Monday, August 4, 2014

Current task

In case anybody is interested, these days I'm working on a book with Josh Rasmussen arguing there is at least one necessary being (definition: an entity that is concrete and exists necessarily; an entity is concrete if and only if it is possibly a cause), based in part on the arguments on necessarybeing.net. We've got about 40000 words so far:

$ wc -w chapter?.tex
3019 chapter1.tex
7945 chapter2.tex
12295 chapter3.tex
9255 chapter4.tex
435 chapter5.tex
6676 chapter7.tex
4547 chapter8.tex
44172 total

I'm in the middle of chapter 8, which is a variant of my Goedelian ontological argument, with a special focus on the negative formulation.
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5 comments:

  1. MilošAugust 5, 2014 at 3:03 AM

    Of course there are interested folks here, including me. Rasmussen's work was really discovery for me and I am awaiting now to get his first book.

    What tools do you use to make statistics for your writings?

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousAugust 5, 2014 at 3:14 AM

    Wow, I really want this book!

    ReplyDelete
  3. HC Guest BloggerAugust 5, 2014 at 8:17 AM

    Dear Dr. Pruss, are you sure we need an infinite number of GRs for the paradox to work? I think we can replace that infinity with a single GR that is programmed to check the clock at the same intervals, which you have specified for your infinity of GRs. So if he checks the clock at time t and sees that he hasn't killed Fred yet, he kills Fred. But he can't kill Fred at t, because he should have done that at t0, etc. - in other words, he never can start killing Fred because he should always have killed him earlier.

    So:

    1. the paradox doesn't establish the impossibility of an actual infinite, because we can reformulate it using only 1 GR (or a finite number of them that fall asleep again, for example).

    2. The paradox is more or less a restatement of the classic Zeno's paradox about Achilles that can't start running.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Alexander R PrussAugust 7, 2014 at 12:22 AM

    Josh checked in a lot more of his work. :-)

    $ wc -w chapter?.tex
    3019 chapter1.tex
    7945 chapter2.tex
    12293 chapter3.tex
    9253 chapter4.tex
    5930 chapter5.tex
    8543 chapter6.tex
    6676 chapter7.tex
    5781 chapter8.tex
    59440 total

    ReplyDelete
  5. Alexander R PrussAugust 7, 2014 at 12:24 AM

    Milos:

    These stats are from just running the standard Linux/Unix/etc wc utility (in a cygwin shell).

    Guest Blogger:

    But can one program it to do all of these infinitely many checks?

    ReplyDelete