Tristan Wibberley <tristan.wibberley+netnews2@alumni.manchester.ac.uk> wrote:Actually, I got the distinct impression that when he talked about general knowledge, he was explicitly restricting this to things known by someone (though it was never clear exactly clear how many people would have to know something before it became part of general knowledge, or how he would deal with contradictions that might arise).On 17/07/2026 13:43, Alan Mackenzie wrote:Tristan Wibberley
<tristan.wibberley+netnews2@alumni.manchester.ac.uk> wrote:On 13/07/2026 17:22, Alan Mackenzie wrote:There just aren't enough bits of paper to write down the "complete"
set of general knowledge, and even if there were, there aren't
enough people or machines to do it.You only have to write down the things that haven't already been
written down. We've been writing things down for millenia.There's no "only" about unknown knowledge.The thing about "unknown" things is that they're not knowledge, they'reLet's go back to Peter Olcott's words:
unknowledge instead.
He was talking about "complete .... general knowledge". I suppose weOnce one assumes that the massive task of writing down the
complete set of atomic facts of general knowledge has already been
accomplished then the table has been built so that truth can just
be looked up.
could quibble about the finer points of English usage a fair bit, but to
me, what he was trying to propose includes _all_ general knowledge, not
merely a small but continually increasing subset of it.
This seemed clear from his treatment of problems which lack a known solution such as the Goldback Conjecture, which he vacillated between calling 'meaningless' or stating that they were 'outside the scope of general knowledge'.
Basically, I got the impression that he simply wanted to treat anything that was actually known as an 'axiom' of his system and all his system does is check to see whether a particular claim is an axiom or not (making his system entirely uninteresting since it could never produce new knowledge). This would seem to imply that his set of 'axioms' was not fixed but rather something that continuously changed over time.
André
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