Fitch's paradox is about true propositions.
— TheMadFool

I know. I'm extending it to false propositions as well. Sue me. — Olivier5

Yes, but does an apophatic conception of God entail any kind of reality or existence at all? Because if not, then God is simply the imagination of something so great that we cannot imagine it. We don't imagine the unimaginable (which would be a contradiction), we imagine that there is an unimaginable. What kind of reality or existence can we imagine the unimaginable to have? — Janus

You got me there. I was never good at math or logic. As far as I'm concerned, Socrates was a myth. :joke: — Gnomon

It seems to be ascribed meaning when it is noted. In other words, when it's unexpected, as in the case where a response is either anticipated or desired — Ciceronianus

It's the whole point. The addiction of facile semiosis, or natural language, is that the stranger we are to what we think we mean is kept at bay and only emerges in the lessened terms of estrangement we encounter in every exchange. But that estrangement is the engine of all the other addictive terms of facile speech. And if the discipline of engaging in that speech entails a kind of rigor in sustaining that facile performance of it and access to it, lessening the estrangement always haunting it, then the dynamic of that rigor (emotion) and that haunting (the completeness of estrangement) is the real story of language. — Gary M Washburn

There is no escaping ambiguity. If you think you've reached the end of it you need to think again, and keep talking. We cannot outstrip the deficit of understanding and clarity in anything we say.

If polar oppositions are a functional tool in reason, the most encompassing polarity is that between strangeness and familiarity. Between the overwhelming impossibility of saying anything real and the entrenched addiction to facile hearing of words and reading of signs. The stranger is the subject, the facile attribution is the predicate. That's just how it works. Forget that, or, worse, deliberately exclude it, and language is just vapor. — Gary M Washburn

Well obviously not in the conventional sense of "cheating" but it sounds better than "delaying for a femtosecond" — TheVeryIdea

I do not understand the question. Obviously, there is sometimes water and sometimes land. So I can't say it's either sea or land — SolarWind

it is cheating the universe — TheVeryIdea

The tidal flats have water at high tide and land at low tide. — SolarWind

You need an additional assumption to decide the question. — SolarWind

Does the tidal flat belong to the land or to the sea? — SolarWind

This thread encompasses a vast majority of topics. It should not only be about the literal action of killing bugs but also the implications of the action and my stance regarding the physical pain of those bugs encompassed a variety of points that were addressed. — TheSoundConspirator

Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly (a bug) or whether I am now a butterfly (a bug), dreaming I am a man. — Zhuangzi

As flies (bugs) to wanton boys are we to th' gods,

They kill us for their sport. — Gloucester

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus (a bug). Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure. — Agent Smith (The Matrix)

But everything depends on definitions. You wrote it yourself with Sorite's paradox. What is the use of insisting on binary logic if I cannot apply it in many cases? In politics there are many questions where binary logic is of no use. Is the pay of a particular worker fair? Yes or no? — SolarWind

No. Just the way you said it. Funny. — Caldwell

Apparently yes. — 180 Proof

I think universals are a very interesting aspect of cognition, of the way we perceive the world and make sense of it or make it “intelligible”. We seem to have a natural tendency to look at things in a way that unifies separate entities into categories in order to provide ordered relations within a harmonious and meaningful whole. This enables us to process reality in ways that are essential to life — Apollodorus

The essence of human cognition for Plato is “seeing”. When we see something we see a “form” or “shape”. This is why Plato uses the term eidos which means “that which is seen”, i.e., the form or shape of an object of sight — Apollodorus

So, we can see why form in general, and Form as universal in particular, is the basis of intelligibility. Further, if we think about it, each Form is both a unity and something good, as it performs the essential function of making the world intelligible to us. Thus we can reduce all sensibles to Forms and all Forms to the One which is Good. — Apollodorus

Finally, it stands to reason to assume that this first principle, the One, is intelligent as only an intelligent being can create and unify all the Forms and their instantiations in a harmonious, functioning whole. We need not refer to this intelligence as “God”, but it is difficult to deny or doubt its intelligence especially from a 4th-century BC perspective — Apollodorus

Plato, in fact, does not ask us to worship the One. He simply urges us to try and get to know it. He tells us that the One or the Good is knowable, that the Forms lead us to it and that once we know it, we fully know the Forms and, by extension, everything else. Plotinus seems to have made some progress in this direction. In any case, Platonism is an invitation to practical philosophy not mere intellectual speculation. — Apollodorus

The point then is simple: no idea of God one could imagine/conceive of is "not even wrong" (Wolfgang Pauli) No such thing is even a mistake which we could correct to arrive at the truth, the right idea (of God). Apophatic! — TheMadFool

After its destruction he had it melted down and poured into the river, whence he forced the ppl to drink. The gold had been taken from the ears and off the necks of them, whence it had hung as vain adornment, before it was ever fashioned into an idol.

...it’s little different from the tale of Midas, who wished all he touched to be gold, then starved when the food he touched became inedible. — Leghorn

The term "unsaid" refers what is not explicitly stated, what is hidden and/or implied in the speech of an individual or a group of people.

The unsaid may be the product of intimidation; of a mulling over of thought; or of bafflement in the face of the inexpressible. — Wikipedia

Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost. — Khalil Gibran

I'm not convinced that the idea of an immaterial being seems outlandish at all to many or most of those who haven't thought about it much (which is not say I think it necessarily should seem outlandish to have thought about it a lot)..

Naively, many of us seem to imagine ourselves as immaterial beings who "have" or "inhabit" the body. — Janus

What silence signifies depends on context. — Ciceronianus

Ouch! — Caldwell

Extracting "almost" from those three sentences is a good example of something a computer couldn't do! If you asked a human to identify what the sentences have in common, they might say "they are all about people trying and failing". There's no "mapping" from those sentences to the word "almost", even for us.

Your ideas are simplistic and naive. — Daemon

In the last 10 years I've read more and better books than I had previously read in 20 years. Time, at last. And Amazon + the iPad.

I like books that clearly explain how things came to be. So, How The Mountains Grew: A New Geological History of North America by John Dvorak is an excellent history of the planet from dust ball to what you walk around on now. A different area of explanation came from Barons of the Sea: and their race to build the world's fastest clipper ships by Steven Ujifusa. This was about the British/American/China trade in tea -- and illegal opium. Great fortunes were made in this trade, among them Warren Delano's--grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Speed in shipping mattered then, as now. One wanted to be the first into port with the narcotic (China) or tea (New York and London).

This is all much more meaningful now than when I was in college. Geology 101 was a great course, but I hadn't seen much geology myself--beyond a low hills and river valleys. The most significant geological feature where I grew up was loess, dirt blown off the receding glaciers. I hadn't seen a Great Lake, an ocean, a mountains, or a canyon yet. Continental drift was a fairly new concept in 1965.

The next book is Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Fischer. The 'four seeds' were Puritans (East Anglia), Quakers (North midlands), Cavaliers (southern England) and the Scotch-Irish (borderlands and Ulster). From a Puritan POV, the Cavaliers and Scotch Irish were a liability, creating the slave-holding South and the troublesome Appalachians. The feeling about liabilities was and remains mostly mutual.

The New England Puritans (liberal Yankees) and the Cavalier/Scotch Irish (southerners and Reagan Republicans) are still with us. I come from the upper-midwestern Yankee Land.

The level of stupidity I inhabited when I started college was very deep. I think, believe, hope, and claim I've come a long way since then. — Bitter Crank

This is correct

Edit: I think the terms actual age or chronological age should be used rather than bodily age. It often refers to biological age, which is about how messed up your body is for your age. — Vince

IQ - A number representing a person's reasoning ability (measured using problem-solving tests) as compared to the statistical norm or average for their age, taken as 100.

Using your formulation, I would become less intelligent as I got older, even if my mental acuity stayed the same. — T Clark

1. Item number 2 is true
2. The number of true statements in this list is not 3.
3. Puppies are evil co-conspirators with aliens from Haley's comet secretly scheming to steal your precious bodily fluids.

3 cannot be false; because if it is, 2 can neither be true nor false, and 1 be neither true nor false. That violates the principle of bivalence. Therefore, beware the puppies. — InPitzotl

I feel like that's a very myopic quote. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Plato and Aristotle didn't start being forgotten with the rise of Christianity; the process began soon after Aristotle's death. Stoicism and Epicureanism would come to overshadow them soon after, and while both certainly made contributions to philosophy and logic, I think it's fair to say things actually took a step back through antiquity. Plato doesn't come roaring back until he is reintroduced in a religious context himself, with Plotonius as a grand theologian / scholar. Point being, philosophy had already pricked it's finger back in the time of Alexander and only woke up in fits and starts. Hence most philosophy surveys barely skimming the years between Aristotle and Plotonius, then going back to sleep until Decartes- but that's centuries before the rise of Christianity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ockham — Count Timothy von Icarus

Carrington Event. — 180 Proof

A solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would cause widespread electrical disruptions, blackouts, and damage due to extended outages of the electrical grid. The solar storm of 2012 was of similar magnitude, but it passed Earth's orbit without striking the planet, -missing by nine days — Carrington Event (Wikipedia)

A proposition being both true and false is a contradiction. I gave the example of how if x is a cat, it's impossible that x is not a cat (x is cat is true and x is a cat is false).
— TheMadFool

What if you talk about the evolutionary ancestors of cats? One researcher says that's already a cat, another says that's not a cat yet. — SolarWind

why is Hitler being used here? — Caldwell

golden calf — Leghorn

I admire brevity and conciseness — jgill

math person — jgill

Hey here's a primer I wrote as part of my very first tech writing contract, way back in 2004 but most of the background info is still relevant. (This was written for a broadband communications company when everyone was first starting to get ADSL and cable connections, to provide background to end-users, support staff and sales channel.)
10mReplyOptions — Wayfarer