ZOMBIE FORUMS

This is more or less ground we've gone over on the board before, but as I'm too lazy to look up my relevant posts myself, I can hardly expect anyone else to...


Only in the sense that there is no such thing as "objective", period. From our "subjective" points of view however, there are very good reasons for it. Or will you be exiting the room you're in right now by attempting to walk through the wall rather than the open door in a moment?


Logic, or rather the combination of logic and observation which could be called "science" in the formal sense or simply "reason" in the more everyday, informal sense, is simply the sum of our knowledge of the consistant and repeatable aspects of our experience. E.g. your experience tells you that it is easier to walk through empty air rather than solid walls, so by an unconcious logical deduction you conclude that that is probably how you should exit the room. There is nothing really "transcendant" about this; you could just as easily try to walk through the wall, but unless your house was built by an exceptionally shoddy contractor you would spend the rest of your (short, assuming you didn't stop for water) life attempting it without success. And hopefully I don't have to go into a long description of why any organisms that exhibited tendencies towards such behaviors would have been severely selected against in the darwinian sense.

You seem to be mostly talking about the personal uses of logic, so I'll leave the discussion of formal systems to Tamayo :) There is nothing that inherently says we "must" follow the dictates of logic*, (in fact I would argue we often don't from various points of view, but given our large number of conflicting desires, imperfect information about the world, and the general fuzziness of our thought processes, that's hardly surprising), it's just that it is useful and consistent, in many senses. Of course, so can be regular religions, magick, et al, so I can't really fault some people for living their lives by them. But logic, or rather "science" in the broad sense, which I would consider the application of logic to experience, seems to me to be by far the most useful tool we have for understanding the universe (or, to be pedantic, our perceptions thereof).

As for the general difference between science and religion, I would say one of the most important is that, however conservative and resistant to major change the former can be at times, it is still fundamentally capable of questioning and refuting its own earlier conclusions in light of better evidence or more useful conceptual constructs, whereas the latter generally has some assumptions at its base that cannot really be changed. Otherwise it wouldn't be "religion", in any usual sense.


Of course, I could be wrong, but hey- crippling ontological uncertainty is what makes the universe go 'round. Or something.


* By which I mean, what "logic" suggests in combination with our desires, abilities, etc., since by itself it doesn't dictate anything as far as our behavior. If it is our desire to die quickly, then running off a high cliff would be logical; if the contrary is true, it wouldn't be.



Now, now, there's no need for rancor.

The French can't help it if they suck.


Zing! *flees*

You used logic to argue that logic is better than the alternative. My point is (was?) asking the validity of such an argument.

Which arguement is more compelling?

Can't stop you.


Any method of thought is ultimately arbitrary and unprovable, so the best we can do is to pick the one that seems most useful from our perspective. Which I thought I just said, but I've probably been clearer in my posts the last three times or so I've said it on this board ^^.

I claim you are making a category error, here. It is meaningless to speak of an arbitrary or unprovable method, just as it would be to speak of a judicious or provable method. I am not being facetious, here: remember, my claim is that logic is merely a method of combining statements so that one can derive new statements. It is a statement that is arbitrary or predictable, provable or unprovable. It is by means of logic (or, hypothetically, by some other means) one decides whether a statement is judicious or provable -- or not.

This is the same category error made in the very first posting, I am afraid.



If logic is indeed the only method by which one can reliably and usefully combine old statements to produce new statements, then it is necessarily better to have it available as a tool than not to have it, in circumstances when you want to generate new statements out of old ones. You may claim that it is not the only method; I would be inclined to agree, indeed. Thus, the availability of logic as a tool is better than having no tool at all, but the very availability of other tools with which we can generate new statements from old ones muddies the question.

I think the question you wish to ask is, "is logic the best method by which one can figure out new statements given the availability of particular old statements?" Now, WI's claim that "there is no such thing as `objective', period" comes to fore. Whether or not logic is the best method for whatever objective is a matter of opinion. Where WI and I might differ is that I will make the somewhat grandiose claim that some opinions are right and some are wrong, and he might disagree with that opinion.

You did clarify your statement later:



Well, I don't. I use logic as a tool for generating new statements out of old ones. It seems to work well for that purpose. I don't see a god in logic, though; I have failed to perceive even a priesthood of a logical religion. (Pun intended.) There is an old story about a physicist, a mathematician and a logician who are riding on a train together and who all see a black sheep out the window at the same time.

"Hey, there's a black sheep!" says the physicist.

"No, that's a sheep that's black on the side we can see," suggests the mathematician.

"No, that's a sheep that's black on the side we can see during the moments when we are perceiving it," corrects the logician.

The story is used to illustrate that precise, logical definitions don't typically tell us anything we don't already know, but rather delimit the boundary between what it is we know and what it is that we do not know. By contrast, consider the First Commandment, which is a typical religious statement:



Better stay away from fatted calves and golden bullocks or whatever. Why? Because G*d tells us to. Why? I dunno.

I'm happy that I was understood at last.

No, I meant what I said (or vice-versa, I suppose). Are you saying there can't be more and less useful ways of "combining statements to derive new statements"? What about a method whereby the resulting statements are completely opposite of what we would normally expect to follow from the original statements? It would still be a method, just not a very good one for most purposes.


For practical purposes I agree, but right and wrong, and the systems for the deciding thereof, are still determined by our perceptions and cognition, which cannot be fundamentally proved correct, but only seem to be as far as we can tell.

What if there were a reality, for instance, with totally different rules of logic? Where 2+2=6.3, and not just in some semantic sense, etc. Now, I can't remotely imagine such a reality and I certainly don't see how one could exist, but I don't want to limit the universe to only what I can personally imagine or what would make sense to me :P

Now what if that reality is the real one, and ours is just a clever simulation inside it, much as we could make a good approximation of a deterministic universe inside our own computers, and any virtual beings living inside it would have no notion of quantum uncertainty? So in that sense I don't see logic as being as fundamental as you probably do, in that it still has its base in our observations of the universe.





My main point was that you seem to want an ironclad and definite answer, while in my view there isn't one (or any, ultimately), only the best-one-we-can-come-up-with-at-the-moment.

I believe I was not clear, then. What I should have said is, "it is meaningless to say that a method is `judicious' or `provable'". One can prove that a particular method is appropriate for a given purpose but to say that is "provable" presumes some particular purpose. Similarly, one can say that a particular method is judicious for a particular purpose, compared with some other method, but again to say it is "judicious" presumes the purpose to which the method is applied.

A "category error" is thus, in other words, a semantic error. In linguistic terms, the phrase *provable method is a meaningless noise. To make it meaningful, one must say something like method that is provably effective for doing some particular job.

There are, indeed, more and less useful ways of combining statements to derive new statements. I am sufficiently brave to go further and say that there are more and less successful ways of so doing.



Blasphemy! But, seriously now ...

I do not know what you mean by "some semantic sense". Now, in that I find the statement "2+2=6.3" plainly silly, let me suggest a different statement for consideration: "1+1=0". That latter statement is false, if we are working in a group of characteristic other than two, but true if the characteristic of our group is two. When counting chickens, or sheep, or ill-gotten loot, we should probably use a group of characteristic zero; but if we are programming a computer, groups of characteristic two are very common indeed. Neither kind of group is more or less real than the other, in any sense.



Right! Granted! But -- so what? Logic and rationality are not the same thing. I never claimed they were.



You could have got away with that accusation before the turn of the twentieth century, but Cantor and Hilbert and Bourbaki put mathematics and logic on a purely formal basis, so you're too late.

Edit: fixed a very stupid mistake

Tamayo dear, why is is that every time we get into a long argument, I feel like we're going around in circles? And yet I enjoy it anyway. Must be your secksay math-ness...


As do I. My point was that perhaps the fundamental nature of the universe is something we would find silly, in a more fundamental sense than quantum mechanics.


"It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct."
- Michio Kaku



The reason I specified "non-semantic" was to preclude exactly this type of redefinition-trickery. Looks like I wasn't clear enough ^^. Ah well, at least you forced me to go look up group characteristics. Not that I got very far, since I got swamped in specialized jargon like: "Given any infinite abelian A with an element of order 2 and a torsion subgroup embeddable in Q/Z, there is a field K whose multiplicative group is isomorphic to A x F for some free abelian group F", which I'm not even sure applies.

I'm not sure the example I gave was really the best to pick, since it's probably possible to define "4" as "that which 2+2 equals". What I was trying to get across is the idea of a world where the most basic rules of causality and logic which we are used to are incorrect, where is A=B and B=C, then A>C, or something along those lines. Obviously, I can't see how such a universe could work and certainly I couldn't see it being able to support complex structures like sentient beings, but see previous note about that not really ruling it out.



When it comes down to it, I don't really have much interest in denying the truth of mathematical precepts, especially on the basis of hypothetical constructs that we might never be able to observe (since my usual definition of reality as "what is directly or indirectly observable" would seem to make them irrelevant). But however fundamental mathematical laws may appear to be (and I'm not denying they do- they're pretty much the most certain form of thought we have, as far as I can tell), they are still discovered and codified by us (or by other cognitive constructs similarly within our universe- I believe there are some mathematical exploratory computer programs that have reformulated a lot of the last couple centuries of math working on their own). And so, if there were some massive gap in our understanding of reality of which we were not previously aware, our math could similarly be incorrect.

That said, if you're going to assign something the title of Truth™ with a capital T, one could certainly pick worse things than basic mathematical conclusions...

Or perhaps I have a one-track mind. Or perhaps it's another variation on this little play:

T: True mathematical statements are analytic, and thus unassailable.

WI: What if there were things about which we as human beings had no ability to calculate?

T: I'm sure there are. If superbeings could calculate them where we cannot, then, those superbeings can learn more things than we can. It does not invalidate what we have learned.

WI: But what if what the superbeings could learn actually invalidated what we as mere humans believed to be unassailable, analytic truths?

T: That pseudo-question is a meaningless noise. Here is another such meaningless noise: "Can God create a stone too heavy for Him to lift?"

Superbeing: *thwaps T*

T: Owwie!

Getting back to the original question of "Why do I need logic?", my answer is simply:

"Survival"

Logic and rational thought (scientific method) are our feeble attempts to understand the world around us (our universe).

"The universe rewards us for understanding it and punishes us for not understanding it. When we understand the universe, our plans work and we feel good. Conversely, if we try to fly by jumping off a cliff and flapping our arms, the universe will kill us."
- Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart

As per game theory, there are of course exceptions. Idiots have been known to prosper, and rational people to suffer. Just because you are counting the cards does not mean that you are going to win the game; it just shifts the odds a bit in your favor.

Logic and rational thought are our ways of counting the cards in the great game of life.

ñ

I wouldn't say it's a question that's meaningless, per se, just that's unanswerable at present and shows no signs of becoming otherwise in the near future. (Unless of course some superbeing decided to drop by and give us some pointers on the nature of non-logical reality™ instead of thwapping you for your impertinence)


Assuming the God in question is omnipotent, i.e. can do anything, this question really becomes "can God intentionally limit verself from being able to do certain things?" The answer as I see it would be yes, God could place an arbitrary mass limit on the size of stones ve allows verself to move around. Although if God made said change permanent, ve would no longer be truly omnipotent, but "omnipotent minus the ability to work in a quarry", or somesuch.

Tamayo usually makes her points much better than I could, but I think there’s still some “category errorsâ€

Yay Thinman. Except -- with the exception of a "boolean algebra", when the word "algebra" is used as a term to denote a particular kind of mathematical structure, such as for example a ring or a set, an algebra A over a ring R is usually a triple A=(R=(S,P,M),+,*) such that:

A is a module over R;
(R,*) is a multiplicative semigroup;
for a, b in R and u, v, w in A, u*(aMv+bMw)=aMu*v+bMu*w and (aMu+bMv)*w=aMu*w+bMv*w.

The word you want is "magma". "Structure" will do in a pinch.

(Guess what Tamayo did her dissertation in, hm?)


As for my examples of "meaningless noise", I stand by my words, sorry. The pseudo-sentences I so denoted are not English; they are entirely semantically invalid. Discussing them is exactly like discussing the mating habits of invisible pink unicorns.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I'm not going to argue the logic point, since to do so effectively would by definition be logically impossible ;), but as for this:


If we defined various properties of our hypothetical IPU's beforehand, other than the their complete non-observability to us, then we could indeed discuss other properties which arise from those. Hence for "God", if we assume the property of omnipotence beforehand, I don't think my second statement was unreasonable.

I would think you, of all people, would be open to the idea of playing logic games with entities which may or may not have anything to do with observable reality...

There's absolutely no proof of this. Why need there be a connection between a model of the world that corresponds to reality and a model of the world that allows us to survive? Can a thought or concept even correspond in any meaningful way to the noumenon anyway? Describing reality via thought seems to me somewhat akin to trying to translate a painting into music, only the gulf is even greater, because in the latter case we're talking about translating something from one sense to another, whereas in the former we're trying to leap from the conceptual realm entirely past the sensual realm (which the conceptual interfaces with), to the world-beyond-senses.

(Please excuse me. I haven't really read this thread at all, but as I was skimming it, I noticed that quote and just had to address it.)

Hm, I thought that IPUs were absolutely undetectable. I must study them further. They have five-and-a-half sexes, right? Female, male, and blarg. The females lay the eggs, the males fertilise the eggs, and the blargs wamble the gnorpflings.

Emy's quotation of Noam Chomsky is on point. She (and Noam before her) are using that pseudo-sentence as an example of a syntactically-correct but semantically-uncorrectable utterance.



Ouch! I've been thwapped! Again!

Yes, logic games featuring imaginary beings with unknown abilities are indeed amusing. But, given that God (one of those useful imaginary beings) is omnipotent, the pseudo-phrase "a stone too heavy for God to lift" is semantically ill-formed. Similarly, if I can state some analytic theorem, and allow myself absolute confidence that I have not made any mistakes in fashioning that theorem, then within my own purview, that theorem is necessarily true; but I acknowledge that the thing that keeps thwapping me from the Nth dimension may be able to learn more given the same premises than I can. Despite that, given the exact same premises, and using a complete, consistent superset of the rules of deduction that I used, my nemesis will not be able to contradict my theorem. If the rules my nemesis uses are not a superset of my rules, then it and I aren't really talking about the same statement at all, and if my nemesis isn't using a consistent set of rules, then I'm superior to it. (Ow! Hey!) Thus, I claim that the pseudo-phrase "invalidating a theorem given a consistent superset of the original formal rules of deduction" is just as much a failure to communicate as is "colourless green ideas".

The word "pain" is both an English word and a French word, though it is pronounced differently in both languages, and it has very different meanings in each language. That doesn't make either English or French a bad language, either.

Tamayo the thwap victim

Ah, but you see, we have a difference in our base definitions. I am considering "omnipotence" to be merely a starting condition, which can be partially (or totally, though I'm not sure how that would work) nullified by the entity in question, whereas you consider it an axiomatic quality of the entity, which if changed means it is no longer the same entity, hence the semantic meaninglessness of the question. Personally I'm willing to grant that even a partially non-omnipotent God is no longer God, but then I would simply rephrase my interpretation of the question to be "Can God change verself from an onmipotent being to a non-God entity that is omnipotent in all ways except for being able to accelerate rocks possessing a mass greater than m at will?" In which case, my answer is still yes.




What? Nothing to see here...

Then I challenge you to jump off a cliff and flap your arms.



Because otherwise you are relying on dumb luck, with an emphasis on "dumb".