[Corpora-List] QM analogy and grammatical incompleteness

[Dominic Widdows]

> Try a simple thought experiment, Yuval. Try to line up a random group 
> of
> people according to their height and their IQ (golf score, etc.) You 
> will
> find you get a sort of uncertainty principle. The group cannot be 
> perfectly
> ordered with respect to both at the same time.

Hi Rob,

This sort of distributional complexity is perfectly classical, it is 
not a version of the Uncertainty Principle. In your thought experiment, 
the fact that you've ordered people by IQ has no effect on your ability 
to go up to people with a tape measure and measure their height.

It would only be an Uncertainly Principle if giving someone an IQ test 
made a tape measure wobble and go fuzzy whenever you tried to measure 
their height.

I believe that this is the warning that John correctly pointed out 
earlier. My suggestion that there are versions of "knowledge 
incompleteness" in classical physics and linguistics should not be 
confused with the Uncertainty Principle, which is much stronger and 
more bizarre.

Best wishes,
Dominic