HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Dr David Burns' Feeling Good podcasts: https://feelinggood.com/list-of-feeling-good-podcasts/ on the subjects of therapy for depression, anxiety, panic disorders, OCD, self-defeating thought patterns, guilt, shame, empathy, why traditional therapy models are broken, and what to do about it all - how to actually feel good in a couple of hours - such that people can make major inroads into decades of problems in one or two sessions of therapy.

He was in at the start of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, developed methods for using it, and spent years wondering why it doesn't work for about half of all patients - and now developed his answers to that into a thing he calls TEAMS therapy. Understanding why people don't change their mood during months and years of normal therapy sessions, and coming up with ways to get past that leads to him claiming massive differences in effectiveness compared to traditional therapy styles.

The podcast is somewhere as close to "free therapy" as you're likely to get on the internet, discussing different parts of the TEAMS model, explaining and justifying them, demonstrating them, there's a few recordings of therapy sessions with patients, and a lot of anecdotes of putting it into practise. (It's quite slow and chatty if your mood is "I gotta skim read this in point 2 of a second to extract just the important bits!").

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And, for an episode, Sir Roger Penrose interviewed on Joe Rogan, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEw0ePZUMHA because it's an hour and a half of Sir Roger Penrose talking about interesting things, which wasn't from 2019 either but that's when I saw it.

Penrose was on Joe Rogan last December: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEw0ePZUMHA

It might.

http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/roger-penrose-on-why...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEw0ePZUMHA

> Few things in philosophy are definitively discarded (and if they are, they can come back in some revised form); they may fall out of fashion.

Disagree.

Some philosophical ideas seem increasingly unsustainable in the face of mounting scientific knowledge. Vitalism, for instance.

In a similar vein, I'd say we're seeing an ongoing erosion of dualism in philosophy of mind, which will be unlikely to recover. Like with vitalism, the more we learn from science, the less magic we need to explain ourselves, be it 'life', or consciousness.

In the case of logical positivism, it was a case of showing the position to be unsustainable on its own terms. That's analogous to disproving a scientific hypothesis - I don't see it coming back.

> either you took Brouwer's intuitionism, which has no inconsistencies but is inconvenient, or you take classical mathematics because it's useful. But if you do, you need to know that it's consistent, but you can't.

Neat. I see I'll have to do my homework.

> LEM is an axiom that you either include (in classical mathematics) or not (in constructive mathematics).

But if you do include it, don't you have to commit arbitrarily to either AC or ¬AC?

> if the formulas refer to something, what kind of thing is that thing, and if that thing exists independently of the formulas, how do we know that the formulas tell us the truth about those things?

Isn't this 'just' a question of knowing that the correspondence is valid?

> There's an infinity of possible derivations, that yield all the theorems in the theory. We can look at that as a form of nondeterministic computation (that nondeterministically chooses an inference) .

Right, I'm with you. Infinite graph traversal.

> Gödel did.

Roger Penrose too. Honestly I find his position to be almost risibly weak. It's plain old quantum mysticism and wishful thinking, as far as I can tell. Microtubules are meant to be essentially magical? Seriously? Here he is explaining his position (takes about 10 minutes) https://youtu.be/GEw0ePZUMHA?t=660 and here's the Wikipedia article on his book about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind

⬐ pron

> Some philosophical ideas seem increasingly unsustainable in the face of mounting scientific knowledge. Vitalism, for instance.

OK, but the philosophy of mathematics is a more slippery beast.

> But if you do include it, don't you have to commit arbitrarily to either AC or ¬AC?

No. You can have a theory that's consistent with either.

> Isn't this 'just' a question of knowing that the correspondence is valid?

Correspondence to what? Are those objects platonic ideals? Are they abstractions of physical reality? You can answer this question in many ways. But whichever way, this question of soundness (formal provability corresponds to semantic truth) rests on us knowing what is true.

Some philosophies of mathematics say that the question is unimportant: it doesn't matter if we get the "truth" part right, all that matters is that mathematics is a useful tool for whatever we choose to apply it to (this doesn't even mean applied mathematics; one valid "use" is intellectual amusement).

⬐ MaxBarraclough

> No. You can have a theory that's consistent with either.

I think I see your point. If your theory has no way to express the question Is the AC true? then the LEM is no issue, as there's no 'proposition' to worry about at all.

> Are those objects platonic ideals? Are they abstractions of physical reality?

My intuition is to favour the former, as the latter seems a much stronger claim.

It seems reasonable to say that any mathematical system exists as a platonic ideal, but it's plain that not all mathematical systems abstract physical systems, and we shouldn't be quick to say that we know that any mathematical system does so. That's an empirical question that - true to Popper - can never be positively proved.

⬐ pron

> If your theory has no way to express the question Is the AC true? then the LEM is no issue, as there's no 'proposition' to worry about at all.

That's not what I meant. I meant that choice can be neither proven nor disproven. The philosophical fact that, due to LEM, it must either be true or not is irrelevant, because you cannot rely on it being true or on it being false.

> My intuition is to favour the former, as the latter seems a much stronger claim.

Well, Platonism is a popular philosophy of mathematics among mathematicians, but many strongly reject it.

⬐ MaxBarraclough

> can be neither proven nor disproven. The philosophical fact that, due to LEM, it must either be true or not is irrelevant, because you cannot rely on it being true or on it being false

So it's similar to, but not the same thing as, modifying the LEM to permit Unknowable as a third category (beyond the proposition is true and its negation is true). Instead we maintain that it has a truth value one way or the other, but that it happens to be both unknowable and of no consequence.

⬐ pron

> modifying the LEM to permit Unknowable as a third category

LEM doesn't need to be modified, and it's not a third category. In classical logic (with LEM), unlike in constructive/intuitionistic logic (no LEM), truth and provability are simply not the same -- in fact, it is LEM that creates that difference.

> Instead we maintain that it has a truth value one way or the other, but that it happens to be both unknowable and of no consequence.

Precisely! That is the difference between classical and constructive logic. In constructive logic truth and provability are the same, and something is neither true nor false until it has been proven or refuted. But before you conclude that this kind of logic, without LEM, is obviously better (philosophically), you should know that any logic has weirdnesses. What happens without LEM, for example, is that it is not true that every subset of a finite set is necessarily finite. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯