joigus

I see your point. I didn't mean being serious when using it. I know real life speech is very much the way you depicted it in your @Genady depicted it in their example, which is a perfect example of pragmatics at work. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Otherwise daily conversation would be unsufferable. When I said "being serious" I meant it philosophically/scientifically. Edited: Sorry. It was @Genady who mentioned pragmatics, and gave the example.

Could you, please, elaborate? I'm prepared to accept that until we commit what we think to either paper, screen, or air --speech--, we're still not in the realm of meaning. It's only when there are at least two thinking agents that the question of meaning really arises. Is that anything like what you mean? There I go again. Thanks everybody for your contributions. I'll be reflecting on them ASAP. Interesting points here. Thank you. At first I translated, of course; but soon I realised that I'd better make it dynamic, emotionally involved, and intellectually involved, or else I would never acquire the language. Language needs to be a tool. Otherwise it's like learning lists, and logical trees, with no connection to any level of experience. And, as I've pointed out before in these forums, the brain is a very costly organ in energetic terms. Your brain is not going to commit. I do have a tendency to thinks maths in Spanish, but at some point I started forcing myself to do it in English. Now I can do it, although not as dexterously as in my mother tongue, of course. Maths in Italian must sound really charming.

Very interesting comments. Thank you all for your feedback. I even wonder if meaning (or perhaps information) is in our heads, even. I have the picture of a cat in my head. I say 'cat.' Immediately, a picture of a cat is conjured up in your head. Does information (or meaning, as the case may be) transcend even such deeply ingrained concepts as locality? Was something there from the very beginning that play the role of ultimate congruences, against which we must contrast our conceptions? In the case of a cat, to me, it's very clear that: No, cats appeared historically. They are contingent. I mean something more primitive, like the rules of logic, abstract structures. Something acting, as it were, like a solid material that gives consistence to our fleeting impressions. A cat, after all, is a fleeting impression. I was more trying to Wittgenstein the subject, but that's a good departing point: Plato. So what are the shadows the cast of?

Ah. That sounds interesting. Meaning has a bunch of implications that go beyond simple (digitised, perhaps?) information. Thanks for the contribution.

Back in 2010 I wrote this brief essay on language and meaning. Please bear with me, as I wrote it back when I was still learning to make my English more accurate and efficient at conveying meaning. So it's perhaps peppered with cliches, and other stylistic sins. And, curiously enough, meaning is all it's about. My preoccupation with meaning. Is it, in the last analysis, something unreachable? Do we have to make do with an internal 'prop', so that we can keep communicating? What I'm interested in here is meaning. Does anyone among you share this preoccupation with language that, if you're serious about it, it has the potential to send you into an infinite loop of ultimately un-discernible layers of meaning? Like a monumental chess game played backwards: What was the meaning of the previous sentence? From a practical point of view, speakers of a language have to impose some kind of cutting-off mechanism, so that the sentence doesn't become an un-decipherable sequence. So perhaps, in a sense, we make meaning as we go along. From what I remember of philosophy, Wittgenstein was one of the great thinkers on the topic, so any pointers to what he had to say about this would be welcome. Also, any own reflections that you may have to offer. Yours truly, Joigus PS: As back then, I dedicate this to Katie, the American English teacher who taught me that 'toast' and 'input' are uncountable nouns. I wonder what's become of her.

Quantum mechanics has nothing in the way of a cohesive force. Schrödinger's equation is more like a heat equation, but with an imaginary "heat capacity." And it's generally dispersive.

Before I get more heavily involved in this thread... Could you please clarify these points?: If you want to make a wavepacket reduction possible, you must make the Schrödinger equation either non-linear or non-unitary. Which one is it? It's been tried before in a linear and unitary way: Coleman-Hepp. Criticised by John Bell, very eloquently I think. Weinberg also tried to generalise quantum mechanics to a non-linear dynamical theory. Without much success.

Interference has been described correctly several times, including by David Bohm and Louis DeBroglie (with a "realistic" theory). So it's not the bone of contention, IMO. Anything that has waves will give you interference. Copenhagen's QM too. I also think you should always try to be conservative in your scientific claims, because Nature has a way of doing what we don't expect. And that's all I can say at this point.

Good one. Simultaneity is frame-dependent.

I look much worse when I just wake up. You gotta love lions and lionesses. Wild animals have it very hard. Even a humble magpie. None of us would wanna trade deals with them. Cheers mate! And thanks for the wonderful photos and info.

LOL. I always use Bach to tell the time.

This is definitely worth \( e^{i2\pi} \) reputation.

Thanks a lot. I did miss the "vertical caption."

Help yourself.

As a Zen master would put it: Just wake up!