Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I am aware ;) The question was calculated.

It's obvious that you can't substitute Peter Parker (before the accident) for Spider-man.

The Mathematical idea of equality-as-substitution ignores time. Which is why I called it "reductionist"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_(philosophy)




Mathematics have other ways to talk about equivalence than just equality that allow to handle such cases though.


Yeah, but there's an epistemic/cultural issue at play. There's an entire thread below where Mathematicians are aggressively objecting to me demonstrating some of those alternative notions to the point of calling the realizations of my designs "wrong" even though the reification is equivalent to the design.

But in the extreme case you can also construct universes which only speak of inequalities (total order) as a rejection of the identity axiom.

In that universe Peter Parker and Spider Man are different entities, and so what you can and can't say about them is entirely down to judgment.

The most important question is WHY do you want to say anything about anything and who do you want to say it to?

It's difficult to encode any information in language without knowing who is going to be decoding it.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: