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melting gummy bears
Bear goo has become an iconic phrase in connection with xorlo. The background of it is that there is no consensus on whether or not lo cribe can refer to bear goo. Arguments for both sides have been brought forth, and it tends to come down to philosophy. It also turns out that the question of bear goo is a broader one than xorlo. Below is a casual conversation about bear goo, which was held at the end of July 2013 on the #lojban IRC channel on freenode.
Btw, I would like to point out that the reason I kept saying "bear goo aside" when we were talking about xorlo was because I knew you were strongly opposed to the idea and I didn't want the discussion to revolve around something I felt was not central to the current point under discussion, and not because I thought bear goo was unthinkable. doi la latro'a :)
that is, making that equation makes sense requires a little bit of circularity, in artificially defining zilkancu to be distributive in its 3rd argument I still think bear goo is a dumb idea in the first place, but again, xorlo comes down to what zo'e is and what broda'ing means, not really what lo means if people come to a consensus that bear goo meets the definition of cribe, then the fact that it doesn't meet the definition of "bear" is superfluous the difference is that I completely reject that "anything to do with bears" i.e. zo'e ne lo ka cribe matches lo cribe
I understand. You view the universe as a set of predefined individuals, simply put. Not everyone does that, but it's common in math and classical logic.
not at all this is simpler than that: I just don't think bear goo cribes there's no a priori universal classification of cribe here I just never thought bear goo actually cribe'd, and that it was silly to say it did
there are still valid questions about whether things do: does a bear corpse cribe? how long after death does it stay that way? again, no there's a gray area bear goo is just way past it
I just don't think bear goo is ever there the gray area moves bear goo is just beyond the boundary, and by a long shot so it's never caught really, we agree on more than you think when I say that "I reject bear goo"
I think the difference is fairly marginal and again, bear goo doesn't really have anything to do with it, it doesn't change anything, it just changes the predicate
I could construe a context where cribe is enough/appropriate to identify/distinguish between different animals having been in some place, or maybe when following a trail.
xorlo didn't have anything to do with it then you're still not talking about a bear's physical presence at this moment (actually, I'm not even really sure what you were going for with that comment)
Let's say you and I are out in the jungle and following a trail. We come across some goo. We're trying to find Bear. But there are other animals there too So cribe or not.
if you said xu ta cribe I would say ki'a seriously not even ua nai (there's unfortunately not a thing between, where you say you understand the syntax but don't understand the basic semantic assumptions)
Okay. Now let's go the other direction, towards the root node. Say in said jungle, there live different animals: bears, birds, and tigers (or whatever). They are rare, so we see them rarely if at all. You and I take different paths through the jungle and meet again at the end of the day. You ask me "how many animals did you see?" I say: "Two. But I didn't see Tiger." Maybe I could add "I came across a big flock of birds this noon" I'd assume you to ki'a or something again. Obviously, you say, I saw more than two animals if there was a flock of birds
Dynamic to me would at least imply that i can call a flock of birds a single bird. Since, at the beginning of our journey, went out to find three animals: bears, tigers, birds.
was distracted for a sec so the bear dies, and immediately after it dies, I identify it as a bear: it has bear teeth, bear claws, bear fur, bear shape, etc. as it decays, it starts looking less like a bear its fur falls out, its teeth and claws decay eventually its skin is removed etc. much later, it is composted and incorporated into the soil by the time it is in the soil, it is most definitely not a bear but it is not determinate a priori when exactly it stopped being a bear
that is, there's a period when it was definitely a bear, extending throughout its life and through some of the aftermath of its death, and a period when it is definitely not a bear, long after its death, but there is a period where it is merely "bearish", and whether "bear" actually applies to it depends on other factors I would say yes, but that has more to do with "bear" than anything else
I don't know what a better term is, but only part of the system is static much of it is dynamic because as I said, there's no definite transition point where it stopped being a bear on the other hand, there is a region that is definitely bear and a region that is definitely non-bear but the middle is gray, fluid, and indeterminate
There are some absolute classifications you are applying on the universe and then use them once and for all, even if some things are dynamic, you have just shown that some things are not, for example the limits of cribe seem rather clear, and a flock of birds is never a bird.
hrm, I need to play with this issue that last point is a good one my internal resolution comes from my previous interpretation, which is more self-consistent than my current, somewhat wishy-washy one which is to say that lo za'u cipni cu cipni is a distributive statement but this is incompatible with the sruri lo dinju gi'e krixa perspective (which I still don't actually like, but for more practical than philosophical reasons) when I say "internal resolution", I mean the answer that manifests before I've had to compare perspectives etc.
it's between the two, Rnuomer I prefer to think of selbri as noun-verbs, and consider the best brivla to have place structures that are neither truly nounish nor truly verbish
note that in lojban, the issue you're talking about wouldn't happen, selpa'i you would've said mi viska lo cipni not "I saw a bird" and I wouldn't have concluded it was singular where we perhaps run into trouble is mi viska lo pa cipni if a flock of birds cipni, then lo pa cipni is ambiguous as to whether it is actually a flock or not
despite seemingly being explicitly singular sorta; in english nouns are themselves content-words in lojban the only sumti that are content-words are KOhA cf. "dog" vs. "gerku"
my notion of noun-verb is a bit vague; the point is that it has to do with both a state of being and a state of action nounish selbri are about states of being; verbish selbri are about states of action; noun-verbish selbri build in both, describing what something is via what it does and vice versa
loi is explicitly non-distributive lo is explicitly not explicit about distributivity (nor about whether distributivity even makes sense, if there are no quantifiers present)
well is the flock birding together as one unit? or do they each individually bird, as a mass? a mass of birding things? (shush me if I'm being dumb though =:x)
I tend toward prototype logic. I have in my head an image of the prototype "Bird", and things either fall into the empirical cluster in thingspace that triggers that concept, or they don't. Things at the edges get iffy, and then I back up and start having to talk about what they actually are.
e.g. flying I mean "what does it take to qualify as "flying"" we can clearly say that someone standing on the ground is in fact not flying relative to the ground, anyway
for this linguistic discussion along with a concept from probability anyone care to hear it? I can give an intuitive description of the math it'll take about a paragraph
you can imagine, without having to go through all the math, a process of diffusion in a force field that is, a particle moves around randomly in space, but depending on its position in space it may be pushed more in one direction or another you can now imagine labeling two distinguished regions A and B; A definitely has some property and B definitely doesn't (the physical example is a chemical system, where A is definitely reactants and B is definitely products) this diffusion system induces a function called a committor, which is the probability of getting to B before going back to A, from each point x the committor is a "reaction coordinate", in the sense that as it increases, the system is "more B-ish", and as it decreases, the system is more "A-ish" going back to the force field for a second, in physical examples the force field is the gradient of some energy, that is, the system tries to decrease in energy for the most part now that we have an energy, we can talk about temperature; specifically, in these systems the committor depends strongly on the temperature when temperature is low, the energy is the dominant contributor, the system stays away from high energy areas, and the committor abruptly goes from near 0 to near 1 as you pass over an energy barrier when temperature is high, the energy is a less important contributor, the system goes pretty much everywhere, and the system gradually transitions from near 0 to near 1
you can stretch the metaphor a tad further, and imagine the diffusion as your mind going about its process of figuring out whether to assign a given input x to A or to b *B for "low T" or an input near A or B, it's a quick process which almost always has the same outcome for "high T" or input near the dividing surface, it can be a gradual process, and you sometimes conclude A, sometimes B
but unless the predicates depend on one another you could probably call that diffusion in several separate binary systems at once and yes, perfect logic requires perfect definitions
The seltau is telling you the area of T that it is more probable to be Narrowing lo mlatu includes lo cladu mlatu then Additionally, imagine the T of a gismu being centered on it and the seltau narrowing the field. Then it's hierarchical. Therefore you can say lo cribe goo and lo goo cribe and they don't mean the same thing. Since lo goo cribe is an entirely different T than lo cribe goo, you can't refer to bear goo as just lo cribe. It's a different logical subsection
Expanding the field analogy a little bit, imagine something, say some goo on the ground. Now, this goo is primarily a type of goo or something or other having to do with goo It is possible that it's from a bear But, the goo itself is primarily a different fuzziness region, T, than bear "bear goo" would then therefore lie outside the T of bear And cannot be termed lo cribe It's like electrons with different orbitals.
That's what this is. Probabilistic space. Such as, an electron is most likely at point A but can be contained anywhere within region T And is, and is not, simultaneously at all such points. lo mlatu may or may not be lo cladu mlatu
that's also taken, lol albeit by computer scientists but really, T is an important aspect of this, because it has to do with how sharply you care to delineate regions of the description space
I know, but the model naturally includes a temperature the volatility, informality, whatever you want to call it is intrinsic sometimes we want to have crisp, clean definitions; other times we don't
that would also have a temperature once you go to the thermodynamic limit I'm saying that there's not a fixed probability measure when you're joking around among friends, terms blur and mix more freely than when you're in a courtroom
(as an aside, quantum is not purely probabilistic; if that were the case, transitions between observable states would be impossible) but yes; broda is a less crisp region of description space than brode broda
perhaps, perhaps not depends on if you claim that there is a crisp region at all with mlatu in particular there probably is, but with other selbri this may not be so obvious
sure on the other hand, if you define lo broda as zo'e ne lo* ka broda, where "lo*" is a magic thing that makes a ka like we normally use it, then it's not confusing
since bear goo does in fact have something to do with being a bear, even if it isn't itself actually a bear eh, that doesn't exactly fix it, though, because we don't talk about the potential directly
if a flock of birds cipni, and you see one flock of birds, then you saw lo pa cipni, even if the flock had 10 birds in it and yes, of course there's deceptiveness, that didn't need a probabilistic interpretation to be concluded :)
not...exactly I'm using english as metalanguage here so don't gloss cribe as "bear" you can restructure the description space so that cribe is "living bears" and cribe morsi is "bear corpses"
which for a computer would be more neural network: when presented with a bear-candidate, what fires? how does this compare to something that we definitely call a bear? for example, to me a living bear is more bearish than a bear corpse
even a fresh one I'd still call a fresh bear corpse a bear but my potential has gone up by that point then as it decays it goes up further, and sometime before the point where I can't even tell it was a bear, the potential is so high that it's not worth thinking about
I think selpa'i's potential rises less sharply as the bear dies based on our discussion in general I think selpa'i is "hotter" than I am, in this formalism
You can't remove all the uncertainty, but you can diminish most of it. Definitions need to be specific, or people may speak with the knowledge that no matter what, they'll never be able to completely remove the fuzziness from the meaning. Meh .i mi xagji
To me it's very difficult to priorly define a personal scale of potential, as everything is highly sensitive to context; the psychology isn't static throughout time. Making up a scale here and now is to some extent futile (or requires a lot of imagination and foresight) as the universe "collapes" time and again and needs to be re-differentiated each time.
but the boundaries themselves (in the sense of the potential, not sharply delineated regions) move slowly for example the fact that a bear corpse is less bearish than a living bear is an invariant for me the idea that a bear corpse is a bear is not the probability is always lower, but it could be a difference of 1 vs. 0.9 or 1 vs. 0.5 the tricky thing about all this is that there is SOME effective nonexistence of context er nonrelevance I guess if there weren't we would never be able to communicate
I'm saying that there are some basic assumptions that are so absurdly hard to break that it doesn't matter, or at least so it seems if there weren't, we wouldn't be able to depend on those assumptions to communicate a blunt example: "assumption" does not mean "fish", ever
perhaps one sensible assumption is that the potential is finite on a bounded region, where the bounds are invariant that is, there are some things that might in a bizarre context be bears, but aren't ruled out a priori and some things that are usually bears, and some things that are always bears and then everything else is never ever a bear- on a more practical note
Could your model be called a dynamic-range-but-definitely-always-some-endpoint Ready-Madeist view? Since your dead bear scale is flexible-ish, but always has some endpoint. And this would fit with your idea of there being things that can never ever cribe
then there's absolutely nothing to get the static endpoints from because prior to that I'd only said that there are "practical static endpoints", which means it's not in the model at all just a consequence so, no, don't call it that anyway on a more practical note
I'm not sure whether that postulate should be built into the model, or if you should instead have an unbounded potential that just tails off for most predicates so don't quote me on it being built in because it's not ANYWAY been trying to change the subject for 5 minutes I'd like to try and work out the lo du'u mi viska pa loi za'u cipni cu nibli lo du'u mi viska pa lo cipni thing "I see a flock of cipni; a flock of cipnicipni's; therefore I see one cipni (namely, the flock)" provided loi za'u cipni cu cipni, everything else passes through I should have said "one flock", however, not "a flock"
Interesting, you seem to be taking this whole thing from a whole 'nother angle. This is an entirely different dimension of the "I see one bird" thing. In my example, it was about slicing up the universe in such a way that a flock of birds (all of a single species probably) are seen and described as a single bird, because in that particular universe the distinction between those individual flock members doesn't exist. There literally is only one bird there. This is what happens in a non-ready-made universe. The universe always starts out as a big clump, and can be sliced up in infinitely many ways, and then stuff happens post-differentiation. In a ready-made view, the universe gets sliced up once and never collapes again. In non-RM, it always goes back to a clump.
I know but even in this view you can have it that single birds cipni and flocks of birds cipni then take a bunch of single birds, put them in a group say that the group cipni see the group and now say that you saw only one thing that cipni
but I would be inclined to agree with it for cipni and such at least, naively this "gotcha" makes me hesitant, but if I hadn't considered it, I would have no issue with loi cipni cu cipni
uhh avoid go'i, please because attempting to answer your question confused me you replaced the only sumti that was filled so it wasn't clear whether go'i was actually just cipni or "the previous sentence's cipni" in idiomatic lojban it'd be the former if all the sumti were replaced at any rate, pa da cipni definitely doesn't happen but you could group the universe such that pa da cu cipni gi'e gunma that's the problem with masses, the speaker is free to build and dismantle them also, these outer quantifiers play differently with "cognitive" predicates vs. "noncognitive" predicates for example, if I see a flock of 10 birds, pa cipni cu zvati is false, but mi viska pa cipni can be true if I see the flock but can't pick out individual birds (maybe make it 1000 birds)
You can look at the flock, see individual birds, and still claim that pa cipni cu zvati (because extra birds don't add a count to how many different birds you perceive), that's the example I explained earlier. It's most simple to imagine (I think) if you let all the flock be eagles, then an eagle more or less doesn't change that there is just one bird, namely the eagle.
that's deceptive at best you observe pa cipni cu zvati, but you're wrong, because the components are also birds a problem is that in fact a very large number of cipni are present supposing there's 10 birds in a flock present, then you have the 10 singletons, the 45 pairs, the 120 triples, etc. so many hundreds of cipni are "present" because every subgroup exists, even if not every subgroup matters in fact an even larger number of subgroups exist when you start allowing for bird goo; for example, a whole bird+another bird's liver is perhaps a cipni too
See, this is why I keep thinking that you are RM-ist. And this is not in any way meant in a bad way, it's simply a different perspective. Either you can't perceive the universe non-RM, or you just find it horrible. Which is it? Because I am trying to explain that they don't, in a way, exist.
2) groups of birds are birds er groups of birds are cipni conclusion: >1000 cipni exist and while I can imagine it, it's sufficiently impractical that I don't really care to bother xorlo isn't worth sacrificing outer quantifiers as a concept for nothing is, really we need them to be communicative there's a point when I stop caring about the philosophy of all this because it's so far down the rabbit hole that it doesn't mean anything anymore I feel the same about most of the attempts that have been made at formalizing subjunctivity anything that involves outer quantifiers not meaning what they should mean is so far down the rabbit hole that it's gone to china and back 1000 times already going back to my example supposing there are 10 birds the way we mean it in english
What they should mean? They still do what they do, namely they quantify over something. They don't tell you what the domain of discourse is, or about cardinality, but why should they?
why are there only 10 cipni, if we acknowledge that groups of birds are birds the problem is that you can't change the domain of discourse so we have to have a sane one
if you can regroup things and also can express that there are 10 birds on a branch in the sense that english means, then you're going to have to have that a flock of birds isn't a bird sets are awkward as hell for a lot of reasons they don't actually do anything other than cmima and se mei they encode other things but that's indirect
the issue is that we've acknowledged that lo za'u broda cu broda and that lo za'u broda cu [do something that they can only do as a group] and that this is at the same level of predication (I've proposed having distinct CU for different levels of predication more than once) (I've never liked masses-as-sumti) (it's orthogonal to the real issue, which is how the plural entity behaves)
...you don't have to equate sets and single birds for that to work. you just have to have a cardinality function that's defined over the intersection of 'Set a' and 'a'
a plural group of students has a collective property of surrounding the building and an individual property of screaming the big gap that this opens is that it may not always make sense to assume that a mass is openable but then you just respond to an individual statement with na'i and all is well
ksf: not really; there are fundamental obstacles to actually building this sort of thing up from set theory in particular the old "what are the members of pi?" question set theory is terrible it's an awkward foundation that is really only nice because it shows that you don't have to assume that much to get off the ground
If we consider the definition of the inner quantifier, lo PA broda = zo'e noi ke'a broda zi'e noi zilkancu li PA lo broda, it turns out that inner quantifiers just need to "quantify" over instances of lo broda Then, we say that lo broda can just produce any type.
Let me explain. I can make it quite concrete: I don't consider lo ro ninmu in do melrai lo ro ninmu to "stand in" for lo'i ro ninmu. Instead, my definition of traji doesn't use a set.
(btw, ksf, I don't want to be rude, but I'd appreciate if you stopped with the set theory/type theory discussion; it's been beaten to death by this community already, and it's long since accepted that it's not adequate)
If lo broda is explicitly not explicit about distributivity (in other words, it can produce individuals or collectives) then the zilkancu equation of the gadri proposal lets lo pa cipni be a flock of birds without saying that a flock of birds is a bird. (That's the main difference that I'm pointing out.)
tsani: Depends on what you mean by types again. I don't reject the idea that a du'u cannot dacti, so clearly I agree with types, so what exactly do you mean? If you mean that I find rigid-typing a bit inconvenient (i.e. sumti places being super limited in what they can take), then yes, I do.
I agree that it may have been unintentional on xorxes's part, but to be honest, and being somewhat acquainted with his ideas by proxy of selpa'i, then I'm inclined to think that this awkward consequence was intentional.
