i sincerely answered your question and yet you have attacked me once again. i will only say this: regarding 9/11, too many people were killed that day and the illegal wars that followed because of it, i will not sit on the fence when innocent little babies have their arms ripped off their bodies because of lies. this is not dogma in action this is conscience.
I stand by that 100%. I've spent the past hour reading some of Langan's writing. He discusses some of the problems of determinacy and information theory dealt with in books like Hofstader's 'GEB'. I found this para In fact, if we regard the scientific method as a theory about the nature and acquisition of scientific knowledge (and we can), it is not a theory of knowledge in general. It is only a theory of things accessible to the senses. Worse yet, it is a theory only of sensible things that have two further attributes: they are non-universal and can therefore be distinguished from the rest of sensory reality, and they can be seen by multiple observers who are able to âreplicateâ each otherâs observations under like conditions. Needless to say, there is no reason to assume that these attributes are necessary even in the sensory realm. The first describes nothing general enough to coincide with reality as a whole â for example, the homogeneous medium of which reality consists, or an abstract mathematical principle that is everywhere true - and the second describes nothing that is either subjective, like human consciousness, or objective but rare and unpredictableâ¦e.g. ghosts, UFOs and yetis, of which jokes are made but which may, given the number of individual witnesses reporting them, correspond to real phenomena. No problem with me. It's clear enough that the nature of physical reality is not 'measurable' in the same way that scientists used to think it was. It seems that Langan is approaching the ID issue by breaking it's opposite, or at least the philosophical underpinnings of the process that results in the primary opposing view. Whether this constitutes an argument strong enough to be considered a theory, I a not sure. I will stand up and admit that GEB was one of the most difficult reads I have ever attempted and I have a fantasy of getting 3 free months when I can try it again and make notes all the way along. For me personally, a clearer understanding of GEB would be necessary in order to fully understand Langan's theories... oops, he probably wouldn't want me to use that word. At any rate, Langan seems a lot more credible than the ID proponents we have on here.
You mean my suggestion that you believed Langan has a 210 IQ because you found that little video? Ok, I admit that there is a chance that you actually did some reading of Langan's work and your belief about his 1 in a billion IQ is an informed opinion as opposed to a pathetically credulous fantasy. The chances are extremely small, but there is a chance. I'm not holding my breath for you to get involved in an in-depth discussion of Langan's ideas with guys like 2cents and John Dough... because I don't think you have the ammo for that discussion. Doesn't change the fact that you post the results of your Google video searches as if they were the basis for a Pulitzer nomination.
That was very mature. I guess I'll respond at your level. ----------------------------------------------- WTC Bldg #7!! JFK!! Roswell!! Google Video!! The Bush family!! Bin Laden Body Doubles!! Back and to the Left!! KBR!! I am ratgirl!! Hear me squeak like a rat. ______________________________
video is a powerful medium. a picture is worth a thousand words... a video is how many pictures? i like shortcuts.
i had a 1st read of this from him: http://megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/Langan_CTMU_092902.pdf his CTMU paper if one leaves aside the terminology he has so copiously developed for himself instead of drawing from the developements in non-bivalent self-referential etc logics over the last few decades, basically, his "telic" principle is nothing more than what today's complexity science calls "fitness", ie locally optimum use of Gibbs free energy... nothing telic there... unless again, one wants to beliiiiieeve... a good read fyi: http://www.necsi.org/publications/dcs/ http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1260899&highlight=complex#post1260899 agree his dichotomic presentation of causal / acausal at the beginning is very lacking... for instance it skips "anticausal" where present state is dictated by future states... as an aside, i find some exploratory models of 3-dimensional time (2 curled dimensions), eg http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0510010 more interesting... interesting paper nonetheless, once you strip out the ID linguo, that adds absolutely nothing to the author's thesis... but wasn't that to be expected...
by all means do find that time if u can, it is indeed an extraordinary read, and godel's demo on the inevitable nature of indecidability in complex formal systems, a huge breakthrough... now the "spoiler" perhaps would be that we've learnt from this and there's been loads of exciting developments over the last few decades, eg cause i gotta run http://web.mit.edu/dmytro/www/NewSetTheory.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom scroll down and as earlier mentionned, self-referential logics / axiomatic systems
Mr. Langan is clearly a very brilliant person. I think he may only lack the opportunity to interact with others in his mental league, due to his unconventional background and the prevalence of elitism among the formally educated. There's simply nothing like a good argument to flush out errors in one's own thinking.