Yesterday, navrins pondered a question that has truly profound

And the REASON it has truly profound implications is that, to me, it's so obvious that nobody would ever think about it -- but that many (most?) people don't, because it's NOT obvious.

He was considering the fact that, in mathematics, you have sets, and you can always tell, except in a very few Goedel-type cases, whether a given entity is in or outside the set.

But that, in real life, there are many sets that aren't like that. For instance, the set of "buildings". I can tell that a towel isn't a building, and my house is, but if someone is building a building, at what point does it turn into a building?

There used to be a tradition/superstition, by the way, that, at some point when the frame was completed, but before the walls were started, someone would drag a small tree up to the top of the thing. And so, by that tradition, you could get an answer -- it's a building after someone's dragged a tree up it.

I haven't seen anybody do that in YEARS, but it brings up an important point. The very category of "building" isn't a real thing. It is something defined by humans, and therefore may be defined in any way we wish.

But it doesn't really exist. The concept of "building-ness". Sure, Plato hypothesized that all categories have actual examples of Platonic forms: that a "chair" is any approximation of the Platonic form of "chair-ness".

But in reality, there is no such thing as "chair-ness" in itself. It is purely a human-created artificial definition. It doesn't exist per se -- it only exists in our minds as an idea.

This has profound implications for Bad Science.( Read more... )