Subject: Re: [lojban] pro-sumti question

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2002 11:54:57 EDT

In a message dated 7/6/2002 8:46:47 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> la greg cusku di'e
> 
> >A mass
> >should be more than the sum of it's elements. I'm sure there must be some
> >relation for which {lei broda cu brode .ijenai su'o le broda cu brode} is
> >true.
> 
xorxes example works fine, but what does this particular sentence have to do 
with anything (greg's note never got here)? "sum" is a handy term of art 
because it is used already for two major cases and often informally for 
several others, but it is not
something that requires all or any of the members to have the properties of 
the mass.
In fact, one of the sum senses almost guarantees that this won't happen the 
weight case.

xorxes:
<But it can also be that the mass is somehow less than the sum of
it's elements, when there is some kind of overlap among the elements.
It all depends on how you define the sum, of course.>

"Sum" is left pretty vague as a promissory note to fill it in, though xorxes 
seems sure that it cannot be. I was trying to think of a case of the sort he 
suggests here, but nothing natural came to mind -- orverlapping is not 
something things do well. It works nicely with sets, of course, but masses 
of sets are not very pleasant to contemplate.