Message-ID: <3447761A.4572@locke.ccil.org> Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 10:28:42 -0400 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: ka/ni kama References: <199710162158.QAA18552@locke.ccil.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1124 X-From-Space-Date: Fri Oct 17 10:28:42 1997 X-From-Space-Address: - 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