Aberdeen

Many thanks to all the people who made the Joint Sessions in Aberdeen very pleasant, especially Jonny:

I saw a mysterious looking man called Martin Cooke from Glasgow present a paper on a physically possible supertask that he thought proved that propensity theories were contradictory, or physical tendencies were, if there is a difference. There were a lot of structural similarities with the 2 envelope paradox, so I went over and started talking to him at lunch. We talked for quite along time before we realised that he had actually commented on Blogginthequestion! Under the pseudonym Enigman! “So you are Enigman!” I declared and shook him firmly by the hand.

My talk went well enough (e.g. I didn't faint), although I was booed when I replied to a question about what I was proving by saying that my proof could be regarded as a proof that the counting numbers are indefinitely extensible, if we assume that physical tendencies are well-described by some propensity theory or other! The talks I sat through were more academic, as were the plenary speakers. The best bits were Kit Fine likening David Lewis to Thales (Lewis said that to question set theory would be silly, but his basic supposition was that there are no Laws of Nature) and a discussion on the nature of time (following an argument against presentism that was illustrated by a drawing, so that in effect, the force of the argument presupposed that time was quasi-spatial, imho; the man making the argument replied that presentism was crazy).