I see that SIlas is back to insisting that you can't simulate a squirrel with a simple list of axioms, after having been told forty eight bajillion times (here and elsewhere) that nobody's asserting any such thing;
I didn't say that. Read it again. I said that there is some finite axiom list that can describe squirrels, but it's not just the axioms that suffice to let you use arithmetic. It's those, plus biological information about squirrels. But this arithmetic is not the infinitely complex arithmetic you talk about in other contexts!
my claim is that you can simulate a squirrel in the structure N, not in any particular axiomatic system.
You can't -- you need axioms beyond those that specify N. The fact that the biological model involving those axioms uses math, doesn't mean you've described it once you've described the structure N. So whether or not you call that "simulating it in the structure N", it's certainly more complex than just N.
I'm responding here to your invitation in the parent, since this post provides some good examples of what you're not getting.
I didn't say that. Read it again. I said that there is some finite axiom list that can describe squirrels, but it's not just the axioms that suffice to let you use arithmetic.
Simulating squirrels and using arithmetic require information, but that information is not supplied in the form of axioms. The best way to imagine this in the case of arithmetic is in terms of a structure.
Starting from the definition in that wikipedia page,...
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!"