Re: hyper-sets

Onar Aam (onar@HSR.NO)
Sun, 4 Jun 1995 21:01:08 +0100


I first encountered hypersets in Ben Goertzel's "Chaotic Logic". He actually was
the first, to my knowledge, to construct a hyperset out of the objective and
subjective world. I'll check with his references and post them to this list.

One comment from Jeff puzzled me, though. He wrote:
"Is the subjective world a subset of the Objective world? I have my doubts."

The subjective world as subset of the objective world:

Minds are a subset of the universe. That is, there is a world on the "outside"
which is not part of the mind, but which the mind belongs to.

The objective world as subset of the subjective world:

The outside world is an illusion of the mind, a very real virtual reality
spanned by the mind. This means that the outside world is a part (read: subset)
of the mind.

These two possible scenarios are both possible. We may have certain qualms about
the latter scenario, but the point is that the two alternatives are
*indistinguishable*. We can never know which of them is correct. This
fundamental symmetry is reflected in the mutual, symmetrical relation of the
hyperset O = {S}, S = {O} (O = objetive. S = subjective)

Onar.