Do the QRS have a superiority complex?

[Imadrongo]

Dude, I am not going to play this game. The time to play this game was during the 1st episode of the Reasoning show, when i crushed you on this very topic. If you still don't understand the problem -- if you still don't understand the difference between reasoning from axioms to explicate the implicit, and simply restating trivial tautologies in new words -- go back and listen to it again.

Hahaha. I didn't realize that was you. You ripped them apart in that reasoning show and they didn't understand you, it was quite funny. :thumbsup:

[David Quinn]

I believe they are far superior to the average person in logical reduction via deduction. In other words, for what it is worth, they are more or less masters at pure logic.

hahaha. Dude, QRS to pure logic are like kids playing legos to civil engineering. They are completely clueless about logic. What passes for 'logic' with them is informal, intuitionist babble. Their whole schtick is in redefining their way to conclusion, not in actually reasoning.

Redefining to conclusions is reasoning. There is nothing else to reasoning other than this.

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[David Quinn]

Dude, I am not going to play this game. The time to play this game was during the 1st episode of the Reasoning show, when i crushed you on this very topic. If you still don't understand the problem -- if you still don't understand the difference between reasoning from axioms to explicate the implicit, and simply restating trivial tautologies in new words -- go back and listen to it again.

Your blindness to the possibilities of tautological truth undercuts this boast, Victor.

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[David Quinn]

Dude, I am not going to play this game. The time to play this game was during the 1st episode of the Reasoning show, when i crushed you on this very topic. If you still don't understand the problem -- if you still don't understand the difference between reasoning from axioms to explicate the implicit, and simply restating trivial tautologies in new words -- go back and listen to it again.

Hahaha. I didn't realize that was you. You ripped them apart in that reasoning show and they didn't understand you, it was quite funny. :thumbsup:

It's not that we didn't understand him - after all, he was simply expressing the conventional viewpoint that we've heard a thousand times before. It's just that it was so unimaginative and mundane.

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[Matt Gregory]

Redefining to conclusions is reasoning. There is nothing else to reasoning other than this.

Well, there's inspiration, isn't there? A scientist can look at some data and be like, "Oh, that reminds me of . . . hexagons!" So he forms a hypothesis based on hexagons and starts to reason his way to the hypothesis to see if he can make it there from his current state of knowledge. Wouldn't the inspiration count as a part of reasoning somehow?

[Dan Rowden]

Name me one person in human history who didn't define their way to conclusions.

Dude, I am not going to play this game.

Translation: "I can't name one. All I can do is toss in the modifier "re" to "defining" and pretend it means something."

[maestro]

Redefining to conclusions is reasoning. There is nothing else to reasoning other than this.

Does it mean that if you believe something just redefine your axioms so that the dogma follows from your axioms logically?

[Kevin Solway]

Does it mean that if you believe something just redefine your axioms so that the dogma follows from your axioms logically?

That would be fine, so long as the axioms are perfectly and absolutely true, and unable to be falsified in any possible way. But in that case the conclusion wouldn't be a "dogma".

If it were one of my axioms that a thing can be other than what it is, then there would be a fault with the axioms.

[Dan Rowden]

Your axions have to relate to reality if they are asserting something about it. Where Victor and sane people part company is in the idea [Victor's] that one can only derive knowledge of reality by empirical, inductive means and that everything else is trivial word-play.

[maestro]

Where Victor and sane people part company is in the idea [Victor's] that one can only derive knowledge of reality by empirical, inductive means and that everything else is trivial word-play.

Since the world appears only upon the senses appearing, i.e. no senses no world, does it not imply that no sensory data means no knowledge of the world.

[Jason]

Does it mean that if you believe something just redefine your axioms so that the dogma follows from your axioms logically?

That would be fine, so long as the axioms are perfectly and absolutely true, and unable to be falsified in any possible way. But in that case the conclusion wouldn't be a "dogma".

If it were one of my axioms that a thing can be other than what it is, then there would be a fault with the axioms.

Axiom: Experience is happening.

I think you'd probably agree with that one but see it as only one quite limited axiom which, standing alone, misses other core axioms. That makes me wonder how you would propose knowing, after finding say several such axioms, if there were any more to be found. It's like trading cards - gotta collect the whole set.

[Dan Rowden]

Where Victor and sane people part company is in the idea [Victor's] that one can only derive knowledge of reality by empirical, inductive means and that everything else is trivial word-play.

Since the world appears only upon the senses appearing, i.e. no senses no world, does it not imply that no sensory data means no knowledge of the world.

If by "sense" we mean data source, then I guess that would follow. But it doesn't seem germane. If there's nothing to think about there's nothing to think about, right? The senses provide us data according to their function, but do they provide us information? Where or what is the information within sensory data? How much knowledge of the world does a cow have?

[maestro]

If there's nothing to think about there's nothing to think about, right? The senses provide us data according to their function, but do they provide us information? Where or what is the information within sensory data? How much knowledge of the world does a cow have?

The information of the world is within the sensory data, the cow does not have a powerful mind to model the world using the sensory data.

Without the sensory data the mind has no input to form any model of reality. Therefore all its knowledge of reality is predicated upon the sensory data.

[Dan Rowden]

If there's nothing to think about there's nothing to think about, right? The senses provide us data according to their function, but do they provide us information? Where or what is the information within sensory data? How much knowledge of the world does a cow have?

The information of the world is within the sensory data, the cow does not have a powerful mind to model the world using the sensory data.

So, the information is produced by the modeling, not the raw data. Isn't this what we intend by information? Modeled data? And beyond that knowledge consists of modeled information that is consistent over time?

Without the sensory data the mind has no input to form any model of reality.

That seems to be the case, but we can't really say that for certain. DNA, for instance, may carry data. If a body can function without any sensory input (which, admittedly, seems entirely unlikely) it may be possible for the mind to still function. All it needs is basic memory and discrimination. Certain primary facts about reality could potentially be discerned from that rudimentary basis. All it really needs is - gasp! - A=A.

Therefore all its knowledge of reality is predicated upon the sensory data.

One can say sensory data constitutes necessary causes for knowledge, but so do lots of things. Knowledge of those aspects of reality directly related to the functioning of a given sense would be predicated on that sense and its data. However, there are other forms of knowledge.

[xerox]

...

[Dan Rowden]

I'm not sure winning is possible if there's no-one to beat. How do you win a one-man race?

[Kevin Solway]

Axiom: Experience is happening.

I think you'd probably agree with that one but see it as only one quite limited axiom which, standing alone, misses other core axioms. That makes me wonder how you would propose knowing, after finding say several such axioms, if there were any more to be found. It's like trading cards - gotta collect the whole set.

There's only one, absolutely true axiom at base, and that is A=A (a thing is itself). It is the essence of logic itself.

"Experience is happening" is really a statement of A=A, using other words.

[Philosophaster]

If A=A is the only fundamental axiom, then derive the following logical statements from it:

! (A & !A) ("It is not the case that both A and not-A")

A v !A ("Either A or not-A")

Should be easy enough...

[vicdan]

Redefining to conclusions is reasoning. There is nothing else to reasoning other than this. -

You poor deluded idiot, here's an elucidation of the difference.

REAL REASONING:

Assume Euclidean axioms:

1. Any two points can be joined by a straight line.
2. Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.
3. Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as center.
4. All right angles are congruent.
5. Parallel postulate. If two lines intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough.

[Reason, argue, transform... shuffle, shuffle...]

Conclusion: Pythagorean Theorem! In any right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of catheti.


QRS 'reasoning':

1. Define hypotenuse as the square root of the sum of squares of the catheti
2. Therefore, in any right triangle, the square of the hypothenuse equals the sum of the squares of the catheti!

See the difference, dude?

Yes, any deductive argument must ultimately proceed from axiomatic assumptions. Therefore, any deductive argument is a tautology. What makes tautologies like this useful is that they explicate the implicit, they allow us to dig deep, deep into the nature of the system we are working with. They let us tease out the unobvious -- i.e. it's not at all obvious that Pythagoran theorem is true, yet it's implicit in Euclidean axioms. You guys, instead of actually teasing out the deeply unobvious, simply define your way to a conclusion.

Furthermore, deductive reasoning lets us discover something interesting when the initial axioms aren't merely random semantic flashes, but rather model our sensory world in some way. Calculus lets you calculate ballistic trajectories, for example, because its axioms and operations are not only formal definitions, but also map to the real world in important ways.Similarly, Euclidean geometry models the real world closely enough, and so the theorems of Euclidean geometry (such as the Pythagorean theorem), by explicating the deeply implicit in its theorem space, actually tell us something interesting about the empirical phenomena those axioms can be used to represent. Your 'assumptions' do nothing of the sort. They are simply detached, and profoundly superficial, symbol shuffling.

Take your canonical argument that 'all things are finite'. You define 'finite' as being less than the totality, and you define 'thing' as a part of the totality, or something to that effect. There is nothing revelatory, nothing deep, nothing surprising about this. You simply define your way to the conclusion you want, and you aren't afraid to mangle common terms and concepts into uselessness in the process. In making such an argument, you neither establish the modeling correspondence between your terms and the empirical phenomena, nor do you tease out any non-obvious implications of your axiomatic assumptions. The only mileage you get is from using the terms which already have meaning in English, so that your conclusion, when interpreted in English, seems to be profound -- but of course this is not the case, because you hadn't used the standard English definitions of the words in the first place.

You could similarly define 'cat' to be a stick and 'dog' to be an organic object, and then you could argue that all cats are dogs -- with about the same result.

[vicdan]

Your axions have to relate to reality if they are asserting something about it. Where Victor and sane people part company is in the idea [Victor's] that one can only derive knowledge of reality by empirical, inductive means and that everything else is trivial word-play.

Now why would you lie about me so blatantly, asshole? I had made it very clear during that Reasoning show episode, asshole, that tautology is important and has its place -- but you don't understand what that is. i had never, ever denied the importance of deductive reasoning. See my above post to Quinn (which i wrote before reading this reply of yours BTW).

I haven't forgotten much about logic, but what little I have forgotten is already more than you and your buddies will ever understand about it.

[Philosophaster]

V., do you happen to know how to derive the equations for Pythagorean triples (m^2 - n^2, 2mn, m^2 + n^2)?

[vicdan]

not off the top of my head. I haven't done any analytical geometry in a decade and a half.

[maestro]

So, the information is produced by the modeling, not the raw data. Isn't this what we intend by information? Modeled data? And beyond that knowledge consists of modeled information that is consistent over time?

The model is not the information. The model is a hypothetical construct of how the world works, for example in the gravitational law, the force of gravity is the model, the information is the perception that things fall to the ground. A model consistent with information over time is knowledge.

That seems to be the case, but we can't really say that for certain. DNA, for instance, may carry data. If a body can function without any sensory input (which, admittedly, seems entirely unlikely) it may be possible for the mind to still function. All it needs is basic memory and discrimination.

You are saying that a child raised in a sensory deprivation room, will have some rudimentary knowledge of the world stored in its memory, that may be the case, but that memory was still stored evolutionarily by sensory data acquired by its ansectors. Or suppose due to weird brain chemistry it rather sees hallucinations and starts modelling the world accordingly, the truths it then discovers are all unrelated to our world due to his different sensory inputs.

[David Quinn]

If A=A is the only fundamental axiom, then derive the following logical statements from it:

! (A & !A) ("It is not the case that both A and not-A")

A v !A ("Either A or not-A")

Should be easy enough...

They are both restatements of A=A.

A cannot be "both A and not-A" because A is nothing other than A.

And because only A can equal A, what is not A must be something other than A.

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[David Quinn]

Redefining to conclusions is reasoning. There is nothing else to reasoning other than this. -

You poor deluded idiot, here's an elucidation of the difference.

REAL REASONING:

Assume Euclidean axioms:

1. Any two points can be joined by a straight line.
2. Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.
3. Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as center.
4. All right angles are congruent.
5. Parallel postulate. If two lines intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough.

[Reason, argue, transform... shuffle, shuffle...]

Conclusion: Pythagorean Theorem! In any right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of catheti.


QRS 'reasoning':

1. Define hypotenuse as the square root of the sum of squares of the catheti
2. Therefore, in any right triangle, the square of the hypothenuse equals the sum of the squares of the catheti!

See the difference, dude?

Yes, there is a massive difference there, but your example of "QRS reasoning" is a caricature and has no bearing on the way I do things.

For example, I never create complex premises out of the blue in the way that your example suggests above.

Yes, any deductive argument must ultimately proceed from axiomatic assumptions. Therefore, any deductive argument is a tautology. What makes tautologies like this useful is that they explicate the implicit, they allow us to dig deep, deep into the nature of the system we are working with. They let us tease out the unobvious -- i.e. it's not at all obvious that Pythagoran theorem is true, yet it's implicit in Euclidean axioms. You guys, instead of actually teasing out the deeply unobvious, simply define your way to a conclusion.

I disagree with your either/or scenario here. It is true that I define my way to conclusions, but it is untrue that I am not teasing out the deeply unobvious in the process.

Furthermore, deductive reasoning lets us discover something interesting when the initial axioms aren't merely random semantic flashes, but rather model our sensory world in some way.

Again, your vision is limited. Modeling the sensory world is just one application of deductive reasoning. Another application is exposing contradictions in our thinking and eliminating our deluded views about reality.

Calculus lets you calculate ballistic trajectories, for example, because its axioms and operations are not only formal definitions, but also map to the real world in important ways.Similarly, Euclidean geometry models the real world closely enough, and so the theorems of Euclidean geometry (such as the Pythagorean theorem), by explicating the deeply implicit in its theorem space, actually tell us something interesting about the empirical phenomena those axioms can be used to represent. Your 'assumptions' do nothing of the sort. They are simply detached, and profoundly superficial, symbol shuffling.

The thing to remember is that people's attachments and delusions are wrapped up in symbols. Their personal lives are dictated by symbols, such as "love", "marriage", "success", "happiness", "life", "self", "comfort", etc. This is where the "superficial shuffling of symbols" acquires its bite.

Take your canonical argument that 'all things are finite'. You define 'finite' as being less than the totality, and you define 'thing' as a part of the totality, or something to that effect. There is nothing revelatory, nothing deep, nothing surprising about this.

The implications of this argument are deep and revelatory. For example, because the totality itself cannot be a thing, it immediately means that it cannot have the form of a God or a cosmic consciousness or a physical universe or indeed anything at all. This is amazing knowledge.

You simply define your way to the conclusion you want, and you aren't afraid to mangle common terms and concepts into uselessness in the process.

It might be useless for those who want to confine their minds to what is technical and academic in life, but it is very useful for those who want to expand their mind beyond those areas.

Usefulness is in the eye of the beholder.

In making such an argument, you neither establish the modeling correspondence between your terms and the empirical phenomena, nor do you tease out any non-obvious implications of your axiomatic assumptions. The only mileage you get is from using the terms which already have meaning in English, so that your conclusion, when interpreted in English, seems to be profound -- but of course this is not the case, because you hadn't used the standard English definitions of the words in the first place.

You could similarly define 'cat' to be a stick and 'dog' to be an organic object, and then you could argue that all cats are dogs -- with about the same result.

Oh, Victor, you have no idea what we are on about. This blindness is mainly due to your propensity to keep your thinking strictly confined to what is technical and academic in life.

Yes, it's true that as far as technical and academic thinking is concerned, one has to strictly adhere to conventional, agreed-upon terms. That is the way the collaborative nature of the technical, academic process works. It wouldn't work if everybody started redefining their terms willy-nilly. There would be chaos.

This is all easily understood and I accept it. But such a requirement is neither necessary nor feasible when it come to deeper forms of thinking which go far beyond the technical and academic realms. When it comes to personally understanding reality - directly and inwardly, with one's own mind - it becomes an entirely different ball-game. Here, sticking to conventional meanings doesn't mean anything. One has to consciously assess and reassess the meanings of all the terms one uses, particularly terms like reality, truth, existence, self, consciousness, God, thing, absolute, objective, etc. Each individual has to determine for himself the meaning of these things. It is what conscious thinking is all about.

Your desire to extend what is only suitable for the technical and academic realms of life into these deeper, personal realms is ludicrous to the extreme. It is akin to extending what is written in the Bible into the scientific realms and using scripture to determine what is a valid scientific theory. Not only is it entirely inappropriate, but it actively negates the conscious activity that is required to become a deep thinker. At root, it is the same anti-knowledge impulse that religious fundamentalists display towards science.

You're a religious fundamentalist at heart, Victor.

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