NancyLebovitz comments on Reflection in Probabilistic Logic - Less Wrong

63 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 March 2013 04:37PM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 31 March 2013 01:08:16AM 5 points [-]

Another dilettante question: Is there a mathematics of statements with truth values that change? I'm imagining "This statement is false" getting filed under "2-part cycle".

Comment author: paulfchristiano 31 March 2013 05:24:50AM *  10 points [-]

Yes. There is an overview of revision theories of truth (and many other approaches to defining truth) at the SEP.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 31 March 2013 02:50:11AM 7 points [-]

I've never heard of it but my intuition says it doesn't sound very promising - any correspondence definition of "truth" that changes over time should reduce to a timeless time-indexed truth predicate and I don't see how that would help much, unless the truth predicate couldn't talk about the index.

Comment author: ThrustVectoring 01 April 2013 01:00:52AM *  1 point [-]

The truth predicate could talk about the past (but not the present), but I believe that reduces down to other things that have been explored quite thoroughly (iirc, an idea of a hierarchy of math with higher levels being able to talk about lower levels but not vice versa was around for Bertrand Russel to endorse). And at that point "time" is just a label for what level of explanatory power you are talking about.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 March 2013 11:16:11AM 1 point [-]

(This reminds me of when I short-circuited a NOT gate, curious to see what would happen and suspecting it might oscillate between the two values. Actually, it stabilized to a voltage somewhere between “0” and “1” and stayed there.)

Comment author: RichardKennaway 31 March 2013 01:44:14PM 1 point [-]

You could look up George Spencer Brown's "Laws of Form". It's...odd. (Poking this in through a phone otherwise would go into more detail.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 31 March 2013 03:26:31PM 0 points [-]

I read it long ago, but didn't understand the parts that looked like circuits. I should probably give it another try.

Comment author: bogus 31 March 2013 03:18:39PM *  0 points [-]

If you posit that: "This statement is false" (i.e. the fixpoint μ x. ¬x ) oscillates or "switches" between TRUE and FALSE, then this is pretty much how digital logic works in electronics, because the NOT operation is implemented as a logic gate with a finite delay.