Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project

29 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 December 2012 12:26AM

Followup toLogical PinpointingCausal Reference

Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy.

- Death, in Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

Meditation: So far we've talked about two kinds of meaningfulness and two ways that sentences can refer; a way of comparing to physical things found by following pinned-down causal links, and logical validity by comparison to models pinned-down by axioms. Is there anything else that can be meaningfully talked about? Where would you find justice, or mercy?

continue reading »