Schrodinger? Izzat you?
Even God thinks this argument is lame, and He’s fucking God.
I know this, because X is Y, and X is not Y, therefore you masterbate a lot.
Hey, what up Heisenberg!
The people in my cubical are wondering why I keep snickering. I did manage to not spray coffee on my keyboard, so you don’t owe me a new one.
Wait, who’s fucking God? I hope God remembers what happened last time He knocked someone up.
God is fucking God. Perks of being omnipresent.
(post #80)
(post #81)
(post #89)
I was not questioning the pleasure and utility of standard logic.
I was implicitly ridiculing the notion that the substandard axiom
“any property may be attributed to members of the empty set”
could possess any utility, and I was explicitly ridiculing the notion
that the syllogism:
(Premise) “there are no unicorns”
(Conclusion) “all unicorns are lesbians”
could be fun.
I believe it’s technically a menage a trois.
2,000 years and we’re still talking about His one night stand.
this.
As for the second point, it is tautologously true that any legitimate opportunity to utter the phrase “all unicorns are lesbians” is fun, so I don’t know what else to tell you.
As to the first point, it’s not an axiom, it’s a consequence of the rules of inference.
Here’s an intuitive way to grasp why the members of an empty set can correctly be said to have any attribute you might care to name (assuming existence isn’t an attribute of course!). If there are no vases on the table, and I tell you to grab all the red vases from the table and bring them to me, and you bring me no vases, have you failed to do as I asked? Of course not–you’ve succeeded in doing it. I asked you to bring me all the vases on the table–and you brought all of them to me by bringing me zero of them. So, you fulfilled my request to bring me all the red vases by bringing me all the vases. (That’s zero vases.) Hence, all the vases on the table are red. Replace “red” with anything you like and the argument still goes through.
Hence, every member of the empty set “vases on the table” has any attribute you care to name.
Thank’ee! I was going to answer, but you beat me to it…and better.
Bawdy examples in logic are lots of fun. A lot of us would have paid closer attention in school if they’d used lesbian unicorns instead of urns full of blue balls.
The Ontological argument is very different from the OP’s. (And is much more difficult to answer.)
This statement is false.
I dunno, a sigh and a call of “bullshit” is all the effort I’ve ever needed.
It is a matter of personal taste. For people whose tastes have not advanced
past Junior HS level it might be fun.
No, it is not a consequence of the rules of inference. It is an axiom forming the basis
of a class of preposterous inferences.
The standard axiom is : An empty set contains no members and no attributes
(assuming non-existence is not an attribute).
It would make more sense to begin with the premise that since the set of vases
on the table is empty then the request to grab a vase (color is immaterial) from
the table is impossible to fulfill. To put in another way it is impossible to “succeed”
in fulfilling the request. No need for our purposes to discuss whether inability to
fulfill an impossible request constitutes a form of “failure”.
If you want to live with such inferences from your axiom as “all is equivalent to zero”
and “red vases are zero vases” then I guess no one can stop you, although I wish
your parents and teachers had stopped you back before the effects of not cleaning your
bong screen got really out of hand.
I will close this post by taking the inference from your axiom ‘the empty set “vases
on the table” has any attribute you care to name’ at face value, and performing a
reductio ad absurditum:
You say there are no vases on the table? Ah, but there IS on the table something
that walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, and possesses every
other attribute we can imagine a duck having. Finally, this duck-like entity is uniformly
brown in color. Allow me to attach a label to it bearing the words “red vase”. According
to your axiom it IS a red vase, and you shouldn’t get too upset if after I bring it
to you, in successful fulfillment of your request, it shits in your lap.
I wonder where you’re getting this information from.
And did she yell out “oh God!”?
Me too! That sure isn’t how it’s taught in either math classes or philosophy classes! The way it’s actually taught is that members of the empty set (which, of course, there aren’t any!) have any attribute you care to assert. Unicorns are lesbians. Even prime numbers greater than two are also divisible by three. etc.
One could, I suppose, create a completely new system of logic, in which members of the empty set are defined as having no attributes at all.
(Just as a new system of logic could be created in which universal statements imply the existence of at least one instance, which isn’t how it’s done today. Today, I can say “All unicorns are lesbians,” and then duck responsibility by noting there aren’t any unicorns. Under this new, variant logic, I couldn’t say it, because the statement “All unicorns are lesbians” implies that there actually is at least one lesbian unicorn out there, somewhere. It could work. It could be entirely self-consistent. It just isn’t how real logicians do it in our world!)
Anyway, logic is fun, and I feel rather sorry for anyone who doesn’t get it!