> On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, David Leeper wrote:
>
> > Santo,
> >
> > Santo Wrote:
> > >Do memes usually come in pairs of apparent opposites? Or am I just
> > fooling myself with
> > >semantics? (In that it is hard linguistically to have a symbol for "X"
> > >without, by labeling it so, creating the concept of everything else
> > >being "not X".) I seem to recall that set theory deals with this at
> > >length...
> >
> > I'm not sure Set Theory is up to the task of describing memes and their
> > interactions. Using
> > only Logic and Set Theory, Bertrand Russel proved the moon is made of
green
> > cheese.
> >
> > Cohesive Math works a little better. Given X, we assign it to 1. The
> > opposite of X is -1,
> > which is only one thing, rather than an infinite number of things.
>
> The above is sarcasm, right?
>
> Unless Bertrand Russell's math dated from after now [1996], he didn't
> have a way to to translate both of the natural-english terms "moon" and
> "Green cheese" into a form which would allow such manipulation to be
> translated back into that sentence.
No sarcasm. Using Logic and Set Theory, Russell broke them both
with the "Set of all sets with no members", which must contain
itself and must not contain itself. Once this was done, _any_
statement could logically be shown to be True. Why? Because
Logic was broken.
Later, new concepts overcame this limition, one was Class, another
was Fuzzy Logic, another was Cohesive Math.
-- David Leeper Homo Deus http://home1.gte.net/dleeper/index.htm