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Questions about the book True and Unstable

שו”תCategory: philosophyQuestions about the book True and Unstable
asked 9 years ago

Several questions following the book True and Unstable
1. The Rabbi writes in the book that one of the measures of the complexity of a graph is the number of changes in the direction of the arrows. I wanted to ask about this – the graph is created, if I understood correctly, to examine the complexity of the proposed theories. But the complexity that determines the plausibility of the theory is the realistic complexity – the one that the reality it indicates is simpler (requires an assumption of fewer talents, for example). I understand how the number of codons or the number of subgraphs are a sign(!) of realistic complexity, but is the complexity of the progression in the arrows also a sign? I also didn’t quite understand how you choose from which letter you choose to progress to which letter.
2. The rabbi in the book sees Occam’s razor as a criterion for truth. Why doesn’t this principle contradict the ideological view – does the rabbi think that any worldview that does not assume the existence of abstract ideas cannot explain the world (and then the aforementioned principle does not apply anyway)?
3. Regarding the ididit view – apart from the claim about the idea of ​​morality (in which the Rabbi also brought examples of universal human intuitive conventions, and even in which I have some doubts whether they are true for any society) that it can be said that this is something that is embedded in the human soul, what does it even mean to claim that there is an idea of ​​a frog in reality? According to this theory, our inductive intuition would not be affected by the number of objects we have encountered, but I am not sure that a person who has seen two frogs in his life would assume that all frogs will be green and have two eyes (he would probably infer the second fact by induction following the rest of the animals he has seen in life, which only strengthens the question).
Thanks in advance.


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מיכי Staff answered 9 years ago
Hello. 1. The changes in direction express the fact that there is no simple hierarchy in the image shown in the graph. That is, if there are no changes in direction, this means that if A is more severe than B and B is more severe than M, then A is more severe than M. When there are changes in direction, this expresses non-transitive hierarchical relations, and therefore it is less simple. The progression is determined from easy to difficult, that is, from the vertex whose vector is lower in all its components to the vector that is higher in all its components. 2. Why would he hide? I didn’t understand the question. A theoretical explanation of the world is given in terms of abstract realities. Therefore, a worldview that does not recognize the existence of abstract ideas does not believe in explanations at all. It is not correct to say that it cannot explain. It does not try to explain. For it, explanation is just a description in a different form, not an explanation. 3. I didn’t understand the question. As a general rule, I don’t assume that all people must agree to something. Agreement is some indication but not a necessary condition. —————————————————————————————— Asks: I will try to explain the third question again. Should the existence of idite vision mean that we don’t have to examine many objects in order to make an induction? That is, if when I look at a frog I also see the idea of ​​the frog, why would my assumptions about the next frog be less certain if I saw 20 frogs or one frog, since my conclusion about the next frog stemmed from looking at the idea of ​​the frog (and in this regard there is no difference between a frog and 20)? But certainly, intuitively, there is a difference in a person’s certainty between the two cases. This difference apparently indicates that what brings me to conclusions is not observing an external thing (the idea of ​​the thing), but some internal occurrence (if I understood correctly from the description in this book what Husserl describes). Likewise, when we assume that there are certain ideas that we look at while looking at reality, how is it that Reuven doesn’t see the idea that Shimon sees? radiant —————————————————————————————— Rabbi: As I explained in my book, this is not observation in the usual sense. It is a borrowed expression, which means that it is a process that also has a cognitive dimension and not a purely intellectual one. If induction were a purely intellectual process as is usually thought, it would have no justification, because it only reflects the structure of my brain/mind. The world owes nothing to this subjective structure. This is the root of the problem that Day found in induction. As an alternative to this, I argue that it is a mechanism that also has a cognitive dimension and not just a intellectual one. I observe the world (with my mind’s eye) and that is how I “see” the ideas. As mentioned, this observation is a process that has intellectual and cognitive components, and therefore the more examples you see, the better you will “see” the idea. If only because it is a “blurry” thing that is difficult to see (even in physical vision, if something is blurry, observation will often improve your ability to see it). This is also the reason why we don’t all “see” the same thing, because our thinking dimension is different. And yet it is not a purely subjective process, and this is the contribution of the alternative I proposed there. By the way, theoretically you could ask the same thing about the usual concept of induction (as pure thinking). Why is there a difference between seeing one frog and twenty frogs? There are still countless forms of generalization (as I explained there).

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