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Still reading the article, but upon reading > Despite these difficulties, the cognitive notion of a continuum is not at all difficult to grasp. The difficultie

Still reading the article, but upon reading > Despite these difficulties, the cognitive notion of a continuum is not at all difficult to grasp. The difficulties arise only when trying to communicate, for example by naming or describing all the real numbers. But one can understand without communicating. I feel it's important to point out that humans are very good at convincing themselves that they have done a great job of understanding things when they have not. Including brilliant minds. Since this is in "trust our intuitions" territory about, essentially, philosophy of mind, it's worth bringing along this awareness.

kirkules 4y ago
I also think it's notable that somehow DNA "encoding" our minds for mind-inheritance is ruled out using the channel capacity theorem. Shouldn't this same kind of argument rule out the transferral of minds from one moment to the next, unless minds do not actually arise from our bodies? In other words, does this criticism by Lee commit to mind-body dualism?
- pencilguin 4y ago
  It demonstrates that the statement is nonsensical.
bell-cot 4y ago
>> [...] cognitive notion of a continuum is not at all difficult to grasp. The difficulties arise only when trying to communicate, for example by naming or describing all the real numbers. But one can understand [...] Notice that one can do a very similar analysis after replacing "continuum" with "rules of the game of chess" and "naming or describing all real numbers" with "name or describing all positions which could occur in a chess game". You don't need uncountable infinities, topological oddities of R, subtle but deep differences from how the real world works, etc. to get out to where humans aren't all that good at understanding things.
zmgsabst 4y ago
In fact, the formalization of calculus (and in particular, continuity and differentiability via limits) came about because people had different intuition about “continuous” functions. I would say the implications of a continuum versus a dense cloud of rationals is incredibly unintuitive.

kirkules 4y ago

I also think it's notable that somehow DNA "encoding" our minds for mind-inheritance is ruled out using the channel capacity theorem. Shouldn't this same kind of argument rule out the transferral of minds from one moment to the next, unless minds do not actually arise from our bodies? In other words, does this criticism by Lee commit to mind-body dualism?

pencilguin 4y ago
It demonstrates that the statement is nonsensical.

bell-cot 4y ago

>> [...] cognitive notion of a continuum is not at all difficult to grasp. The difficulties arise only when trying to communicate, for example by naming or describing all the real numbers. But one can understand [...] Notice that one can do a very similar analysis after replacing "continuum" with "rules of the game of chess" and "naming or describing all real numbers" with "name or describing all positions which could occur in a chess game". You don't need uncountable infinities, topological oddities of R, subtle but deep differences from how the real world works, etc. to get out to where humans aren't all that good at understanding things.

zmgsabst 4y ago

In fact, the formalization of calculus (and in particular, continuity and differentiability via limits) came about because people had different intuition about “continuous” functions. I would say the implications of a continuum versus a dense cloud of rationals is incredibly unintuitive.