Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 11:06:18 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710171606.LAA24958@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: John Cowan Sender: Lojban list From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral Subject: Re: ka/ni kama X-To: Lojban List To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1161 X-From-Space-Date: Fri Oct 17 11:10:54 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Lee Daniel Crocker (none) wrote: > Not wanting to get into the philosophical argument of whether or > not qualia are meaningful existents, And a good thing too. I could explain it to you, but then I'd have to kill you. :-) > I /can/ ask what are "pure" > numbers if not qualia? If /these/ qualia are basic to the language, > why can't I express others? There are many interpretations of numbers as sets: in Cantor's interpretation (which is hardcoded into the Loglan offshoot -gua!spi), *n* is the set of all sets of cardinality *n*. In von Neumann's interpretation, 0 is the null set and *n* is the set whose members are the integers smaller than *n*. And there are others. > And that brings to mind the obvious place one might want dimensioned > quantities: in mekso. If one can say that 2+2=4 without implying > that 4 of something are around somewhere, why can I not say that a > newton is a kg*m/sec^2 without implying that any pushing is going on? You can. This is what the sumti/selbri to number converters are for. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban