Re: ka/ni kama

[John Cowan <cowan@DRV.CBC.COM>]

Lee Daniel Crocker (none) wrote:

> Not wanting to get into the philosophical argument of whether or
> not qualia are meaningful existents,

And a good thing too.  I could explain it to you,
but then I'd have to kill you.  :-)

> I /can/ ask what are "pure"
> numbers if not qualia?  If /these/ qualia are basic to the language,
> why can't I express others?

There are many interpretations of numbers as sets:
in Cantor's interpretation (which is hardcoded into the
Loglan offshoot -gua!spi), *n* is the set of all
sets of cardinality *n*.  In von Neumann's interpretation,
0 is the null set and *n* is the set whose members
are the integers smaller than *n*.  And there are others.

> And that brings to mind the obvious place one might want dimensioned
> quantities: in mekso.  If one can say that 2+2=4 without implying
> that 4 of something are around somewhere, why can I not say that a
> newton is a kg*m/sec^2 without implying that any pushing is going on?

You can.  This is what the sumti/selbri to number converters
are for.

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban