it was meant to correct Silas, who seemed to think that I was reading some deep significance into our inability to know all the truths of arithmetic. My point was that there are lots of things we can't know all the truths about, and this was therefore not the feature of arithmetic I was pointing to.
Yes, it was. When I and several others pointed out that arithmetic isn't actually complex, you responded by saying that it is infinitely complex, because it can't be finitely described, because to do so ... you'd have to know all the truths.
Am I misreading that response? If so, how do you reconcile arithmetic's infinite complexity with the fact that scientists in fact use it to compress discriptions of the world? An infinitely complex entity can't help to compress your descriptions.
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
ETA: It would seem that rationality quotes are no longer desired. After several days this thread stands voted into the negatives. Wolud whoever chose to to downvote this below 0 would care to express their disapproval of the regular quotes tradition more explicitly? Or perhaps they may like to browse around for some alternative posts that they could downvote instead of this one? Or, since we're in the business of quotation, they could "come on if they think they're hard enough!"