Honestly if you can't even bring yourself to treat the people you speak to with the bare minimum of respect you can fuck off.
2h — Isaac

Okay so it's fine to doubt big pharma and the government but not you, for some reason.

You sure bristle about it quite a lot yourself.

What's the meaning of the LEM, according to you?

Artificial doubt, manufactured doubt, is a problem. Well grounded doubt is not. If there is doubt about the seriousness or the origin of the doubt, maybe not spread it. Take into consideration the risk you are taking of spreading unfounded doubt.

Another point is, you think the stuff you get in your feed and you spread here comes from nowhere? You think nobody profit from it? Think again. Profiteers are everywhere, including I suspect on 'your side'.

For one, I was correct, and you would long have realized it if you weren't so contrarian. For two, your little experiment made you look like you were ignoring your interlocutors.

All of which will never change so long as people continue to support the blackmail of "don't criticise the pharmaceuticals, people might stop taking medicines!". — Isaac

Never heard that line. There's no taboo that i know of on criticizing big pharma.

I can agree with that. Capitalism mechanically leads to an unhealthy concentration of power. I still welcome the attention paid at long last to malaria. It's a poor man's disease and has attracted very little research.

They've cheated before therefore they can't produce a useful vaccine. Understood.

Now that I think of it, my wife cheated on me once. Gonna throw her under the bus right now!

Great news!

World Health Organization approves malaria vaccine
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/new-malaria-vaccine-explained-by-the-who

In 2019, 386,000 Africans died from malaria, of which 274,000 were children under five, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In the past 18 months, there have been 212,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths.

Now the WHO has approved a malaria vaccine for children for the first time, after a successful pilot scheme in three African countries: Ghana, Kenya and Malawi.

RTS,S - or Mosquirix - is a vaccine developed by British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, which acts against P. falciparum, the most deadly malaria parasite globally, and the most prevalent in Africa.

WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called it a "historic moment" and a "breakthrough for science, child health and malaria control".

“Using this vaccine on top of existing tools to prevent malaria could save tens of thousands of young lives each year,” he added.

Thanks for the info. Anything else you want to share?

I must congratulate you for learning, at long last, to use the quote feature. Well done!

Am I believing something wrong? — Wayfarer

No offence, but I think you pay too much attention to naïve materialists. You know, the kind of people who think their selves (i.e. themselves) don't exist because there can be no ghost in no machine... It seems to me that you resent their academic influence and credibility, but the world in which they are credible is a very small one and most probably not the world you live in. They only "hold sway" in a few academic circles that are irrelevant to anything.

I bet most people around you actually think of themselves as more than just meat puppets. And even the most naïve materialist out there will usually behave as a normal person, not as a meat puppet. They would for instance expect some respect from other human beings and would also extend some respect to other human beings, quite unlike the way they would treat actual puppets, and unlike the way they treat animals.

There's no reason to feel angry about academic fads. Academics only have the prestige that you give them.

I think that really encapsulates the philosophical situation. It makes empiricists nervous, and empiricists hold sway. — Wayfarer

I consider myself an empiricist, and yet I accept the existence of concepts. Am I doing something wrong?

You know, maybe with a little good will you would be able to understand what I am saying. It's not that complicated. Otherwise, have fun with the other serial misunderstanders.

If the math involved in structural engineering has worked for a hundred plus years, it seems very implausible to think it would suddenly cease working — Janus

The math involved in structural engineering have changed overtime. If in one of these changes, them engineers postulated that anything mathematical is both true and false at the same time, as Wittgenstein was effectively (though unwittingly) suggesting, they might have ended building quite a few failed bridges.

If a system is inconsistent, then the system contradicts every statement in the system, not just the law of excluded middle. So it is pointless to adduce the law of excluded middle in this way. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I wouldn't call it pointless to point at one consequence among many. Your choice of word. But we agree on the rest.

Yes, the liar's paradox statement is shorthand for the overall argument. — T Clark

I think it's always a good idea to ask precise questions; that was the sense of my input.

Rereading this thread ... — 180 Proof

:-) That's something I do too: post here a song brought to mind by a discussion on another thread.

Indeed, race is not a valid biological concept. Rather it is a cultural concept i.e. a social construct. Which doesn't mean it's moot, but there's no biological underpinning to grouping people together based on the amount of melanin in their skin... Melanin is just ONE protein amongst the hundreds of thousands of proteins we synthetize every day. To regroup all low-melanin people in one "white race" is akin to calling all diabetics the "no-sugar race". Makes no biological sense.

What was Banno's question? — SophistiCat

I think he asked: Did we invent or did we discover chess? This I read as a parallel to the question of whether math are invented or discovered.

This whole discussion started from the question of whether the liars paradox has any implications for the design of bridges, i.e. if the paradox undermines the basic aspects of using math to solve problems. Thoughts? — T Clark

As already explained, this is not really the question at hand, rather it is a bit of a caricature of the more general question at hand, which was: How should we treat logical contradictions in mathematics? Should we reject or minimize them, as if they were a problem, or should we rather welcome them and treat them as a source of creativity?

Again, retracting the law of excluded middle does not provide contradictions. — TonesInDeepFreeze

The point is that allowing contradictions as fine and mellow in mathematics would contradict the LEM.

Inconsistent mathematical systems are a thing. — Banno

Fair enough. As I said, if anyone wants to build a parallel form of mathematics where the LEM does not apply, I see no objection whatsoever. As long as they don't build any bridge with it...

It feels good that Wittgenstein agrees with me, even if Turing and you do not. — T Clark

Wonderful. On my side it feels very good to agree with Turing -- enigma buster & war hero, inventor of the computer -- and to disagree with Wittgenstein, whom I consider a fake philosopher.

The law of excluded middle is thus a kind of useful fiction. — Joshs

Why then, i guess your answer to Wittgenstein ought to be: don't dispose of the LEM, it's useful...

Whether or not Wittgenstein means what I said he means, I think this shows that the author of the article thinks Wittgenstein means what I said he means. — T Clark

Wittgenstein is literally asking why should one be afraid of contradictions in mathematics. What you or the author are saying, I don't know. I would answer that mathematics as we know them are built on the LEM, so the reason why we should be afraid of contradictions in mathematics is to keep that body of work alive and well. Now if anyone wants to build a parallel form of mathematics where the LEM does not apply, be my guest.

Just don't build any bridge with it.

Did you read the Wittgenstein quote? Do you understand what he’s trying to say? — Joshs

He is saying that the LEM is not always useful. So? We should give it up just like that?

When you find out that your cellphone cannot mow the lawn, does your cellphone deconstruct itself?

We don’t have to drop the law of the excluded middle, it deconstructs itself. — Joshs

Ridiculous.

I think what Wittgenstein was saying is that the trivial inconsistencies associated with the paradoxes don't matter. Are meaningless. There's a good chance I'm wrong about that, but that's how I read the article Banno linked to. — T Clark

I don't read this in the only (?) direct quote provided in that article, which reads as follows:

“Why are people afraid of contradictions? It is easy to understand why they should be afraid of contradictions in orders, descriptions, etc. outside mathematics. The question is: Why should they be afraid of contradictions inside mathematics?”

(emphasis mine)

Also from the article (though not a direct quote):

In relevance to this essay, Alan Turing (1912–1954) strongly disagreed withLudwig Wittgenstein’s argument that mathematicians and philosophers should happily allow contradictions to exist within mathematical systems.

The liar's paradox, like all logical paradoxes, has a simple non paradoxical solution. It's only an apparent paradox. So of course it can't break bridges or lead to poorly conceived ones. But happily or even casually allowing contradictions in math is equivalent to dropping the law of the excluded middle from mathematical logic, with far reaching consequences.

Luckily it will never happen. Math is too serious a matter to be left to philosophers.

Things in engineering are usually defined as sometimes overdetermined or positively redundant, in practice.

Epistemic closure of mathematics or its inability being used in practice doesn't prohibit a computer from modelling a bridge — Shawn

If that's what LW was saying, i.e. that we can in practice tolerate a few inconsistencies here or there in math as long as we know how to deal with them in practice, without otherwise departing from 'either p or non p', then I can agree. That looks like a reasonable position to me. But it seems he was arguing for treating contradictions not as a problem but as some sort of creative source of inspiration. That's often a good idea in real life, in literature, in proverbs and in art, all contexts where the law of the excluded middle is at best an ideal, at worse a distraction. But I'm not sure it's a good idea in mathematics.

That's because you take the whole question of 'can the liar's paradox break bridges' a bit too literally. The real question hidden behind this tag line is: should math allow contradictions? I.e. should we get rid of the law of excluded middle in math, or would that lead to poorly designed bridges?

Why yes. What's in our mind may at some point translate into real material structures like bridges, that are designed by someone using mathematics. If you allow contradictions to spread uncheck in engineers' minds and in their math, you may well end up with poorly conceived bridges.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that the kinds of paradoxes we're talking about have no connection to anything outside our minds. — T Clark

Mathematics are in our mind, and science and technology too.

Allowing contradictions in how you do calculus would cause all modern bridges to fall down. Does that matter? Is it different from the point about foundations? — Srap Tasmaner

If you want to allow contradictions in mathematics, you need to include in your axiomatic the possibility that two mathematical statements contradicting one another can both be true nevertheless.. This means inter alia that you cannot use ad absurdum proofs anymore. You can't also limit this to certain parts of math and not others. Every theorem would be both true and false. It would be the end of math.

On the one hand, I think I agree with Turing about contradictions mattering, but on the other hand it does seem clear to me that practice and intuition is the foundation of theory not the other way around, and you don't really need the theory, even when it comes to mathematics, insofar as foundations counts as the theory, to practice. — Srap Tasmaner

Nevertheless, allowing contradictions at the level of foundations would result in contradictions permeating the whole body of mathematics, and in the end, some calculation about some bridge may very well prove self-contradictory. So Turing was correct.

Beethoven's Hymn to Joy, by the Red Army Choir:

I am indebted to you for those Rage Against the Machine clips. I never listened to them much before. Keep them coming.

Foundations of mathematics is nearly a separate field of study, and unnecessary for the doing of mathematics. — Srap Tasmaner

Good foundations are not absolutely necessary to build a good house, but they make it easier.

When I was in first grade, my teacher was an old woman who all her life had taught arithmetic the traditional way, i.e. training kids to learn by heart and apply mechanically certain procedures to numbers, called addition, multiplication, etc. And then two years before retirement there was a pedagogic reform, and she was asked to teach "modern mathematics". What was meant by that, was mathematics based on clear axioms, derived from set theory. Us kids were supposed to learn the foundations of math (developed during the 20th century) first, in first and second grade, and only then derive applications such as addition or multiplication. This would give us a stronger background and better mathematical abilities. And it worked, at least for me. I learnt the conceptual basis for set theory and numeration, i.e. how to count in base 10 but also in base 2 or in any other base, when I was 7 years old. And I remained a math prodigy for all my school years.

Unlike Wittgenstein, Turing knew what he was talking about. He knew that founding math on sound, non-contradictory axiomatics has been the mathematical project of the century, a project on which thousands of mathematicians worldwide have worked very very hard. It was done out of a belief that such foundations were useful and important if mathematics were to be more than just a bag of tricks.

Then is seems we are both realists, except that you call yourself an antirealist. — Banno

Good one.

Maybe antirealists are only realist about antimatter, but not about the other stuff? ;-)

I guess common sense and patriotism aren't for you then. Ciao...

I don't know enough about this stuff to point to examples, but Turing's general point that allowing contradictions can be dangerous is almost certainly correct, precisely because of the emergence of computers. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. Hard to understand why anyone would dispute Turing's point. If one allows contradictions within mathematics, they will spread everywhere, in all mathematics. The idea that engineering calculations would somehow remain unaffected is like saying: the logical foundations of mathematics are purely decorative, pure aesthetics, they do not actually matter at all when doing actual mathematics. They can be self-contradictory all you like, just like a poem can.

As usual, Witty was only trying to sound witty, and as usual he tried a bit too hard.

Maybe you could write to the Pentagon and ask them to gently slow down their vaccination efforts, so you can better spread your ideological bullshit?