

The Problem of the Many - infinity
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/problem-of-many/

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panic
As usual, this is a philosophical "problem" caused by overanalysis of
language. A cloud exists when someone can say "that's a cloud" and a listener
thinks "yes, that is a cloud", or that fact is somehow meaningful to them in
their life.

If you're a pilot, a cloud is a way to talk about something that reduces your
visibility and causes turbulence. If you aren't carrying an umbrella, a cloud
may be a sign you're about to get wet. The fact that these phenomena share the
name "cloud" is only meaningful to the extent that they arise from the same
sort of physical processes. But trying to rigidly assign a particular
arrangement of physical processes to a single entity "cloud" leads to the
nonsense you see here.

Nobody using the word "cloud" cares about this assignment. They care about
whether there'll be turbulence, or whether they're likely to get wet, or
whether the cloud looks like a bunny rabbit or whatever. The solution to the
paradox is to realize that not all concepts are analyzable to this degree, and
that that's OK.

~~~
Houshalter
>Many philosophers—particularly amateur philosophers, and ancient
philosophers—share a dangerous instinct: If you give them a question, they try
to answer it.

\-- Eliezer Yudkowsky

~~~
spacehome
Eliezer is right, and I would add a corollary that you almost always run into
trouble trying to fit objects into human-defined abstract categories.

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pixelperfect
The lack of inherent existence of the cloud seems to be the most logical
solution to this problem. Although the cloud has no inherent existence, if we
look at the same spot in the sky, I have a perception of a cloud, and you have
a perception of a cloud. Our perceptions are not the same, and when we get to
the edges of the cloud the boundaries we perceive are highly likely to differ.
Nevertheless, because our perceptions have so much in common, I can say "that
cloud" to you will know what I am talking about. Your perception will still
differ from mine, especially along the borders of the cloud, but the
differences in perception are not likely to be important for the sake of our
discussion. The author's rebuttal in paragraph 3 of the Nihilism section looks
weak to me.

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drcomputer
I'm going to guess you've never had an extreme problem in communication
throughout your entire existence.

For some time, for me, the grammatical structure of my sentences formed such a
weak relationship to the interpretation of meaning of language, that a single
word of a single sentence in a single paragraph could compose many meanings,
and that doing this over and over throughout the paragraph could compose many
more meanings, until all comprehension of what was intended to be expressed
seemed to be completely lost. Communication had distinct dual meanings often,
sometimes many, many more. The grammatical structure serves as an abstract
form, then each word relationship is applied and toyed around with until
associations that have nothing to do with the topic at hand are formed. I
would be lost in attempting to speak back to someone. When I tried to speak, I
would run off on a tangent that received blank stares at best. I was convinced
people were purposefully messing with my head, but it was only the extraction
of a single word from a single sentence that projected itself into my
imagination and then distorted itself into a web of intricate knots that
continued to build one after the other.

Some people call this telling stories. For me, it was the way I perceived my
reality, even though my perception held in thought never matched my reality.

I have a habit of escaping into complex mathematics, so at least I have the
illusion of intelligence (although it turns out, I am very good at complex
mathematics, and this is useful). But it's very difficult, living like this.
The single and the many is a real problem. You can think you know what you are
talking about, but until you actually become convinced that every sentence can
be interpreted completely differently by the listener, and by some form of
magic I call compassion of others noticing how completely aloof I am, you
manage to exist in society as member that actually contributes something.
Also, when you intersect with people really frequently over short gaps that
are spaced out by really long gaps of 'misunderstanding one another', then
it's freaky and causality gets all tangled and you can sometimes get convinced
that people can read your mind.

You may say cloud, but when I first read this article, I thought of the
internet clouds, instead of water clouds. Now, this is only a small delta
change between word choice. Imagine that a single sentence can be interpreted
in millions of ways, and it can be continued on in conversation, in other
sentences in millions of ways, and no one actually has a clue of what is being
spoken about, but we all think we do. This is why I prefer to stare at my
whiteboard with complex mathematics.

~~~
JonnieCache
Perhaps you should go in the other direction and write poetry. It seems youre
most of the way there already. Your post is elegant and strange. I had the
urge to read it aloud.

~~~
drcomputer
I grew up writing poetry. I have a love of words, metaphor, literature,
sentence structure, composition (in music as well). But the base form is
mathematically expressible, that is the foundation of every perception to me.
It's the only thing that can't mutate into something else - it can be used to
express that which is not itself, but mathematics is formal structure itself.
The symbols and organization are typically just decoration. It either makes
sense or it doesn't, in that abstract form. I don't find that kind of unity
really anywhere else. I appreciate the compliment, though.

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unclesaamm
Seems useful to think of this from a computer vision standpoint. With vision
problems, you often first need human annotation, and unless human beings can
agree to a high degree, there are going to be problems. The "number of clouds"
in a picture is an ambiguous enough concept that I can't imagine everybody
agreeing.

That said, if there is clearly _one_ cloud, I think most annotators would
agree that there is one cloud (and not, say, infinitely many).

So going from that, you can frame it as a constraint optimization problem. You
want the largest possible collection of droplets to be a cloud, without
accidentally defining all the clouds in the world into a single cloud. There
has to be a loss function for the cloud-ness of a set of droplets based off
how dispersed the droplets are in it.

Think about the fill bucket in Microsoft Paint. A single pixel hole allows the
entire image to get painted one color. We don't want our definition of cloud
to leak along the single droplets that exist in the air to define the entire
atmosphere as a cloud, but we definitely want to group certain things together
as clouds.

Hopefully that is food for thought for someone who is better versed at the
specifics of anything I just said!

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danidiaz
Reminds me of a strange story by Philip K. Dick titled "Null-O". The
protagonists of that story are complete (and militant) mereological nihilists.

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stared
A physicist's point of view:

P.W. Anderson, "More is Different" (1972),
[http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72mo...](http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf)

(One of my favourite essays on philosophy of science, by scientists. Perhaps
just after Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the
Natural Sciences".)

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bobcostas55
>It would be profoundly counterintuitive if there were no clouds, or no
cathodes, or no humans, and that is probably enough to reject the position

I really hate it when philosophers make "arguments by intuition". It's almost
always used to justify denying some aspect of reality, or even worse, some
ethical tradition.

~~~
Amezarak
> I really hate it when philosophers make "arguments by intuition". It's
> almost always used to justify denying some aspect of reality, or even worse,
> some ethical tradition.

Precisely. When you see what you're calling an argument by intuition, you can
be sure that the writer will soon arrive at a comfortable proposition that
makes you and him feel good and doesn't overturn any sacred cows.

Elsewhere in this thread a commenter claimed philosophy hadn't solved any of
the problems posed by Socrates thousands of years ago. In fact, it has. The
problem is many of these problems are subject to "proofs by intuition" which
make us feel good and let us dismiss the counterevidence supplied by reason
and thereby continue the "debate" in perpetuity.

Take for example, free will. The philosophical answer to the question of free
will is that there is no question: the idea is confused nonsense. But (at
least nowadays) we have a "feeling" of free will, and it upsets people to
imagine they're not the captain of their fate, so the argument by intuition
prevails. A similar objection goes along the lines of "but what would we do
about criminals if they don't have free will! it would be unfair to punish
them!" ergo free will exists because otherwise it would makes us feel bad.

I don't mean to pick on free will - the same goes for most of the other old
questions. The argument by intuition as you say is worst in ethics - anything
that doesn't "feel right" is wrong.

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rbrogan
Maybe there is a difference between an idea and a concept. I have an idea of a
cloud. I have no strong concept of a cloud, and that would not matter unless
faced with a problem that required a strong concept of a cloud in order to
resolve the problem.

Is there a problem? Seems to me if there were an actual and important problem
whose solution were dependent on "what a cloud is" then you would have no
shortage of conceptualizations. What then matters is to what extent they are
useful for resolving problems.

I believe this is quite normal and our conceptualizations of ideas change as
the problems we face change. For instance, you can always ask what does
Justice, the Idea, mean. People have developed concepts over time and applied
them. The success leads to further problems, asking again what Justice means,
and further concepts.

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dkural
The universe is (most likely..) made of atoms, protons electrons etc. On the
other hand is seeing is done by the seer.. So we define where stuff begins and
ends, and if we disagree about it, well, that's just fine.

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dwaltrip
A single cloud in the sky may exist in such fashion that it has no precise
boundary and is not constituted by any specific set of water droplets. We
invented the word cloud as a name for loosely grouped water droplets that
appear white and fluffy when viewed from a far (as they commonly are). No
"contradiction" here.

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methou
First I thought this was talking about population problems as a social science
project, then it turns out just talking about cloud as is?

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gisely
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