There are certainly people who believe that the Russell paradox says something profound about math and logic. — Clarky
That's a fun phrase. BTW thanks for putting that list of articles on your profile, the couple I've read were very interesting.fallacy of tendentious nomenclature
Then again, if he got something essentially right, then these kinds of big-picture narratives can be valuable as setting directions for future research and providing an insight into large-scale patterns. — SophistiCat
BT 14We need only consider the Socratic maxims: "Virtue is knowledge, all sins arise from ignorance, the virtuous man is the happy man." In these three basic optimistic formulae lies the death of tragedy.
BT 15This is why the image of the dying Socrates, man freed by insight and reason from the fear of death, became the emblem over the portals of science, reminding all who entered of their mission: to make existence appear intelligible and consequently justified.
BGE 10[To] ultimately prefer even a handful of ‘certainty’ to a whole carload of beautiful possibilities [ . . . ] this is nihilism and the sign of a mortally weary soul.
Reginster, "The Affirmation of Life", chapter 6 part 2In this praise for ignorance and uncertainty, and for the problematic character of life itself, Nietzsche finds himself close to Socrates, indeed perhaps closer than he acknowledges.
Why does Nietzsche reject Aristotle's and stoicism also — Ross
BGE 9In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature—even on nature—and incorporate them in her; you demand that she should be nature “according to the Stoa,” and you would like all existence to exist only after your own image—as an immense eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism.
Is it rather the case that many of these philosophical systems of ethics and morality whether it's Aristotle's or Plato's ethics or Kant's moral theory that they are a goal or set of ideas for humanity to aspire to. — Ross
Gather ye roses while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
A world where beauty fleets away
Is no world for denying.
Come lads and lasses, fall to play
Lose no more time in sighing
The very flowers you pluck to-day
To-morrow will be dying;
And all the flowers are crying,
And all the leaves have tongues to say,-
Gather ye roses while ye may.
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
Here, where the world is quiet;
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
[...]
Though one were strong as seven,
He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
Nor weep for pains in hell;
Though one were fair as roses,
His beauty clouds and closes;
And well though love reposes,
In the end it is not well.
[...]
We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure;
To-day will die to-morrow;
Time stoops to no man's lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
Weeps that no loves endure.
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.
It is a sign of a strength of the free energy principle that the bogus “dark room problem” is the best opposition that might be mustered. — apokrisis
The trick is then to act in ways that only increase your certainty about the sensations you will experience. If the certainty of your actions effectively reduces the uncertainty of your sensations, then the two sides of the equation are tightly coupled in a way that optimises your ability to exist in the world. — apokrisis
You are winning to the degree your plans for your future don’t encounter the unexpected. But an organism lives in the world. It exists because it can tame environmental uncertainty through its actions. It can feed itself, protect itself, reproduce itself, etc. It can act in ways that reduce the world’s uncertainty. So it doesn’t need to retreat to the refuge of a darkened room to escape the environment’s capacity to surprise. — apokrisis
But the theory actually states that life expresses the drive to avoid becoming randomised by its environment. — apokrisis
Organisms that succeed, the free-energy principle mandates, do so by minimizing their tendency to enter into this special kind of surprising (that is, non-anticipated) state. But at first sight this principle seems bizarre. Animals do not simply find a dark corner and stay there. Play and exploration are core features of many life-forms.
It is for the contrived definition of "living" that seems to be used here, almost entirely by definition. If life is nothing but avoiding non-anticipated stimuli, then minimising non-anticipated stimuli means living longer?But why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest? — Banno
I'm over here struggling to think of an example. Not of a biological system, but of an ecosystem that would even vaguely resemble this "dark room".Yes, a human is only one example of a biological system, but you only need one counterexample to falsify a law. — Kenosha Kid
:up:Our fear of lurking tigers _is_ quite different from our innate curiosity for the novel, and should be treated as such. — Kenosha Kid
when the Universe gets cold it means that the Universe is dying cause there isn't enough Entropy — TheQuestion
If the Multiverse theory is proven to be true then that would mean a outside force is funneling energy in our Universe causing a rapid expansion. — TheQuestion
And heat is the motivating factor to cause Entropy to make things. — TheQuestion
math paradoxes we're talking about are trivial — T Clark
What? Must I ever be on the way? Whirled by every wind, unsettled, driven about? O earth, you have become too round for me!
Too much has become clear to me: now it does not concern me anymore. Nothing lives any longer that I love, - how should I still love myself?
So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind.
A good wind? Ah, he only who knows where he sails, knows what wind is good, and a fair wind for him.
Und da sitz’ ich in der grossen Runde,
In der stillen kühlen Feierstunde,
Und der Meister sagt zu Allen:
„Euer Werk hat mir gefallen;“
Und das liebe Mädchen sagt
Allen eine gute Nacht.
There are certainly people who believe that the Russell paradox says something profound about math and logic. — T Clark
I don't think this analogy applies. Seems like with the Russel paradox, we start with what appear to be consistent rules and get contradictory results. — T Clark
what if you are making those assumptions in arguments that are not liar's paradoxes — Philosophim
The liar's paradox only shows up when we are talking about sentences that we would never use in normal speech — T Clark
Is this the issue, that mathematicians and logicians don't believe math was invented by humans? That they think it is intrinsic to the world? — T Clark
I don't get it. — T Clark
As you consider the next question, please assume that Steve was selected at random from a representative sample:
An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: "Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail." Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?
The resemblance of Steve's personality to that of a stereotypical librarian strikes everyone immediately, but equally relevant statistical considerations are almost always ignored. Did it occur to you that there are more than 20 male farmers for each male librarian in the United States?
I hear that cats have fast reactions. Does their physical ability (strength, dexterity, etc.) benefit from this over time?I personally have always enjoyed a highly-developed intuitive sense. — Pantagruel
An uncomfortable truth (full disclosure: I took no more than a single undergrad course). Still, its hard to find people willing to even talk about philosophy... and I guess it's a kind of therapy for some of us. Or just a way to kill time for shut-ins. Maybe we need a new thread: What is the value of this forum? :wink:people assume that they can do meaningful philosophy without the need to be scientifically informed on the subject. — Nickolasgaspar
The intellect is no less flawed than the intuition. — Miller
not being rigorous — Yohan
:up:Science is counterintuitive because the world that scientific instruments measure is different from our inborn naive intuitions of what the world we imagine ought to be. The fault is with our subjective psychological intuitions and not with objective scientific instruments. — magritte
An example will perhaps illustrate the difference between intuition and logic: — TheMadFool
credibility of mathematics — T Clark
The liar's paradox seems like a little joke that people have decided to take seriously. I can't see how it gives any insight into meaning or truth, as some propose. — T Clark
parentheses addedThere is no single first-order formula that serves to define the truth of all sentences of first-order logic in the universe (of sets).
didn't make sense to me. Humans can use whatever grammar they like, so I'm not sure what you are confused about here.Why are self-referential sentences like the liar sentence (3) only in the 2nd person while we humans can do the same in one additional way viz. in the 1st person?
There is a set R which consists of all and only non-reflexive sets:
R = {x | x is non-reflexive}
But then we see that R belongs to R iff R is non-reflexive, which holds iff R does not belong to R. Hence either assumption, that R belongs to or R does not belong to R leads to a contradiction.
Suppose we have some set b and form the Russell set using b as a universe.
That is, let R_b, = {c ∈ b | c is non-reflexive}
There is nothing paradoxical about R_b - The reasoning that seemed to give rise to paradox only tells us that R_b ∉ b. In other words, the Russell construction gives us a way to take any set b whatsoever and generate a new set not in b.
The tongue in cheek title of our book is intended to suggest that circularity
has an undeservedly bad reputation in philosophical circles. On the other hand,
we certainly do not think that every proposal or argument using circularity
bears close scrutiny. For example, one of the morals of our resolution of
the Hypergame Paradox is that certain kinds of circular definitions really are
incoherent.
Professor Hill denounced the judge who had harassed her.
The law school professor who had worked for him denounced Judge Thomas.
The law school professor who had worked for him denounced the judge who had harassed her.
Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum" was intended to be an irrefutable argument from undeniable premises. Descartes could not doubt the fact that he thought. [...] The reason is that Descartes' act of doubting itself requires thinking [...]. Basically, Descartes' famous dictum is shorthand for something more like: I am thinking this thought, and this I cannot doubt because my doubting requires my thought.
I’d be interested in hearing about situations where self-referential ideas actually contribute rather than obscure.
One does not get an answer to the question, What is the state after collision? but only to the question, How probable is a given effect of the collision? From the standpoint of our quantum mechanics, there is no quantity which causally fixes the effect of a collision in an individual event.
If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success
God does not play dice.
The more I ponder about the physical part of Schroedinger's theory, the more disgusting it appears to me.
“Life IS pain your highness, and anyone who tells you different is selling something”
Selling something like Elfism for example. :wink: — DingoJones
Q: What premises are necessary before I am open-minded enough to consider/accept Efilism?
Only when life is viewed as an essentially burdensome problem does the search for solutions make any sense. — _db
We can doubt anything and eveeything. That's how it is I'm afraid. — TheMadFool
The equality of persons as persons does not refer to their capacity or lack thereof. The idea is that, as a person, you are just like other persons, no matter the circumstances one finds oneself within
But this is problematic because it presents the need for a determination of worth that moves past fixed universals to one that is to a certain extent spiritual and objective.