[QUOTE=Pleonast]
Logic (i.e., the rules of inference) isn’t an assumption? Where did it come from? It didn’t come from mathematics.
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Funnily enough, I don’t know the history of formal or symbolic logic. I presume that some philosopher was diddling around with the idea of “what is truth”, and then stumbled onto the idea of 1) defining it the obvious way, and 2) drawing up a few truth tables.
Regardless, it didn’t come from mathematics; but is a lot like it in that it’s a completely separate abstract and artificial system. It has no assumptions about reality - just abstract definions and abstract axioms.
[QUOTE=Pleonast]
Once you start trying to match mathematics up to the world, you’re doing science, not math. You may justify your axioms or logic because of your observations, and that’s exactly the point I was trying to make–axioms and logic are the starting point of mathematics and cannot be justified within it.
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Of course they can’t, if you’re talking about matching it to the real world.
Religion, on the other hand, does try to justify its beliefs as being true and applicable in the real world based on nothing but its own say-so. Which is why, unlike math and logic, we shouldn’t believe its claims.
[QUOTE=Pleonast]
I don’t see how it’s possible to objectively compare subjective statements about untestable claims. That’s why your statement is a value judgement.
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You’ve moved the goalposts - where did I say anything about objective comparison?
Regardless, I maintain that my “value judgement” is true. Because artful and imiginative reinterpretaions and reimaginings of remembered internal mental phenomenon are worthless as a source of objective truths about reality outside your imagination, which is, objectively, not better than reading your alphabet soup. The fact that this is a judgement about the [lack of] value doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. Regardless of whether you don’t want to admit it.
[Quote=Left Hand of Dorkness]
That is, of course, what I was suggesting: I was talking about the foundation assumptions of science, not of proposed formal logic systems. My understanding is that the scientific method assumes that if P is true, ~P is false.
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Actually I think that the definition of the word true assumes that if P is true, then ~P is false -at least in standard english and first-year logic. I gather that there are those who redefine the term “true” in their own logic systems to better codify uncertainty or ‘gradiations’ of truth, but such redefinitions rather obviously are reserved to the systems that contain them, which doesn’t include science (which uses the english definition).
I guess I don’t see what the problem you have with this is.
[Quote=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Okay, fair enough–but then you don’t get to appeal to #4 until we get there. That means no references to data gathered by the senses. If you’re unwilling to meet that criterion, then no objecting to my pointing out that such data may be flawed.
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What’s happening here is that there are three or four different ‘stages’ where our observations might be questioned - but that all these questionings are answered by exactly the same answer, which applies at all levels. Observed reality is too damn consistent to be random.
What I was objecting to was you seemed to be moving the questions around like a game of cups - suddenly my answer to #2 was bad because it didn’t also explicity answer #4? I wasn’t going to start down that road - it’d end with me having to answer each question with an essay that answers all possible questions. I don’t want to go there.
[Quote=Left Hand of Dorkness]
The problem is that the descriptive power of statistics assumes a rational universe: if the universe is irrational, statistical theory is useless for providing theories. In an irrational universe, that compelling evidence is nowhere near compelling. You can’t assume that which you’re trying to demonstrate.
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No - the descriptive power of statistics assumes that the abstract system of math is functional - it has no dependency on the rational universe to function. It works in every universe for which you can take enough sample observations. The only effect of it being used in a random universe is that the results would be reflective of that randomity.
They’re not. Quite decidedly.
[Quote=Left Hand of Dorkness]
I’m not suggesting that things will start going completely random: I’m suggesting that they’re going completely random right now, and that it’s sheer chance (or else some strange alien unreason that our brains are ill-equipped to comprehend) that has resulted in our belief that things operate according to reason. I don’t believe for a second that that’s true: I take it on faith, I take it as axiomatic, that it’s not.
If things started going haywire, I’d drop the axiom, in the same way that Euclid would’ve dropped “the shortest distance between two points is a line” if someone showed him how to get a shorter distance using an arc. In neither case does a willingness to drop the axiom in the face of countering evidence suggest that it’s not an axiom.
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I don’t believe it’s true either, but faith has nothing to do with it. The preponderance of evidence against it is so powerful that the odds of the universe to date being completely random are, essentially, zero.
Consider this example. A perfectly random coin when flipped has a 50% chance of landing on heads. This is true for every single coin flip - so it’s perfectly possible for the coin to land on heads 10, 20, 100, or even a hundred million billion times in a row.
But the odds are against it. If you see heads coming up with such consistency, you’re almost certainly dealing with a two-headed coin - that is, one with no randomity at all.
Because the odds of seeing 10 heads in a row are worse that 1/1000. And the odds of seeing 20 in a row are worse than one in a million. And that’s just 20 flips! The odds of seeing 100 in a row (on a random coin) are appreciably worse than a thousand million billion trillion to one. (There’s not space enough in this post to write the odds against 100,000,000,000,000,000 random flips coming up all heads.)
Now, for every instant that goes by I see a visual image that remains decidedly unrandom. (Were it random, it should look like television snow.) Now, from technology I know I’m processing at least 25 frames a second of visual information, with at least 2000x1000 distinct elements of visual data, with a color acuity that represents at least 1000 different shades. So, using these very low numbers, I rake in at least 50 trillion bits of visual information a second. The odds that that’s happening at random and still forming a coherent, consistent-appearing view onto an apparent environment -any environment!- are so low as to be beneath consideration. And every additional second that goes by, the odds get even worse.
I can’t think of anything that requires less faith to believe.
And things started going haywire, it would just be more data, more observations. At that point, given the volumnous preponderance of evidence that things were orderly in the past, I would assume that something had changed, not that my past observations were all random hits at an infinity-to-one chance.
[Quote=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Yes, which is why I said that science accepts it as axiomatic that our senses provide a more-or-less accurate understanding of the objective universe.
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Actually it bases it on observations, and it only assumes it passively, in the same way it assumes there are no black swans until you come up with one. That’s just he nature of science; large chunks of it are held quite provisionally, really, just waiting for somebody to come along an prove things otherwise. And by “large chunks” I mean “all of it”. It has no axioms, really; anything may be disproven, and anything that looks like it might be an axiom is quite solidly proven (at least so far).
[Quote=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Going back to Euclid: can you connect two dots in a way that’s shorter than a line drawn between them? If not, do you reject Euclid’s assertion that this is an axiom?
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You’re confusing explicit axioms in abstract systems with statements about objective reality. Euclidean geometry has axioms. Science is not Euclidean geometry.
[Quote=Left Hand of Dorkness]
NObody is saying science is flawed, and this is a common misconception among scientists: a belief that a system with axioms is a flawed system. It ain’t. Every system rests on the back of axioms.
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I think this is more like a common misconception among you. Nobody minds that abstract systems like math and logic have axioms and defined truths. And science doesn’t rest on the back of axioms. (The scientific method does, but that’s an abstract system that’s distinct from the body of observations and discoveries commonly known as science.)
However, making up axioms about objectively reality (like religion does) is another beast entirely - one which I think alphabet soup is as good a source for as anything else anyone has come up with. But neither science, math, nor logic does anything like that.
[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
Is it better to be intellectually honest or emotionally honest? Is a balance of the two good or bad? Necessary or not?
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It’s best to be intellectually honest about your emotions. Admitting that they’re an internal effect of your mind and not a magical conduit to fairyland would be a fine start for many people.
If you have some other meaning for the phrase “emotionally honest”, I’d be interested in hearing it. Preferable something short and simple, please.
[QUOTE=cosmosdan]
I wouldn’t expect a soul to drink alcohol or anything else. While the soul is still attached to the body I might expect something else.
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Wha? What are you talking about? In reality, bodies with brains drink, brains are effected by the physical contact with alcohol. If souls existed, bodies with souls would drink but not be effected (especially not in their personality) because souls would not be effected by physical contact with alcohol, due to the lack of physical contact between the alcohol and the soul. This is not hard to comphrehend.
And how is the soul “attached” to the body, supposedly? Physically? Is the soul physical?