I've invented a totally new way to get information out! What I do see, is I take two soup cans, punch a hole in them, then I put some string into the holes, and then tie them off... now, hold the two cans so that the string become taut...
Because, same as I would be willing to watch German ads on TV just to get German TV, there is little point for the advertisers to advertise something that I can't buy here in the US. I mean, it works fine for big companies that sell under the same name there and here, like Lexus, Mercedes, BMW, and T-Mobile, but what about Beer commercials?
And what about standards of decency? I saw naked boobies on a German television program... WON'T YOU THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!
Thanks for using big words... you got me using tautological wrong, and nonetheless misspelling it.
You'll have to forgive me; I dislike using uncommon words, because they cause confusion and result in people misunderstanding you. To the point, I thought that tautological meant something akin to "useless", not redundent. One can argue that redundent things are useless, but they certainly are not semantically the same thing. As not all useless things are redundent.
My apologies for my ignorance of the word in question.
I am sorry if it somehow appeared that I was implicitely implying that your stand on this points was somewhat childlike: I intended to be as explicit about it as I could. I firmly believe your attitude towards certain of the subjects we are dealing with, such as on how to deal with specific authority, to be quite of the romantic kind, cavalier if you like the word, and, in ultimate terms, quite childlike. Now, this does not mean, not at all, that I think you are worthless or an idiot or anything: it just plainly means what I said: that I think that some of your views are childlike.
Oh, don't worry, it was quite explicit. If one were to read my comment looking for detail, one would see that I did in fact say that you were definitely explicit in calling my argument infantile, and that I did not have to rely on that most greatest of sins on Slashdot, infering someone's meaning from their implicit statements.
Also, perhaps you don't understand that telling someone their argument is childlike is rude, and derogatory. I don't mind you saying that it's ignorant, incorrectly founded, based on false premises, or other such things. These are constructive comments that state that I amm either missing information, or I'm making statements that are not logically based, or that I'm just making shit up.
Telling me that what I'm writing is exactly what a child would write isn't exactly constructive...
The argument is contained in Bouveresse's book. I cannot be more explicit about this than this. I will not repeat his arguments. That would be pointless.
Because you feel a need to force me to go out and obtain a book, rather than using that vastly more mature and adult knowledge to simply assert a reasonably relavent reason to me. I hate this behavior of people. "I don't know how to spell 'eccentric'" "Look it up in the dictionary." "Awesome, thanks for the advice." Perhaps I don't have the literary pedigree that you do to make any sort of passible progress attempting to read this book. As you said, you're not certain if there exists an English translation.
Well, do you mind being so kind as to grace us with an summary of an excerpt of the argument to show us that you're not just saying, "Well, there's this book, "EnAjAvUVes, Bej AlGer AlEnDov." and it says everything that I need to support my argument. Oh, by the way, I don't know if they have an English version, so I hope you can speak IoVeb."
You have to understand that the statement "6+6=0" in the theorry of Z_12 and the statement of "6+6!=0" in the theory of Z are using the same sign "6" to represent different things. They are conventionally represented with the same sign, by what is called in the jargon an "abus de langague", but they mean different things. It is not that one statement is true in one context and false in the other: they are completely different statements, that happen to be written, when following the traditional notations, with the same signs. The word "come" means somethign in English and somethign different in Spanish. "6" means one thing in the context of the theory of Z_12, and something different in the theory of "6". It is not much deeper than that.
I understand that the context is an implicit matter of these things. But then you have to realiize that the contextual view that I have on the world is then different from your contextual view on the world, and that you are thus unfit to prove anything within my universal context, because you're unaware of all the constraints that are applicable to me.
In fact, while the previous paragraph by an "abus de langague" is using exactly the same words when I wrote it as when you read it, you'll see that they mean different things. A reasonable question is, where does the context stop being significant?
Can you prove anything at all for all possible constraints? Marxist Haccker 42 asserts no.
Well, he is wrong. You can prove that "6+6!=0" in the theory of the integ
So, it's exactly like what I've been doing with my object oriented approach to C coding, that doesn't make sense in OO languages because the syntax makes you lazily pick the non-DI way...
I mean, if you can cite a Wiki in support of your position, couldn't you just as easily cite the more authoritative sources--your childhood mentor, your high school civics teacher, the many volumes of theory written by the grand masters of the subject that you read at university, etc.--whose instruction was the true support for your convictions
I don't know... I think that Wikipedia is more accessible to my other participators in any given debate than Mrs Whitmore.
I mean, are you seriously saying that when you run into an important issue that you know nothing about, you arrive at a conclusion based on what Wikipedia has to say about the subject?
Not that alone. I don't just blindly accept authoritarian information. First I consider if it makes sense, then I consider it for information. And I generally always remain skeptical about it.
But there are a number of issues that I first picked up information on through Wikipedia. I'll give you an example, Mayonnaise. I wanted to learn about Mayonnaise. I had never learned about it, so I load it up in Wikipedia, and read about it. Interesting articles, lots of information.
Oddly enough, considering that I knew nothing about emulsifications and Mayo before I read the article, there's not much critical thought I could give it beyond what was presented in the Wikipedia article. I then talked with a friend on IRC about Mayo, and her information came from actually making Mayo once with a family (guest family in a foreign country, I believe). She had more experience than I, but she held the opinion that if it didn't have mustard in it, that it wasn't really Mayo. When I pointed out that Best Foods Mayo doesn't have mustard in it, she said it wasn't real Mayo then.
Who was more justified in their belief about Best Foods Mayo being a real or "false" Mayo.
If so, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution. And if not, why bother citing Wikipedia at all, rather than the superior sources that actually influenced you?
Perhaps sometimes I no longer remember those superior sources, or perhaps like those crazy whiz-bang geniuses that invent calculus on their own, I just need a more credible source than my own credibility to back up my idea.
I mean, take these geniuses in 3rd world countries that invent calculus from basic arithmatic. Would you really require them to cite their sources for their discovery, when their sources are simply elementary school text books? Rather, if they made an impact on math that required them to reference a piece of calculus, they would need to cite an established authority to support their claim, rather than simply adding a footnote saying "I built this claim upon theories that I discovered independently, and thus have no sources."
Functionally, there are two reasons for citation. Either pointing to where an idea came from, or pointing to supporting information. In the first part, you should cite Wikipedia if that's where your inspiration, or information came from. In the second part, you can cite Wikipedia, because you just need any supporting source that is not you, that has more credibility than you feel that you do.
And let's face it, if you're some random person arguing on the internet, you generally have way less credibility than Wikipedia on the vast majority of topics. In fact, it could be argued that it's unlikely for most people to have any reasonably credibility outside of Wikipedia, unless they're an authority in the field already, and known or justifiable to their audience/opposing participants.
"He just wants you to think" is a standard line to justify nonsensical babbling, when it is no longer possible to put forward arguments based on usefulness or infomativeness or even logical consistency. From koans to most of Lacan's seminaires.
No, nonsensical babbling is people speaking in tongues. This is coherent speech and certainly cannot be classified as babbling.
Moreover, your retorting "nonsensical babbling" at me shows a rather insulting assumption on your part about me. (More over the connotational meaning behind babbling indicates an opinion that my statements are childlike, and pre-coherent speech.... luckily, you later overtly say that I'm acting infantile... so I don't have to rely on implied speech, to know that you think me like a child.)
Making reference to someone's work and ideas is by all means different from saying "go read this and believe every single word with absolute faith", and confusing the two is to be expected at most from a teenager. Reasonable adults, on the other hand, recognize that refering to other people's work is valuable, and acknowledge that complete acceptance of an author's thoughts is not the only option when dealing with them.
Certainly. But you'll agree that a scientific paper would look pretty stupid if you didn't put the relavent information into your text, and just said, "and as per This Guy Who Thinks Like Me, you'll see that I'm right." You're providing that the misapplication of Gödel's Theorem here is unjustified, but you don't actually justify your position here.
More to the matter here, the guy started this whole line of debate with the refusal to appeal to authority. So citation as proof is certainly the most unresponsive response you can make. It's like someone telling one that they would like one to not cuss, and one responds with "Well fuck that."
Moreover, your retorting "regurgitated citation" at me shows a rather insulting assumption on your part about me.
I used the word regurgitate, because it's an automated response to a given stimulus, without thought taken as to if the response is justified. Reading one of his later posts, it appears that you were in this case justified. He does certainly apply Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem outside of formal logic. But knee jerk responses to alternative thoughts are not any better than stereotypical comments about people other than one's own.
It's thought-ism. Rather than attempting to understand what the person actually believes, and attempting to help them understand their misapplication of Gödel's Theorem, you're just saying "you're wrong. Read this book if you want to know why." (By all means, if you provided any sort of justification or rationalization for the opinion that he is wrong, then let me know; I can't find it on my own, which may entirely be my fault.)
I have no idea what you mean by "authoritatian" source of insipiration.
An "authoritarian source of inspiration" is what the thing is, that when someone reads it they go "Hey, I should believe that." Rather than formulate the idea before hand, then come across it somewhere else and go "Hey, I believe that." or "Hey, that's like what I believe."
Of course, me trapped outside of his brain and opinions as I am, I suppose I'm not at liberty to say what his inspirational source for his assertion.
That what we know cannot be definitely proven might need some publicity, I imagine; but that has been dealt with since the begining of time. His posture includes many other things which are not contained in that basic (and essentially tautological) gnoseological statement.
Quite indeed. "Everything" certainly is more than "Some". Although, you have to understand that he's not saying that nothing can be proven, he's saying that nothing can be proven definitively. He agreed in another post that certainly, mathematical articles have very little controversy when considered within their specific axiomatic bases.
Maybe not, but I don't see how modeling the world that way is useful.
Because humans occationally think this way just naturally. Have you ever introduced two friends, then they go off and do something without you, and then they're talking about doing that thing around you, and you're like "wtf? I don't remember you guys doing that..."
it's natural to imagine that people are tempted into solipsistic thought, and in many ways are trapped in a solipsistic-like reality by our perceptions, and our lack of any view point but our own. This would be a driving reason behind racism, and bigotted attitudes, and a general dislike of anything that's just "not normal."
Without being aware that such a position might exist, you fail to see when you're actually ACTING solipisticly, and writing people off as crackpots and idiots, without actually considering their matter, but rather just because it doesn't fit within your box. So, you end up sending the occational breakthrough mathematician or scientist to the looney bin just because he's saying things that don't make sense to you.... then later, you start understand what he was talking about and you're just like "OOOOOOooooh."
(As an example of this, take a certain Mathematician who was examining the nature of natural numbers, by using powersets of the empty set. Everyone thought he was totally stark raving mad, until they actually stopped and thought about it.)
I hope I live up to expectations! The neat thing is that you've seen through the act- and we can now recommend reading to each other that explores in depth the philosophy we've touched on the surface. A very large space to explore indeed.
Oddly, I don't read that much stuff... I'm one of those crackpots who could really say that their ideas are their own. I've come up with this stuff essentially without any literary or authoritarian backing. I have people say things like "This is just you calling on Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem which is wrong outside of formal logic" and I'm like "whosa ma whatsit? I thought that up myself...:( or at least I may have been inspired by something else that I no longer recall"
Hey, a question, you got some way to contact you without runnig a thread on slashdot for pages that has nothing to do with the topic of the article?
Possible. So do you have an idea for a better way?
Oddly, I've come to realize that we share a lot of fundamental layers of belief. That belief is layered upon subjective axioms that one must plainly accept as truth. I've just kept it confined to culture and religion before speaking with you.
I use this very notion to justify my belief in God. They tell me that I can't believe in God, because how do I know I'm worshiping the right God? Well, I don't, but I've chosen this one. Some tell me that's not a good enough reason to believe in God, and I tell them that at some level, if we have free-will that we must have chosen our beliefs at some point, and that in that case, everyone has chosen to believe in God, and that my justified need for the belief in God is no worse than anyone else's.
That's probably also why I've caught your notion before I just ignored you and left you on my foes list. Now I look forward to reading what you have to say.
Personally, up until this point, I've had no better luck than you either, because I've been attempting to use formal logic to establish my position to others. Of course, they immediately attack it, since- as I know understand- it's not based on traditional logic.
So, you got me on a better way...
Yep- it's useful how those tied to a single mythos can get sucked in by argument- when the argument itself is just an onion layer. It's when you get past the argument that things get really interesting.
Perhaps this same "mythos" standing-in-the-shoes-of thing is the same reason why I'm so excellent at switching levels of abstraction in my work, and programming. I treat everything at the best level of abstraction, rather than try and bash something into the wrong layer.
1. I don't imagine he's attempting to be deep, or informative. In except maybe that he just wants you to think.
2. Dude... don't point to another source in your debates with this guy. He doesn't care about what the authorities think... he cares what YOU think. Pulling out some form response to him only expresses his notion that people appeal far too greatly upon authoritarian figures instead of actually think for themselves.
You read this book "Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie", if you understood it, then apply it... don't point him to it and say "all your answers are here." Otherwise you're showing no intelligent thought, just regurgitated citation.
The GP was also not citing Gödel (since you put the Umlauts in I'll bother to also.), he was saying that in many ways it's LIKE Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem.
3. You know, I thought at first the guy was full of it, too, but he's not. He's actually thinking, which is more than I can say for you. He's considered and constructed his own ideas, rather than relying on others to tell him what to think. Likely, he read about Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and thought that it sounded similar. But by no means was his authoritarian source of inspiration.
He's not battling sillyness with sillyness, he's making an honest attempt to make people consider that hey, this fact we all "know" can't really be definitively proven (which it can't). So if everything is just as provable as anything else, then what good is it to say anything is "true" or "false."
He's working in a different logical field than you're attempting to beat him with. It's like hitting a pillow. If your goal is just to hit the pillow, then you'll do pretty good at it, but if the pillows goal is at that exact same moment simply to exist, then it's possible for both of you to "win" at the same time even under the same conditions.
In this case, he's not trying to win, he's trying to make you to think, because to him, there is no "win", there's only: "I learned something".
And as for gaining others' respect; I hardly think he's attempting to do that, because his tools by his own mouth are those of invoking anger and competetiveness in his debate partner. I hardly think that should be the goal of anyone seeking respect for what he's saying.
4. Once you step out of the realm of "everything has to be true of false", solipsism is no different than realism. You can't prove that solipsism isn't what the world is, so should one choose to accept that point of view, it's not your place to tell them that they're wrong.
His assertion that there are no facts is not a factual assertion on his part. It's a truthless assertion. It's his assertion of the belief that there exists no actuality of fact.
I managed to realize this and come to an understanding in logic and debate, since I allowed for him to believe the assertion of lack of facts, while I held the assertion that there is fact, and that we can be reasonably secure in knowing if something were fact.
If you took philosophy you'd know that contradictions are not allowed because you can prove anything by contradiction.
That's his assertion. You can't prove anything, which is a contradiction, which means that you can prove everything. And thus the assignment of true and false to anything is meaningless.
Seriously, I thought this guy was a nutjob weirdo too, until I started reading his position, and saw merit in it. He's not denying that Wikipedia is full of useful information, he's asserting that it does not contain facts, because of his assertion that facts don't exist.
Which is kind of the point originally- but what you're pointing out is that strategy is wrong.
Maybe wrong is the wrong word here. More like, may not be the best for attracting people willing to even listen to your meta-model.
Or lack of validity, as the case may be....:-)
Well, the position is logically valid. It's just a damned hard viewpoint to keep consistent with. I mean, you could take a meta-meta-model from what I'm considering that even logic is just a mythos that we all have established, and that in that case, it's ridiculous to argue anything at all, since it's very likely that our logic is wrong.
Or disproven. In fact, the only thing we have really proven is that wikipedia a very useful repository of established mythos.
Good classification. To quote one of my friends, Wikipedia is a "giant poo of information."
Well, the main issues I see that you've been having are that you jump out and make assertions without any original basis. Thus, provoking anger and frustration.
Perhaps one of the reasons why I'm the first person to see any validity in your statements is that I wasn't mad about what you were saying;)
Either way, this all started off with "wikipedia is full of false information." With no indication that you feel rather than wikipedia is full of an established mythos that society perpetuates, and cannot be fundamentally proven in most cases.
And the same to you- I love that "stateless knowledge" idea.
"Stateless knowledge" is good for the whole thing.
"Truthless statement" is good for individual assertions that people would make.
I hate the word "maybe" for the truth value being assigned to such truthless statements. Although I suppose that there are two possible truth values within this context, one would be that a True Truth Value exists, but it's unknowable, and thus it would be a "maybe", but there are other things where no such true truth value could ever exist. "I'm feeling happy", where there is literally no truth value involved at all, and "maybe" doesn't fit this well. It would be a "null" truth value.
Of course, within your context, it should be impossible to assert which one is which, thus fundamentally you'd need a truth value assigning both "maybe" and "null" at the same time.
"mythos" is also a good word for describing the working model of truth that someone has.
Actually... one would be asserting myth-values to things, not truth-values. Of course a myth-value has only one value, "mythic". So it's almost pointless to even talk about it, except to say that one can assign the myth-value of something to be "true" or "false" within their own system.
Those that do not, cannot actually build new knowledge- they can only refine their own religious mythos.
I would avoid the "relgigious" in mythos. While one could equate ones entire axiomatic belief system to be a religion, that's not fundamentally necessary. Simply calling it a "mythos" should be sufficient.
No mythos is actually "better" than other posible mythos
Careful now! Because you're asserting your meta-model mythos as better than my meta-model mythos.
I'm willing to debate with you on your grounds, because as you stated, Intelligence is the ability to think quickly, and I can quickly adapt to relate to one's point of view.
While I see the merit of your position, and the working nature of it, you have to be careful to not push it to the point of hypocracy where you start asserting that your mythos is the only valid one, because at that point you are making a truth statement.
It's a narrow rope you've chosen to walk, be careful!
Oh, and you should accept that some people choose to assert a mythos and a belief in a fact-based way with right and wrong things about the world; and while you don't agree with it, your meta-model is no better than my meta-model.
I'm at least willing to make such an assertion myself. Your meta-model is valid, and sound... but your implementation needs some work. In the future I may even use your meta-model to lead someone to consider things that they would not have otherwise considered.
But I still choose to argue within the mythos of generally accepted fact.
Slashdot Mirror
They still had/have adverts in Germany
Oh, I imagine you can get a Bud in Germany... right after the bartender stops laughing and picks himself up off the floor.
:)
Hehe
I make no assertion about the introduction of sexual material to our kids... I'm just parodying what some might say.
POORLY written tripe...
Shit, you guys made the language, now show it!
I've invented a totally new way to get information out! What I do see, is I take two soup cans, punch a hole in them, then I put some string into the holes, and then tie them off... now, hold the two cans so that the string become taut...
VIOLA! You're now cancasting!
I like how side effects are generally ordered in the progression of how much it sucks to get them:
"May cause sore feet, nause, headaches, coma, death, or even diarrhea"
I swear, I didn't think that saying "naked boobies" was karma whoring... I apologize, I should have know better.
Because, same as I would be willing to watch German ads on TV just to get German TV, there is little point for the advertisers to advertise something that I can't buy here in the US. I mean, it works fine for big companies that sell under the same name there and here, like Lexus, Mercedes, BMW, and T-Mobile, but what about Beer commercials?
And what about standards of decency? I saw naked boobies on a German television program... WON'T YOU THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!
No no no no... he means AMERICAN football in the UK.
Thanks for using big words... you got me using tautological wrong, and nonetheless misspelling it.
You'll have to forgive me; I dislike using uncommon words, because they cause confusion and result in people misunderstanding you. To the point, I thought that tautological meant something akin to "useless", not redundent. One can argue that redundent things are useless, but they certainly are not semantically the same thing. As not all useless things are redundent.
My apologies for my ignorance of the word in question.
Oh, don't worry, it was quite explicit. If one were to read my comment looking for detail, one would see that I did in fact say that you were definitely explicit in calling my argument infantile, and that I did not have to rely on that most greatest of sins on Slashdot, infering someone's meaning from their implicit statements.
Also, perhaps you don't understand that telling someone their argument is childlike is rude, and derogatory. I don't mind you saying that it's ignorant, incorrectly founded, based on false premises, or other such things. These are constructive comments that state that I amm either missing information, or I'm making statements that are not logically based, or that I'm just making shit up.
Telling me that what I'm writing is exactly what a child would write isn't exactly constructive...
The argument is contained in Bouveresse's book. I cannot be more explicit about this than this. I will not repeat his arguments. That would be pointless.
Because you feel a need to force me to go out and obtain a book, rather than using that vastly more mature and adult knowledge to simply assert a reasonably relavent reason to me. I hate this behavior of people. "I don't know how to spell 'eccentric'" "Look it up in the dictionary." "Awesome, thanks for the advice." Perhaps I don't have the literary pedigree that you do to make any sort of passible progress attempting to read this book. As you said, you're not certain if there exists an English translation.
Well, do you mind being so kind as to grace us with an summary of an excerpt of the argument to show us that you're not just saying, "Well, there's this book, "EnAjAvUVes, Bej AlGer AlEnDov." and it says everything that I need to support my argument. Oh, by the way, I don't know if they have an English version, so I hope you can speak IoVeb."
You have to understand that the statement "6+6=0" in the theorry of Z_12 and the statement of "6+6!=0" in the theory of Z are using the same sign "6" to represent different things. They are conventionally represented with the same sign, by what is called in the jargon an "abus de langague", but they mean different things. It is not that one statement is true in one context and false in the other: they are completely different statements, that happen to be written, when following the traditional notations, with the same signs. The word "come" means somethign in English and somethign different in Spanish. "6" means one thing in the context of the theory of Z_12, and something different in the theory of "6". It is not much deeper than that.
I understand that the context is an implicit matter of these things. But then you have to realiize that the contextual view that I have on the world is then different from your contextual view on the world, and that you are thus unfit to prove anything within my universal context, because you're unaware of all the constraints that are applicable to me.
In fact, while the previous paragraph by an "abus de langague" is using exactly the same words when I wrote it as when you read it, you'll see that they mean different things. A reasonable question is, where does the context stop being significant?
Well, he is wrong. You can prove that "6+6!=0" in the theory of the integ
OOO! I get it know...
So, it's exactly like what I've been doing with my object oriented approach to C coding, that doesn't make sense in OO languages because the syntax makes you lazily pick the non-DI way...
I mean, if you can cite a Wiki in support of your position, couldn't you just as easily cite the more authoritative sources--your childhood mentor, your high school civics teacher, the many volumes of theory written by the grand masters of the subject that you read at university, etc.--whose instruction was the true support for your convictions
I don't know... I think that Wikipedia is more accessible to my other participators in any given debate than Mrs Whitmore.
I mean, are you seriously saying that when you run into an important issue that you know nothing about, you arrive at a conclusion based on what Wikipedia has to say about the subject?
Not that alone. I don't just blindly accept authoritarian information. First I consider if it makes sense, then I consider it for information. And I generally always remain skeptical about it.
But there are a number of issues that I first picked up information on through Wikipedia. I'll give you an example, Mayonnaise. I wanted to learn about Mayonnaise. I had never learned about it, so I load it up in Wikipedia, and read about it. Interesting articles, lots of information.
Oddly enough, considering that I knew nothing about emulsifications and Mayo before I read the article, there's not much critical thought I could give it beyond what was presented in the Wikipedia article. I then talked with a friend on IRC about Mayo, and her information came from actually making Mayo once with a family (guest family in a foreign country, I believe). She had more experience than I, but she held the opinion that if it didn't have mustard in it, that it wasn't really Mayo. When I pointed out that Best Foods Mayo doesn't have mustard in it, she said it wasn't real Mayo then.
Who was more justified in their belief about Best Foods Mayo being a real or "false" Mayo.
If so, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution. And if not, why bother citing Wikipedia at all, rather than the superior sources that actually influenced you?
Perhaps sometimes I no longer remember those superior sources, or perhaps like those crazy whiz-bang geniuses that invent calculus on their own, I just need a more credible source than my own credibility to back up my idea.
I mean, take these geniuses in 3rd world countries that invent calculus from basic arithmatic. Would you really require them to cite their sources for their discovery, when their sources are simply elementary school text books? Rather, if they made an impact on math that required them to reference a piece of calculus, they would need to cite an established authority to support their claim, rather than simply adding a footnote saying "I built this claim upon theories that I discovered independently, and thus have no sources."
Functionally, there are two reasons for citation. Either pointing to where an idea came from, or pointing to supporting information. In the first part, you should cite Wikipedia if that's where your inspiration, or information came from. In the second part, you can cite Wikipedia, because you just need any supporting source that is not you, that has more credibility than you feel that you do.
And let's face it, if you're some random person arguing on the internet, you generally have way less credibility than Wikipedia on the vast majority of topics. In fact, it could be argued that it's unlikely for most people to have any reasonably credibility outside of Wikipedia, unless they're an authority in the field already, and known or justifiable to their audience/opposing participants.
"He just wants you to think" is a standard line to justify nonsensical babbling, when it is no longer possible to put forward arguments based on usefulness or infomativeness or even logical consistency. From koans to most of Lacan's seminaires.
No, nonsensical babbling is people speaking in tongues. This is coherent speech and certainly cannot be classified as babbling.
Moreover, your retorting "nonsensical babbling" at me shows a rather insulting assumption on your part about me. (More over the connotational meaning behind babbling indicates an opinion that my statements are childlike, and pre-coherent speech.... luckily, you later overtly say that I'm acting infantile... so I don't have to rely on implied speech, to know that you think me like a child.)
Making reference to someone's work and ideas is by all means different from saying "go read this and believe every single word with absolute faith", and confusing the two is to be expected at most from a teenager. Reasonable adults, on the other hand, recognize that refering to other people's work is valuable, and acknowledge that complete acceptance of an author's thoughts is not the only option when dealing with them.
Certainly. But you'll agree that a scientific paper would look pretty stupid if you didn't put the relavent information into your text, and just said, "and as per This Guy Who Thinks Like Me, you'll see that I'm right." You're providing that the misapplication of Gödel's Theorem here is unjustified, but you don't actually justify your position here.
More to the matter here, the guy started this whole line of debate with the refusal to appeal to authority. So citation as proof is certainly the most unresponsive response you can make. It's like someone telling one that they would like one to not cuss, and one responds with "Well fuck that."
Moreover, your retorting "regurgitated citation" at me shows a rather insulting assumption on your part about me.
I used the word regurgitate, because it's an automated response to a given stimulus, without thought taken as to if the response is justified. Reading one of his later posts, it appears that you were in this case justified. He does certainly apply Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem outside of formal logic. But knee jerk responses to alternative thoughts are not any better than stereotypical comments about people other than one's own.
It's thought-ism. Rather than attempting to understand what the person actually believes, and attempting to help them understand their misapplication of Gödel's Theorem, you're just saying "you're wrong. Read this book if you want to know why." (By all means, if you provided any sort of justification or rationalization for the opinion that he is wrong, then let me know; I can't find it on my own, which may entirely be my fault.)
I have no idea what you mean by "authoritatian" source of insipiration.
An "authoritarian source of inspiration" is what the thing is, that when someone reads it they go "Hey, I should believe that." Rather than formulate the idea before hand, then come across it somewhere else and go "Hey, I believe that." or "Hey, that's like what I believe."
Of course, me trapped outside of his brain and opinions as I am, I suppose I'm not at liberty to say what his inspirational source for his assertion.
That what we know cannot be definitely proven might need some publicity, I imagine; but that has been dealt with since the begining of time. His posture includes many other things which are not contained in that basic (and essentially tautological) gnoseological statement.
Quite indeed. "Everything" certainly is more than "Some". Although, you have to understand that he's not saying that nothing can be proven, he's saying that nothing can be proven definitively. He agreed in another post that certainly, mathematical articles have very little controversy when considered within their specific axiomatic bases.
Maybe not, but I don't see how modeling the world that way is useful.
Because humans occationally think this way just naturally. Have you ever introduced two friends, then they go off and do something without you, and then they're talking about doing that thing around you, and you're like "wtf? I don't remember you guys doing that..."
it's natural to imagine that people are tempted into solipsistic thought, and in many ways are trapped in a solipsistic-like reality by our perceptions, and our lack of any view point but our own. This would be a driving reason behind racism, and bigotted attitudes, and a general dislike of anything that's just "not normal."
Without being aware that such a position might exist, you fail to see when you're actually ACTING solipisticly, and writing people off as crackpots and idiots, without actually considering their matter, but rather just because it doesn't fit within your box. So, you end up sending the occational breakthrough mathematician or scientist to the looney bin just because he's saying things that don't make sense to you.... then later, you start understand what he was talking about and you're just like "OOOOOOooooh."
(As an example of this, take a certain Mathematician who was examining the nature of natural numbers, by using powersets of the empty set. Everyone thought he was totally stark raving mad, until they actually stopped and thought about it.)
I hope I live up to expectations! The neat thing is that you've seen through the act- and we can now recommend reading to each other that explores in depth the philosophy we've touched on the surface. A very large space to explore indeed.
:( or at least I may have been inspired by something else that I no longer recall"
Oddly, I don't read that much stuff... I'm one of those crackpots who could really say that their ideas are their own. I've come up with this stuff essentially without any literary or authoritarian backing. I have people say things like "This is just you calling on Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem which is wrong outside of formal logic" and I'm like "whosa ma whatsit? I thought that up myself...
Hey, a question, you got some way to contact you without runnig a thread on slashdot for pages that has nothing to do with the topic of the article?
Possible. So do you have an idea for a better way?
Oddly, I've come to realize that we share a lot of fundamental layers of belief. That belief is layered upon subjective axioms that one must plainly accept as truth. I've just kept it confined to culture and religion before speaking with you.
I use this very notion to justify my belief in God. They tell me that I can't believe in God, because how do I know I'm worshiping the right God? Well, I don't, but I've chosen this one. Some tell me that's not a good enough reason to believe in God, and I tell them that at some level, if we have free-will that we must have chosen our beliefs at some point, and that in that case, everyone has chosen to believe in God, and that my justified need for the belief in God is no worse than anyone else's.
That's probably also why I've caught your notion before I just ignored you and left you on my foes list. Now I look forward to reading what you have to say.
Personally, up until this point, I've had no better luck than you either, because I've been attempting to use formal logic to establish my position to others. Of course, they immediately attack it, since- as I know understand- it's not based on traditional logic.
So, you got me on a better way...
Yep- it's useful how those tied to a single mythos can get sucked in by argument- when the argument itself is just an onion layer. It's when you get past the argument that things get really interesting.
Perhaps this same "mythos" standing-in-the-shoes-of thing is the same reason why I'm so excellent at switching levels of abstraction in my work, and programming. I treat everything at the best level of abstraction, rather than try and bash something into the wrong layer.
1. I don't imagine he's attempting to be deep, or informative. In except maybe that he just wants you to think.
2. Dude... don't point to another source in your debates with this guy. He doesn't care about what the authorities think... he cares what YOU think. Pulling out some form response to him only expresses his notion that people appeal far too greatly upon authoritarian figures instead of actually think for themselves.
You read this book "Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie", if you understood it, then apply it... don't point him to it and say "all your answers are here." Otherwise you're showing no intelligent thought, just regurgitated citation.
The GP was also not citing Gödel (since you put the Umlauts in I'll bother to also.), he was saying that in many ways it's LIKE Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem.
3. You know, I thought at first the guy was full of it, too, but he's not. He's actually thinking, which is more than I can say for you. He's considered and constructed his own ideas, rather than relying on others to tell him what to think. Likely, he read about Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and thought that it sounded similar. But by no means was his authoritarian source of inspiration.
He's not battling sillyness with sillyness, he's making an honest attempt to make people consider that hey, this fact we all "know" can't really be definitively proven (which it can't). So if everything is just as provable as anything else, then what good is it to say anything is "true" or "false."
He's working in a different logical field than you're attempting to beat him with. It's like hitting a pillow. If your goal is just to hit the pillow, then you'll do pretty good at it, but if the pillows goal is at that exact same moment simply to exist, then it's possible for both of you to "win" at the same time even under the same conditions.
In this case, he's not trying to win, he's trying to make you to think, because to him, there is no "win", there's only: "I learned something".
And as for gaining others' respect; I hardly think he's attempting to do that, because his tools by his own mouth are those of invoking anger and competetiveness in his debate partner. I hardly think that should be the goal of anyone seeking respect for what he's saying.
4. Once you step out of the realm of "everything has to be true of false", solipsism is no different than realism. You can't prove that solipsism isn't what the world is, so should one choose to accept that point of view, it's not your place to tell them that they're wrong.
His assertion that there are no facts is not a factual assertion on his part. It's a truthless assertion. It's his assertion of the belief that there exists no actuality of fact.
I managed to realize this and come to an understanding in logic and debate, since I allowed for him to believe the assertion of lack of facts, while I held the assertion that there is fact, and that we can be reasonably secure in knowing if something were fact.
If you took philosophy you'd know that contradictions are not allowed because you can prove anything by contradiction.
That's his assertion. You can't prove anything, which is a contradiction, which means that you can prove everything. And thus the assignment of true and false to anything is meaningless.
Seriously, I thought this guy was a nutjob weirdo too, until I started reading his position, and saw merit in it. He's not denying that Wikipedia is full of useful information, he's asserting that it does not contain facts, because of his assertion that facts don't exist.
Which is kind of the point originally- but what you're pointing out is that strategy is wrong.
Maybe wrong is the wrong word here. More like, may not be the best for attracting people willing to even listen to your meta-model.
Or lack of validity, as the case may be....:-)
Well, the position is logically valid. It's just a damned hard viewpoint to keep consistent with. I mean, you could take a meta-meta-model from what I'm considering that even logic is just a mythos that we all have established, and that in that case, it's ridiculous to argue anything at all, since it's very likely that our logic is wrong.
Or disproven. In fact, the only thing we have really proven is that wikipedia a very useful repository of established mythos.
Good classification. To quote one of my friends, Wikipedia is a "giant poo of information."
No no no... it's not because I think the article is wrong. Quite the opposite!
It's so far over my head, that I can't make any assertion as to the validity of the article!
Well, the main issues I see that you've been having are that you jump out and make assertions without any original basis. Thus, provoking anger and frustration.
;)
Perhaps one of the reasons why I'm the first person to see any validity in your statements is that I wasn't mad about what you were saying
Either way, this all started off with "wikipedia is full of false information." With no indication that you feel rather than wikipedia is full of an established mythos that society perpetuates, and cannot be fundamentally proven in most cases.
And the same to you- I love that "stateless knowledge" idea.
"Stateless knowledge" is good for the whole thing.
"Truthless statement" is good for individual assertions that people would make.
I hate the word "maybe" for the truth value being assigned to such truthless statements. Although I suppose that there are two possible truth values within this context, one would be that a True Truth Value exists, but it's unknowable, and thus it would be a "maybe", but there are other things where no such true truth value could ever exist. "I'm feeling happy", where there is literally no truth value involved at all, and "maybe" doesn't fit this well. It would be a "null" truth value.
Of course, within your context, it should be impossible to assert which one is which, thus fundamentally you'd need a truth value assigning both "maybe" and "null" at the same time.
"mythos" is also a good word for describing the working model of truth that someone has.
Actually... one would be asserting myth-values to things, not truth-values. Of course a myth-value has only one value, "mythic". So it's almost pointless to even talk about it, except to say that one can assign the myth-value of something to be "true" or "false" within their own system.
Damn, it's big in here.....
Those that do not, cannot actually build new knowledge- they can only refine their own religious mythos.
I would avoid the "relgigious" in mythos. While one could equate ones entire axiomatic belief system to be a religion, that's not fundamentally necessary. Simply calling it a "mythos" should be sufficient.
No mythos is actually "better" than other posible mythos
Careful now! Because you're asserting your meta-model mythos as better than my meta-model mythos.
I'm willing to debate with you on your grounds, because as you stated, Intelligence is the ability to think quickly, and I can quickly adapt to relate to one's point of view.
While I see the merit of your position, and the working nature of it, you have to be careful to not push it to the point of hypocracy where you start asserting that your mythos is the only valid one, because at that point you are making a truth statement.
It's a narrow rope you've chosen to walk, be careful!
Oh, and you should accept that some people choose to assert a mythos and a belief in a fact-based way with right and wrong things about the world; and while you don't agree with it, your meta-model is no better than my meta-model.
I'm at least willing to make such an assertion myself. Your meta-model is valid, and sound... but your implementation needs some work. In the future I may even use your meta-model to lead someone to consider things that they would not have otherwise considered.
But I still choose to argue within the mythos of generally accepted fact.