. When my friend calls out "A" when I play an A note, he does so from memory, not from some innate resonance or whatever. We know this because people with "perfect pitch" adjust to whatever tuning they get used to. Sometime in the 20th century, we started using the reference A = 440 Hz to tune instruments. But this is completely arbitrary! We can, and do, and have used various other reference tunings. How do people with "perfect pitch" respond to different references? They lose their "perfect" pitch! But let them listen to the new reference for a few weeks and eventually they know what "A" sounds like again. This is because their sense of pitch is based on memory.

Second, the uncertainty principle guarantees that nothing can have perfect frequency discrimination, i.e., the ability to distinguish between two frequencies to an arbitrary resolution. A simple Fourier transform will show that, the more precise we require a frequency to be, the more time we'll need to describe it: the Fourier transform of a single frequency is a sinusoid in time. In other words, in order to be infinitely precise about a frequency -- it is exactly 42,000 Hz -- we'd require an infinite amount of time to describe it. This is impossible.

Third, we can create machines that are far more accurate than any human at detecting frequency. Like millions of times more accurate. The human ear has relatively poor frequency discrimination, and it gets significantly worse as frequency rises. This is just a consequence of how the cochlea works. People with "perfect pitch" cannot, for instance, tell the difference between 5000 Hz and 5001 Hz. We can, however, easily build a circuit to discriminate 5000 Hz and 5000.00001 Hz.

With all of this in mind, what is the "truth" that a person with "perfect pitch" hears? What if the computer sitting next to her claims a different "truth"?

There are no absolute, objective perceptions.

The chordal names of them might, depending on language, but the underlying phenomena does not.

In my intonation example, the underlying phenomena are exactly what changed. The chord names remain the same -- C major - but the frequencies invovled in the chords are entirely different, depending on the system of intonation used. So, which one is the "true" C chord?

And for the record, this kid does NOT have a brain-based database of every conceivable combination of notes and timbres. He could hear a combination of unique timbres and fourier transform the hell out of those waves and utterly waveling you across the room with every discrete one, including individual note names and closest timbre profile, because of his absolute reference point to reality. This exists elsewhere in the being from the material brain. The “senses” stand alone from the material sensors, and hold “Nature’s” reference points of beauty and order with which we can distort to create derivative reference points.

Demonstrably false. As every study of "perfect pitch" has shown, there is no absolute reference point. Some people have really good pitch memory, but it's always relative to some reference that they remember. Change the reference and their pitch recognition goes out the window. Where does this memory exist? In the brain.

 

Um, what do you think "partly cloudy" is? It's CODE for the weather, it is NOT the weather itself. How can you not recognize this?

I'm saying it's TWO levels of code: 01010101010 are concatenated bits of truth states FOR "partly cloudy" and "partly cloudy" is direct 1st tier code for "the actuality that is the weather in space and time."

Tell me, why do you insist on converting back and forth between them internally, if just one set of symbols represents "the weather?"

 

Shoot me a definition for POINT that works for you, and I'll see if I can throw a few piranhas at it so we can concretize it.

It's essentially immeasurable, sizeless, and boundless to me. The most "elemental" state of conceivability.

 

I'm sorry I must:



Ok. How do I describe "non-existence?"

I agree there is NO such thing as non-existence. EVERYTHING technically exists. Good semantic thing to point out actually.

When I said "non-existence," I mean provisional "property-lessness" (i.e., I consider "nothing" a form of something that has no discernible properties, as I mentioned in earlier posts).

If you cut your arm, only a mad man would say "I have no cut there." You have a cut there. When it heals, you have no cut. Two states: PRESENCE of cut, ABSENCE of cut. Cut exists, cut doesn't exist. You might have a small cut, or big cut. But only a madman says "I have no cut" when it's plainly "there."

Objective truth is right there. QED. 100% experiential, observable, logical truth. No one would deny you don't have a cut. Unless, of course, to you, you have no arm. In which case I'm going to take out a billboard near your home with that WTF gif. Actually right now, even as we speak, you're going to come back with, "But your arm is actually a Hilbert space vector that tensors to a black-hole near a clockless singularity in 87D space. I mean, how do you even define token "arm? " Arm is just another symbol that stands for 1011001. PROVE you have an arm! Go ahead, prove it!" Gotta give ya hard time. ;--)

If you have a cut on your arm, and want to assign a symbol to denote the truth of "presence of cut", what symbol would you use to denote this vs. "absence of cut?" You can use any symbol for each. 1, 0, 8, ∂, å, ¢. It doesn't matter.

The fundamental truth concerning the cut is whether or not it exists.

The symbol 0 is traditionally used to denote "absence" and the symbol 1 is traditionally used to denote "presence" (non-identifiable element vs. identifiable element). (Sure, you can reverse them, but you get the point).

This is the basis of binary logic that permits reasoning. You can't build a unary machine with only a "high state of voltage" that can also have a comparator chip. No can do. The chip must take contrasting inputs to give you an evaluation using XOR and NAND gates that use a duality of states to yield a result. QED.

And further to this, the storage of such computation is done on multiple flip-flops that remember the contrast!

Presence and absence is the essence of reasoning. No way around it. Otherwise everything is true and everything is false and there is no knowledge!

How do you plan on building a general purpose computer that only uses the presence of voltage on the line to represent whether or not you have a cut? And how do you plan on building a flip flop to store states if only one state is in existence?

 

You invoke "nature" as the basis of all your reference points. Everyone has to have the same origin.

2 issues I have with this:

1) If you are an n bit state processor alone, and nature is an n bit state processor, where is the continuous phenomena coming from, like a guitar string vibrating? State processors are not vibrating continuous phenomena. If nature has no reference points, how is it we do?

2) So perfect pitch is the "remembrance" of a pitch. Agreed. But the person first "heard" the pitch from a vibrating element in nature. Everyone hears A440. Some remember it, some don't. (I too only have relative pitch). Everyone has an ADC that is designed to filter that one frequency to flip flops as binary code. The code nor its relationship to nature's A440's continuous vibration doesn't change. In the same way green traffic lights are green traffic lights to literally everyone forever, unless they're blind or damaged. The "truth" is the objective connection between your states and nature's. Otherwise, WHY invoke nature as anything? NOTHING exists anywhere!
You couldn't get good at an instrument nor teach anyone else if there wasn't an objective standard that existed OUTSIDE you both!

Point is, the reference point in nature ITSELF never changes. That reference system is in every human being. What is your tongue SENSING if, there is no "strawberry" that exists "outside of states?"

 

I'm saying it's TWO levels of code: 01010101010 are concatenated bits of truth states FOR "partly cloudy" and "partly cloudy" is direct 1st tier code for "the actuality that is the weather in space and time."

No, they are both on the same level of abstraction.

The string "partly cloudy" represents a description of the weather to you as an English speaker, just as the string "1010101" represents a description of the weather to Siri as a machine language speaker. I suspect that you are confusing translation as another level of abstraction.

Consider the string "晴れときどき曇り". Assuming you don't understand Japanese, you would have to translate it to English before you could know that it says "partly cloudy". But this isn't another level of abstraction; to a Japanese speaker, the string is "directly" clear. The particular choice of symbols is arbitrary and irrelevant.

Note that "1010101" need not be an ASCII translation of the English symbols "partly cloudy". Indeed, at some point it cannot be. Who do you think decides that it's "partly cloudy" outside? In the old days, it used to be a bunch of underpaid humans that would note the cloud conditions with their eyes and report it to a main office. But now we mostly have automated reports, which use LIDAR and other sensors to determine what the clouds are doing. In other words, a bunch of Siris are telling us that it's partly cloudy, and our personal Siri reports it when we ask for the weather.

To these automatic weather stations, the state of the weather is not an ASCII string such as "partly cloudy". Rather, the state of the weather is the conglomeration of the data derived from various sensors. This is then translated to the 1s and 0s representation of "partly cloudy" for the ease of human consumption.

So, since the state of the weather started as "1010101" and not "partly cloudy", is "1010101" more fundamental or less abstract than "partly cloudy"? No, they are equivalent. The "1010101" and "partly cloudy" representations, regardless of their order of inception, are just symbols describing the same thing, the current state of the weather as observed by sensors (human or otherwise). One form is more appropriate to computer infromation processors, the other to human information processors. But they both have the same purpose: to inform the computer or human what the weather is.

Tell me, why do you insist on converting back and forth between them internally, if just one set of symbols represents "the weather?"

Clearly, I do not agree that only one set of symbols represents the weather. Any set of symbols can do it.

Before you attribute a claim to me, here's a handy heuristic you can use to determine if I actually believe it: If the claim designates a single thing or set of things as privileged or special in any way, then I do not believe it. This applies to symbols, number bases, geometries, molecular configurations, whatever.

 

Shoot me a definition for POINT that works for you, and I'll see if I can throw a few murder hornets at it so we can concretize it.

It's essentially immeasurable, sizeless, and boundless to me. The most "elemental" state of conceivability.

To me, a point is a geometrical object, and I don't need geometry to describe information. But if you feel it's useful, we can work on a definition. I will insist, however, that we do not confuse geometry, a mathematical space, with physical space. Though we can sometimes find useful analogies between mathematical and physical spaces, the two are not the same, just as a map is not the terrain. How do I know that they are not the same? I can do things to geometry with my mind that I cannot do to physical space.

With that, let's define a point.

A mathematical SPACE is the alegbraic structure that results when a number field is combined with one or more operations defined on the field.

We may consider the elements of a mathematical SPACE to be vectors. A map between vectors in the SPACE is called a function. Some SPACEs allow for a special function called an inner product that satisfies certain conditions. Such SPACEs induce a geometry by defining, among other things, the notions of length and angle within the SPACE.

A POINT is a vector in a geometrical SPACE.

We may describe a POINT by an n-tuple of numbers \( (x_1, x_2, ..., x_n) \). This representation is not unique. The minimum n necessary to describe a POINT is the DIMENSION of the SPACE.