Subject: RE: [lojban] So you think you're logical?

From: "Craig" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 16:23:47 -0400

>><'ro temci lo menli cu nibli'>

>>Also curiously prescientitic. Most time frames existed before there were
>any minds and so hardly entailed them, even as future existents,
apparently.
>But I >usppose there is some logic (at least set of premises) that does
make
>this work out.

>But very insightful for something generated by a computer program designed
>to write texts using Markov chains, no?

>I don't know about "insightful." It is a pleasant surprise that a machine
can get as close asa this to things people do say just by adding some
>probability measures in. Of course, I worry about the post-editing. What
else turned up in this run?

An awful lot that I don't remember. Running it just now, I get the following
as its first ten distinct grammatical statements:

coi
na go'i
co'o
je'edai na nelci zo kreig
ki'a
mi ponsi lo jdini be ko'a
i cortu
ma nabmi do {It's probably been spending too much time talking to la
elizas.}
i mi'o ku jinvi le nu claxu gi'e cusku
i e'o co se porpi

There were numerous repetitions of 'coi', 'na go'i', 'co'o', and 'ki'a'.
There were also many nongrammatical statements.

><>But this is a remarkably prescientific notion of causation, one surely
dead
>by the end of the 18th century. Why would we preserve it in Lojban? Aside
>from >physical links -- expanding gases on pistons, gears and wheels,
>fluctuations in magnetic fields, and, of course, grabbing a hand and moving
>it -- it does
>>not function well. And in those cases, {ri'a} still works. (I skip over
>my problem about {ka} being a force of some sort.)

>The only prescientificness I can see is in the fact that if it were used
>when there is no causation, it would entail a post hoc ergo propter hoc
>fallacy. One would never use bai for this, because that would be
fallacious!>

>Well, it is always fallacious to infer causation from mere temporal
succession, but it seems equally fallacious to infer that there is a force
at work in
>causal relations. What we often have is nothing more than observed
repeated cases of the sequence of events that cohere with some explanatory
narrative,
>but no force -- indeed, no compulsion at all, just the way that things work
in this world as a matter of fact. All of this has been a common-place since
at >least the middle of the 18th century, so suggesting there is a force is
a step backward. Of course, there are cases where there is a force and ten
{bapli} >is relevent -- even correct, but these are not the most common
cases.

But if one event impels another to happen, is bai not exactly right?

--la kreig.daniyl.

'segu le balvi temci gi mi'o renvi lo purci
.i ga le fonxa janbe gi du mi'
-la djimis.BYFet

pygypy gubmau ckiku nacycme: 0x5C3A1E74 (laldo), 0x22C68020 (citno)