As a follow-up to an earlier post, where I described how natural laws arise as a result of qualities, this post explores this idea further using an example. Since modern science grew out of the idea that matter is res extensa—i.e., that it has only one property of extension in space—this post also illustrates the lawfulness as a result of the...
This post elaborates on the Sāńkhya theory of the five “gross” elements. The theory is rather complicated, and not well-understood today. One primary source of confusions is a comparison between the Sāńkhya elements and the Greek elements going by the same name. This post will hopefully illustrate how the Sāńkhya elements are deeply enmeshed with a model of perception and a...
In an earlier post, I described the problem of computing in nature, namely that scientific laws employ mathematical formulae, but it is not clear how these formulae are being calculated in nature. The reasons for this are historical and date back to Newton’s formulation of the three laws of motion. While Newton had produced mechanics, he had not himself envisioned machines....
Since the advent of computers, it has been widely believed that the human mind is just like a computer. I have previously described why this is a false analogy due to two problems: (1) the problem of meaning, and (2) the problem of choice. I have also discussed the problem of meaning in computing theory in the book Gödel’s Mistake. However,...
In earlier posts—such as here—I described the notion of space in which words are identical to their meanings, and connected it to a tree-like structure of space. In the last post, I described how this tree-like structure of space appears in all languages in trying to decode their meanings. In this post, I will briefly discuss the empirical evidence that supports...
Since the 1960s, when computers first appeared, a machine that can think just like humans was claimed to be just a few years away. This idea has been called Artificial Intelligence (AI) and it reappears every few years in a new form, the latest being the brouhaha around “Machine Learning”, “Deep Learning”, etc. The algorithms and techniques underlying these trends have...
This post describes a problem in Evolutionary Theory that arises when we consider why all living beings eventually die. I will compare the death of a living being to a computer program that halts after completing execution. The issue of program halting is problematic in computing theory because current computing models do not incorporate meanings. A similar problem exists for living...
