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Does anything exist?

Well, jolly good, and well done if you studied philosophical logic to that level. But that really is not what we are talking about in this thread.

Threads tend to drift somewhat. My one and only point in this thread is that Belz is posting nonsense about logic and I'm having a "someone's wrong on the internet" moment. It will probably be over before Belz comes to his or her senses and I slide back to just lurking once again and leave them to proclaim themselves the Winner of the Very Serious Debate.

But look at what you did here.

You presumably read at least something from my posts because you replied to one of them. Yet you somehow came to believe that I'm writing about philosophical logic. I'm not. I very explicitly used examples from computational logic side of symbolic logic.

LTL is a logic created by a computer scientist and that is used by computer scientists (and an occasional verification engineer) to verify real life computer systems. The TCP protocol that you use to read this very message has been verified with LTL.

That's not philosophy according to the definition that most people use and it's definitely not philosophy according to the people who hate philosophy in this thread. But yet, because I don't immediately join the chorus shunning philosophers, I must be one of those useless philosophers myself.

As a yet another side note, I did almost no work with philosophical logic. The things that they do in the philosophy department are so different from what we did in the computer science department that there was little overlap.
 
Threads tend to drift somewhat.

This isn't drift, it's intentionally burying the question under nonsense and word games to maintain the illusion that the question is "deep" so people can act out their Yoda self-insert fan ficiton.
 
Threads tend to drift somewhat. My one and only point in this thread is that Belz is posting nonsense about logic and I'm having a "someone's wrong on the internet" moment. It will probably be over before Belz comes to his or her senses and I slide back to just lurking once again and leave them to proclaim themselves the Winner of the Very Serious Debate.

But look at what you did here.

You presumably read at least something from my posts because you replied to one of them. Yet you somehow came to believe that I'm writing about philosophical logic. I'm not. I very explicitly used examples from computational logic side of symbolic logic.

LTL is a logic created by a computer scientist and that is used by computer scientists (and an occasional verification engineer) to verify real life computer systems. The TCP protocol that you use to read this very message has been verified with LTL.

That's not philosophy according to the definition that most people use and it's definitely not philosophy according to the people who hate philosophy in this thread. But yet, because I don't immediately join the chorus shunning philosophers, I must be one of those useless philosophers myself.

As a yet another side note, I did almost no work with philosophical logic. The things that they do in the philosophy department are so different from what we did in the computer science department that there was little overlap.


OK, well first thing - I did not actually read your post in very much detail. I just skimmed through one of your last longer replies to Belz. I did notice that you did not seem to pushing the philosophy angle, but the point still remains that the argument in this thread has been about the philosophy issue, ie the claim that all of science depends completely upon philosophy, simply because academic philosophy courses include modules on "Logic", where they often identify 30 or more different types of "logic".

But my obvious point about that philosophical claim, is, as I just tried to explain, is that the claim is clearly clearly untrue! Science generally does NOT rely on formal philosophical or mathematical "logic".

Now you are going to say that Computer Science does use various branches of mathematical "Logic". OK, that's fine. Core science especially (ie physics, chemistry biology ... and I would always include most of Maths) does of course use almost every branch of Maths (and very heavily so in areas like QM, QFT, or Relativity studies ... you are also drowning in maths in all of solid-state science). So what? OK, the answer is - if philosophers here had said that core science relies heavily on maths, then nobody would have objected! ...

... but instead what they claimed was that science relied heavily on philosophy (because parts of "logic theory" are often studied in philosophy courses).
 
... but instead what they claimed was that science relied heavily on philosophy (because parts of "logic theory" are often studied in philosophy courses).

Who did? Anyway, philosophy is one of those subjects that you can't have an intelligent conversation about on this forum. The other notorious one is the question of historical Jesus... Those two things are examples of how natural science background qualifies a person to know everything :) Even without knowing pretty much anything. And this from a person who really thinks that science (especially physics) is - after literature - the best thing this sorry species can show for itself.
 
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Threads tend to drift somewhat. My one and only point in this thread is that Belz is posting nonsense about logic and I'm having a "someone's wrong on the internet" moment. It will probably be over before Belz comes to his or her senses and I slide back to just lurking once again and leave them to proclaim themselves the Winner of the Very Serious Debate.

But look at what you did here.

You presumably read at least something from my posts because you replied to one of them. Yet you somehow came to believe that I'm writing about philosophical logic. I'm not. I very explicitly used examples from computational logic side of symbolic logic.

LTL is a logic created by a computer scientist and that is used by computer scientists (and an occasional verification engineer) to verify real life computer systems. The TCP protocol that you use to read this very message has been verified with LTL.

That's not philosophy according to the definition that most people use and it's definitely not philosophy according to the people who hate philosophy in this thread. But yet, because I don't immediately join the chorus shunning philosophers, I must be one of those useless philosophers myself.

As a yet another side note, I did almost no work with philosophical logic. The things that they do in the philosophy department are so different from what we did in the computer science department that there was little overlap.

Exactly, Marras, logic has moved past the realm of simply philosophy. Such that you basically don't have to know any philosophy to work in the field or just use some form of logic. Much like you don't have to be an engineer or mechanic to be able to drive a car. Heck, these days cars are probably designed as much if not more by artists and interior designers than engineers and mechanics. There was once a Vega, I think, that you had to pull the engine or drill a hole in the wheel well, just to change the spark plugs. So I have no problem with the assertion that the field of logic is no longer just a matter of philosophy anymore. If that was all it was I would have just stayed lurking.

It's like that for a lot of things, the heavy lifting has already been done. You don't have to learn all about electromagnetism to use a tv, radio or phone. Likewise detailed knowledge of thermodynamics isn't needed to be a cook or even an HVAC technician. You just need to know how the current systems and tools of the trade work.

However, Belz...'s question, that was apparently answered and not answered, went directly to the philosophical underpinnings of classical logic. Which isn't how human thinking generally works and why more formal thinking (philosophy) was needed to develop that very structure. Which, of course, the field itself (logic) has moved well beyond.
 
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Who did? .


Well I'm not going to spend my time finding quotes for you ... if you have been following this thread then you must have noticed that it's something that has been alluded to repeatedly.


Anyway, philosophy is one of those subjects that you can't have an intelligent conversation about on this forum. The other notorious one is the question of historical Jesus... Those two things are examples of how natural science background qualifies a person to know everything :) Even without knowing pretty much anything. And this from a person who really thinks that science (especially physics) is - after literature - the best thing this sorry species can show for itself.


We certainly could have an intelligent conversion about philosophy (e.g. as an academic subject, and/or as a discussion of what various famous ancient philosophers have said). But this thread was not actually about philosophy at all ... it started with the question of whether or not anything actually exists. And although ancient philosophers have no doubt all pondered questions like that for thousands of years, that question is now best answered by science.

Why? Why science and not philosophy? Answer - because science has explained in vast mind boggling detail what actually exists (as far as anyone can honestly tell), and it's done that for almost everything imaginable, and actually for many thousands of things that were beyond everyone's imagination at the time. But in contrast, philosophy has explained none of that! Not really explained much of anything at all in fact.

As far as those Jesus threads are concerned – there was plenty of very sensible discussion there on whether or not Jesus existed. And I think a lot people learned a great deal about what the actual evidence is, and how much of that evidence was/is valid.
 
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Well I'm not going to spend my time finding quotes for you ... if you have been following this thread then you must have noticed that it's something that has been alluded to repeatedly.

This is another thing where the line between philosopher and troll starts to blur a lot, constantly demanding the discussion come to a halt to "Show me where someone said that!" in a discussion where's dozens of people are saying it all the time.

It's so blatant and obvious and on the nose, it's obviously intentional.
 
This is another thing where the line between philosopher and troll starts to blur a lot, constantly demanding the discussion come to a halt to "Show me where someone said that!" in a discussion where's dozens of people are saying it all the time.

It's so blatant and obvious and on the nose, it's obviously intentional.

Ah, intentional. Yes. Yes it is. One can make up anything, coat it with a superficial veneer, and call it philosophy, Deep thought. And one ends up with 42.

One might ask what has philosophy discovered lately? Nothing is the answer. No amount of navel gazing ever discovered anything.

Has philosophy contitibuted to science, logic, whatever? Sure I would happily agree to that. Has modern philosophy so contributed to same? Nope.
 
I notice Florida State University at Tallahassee has a Philosophy Department that skews heavily toward personal responsibility. It holds an annual Florida State University Free Will, Responsibility, and Agency Conference, and states:
"The department has also been privileged to be the home of the generously funded Big Questions in Free Will Project and Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project. These projects have funded dozens of research grants, multiple series of conferences, and many publications. "
I kinda gotta wonder who's generously funding the free will work. Does FSU's emphasis on responsibility etc. presuppose - or through the backdoor try to posit - a soul of some sort? Is this philosophy with an agenda? Does philosophy always have an agenda?

I looked up philosophy departments because I was curious about who these days could be considered a real philosophers. Would it be an academic, with a job at a university? Is that where the real philosophizing goes on these days?
 
As I told you it deals with some paradoxes.

Such as?

Now that is demonstrably disingenuous, I've been quite honest about what I known and don't know about it.

I don't know what you're on about. Where did I say you had been dishonest about it?

The former being more than the name and the claim that it does what it says. I previously wrote about its advantages and limitations.

Not really, no. You say it deals with some stuff but don't really make that demonstration.

You claimed to not understand any of it.

What?

While I did take you claiming to accept it as an answer progress. However, your subsequent posts indicant you haven't honestly accepted it as an answer, yet.

You are confused. That I accept an answer as such doesn't mean I agree with it.

As I've said I'm more than willing to help but I'm no expert. As I said before, and you ignored, why should my words be any more convincing to you than the words of those who are considered experts?

That's a strange question as it seems completely unrelated to anything I've posted.

What's "patently true" about something you assert doesn't exist in reality, other than that simple lack of existence?

I have no idea what that means.

It's patently true because there is no instance of an actual logical contradiction in reality. Philosophers can dream up anything they want but if has no bearing on reality then it's pointless except as a form of entertainment.

Further, the law of non-contradiction isn't the only fundamental structure of logic.

No but it's the simplest and most fundamental one, and you've still not managed to demonstrate your claim about it.

The strongest paraconsistent logics are multivalued as TRUE, FALSE and BOTH. In them the law of non-contradiction [NOT (A & NOT A)] becomes a contradiction itself as 'Always NOT (A & NOT A) but sometimes A & NOT A'.

None of which have anything to do with philosophy.

Strange that you fixate on just one of those laws.

For simplicity. And you can't claim that I haven't done that correctly. Imagine the chaos we'd be in if we tried to address several at once!
 

Russell's paradox and the liar’s paradox are the two that spring to mind. In fact, if I recall correctly, the table of contents in the link, I originally gave, mentioned a case study of the liar’s paradox

I don't know what you're on about. Where did I say you had been dishonest about it?

Since I never claimed you said any such thing, you evidently just don’t know “what you’re on about”.


Not really, no. You say it deals with some stuff but don't really make that demonstration.

Yes, really, yes, I previously wrote about its advantages and limitations, that you simply ignored it doesn’t alleviate that fact. As for demonstrations, you’ve been doing so well at demonstrating it, I figured, ‘why get it your way’.


Sorry, my mistake, what you claimed you ‘didn’t know what that means’ was just the one sentence you did quote from that section of my post.

You are confused. That I accept an answer as such doesn't mean I agree with it.

My answer to your question was “Yes”, thus you have accepted, in accepting that as “an answer as such”, the answer “Yes”. Yet, you assert you don’t agree with it. Thus you have not accepted it as “an answer as such” to your question.

Answer accepted and not accepted.

Much like your assertion of a follow up question that was just the same question, that I just put down to you misspeaking. It is one way weaker paraconsistent logics deal with contractions and inconsistent information, that they aren’t actually a contradiction just a miscommunication. Once the problems of normal language get straightened out the apparent contradiction goes away.

The contradiction of your answered unanswered question appears to be more deliberate, simply because you would like to move on. I don’t think you actually hold that as true either. That’s another way weaker paraconsistent logics deal with contractions and inconsistent information. Compartmentalization, you want to claim you’ve accepted the answer to try to get me to get you to, well, accept the answer or find some other way to dismiss it.

Agree or don’t, it makes no difference. Your agreement or lack thereof is neither a relevant factor to the philosophical approach that actually asks the question you cited nor was it a condition of your question itself.

I’ll leave it to you to quote mine the above and below for individual statements to remark to, as if nothing else was written, at your leisure.



That's a strange question as it seems completely unrelated to anything I've posted.

I sated the relation to your posts, again, in the part of my post that you only quoted a couple of sentences from. Given your apparent predilection to just quote and respond to a sentence or two, as if nothing else was written, not strange at all. You seem really bad at this quote mining stuff.

Hint: don’t ask questions about the parts you want to simply ignore.

I have no idea what that means.

Evidently, though you still do assert the meaning below.

It's patently true because there is no instance of an actual logical contradiction in reality. Philosophers can dream up anything they want but if has no bearing on reality then it's pointless except as a form of entertainment.

Exactly, “there is no instance of an actual logical contradiction in reality”. Therefore, the only way to talk about and question such things is within that realm of thinking that need not have any “bearing on reality”. What you have just ascribed philosophy to be. The question you asked can only be one of philosophy, by your very own assertions above.

Basically, it was just a poorly formed question in response to an equally poorly formed argument. That science must be philosophical because it uses logic. Again, while their original foundations were in philosophy, both have moved well and independently beyond that field.

Heck, if I was going to make such an argument, which I wouldn’t because I don’t agree with such an argument. I probably would have used Karl Popper’s philosophy of falsifiability to show, at least, some more current (1934) connection directly between philosophy and science.


No but it's the simplest and most fundamental one, and you've still not managed to demonstrate your claim about it.

Actually, all of them are equally simple and fundamental. I’d have done it differently as I’ll note below. Again, I’ll leave the demonstrations to you, you’re quite well at showing how contradictions generally get formed and often used, even if you may not hold that contradiction true yourself.



None of which have anything to do with philosophy.

Oh, I’m certain that the Professor of Philosophy Graham Priest and the philosopher, logician, and environmentalist Richard Routley, who both coined the term 'dialetheism', will be dissuaded from their careers by your opinion (though Routley died in 1996). The former, Priest, being the one that formalized that defining attribute of a dialetheistic approach, mentioned before and that you remark to.

For simplicity. And you can't claim that I haven't done that correctly. Imagine the chaos we'd be in if we tried to address several at once!


I certainly can claim exactly that. To better make my point I’ll give a couple of examples, from technology and cosmology. It’s a bit long so there is a TLDR statement at the end of this part.

TV, Philo Taylor Farnsworth designed what became the foundation of video imaging, both camera and display, through inspiration from his youth on a farm. Historically, TV owed a significant part of its functionality to, well, agriculture. A farmer plowing a field, that’s how the electron beam scanned across the phosphorus inner surface of the screen. Creating the image that was produced by the camera in much the same way. Sorry for the technical aspects of this next part, but it is relevant at the end. This was accomplished by two signals. A horizontal sync, that drove the beam across each row and a vertical sync, that drove the beam from one row to the next. Anyone around at those times will recall fiddling with the horizontal and vertical hold controls to get the image right. Basically syncing those signals to each other and to their association to image positioning on the screen, these sync signals were imbedded in the TV signal transmission at some offset from the central tuning frequency. Some 70 years later TV display and capture (CCD for capture) technology moved on, to digital. LCD and LED image elements (pixels) are switched on and off directly. You don’t have vertical and horizontal hold controls on a modern TV anymore. However, TV transmission for a time was still the same analog way, with the sync signals. They were converted to digital imaging data for the TV to display by the TV itself. These days both display and transmission are digital. No more sync signals of the type described. Though, I’m sure analog TVs (transmission and display) are still used in a lot of places. However, the leading edge of TV technology has moved well beyond that original agricultural underpinning of its operation.


The big bang, that the universe had a start has been a foundational claim of many religions since their start. The proposal of a big bounce conjecture (a big bounce has big bangs at the start of each bounce) was written about in a poem by Erasmus Darwin in 1791 and later by Edger Allen Poe in Eureka: A Prose Poem in 1848. While not scientific, Poe’s writing did have implications considered anticipatory of modern cosmology. It was also fundamentally and explicitly religious, in that “Divine Volition” is what overcame the Newtonian gravity (as the understanding was at the time) to force the primordial particle apart, spreading atoms throughout the universe. When Einstein developed his field equations and struggled to make them more static, simply asserting the cosmological constant, a Belgian Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, concluded, from the inherent lack of a static nature of the field equations themselves, that the universe started in a big bang. In fact, deriving what has become known as Hubble's law. This was purely a scientific assertion devoid of all religion. At that point, the start of the universe lost all specific religious implications. Though, some may still contend otherwise.


TLDR: Yes, stuff moves on, but if you are still adhering to those original tenets. They carry with them those origins and implications, agricultural, religious or philosophical, as the case may be. At least as foundations but not necessarily imbuing the whole of the field with those aspects. Particularly if you are addressing and questioning one of those original tenets directly, those aspects come into play.

One of the problems with your approach, besides those noted above, is that you are still holding to that original law, with its original philosophical implications. Unfortunately, the only approach that questions or tries to move beyond that law, that I have found, is also based directly on the philosophy of logic.

Frankly, I would have gone with the law of excluded middle. The drive to move away from that law was, as far as I know, driven by the field of logic itself. Also, people are more generally familiar with the existence of multi-valued and fuzzy logic.
 
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Russell's paradox and the liar’s paradox are the two that spring to mind. In fact, if I recall correctly, the table of contents in the link, I originally gave, mentioned a case study of the liar’s paradox

Those are both gibberish, cases of philosophy not (and continuing to just not) get that language doesn't create reality.

Defining something as one thing and then going "Okay but what if it didn't do that?" isn't clever or deep, it's just stupid.

Russell's Paradox is that a set of everything can't contain itself, therefore how can it be a set of everything, but that means something is outside of everything, and then you pretend to have a big made up existential crisis over it when all it is is yet more stupid word games that create surface level contradictions.

The Liar's Paradox is essentially the same thing. "If someone always lies what happens when they lie about telling lies LOL aren't I clever." No. It's just stupid word games.

The rest of your post is just a Gish Gallop of "I already told you!" because like all philosophy fanboys you don't get that "talking" and "actually explaining in anything resembling a meaningful way" aren't the same thing.

Philosophy never explains anything, it just declares stuff over and over and thinks that is the same thing.
 
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Those are both gibberish, cases of philosophy not (and continuing to just not) get that language doesn't create reality.

Defining something as one thing and then going "Okay but what if it didn't do that?" isn't clever or deep, it's just stupid.

Russell's Paradox is that a set of everything can't contain itself, therefore how can it be a set of everything, but that means something is outside of everything, and then you pretend to have a big made up existential crisis over it when all it is is yet more stupid word games that create surface level contradictions.

The Liar's Paradox is essentially the same thing. "If someone always lies what happens when they lie about telling lies LOL aren't I clever." No. It's just stupid word games.

The rest of your post is just a Gish Gallop of "I already told you!" because like all philosophy fanboys you don't get that "talking" and "actually explaining in anything resembling a meaningful way" aren't the same thing.

Philosophy never explains anything, it just declares stuff over and over and thinks that is the same thing.

r/SelfAwareWolves
 
Russell's paradox

A rhetorical construct itself based on the idea that contradictions are impossible! That's pretty funny.

the liar’s paradox

Didn't I ask for actual examples, not rhetorical ones? I want examples of this philosophy having real-world impact. So far you have demonstrated that it doesn't.

Since I never claimed you said any such thing, you evidently just don’t know “what you’re on about”.

You JUST said "Now that is demonstrably disingenuous, I've been quite honest about what I known and don't know about it." I don't know how versed you are in language, but this implies that I called you dishonest about what you knew, when I did not. The fact of the matter is that you have NO IDEA how such a contradiction-friendly philosophy would work, or what it would entail beyond word games.

My answer to your question was “Yes”, thus you have accepted, in accepting that as “an answer as such”, the answer “Yes”. Yet, you assert you don’t agree with it. Thus you have not accepted it as “an answer as such” to your question.

Answer accepted and not accepted.

Are you really unable to understand that I can accept X as an answer to a question without agreeing with it? So you are saying that if you don't agree with someone's answer to a question it means that it was never answered?

You are getting increasingly ridiculous.

Much like your assertion of a follow up question that was just the same question, that I just put down to you misspeaking.

Is English your first language? You seem to have a VERY hard time following a simple conversation. I asked whether X was possible, and now that you say yes, I asked for examples/demonstrations in order to determine whether that "yes" was correct. There is no contradiction there.

The contradiction of your answered unanswered question appears to be more deliberate, simply because you would like to move on.

We did move on, as illustrated by your feeble attempts at answering my second question.

That’s another way weaker paraconsistent logics deal with contractions and inconsistent information. Compartmentalization, you want to claim you’ve accepted the answer to try to get me to get you to, well, accept the answer or find some other way to dismiss it.

You really should go into the Matrix to meet the Architect. You two would get along just fine.

Agree or don’t, it makes no difference.

We're talking about philosophy. It makes all the difference in the world.

Hint: don’t ask questions about the parts you want to simply ignore.

And yet the fact remains that you have no idea whether the philosophy you have touted as able to deal with contradiction works in the real world.

Hint: don't make arguments that you know you can't support.

Exactly, “there is no instance of an actual logical contradiction in reality”. Therefore, the only way to talk about and question such things is within that realm of thinking that need not have any “bearing on reality”. What you have just ascribed philosophy to be. The question you asked can only be one of philosophy, by your very own assertions above.

That sounds like you're saying that philosophy is rather useless. I've said several times that I'm not interested in whether you can phrase something as a contradiction. It's obvious that you can. The question is whether the philosophy in question is applicable to the real world. Right now it seems just as pointless and nonsensical as solipsism.

Again, I’ll leave the demonstrations to you

It isn't my claim. It's yours. If you cannot demonstrate it, then it is rejected and your first answer, which was "yes", was actually wrong.
 
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A = Round. An A is defined as round. If it's not round, it's be definition not an A.

NOW WATCH AS A BLOW YOUR MIND! Are you ready? This is going to be such a paradox!

Imagine... a SQUARE A! OMG PONIES! IT'S SUCH A PARADOX! A SQUARE CAN'T BE AN A! BUT I JUST TOLD YOU TO IMAGIEN ONE! CAN YOUR MIND HANDLE IT?

Russel's Paradox and the Liar's Paradox and all other Philosophical Paradoxes are just that with pretentions and theatrics.
 
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How many legs does a dog have if we call a tail a leg?if a tree falls in the forest...Etc etc.

Yeah, great reductio and focusing on the part no one pays much attention to after their teen years.

Now, do you have a political philosophy or philosophy of self defense? I think you have both, as well as subjective value systems. Or is the anti-intellectual position you are so enamoured with to rename them as something more palatable and capriciously deny what they are: a way of thinking? In a word, a philosophy?
 
Go back to quoting the names of subreddits if you're just going to make the same argument over and over. At least that takes less time to read so it wastes less of my time.

The "But you're doing a type of philosophy!" argument has already been used and rejected.
 
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I guess having one wrong retort and using it over and over is a type of philosophy as well.
 

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