This is just a place to collect cool abbreviations for arguments & whatnot. In cases where I've left out a reference it usually means I was just too lazy to add the link to wikipedia.
WAP, SAP The weak and strong anthropic principle, basically the universe has to be pretty special to have been friendly to human life. Strong version includes the mass of the universe, strength of gravity, all the other natural constants that make the universe "just so." There's Douglas Adams' beautiful comeback of the living puddle that wonderingly remarks how the universe fits it perfecty, "in fact it fits me staggeringly well." (Then the sun comes out and the puddle's custom designed universe inexplicably erases it's very reason for being: how could that BE?!) Neil Tyson answers this by talking about how much of the universe is actually hostile: stars sleeting radiation and vacuum and giant planets of frozen poison gas and so forth, but that seems more over-dramatic than on point.
Explosion, or ECQ is short for Latin: "ex contradictione quodlibet," meaning, "from contradiction, everything follows." Meaning the moon is made of cheese, etc. Chaos. It's a neat and logical argument that you can prove anything, if you let yourself begin with A and ~A.
FOL: First Order Logic constrains the domain of functional operations. This is tidy, avoids Russell's Paradox, implies his "types"?
HOL: Higher Order Logic allows recursion, at the expense of precluding mathematical completeness (see Goedel).
Hard Problem of consciousness is explaining why we have qualia. I think this is the same as asking "what am I?" meaning my sensation of self, vs just a bag of biological parts. Is this a, or maybe the non trivial example of emergence.
Laplace's Demon: is determinism, writ large. By knowing every particle's speed and position, the history could be predicted, forward and back through time. (No relation to Maxwell's demon, who reverses entropy by opening the thermos lid only when efficacious. (He works up a sweat though, so it's ok.))
Last Thursday(ism) is the assertion, common to creationists and solipsism, that "the earth's not really 6e9 years old, God put all those dinosaur bones there last Thursday" ...and similar invulnerable statements.
NST: (Cantor's) Naive Set Theory: any definable group is a set.
Turtles, all the way down. Hawkins popularizing somebody else popularizing William James making fun of early mystical arguments about the earth's place in the universe. Infinite regress or VIR (V for vicious) in DFW's lingo.
Cantor's Diagonal Proof: A function is defined that lets you create a new row in a matrix of integers (letters, reals, etc), however big the matrix is already. (The function is to make the new row of the above diagonal, with each element altered: incremented, negated or what-have you.)
V: Von Neuman Universe is the class of heriditary, well founded sets.
WAP, SAP The weak and strong anthropic principle, basically the universe has to be pretty special to have been friendly to human life. Strong version includes the mass of the universe, strength of gravity, all the other natural constants that make the universe "just so." There's Douglas Adams' beautiful comeback of the living puddle that wonderingly remarks how the universe fits it perfecty, "in fact it fits me staggeringly well." (Then the sun comes out and the puddle's custom designed universe inexplicably erases it's very reason for being: how could that BE?!) Neil Tyson answers this by talking about how much of the universe is actually hostile: stars sleeting radiation and vacuum and giant planets of frozen poison gas and so forth, but that seems more over-dramatic than on point.
Explosion, or ECQ is short for Latin: "ex contradictione quodlibet," meaning, "from contradiction, everything follows." Meaning the moon is made of cheese, etc. Chaos. It's a neat and logical argument that you can prove anything, if you let yourself begin with A and ~A.
FOL: First Order Logic constrains the domain of functional operations. This is tidy, avoids Russell's Paradox, implies his "types"?
HOL: Higher Order Logic allows recursion, at the expense of precluding mathematical completeness (see Goedel).
Hard Problem of consciousness is explaining why we have qualia. I think this is the same as asking "what am I?" meaning my sensation of self, vs just a bag of biological parts. Is this a, or maybe the non trivial example of emergence.
Laplace's Demon: is determinism, writ large. By knowing every particle's speed and position, the history could be predicted, forward and back through time. (No relation to Maxwell's demon, who reverses entropy by opening the thermos lid only when efficacious. (He works up a sweat though, so it's ok.))
NST: (Cantor's) Naive Set Theory: any definable group is a set.
Russell's Paradox: The list of all lists that do not list themselves. You could make such a list, but whether adding itself to the contents or not, the title's untrue either way. BR's solution is to require the domain of f(x) be specified before f can be defined. By choosing x (and closing out the the membership) ahead of f, f is precluded as an argument. This led to Russell to hierarchies of sets, none including itself. It seems (to me) to preclude recursion. That seems silly. Obviously recursion works, but maybe it's not guaranteed to? This is said to be related to Goedel's incompleteness theorem & Cantor's diagonal proof. Turing, in the paper describing his famous machine intelligence test, makes reference to Goedel in describing a limit to computer behavior, saying it could not answer of its brethren, "Will this computer ever answer yes to any question?" I can't quite reason through that one. The interesting point is that the seemingly trivial "BS" sentence "this is false." has been related by plenty of luminaries to Goedel's incompleteness theorem. ...so it's perhaps oversimplified, but not bullshit.
Turtles, all the way down. Hawkins popularizing somebody else popularizing William James making fun of early mystical arguments about the earth's place in the universe. Infinite regress or VIR (V for vicious) in DFW's lingo.
Cantor's Diagonal Proof: A function is defined that lets you create a new row in a matrix of integers (letters, reals, etc), however big the matrix is already. (The function is to make the new row of the above diagonal, with each element altered: incremented, negated or what-have you.)
V: Von Neuman Universe is the class of heriditary, well founded sets.
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