No, it isn't nonsense. It is sophisticated. But by all means assert things rather than argue them. That's your style.

Hence getting whatever you want is not essentially selfish... — Banno

Again, what is your argument? How are you arriving at your conclusion? Are you saying that getting what you want and being selfish are synonymous? Or are you just sneering as you normally do and then wondering why I sneer back?

It is sophisticated. — Bartricks

Well, it would be, were you, as any good Sophist, being paid to write it.

The argument is right there, in the post you quote.

I thought you wanted to play, not hide.

No it isn't. Are you saying that 'getting what you want' and 'being selfish' are the same?

No; I'm saying for your account to be consistent, you must deny that claim.

That's all.

No; I'm saying for your account to be consistent, you must make that claim. — Banno

You think that I - I - think that selfishness and getting whatever you want are the same!? No, I don't. I'm not stupid.

But you - not me, you - said that this omnipotent being is essentially selfish.

That came out of nowhere. No argument. Just as blank assertion. So, I am asking you to defend it. I do not see how you've arrived at that conclusion. I am suggesting that perhaps you're equating getting what you want with selfishness. After all, if you did then that would explain how you've arrived at the conclusion.

Now, I think you're getting a bit scared because you don't know how you arrived at that conclusion and you're worried that if you say "yes" to equating 'getting what you want' with 'being selfish' I'll refute you. Which I will.

You misquoted me.

You didn't say the omnipotent being is essentially selfish?

you must deny that claim. — Banno

Not following - are you saying that being selfish and getting what you want are not - not - the same?

If so, good - they're not. Then what is your argument? That is, how did you arrive at the conclusion that the omnipotent being would be essentially selfish?

Not following - are you saying that being selfish and getting what you want are not - not - the same? — Bartricks

No: I am saying that you must say that, or else be inconsistent.

That is, I am not having a go at your argument.

Well that wasn't remotely clear. I am not a mind reader. You just stated, apropos nothing, that the omnipotent being would be essentially selfish.

Now you're claiming that I need to deny this. Er, I don't think an omnipotent being is essentially selfish - nothing in anything I've said implies otherwise.

I mean, it's like saying "so the omnipotent being is essentially a grape"

Then I say "er, what? How on earth do you arrive at that conclusion"

Then you say "oh, you misquoted me. I just meant that you have to deny the omnipotent being is essentially a grape".

Really? Really? Are you planning on telling me a whole load of things I never claimed, are not in any obvious way implied by anything I have said, and yet that I need to deny? Because that strikes me as an entirely pointless exercise.

The. Omnipotent. Being. Is. Not. Essentially. Selfish. Nothing I said implied otherwise. Happy?

Now you also said I was speaking nonsense. Care to justify that? Or did you just mean that I must deny that I am speaking nonsense?

How contrary you are! You will even argue with me when I agree with you!

What fun!

Will @Bartricks now come back to argue that I do not agree with him?


Edit: He did!

Edit:

No, I didn't. — Bartricks

Quite the contrarian, our Bart.

No, I would argue that I do not argue with you when you agree with me. So I disagree with you about that.

No, I didn't. I argue with you when you disagree with me, not when you agree with me. So I disagree with your edit.

Let's see how deep this agreement between us goes.

An omnipotent will not be bound by any laws, even the laws of Reason. And for that to be the case, an omnipotent being would need to be Reason, no?

An omnipotent will not be bound by any laws, even the laws of Reason — Bartricks

That looks like a contradiction.

The law of non-contradiction is a law of Reason - but it doesn't bind Reason herself.

Plus even I appear able to do things in violation of it. What I am saying is false, for instance. That proposition is true if it is false, and false if it is true. So I just created a contradiction - created a proposition that has the properties of truth and falsity simultaneously.

Not sure why you said this, nor what it could mean for reason not to be bound by the law of non-contradiction.... But leave that as moot.

Consider your statement:
An omnipotent (being) will not be bound by any laws, even the laws of Reason

What is it? It looks like a law, but of course, it can't be - if it were, it would be a law that binds (sic.) an omnipotent being; but an omnipotent being, that very law says, cannot be bound...

So what is it?

For my money, it's on a par with "This statement is false": a nonsense, a broken grammatical amalgam that looks like it should say something, but doesn't.

You, it seems, want to take it seriously.

Not sure why you said this, nor what it could mean for reason not to be bound by the law of non-contradiction.... But leave that as moot. — Banno

Because you - you - said that it was a contradiction to say that Reason is not bound by any laws. So, not out of left field, but a direct response to what you said.

You're just being dismissive again without any arguments. It's getting tiresome.

An omnipotent being needs to be Reason, because otherwise the being will be bound by the laws of Reason.

Reason isn't bound by the laws of Reason because she's Reason, the maker of the bonds.

Now, it is not, in fact, any kind of contradiction to say any of that. For everything just said, including the claim that an omnipotent being needs not to be bound by the laws of Reason, is consistent with there being an omnipotent being and that omnipotent being being Reason.

For my money, it's on a par with "This statement is false": a nonsense, a broken grammatical amalgam that looks like it should say something, but doesn't.

You, it seems, want to take it seriously. — Banno

And as for this, I am not the only one to take it seriously. There's a vast literature on it.

You're just being dismissive again without any arguments. — Bartricks

Well, I don't think your arguments amount to much. So, yes.

It's getting tiresome. — Bartricks

Fine; so don't reply. You don't have to be here.

Reason isn't bound by the laws of Reason because she's Reason, the maker of the bonds. — Bartricks

That says nothing. Further, the anthropomorphism leaves an odd odour.

Now, it is not, in fact, any kind of contradiction to say any of that. For everything just said, including the claim that an omnipotent being needs not to be bound by the laws of Reason, is consistent with there being an omnipotent being and that omnipotent being being Reason. — Bartricks

There is a confusion here about what reason is, that is quite telling.

Yes, I was in error to call it a contradiction. To be a contradiction, it would have to make an assertion and its negation. But what you are writing here does not even succeed in doing that.

A quick run down of my opinion, following on from some of the philosophy that happened after Descartes, would be that reason is about how we string words together. Your error, which you share with other rationalists, is to think that reason binds how things are; and that hence by reason alone you can deduce how things are. The poverty of that approach was set out long ago by Hume, Kant and others, but perhaps was best criticised during the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy. Few would take this sort of natural theology seriously now.

You're not arguing anything. Don't give me your potted history lesson or just state I am in error. Argue.

For my money, it's on a par with "This statement is false": a nonsense, a broken grammatical amalgam that looks like it should say something, but doesn't. — Banno

Roughly speaking, in proving the first incompleteness theorem, Gödel used a modified version of the liar paradox, replacing "this sentence is false" with "this sentence is not provable", called the "Gödel sentence G".

It is not possible to replace "not provable" with "false" in a Gödel sentence because the predicate "Q is the Gödel number of a false formula" cannot be represented as a formula of arithmetic. This result, known as Tarski's undefinability theorem, was discovered independently by Gödel (when he was working on the proof of the incompleteness theorem) and by Alfred Tarski.

So, a liar-paradoxical statement is indeed "broken" in a sense, in terms of arithmetic. Apparently, it was Gödel's original starting point, but it did not work. In the diagonal lemma:

Let F be any formula in the language with one free variable, then here is a sentence ψ such that ψ ↔ F(°#(ψ)) is provable in T.

It is not allowed to choose F(x) as FALSE(x) or TRUE(x) in this lemma.

At the same time, TRUE and FALSE still are represented as functions in the lambda calculus:

TRUE := λx.λy.x
FALSE := λx.λy.y

I am not sure as to how to interpret that ...

In my opinion, Tarski's limitation is actually almost as paradoxical as the liar sentence itself. As far as I am concerned, Tarski's limitation is not intuitive at all.

There's more unsaid than said
Wisdom dies with the dead

what is spoken
of knowledge only a token

There's more truth in silence
Than tears in violence

fools live in paradise
hell overflows with the wise

why knowledge AND goodness?
Surely goodness must be madness

When that say that is more like a description of God personally, it has more to tell us that He is good rather than He knows what is good. — hachit

A difference that matters. Thanks.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Could an omniscient being do nothing?

If so, then there must be something more to benevolence than just knowing what is happening.

If not, then why not? — Banno

Sorry I wasn't clear enough. The problem isn't that God can see the evil. It's that his omniscience doesn't give him reasons to be good. Thus requiring an additional quality - omnibenevolence.

Argue — Bartricks

:joke:

You are doing enough of that for all of us.

Gödel used a modified version of the liar paradox, replacing "this sentence is false" with "this sentence is not provable", — alcontali

Sure.

There's a clear way to make sense of "This sentence is not provable", shown by the use you mention.

"This sentence is not true" has no similar place. It is used to confound and entertain neophytes, instead.

If one were to be charitable, might one suppose such a use for "An omnipotent will not be bound by any laws, including this one"?

It's that his omniscience doesn't give him reasons to be good. Thus requiring an additional quality - omnibenevolence. — TheMadFool

So far as I can see, the only clear way for the bits of this puzzle to fit together is if omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence are independent.