No activity

After the conference I did not read anything. I went over some of the readings but was not really reading them.

German is taking all my time. Now it is up to 8 hours study including the lectures. I like it. I will be done with it for a while at the end of August. Then up to November, there will be a lot of bureaucracy, moving, applications, registrations. Then hopefully I can start to study and write.

First I want to finish Parsons readings. Maybe while I am going through all the boring and disturbing stuff in Sep and Oct, I can read them piece by piece.

Oh and I got the funding for my presentation in the conference. Yay!

And I also decided to make my CV online. I should actually start to look for jobs for the six months without scholarship in Berlin. How I wish I could teach logic!

Here is my cv now: My CV

Photo: http://www.neatorama.com/2008/01/10/mandelbrot-fractal-art-contest/

Berlin, here I come

I am admitted to Freie University...

3 years ago, when I did not know which path I was going to take in my life, I visited Berlin for a week. I have fallen in love with the city. Since then I always wanted to live there for a period of time in my life. I have been trying to get accepted there for a year, now finally I will be studying and writing my PhD thesis in there. Thinking of moving there in November.

Listen to Okna Tsahan Zam. Reminds me of cold high mountains that I have longed without knowing for a long time...I can feel the thin air..

Philosophy

Although I feel like I am doing what I want in life, I realized today that I could not have done another thing probably. I tried and was mostly successful about it actually but I cannot not do Philosophy. It is so hard nowadays though. In the stupid system of mass production, we are obliged to mass produce the papers in the finals periods. I am writing 4 term papers and 2 short papers in 3 weeks. This is insane, and is an allienation process from what I do. For four days I think about ontology, language then after finishing a paper I have to start thinking about truth and pragmatism, and next about randomized control trials, then about Kant's notion of concept and object and numbers then about evidence. This is STUPID. I would like to write about this too, a long term paper! Well maybe I should.

I actually feel like a sculptor who works with a terracotta and with lots of other materials, or maybe what I do is a bit like free style cooking or baking. You collect ideas, think about them, you form another idea, or you already have a new idea then you mix it with other ideas and mould them together till the dough is ready to be baked. I love this, but am not loving to do it as I am doing right now. Sigh...

Image from: http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/philosopher.htm

Too much pressure

It is almost 5 a.m. I have not finished any of my papers yet. I have 5 papers that I am supposed to write simultaneously in 10 days, one translating editing and preface writing during this time, and since I have to focus in and focus out so quickly I keep forgetting at least one task a day.

I do not like to write ontology papers, especially when we are asked to put our own ideas in there.

Study Room

I am dreaming of a well designed table light, wall to wall dark hard wood study table and my Don Quixote drawing hanging above it and my books are nicely arranged in neatly designed shelves. I am sick of being a vagabond, which seems like it will continue for a while still. I move in to houses for 6 months periods and buying cloths seems like using extra space and exceeding the limit of two suitcases. So I hardly buy clothes and nice decorative things- I never buy the latter.

Why I am dragging around this issue. I am sick of studying in the library and I did not set up my room for long study hours since I am very close to library. I do not have any shelves so my books and notes are rising from the ground mixed up with each other.

I have so many papers to write and things to read and projects to work on. But I am restless. So I dream of a study room, once I saw in the web page of my favorite writer Dan Simmons. It is here: http://www.dansimmons.com/images/officepan_slice/officepan.html. I love it. Mine would be even more organized I believe.

I am almost finishing my paper on Randomized Control Trials and Alternative Medicine. Kirstin Borgerson is a must read in this area. She writes very effectively and uses very nice case studies. What I would like to take up as a case study is "Midwifery and home birth" It is getting popular in Canada, California and Europe again. Turks are not very into it as far as I know. All I hear about is C-section birth giving is so easy etc. That's why I wanted to study about it for both to know what's the status in Turkey nowadays and to see what kind of evidence is used when compared to hospital births, for those who prefer/ advise it.

This is a very nice web page: "http://fullcirclehealing.org/docs/classes/birth_preparation.php ", with philosophical approaches to giving birth. Again I am so illiterate about these health and body things there were so many things that I did not even come close to think about. I love feeling this though. It reminds me there are so many things I will not know and it is so hard to reach a complete set of thoughts etc.

Here is a bit of what she says:

Philisophical Assumptions and Guiding Principles

Childbirth is a profound rite of passage, not a medical event (even when medical care is part of the birth).
The essence of childbirth preparation is self-discovery, not assimilating obstetric information.
The teacher (mentor) is "midwife" to the parents' discovery process, not the expert from whom wisdom flows.
Parents' individual needs and differences determine class content. The purpose of childbirth preparation is to prepare mothers to give birth-in-awareness, not to achieve a specific birth outcome.
Pregnancy and birth outcome are influenced by a variety of factors, but can't be controlled by planning.
In order to help parents moblize their coping resources, it is critical for childbirth classes to acknowledge that unexpected, unwelcome events may happen during labor.
Parents deserve support for any birth option which might be right for them (whether it be medication, cesarean, home birth, breastfeeding or bottle-feeding).
Pain is an inevitable part of childbirth, yet much can be done to ease suffering.
Pain-coping practices work best when integrated into daily life, rather than "dusted off" for labor.
Fathers and birth partners help best as birth guardians or loving partners, not as coaches; they also need support.
Childbirth preparation is also parent preparation.

Evidence Based Medicine

What is evidence for medicine? Why alternative medicine is alternative? These are the new topics for my term paper and I will start to discuss it in here. [I've sent out my proposal so I am on suspension for a while on the notion of mathematical intuition]

These notions makes me think of two worlds. One is defined and constituted by reason and one we cannot even define because we do not have the tools to do so. Chakra's, energy points, reiki, even acupuncture cannot be explained by using our reason. We need some other method, which is not "thinking".

I have also been thinking about the importance of approval mechanism. We depend on our references from other people in order to move forward in life. So how can we not be addicts of approval. What would be the alternative method for references. Someone's just looking at our faces and admit us to the universities?

In this second world none of the terms developed by western philosophy can hold. Can we find objectivity in there? What is thinking replaced by?

I cannot even describe it by my words because it is not propositional. Is that it? Can I only give a negative definition about it. Isn't there any bridge between these worlds?

Online vs. Social

My online life collapses when my social life takes its normal course. Oh well, I guess each of us choose in which way to evolve. I am oscillating between physical/social and mind. There is dualism then after all; or else, for the lucky ones, synthesis.

I have concluded my proposal suggesting that there is a logical way to explain immediacy in mathematical intuition (if it is in Kantian sense) . However I also believe that mathematical intuition is a concept we need to redefine. Do we really need singularity, immediacy?

Now I need to read some more Parsons. Peter Smith has just published an online reader/commenter on Parsons' last book, Ontology and Mathematics. But the academic semester is already getting overwhelming, don't know when I am going to find time to read these interesting stuff.

EBM (Evidence Based Medicine) and Some responses to the Previous Issues

Here are two responses from Eray to my recent post. It's been a busy week, I am quite tired and it's Friday and only 10pm. I will soon reply to the responses.

Eray Ozkural at 7:17pm February 19

A "concept" could be said to be computable iff there is a procedure that enumerates all instances of said concept... (That is, we can try to equate a concept with a language L of strings) In that vein, I think triangle is pretty much computable as is every concept in geometry. They do cover all essential aspects of geometry in computable analysis, by the way.

However, it is much easier to talk about computable numbers and computable functions as they have a more rigorous definition.

Modulo this technical talk, yes, when counting we can represent "1" exactly, but not so, perhaps, when we are drawing, it remains more of a mental idealization. This is especially easy to see if we consider that counting itself is a mental operation.

It boils down to a central issue in philosophy of computation. Simulating 2+2=4 *is* addition. Simulating rain is not rain.

Eray Ozkural at 7:19pm February 19

BTW, quantum logic is weird. I never fully understood quantum information theory either... should go back and study a bit too, I recommend studying quantum computation as well. Just for the WTF factor. :)


Apart from that I was in a very interesting conference on Evidence Based Medicine today, will comment on that soon also.

Number 1 as a Cardinal Number and as a Real Number

I do not understand a concept of triangle being a computable one. Is the "concept" computable? I mean a particular triangle can be computable but not a general concept of a triangle.

From the responses I got from Onur and Eray, I have begun to think that real number 1 and cardinal number 1 are different entities. If we are talking about measuring some continuous thing, apparently we can only approach to the number 1 in R (Onur) or we can have a concept by computability, applying an exact computer algorithm (Eray) --still an approximation in R , but when we are counting we have the number 1 exactly, as a unit. There is no approximation in here right? We can both represent the number 1 in actuality and cannot. Particularly, if we are drawing a simple triangle we cannot represent it exactly but if we are counting we can. Where will this take me? (I am asking to my self, no offense :))

Another thing: quantum physics started to come up every area I am diggin' currently. Now there is Quantum Logic too. Need to set aside some time to check these out.

Some responses

Here are responses that appeared on my Facebook account. Apparently one can synchronize her blog with facebook. Good for getting feedbacks.

Eray Ozkural at 5:48pm February 16

sqrt(2), an irrational number, is also a computable real (a real number that can be represented by a simple approximation procedure). such numbers are realized only by computation, i.e. they are still idealization. in other words, you can write an _exact_ computer program that will churn out digits of sqrt(2). that is the best kind of realization you can hope in analysis in general. see weihrauch's textbook: http://eccc.hpi-web.de/eccc-local/ECCC-Books/klaus_book_readme.html

that is to say, the concept of triangle is a computable one. so, it is something that you can conceive of without any loss of conceptual clarity since our minds are computers. this criterion of complete conceivability does not apply to uncountable sets, for instance.

in real life, therefore, it is sufficient to use only R_c and forgo uncomputable numbers. the computability simply allows us to approximate real life situations to the best of our computational ability. sqrt(2) thus represents a limit.

Onur Gun at 6:46pm February 16

in real life everything is approximation, there is no exact sqrt(2) neither 1, i.e. if you draw a side length 1 it is going to be very close to 1. Anyway, I think that is related to quantum mechanics where the idea is you cannot measure things without perturbing the system...

Eray Ozkural at 8:31pm February 16

that usually implies a discrete system, so it's related to the idea of computation

Thank's for the responses will get back to them shortly, now I have to catch a class, in a cold snowy day.

Triangle

I am wondering when we can reach a concept of a triangle that we can represent in actuality.

For example we cannot have a length of sqrt(2), but when one says that we have a unit right angle triangle with both sides 1 units and hypotenuse of sqrt(2) units we don't feel challenged about it. However I believe we should, if we take the units as meters. There is no such length as sqrt(2).

But can we represent the concept in actuality, where the right angle triangle represented by 3, 4, 5 units?

Arithmetic....

I am trying to understand the mathematical intuition. For now, I believe it is a priori, and it can be given a logical foundation, in a classical sense. Anyway, I do not know if it would be useful for mathematics when there is a non-classical logical formulation of it, from fuzzy logic etc.

What are numbers? I believe the intuition of 0 and 1 as numbers and the knowledge of them being different, and the concept of successor relation as the form of time (Kant) is enough for our mathematical intuition of numbers. Whether we intuit more is another question. This is the main idea of Frege's construction of logical system of arithmetic; he gives the formulation of numbers 0 and 1 logically, define successor relation and prove that 0 and 1 are different.

To define all cardinal numbers, he formulates the ancestral relation to define the concept "member of natural number series ending with n" where n+1 as a number belongs to. (Begriffsscrift)

Frege's logical system is ineffectual not because of the Russell Paradox which has been given a solution by Wright (Conception of Numbers as Objects). His system cannot distinguish objects from concepts in a unique way. He suggested that definite descriptions properly construed give classification for objects. However that is not the case, as the mystery of definite descriptions still cannot be solved and occupies a large literature in philosophy of language.

"There exist" a purpose :)

This is a blog which will track my days of struggling for writing my PhD thesis. Right now, I am concentrated on Charles Parsons's thoughts on mathematical intuition. A little hard to understand. I would like to give a logical formulation for mathematical intuitions of numbers. In any case I want to understand what numbers are.