Question.... (Processes of Logic)

Evolutionists may get uptight when you ask these things because the clear implication is that you think all evolutionists are atheists. This is not the case, as shown by the large number of theistic evolutionists here on this board.That said, I am an atheist, and have no trouble with your questions: Neither place exists. If conciousness continues after this life, there's no way to test it. If it does continue, my own personal belief is that it does so in a way incomprehesible to living people. So it's hardly fruitful to try and talk about it. This life is the one where we see results, so it is this life to be concerned with, not the next. From a psychological perspective, religion (gods, etc) is very interesting indeed. Evolution has equipped the mind to come to conclusions based on scarce or absent information. I believe that this gives rise to supernatural, superstitious belief.Is there evidence for the actions of a god in this universe? I don't believe so - at least, not the kind of god that would be at all moral or intelligent (and worthy of worship). Rather, the state of the universe is one of "pitiless indifference" as Dawkins puts it. What kind of god would allow such a state?[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 05-05-2003]

Of course I'm not suggesting that. My use of the word "equip" should not be taken to imply a guiding intelligence. It's just that our language has yet to catch up to the idea of function without design, so sometime it's hard to talk about functions without the distant implicature of a designing force.The reason that it's a survival advantage to make descisions based on limited information is because limited information is all the information you can have. If you waited for total information on ny subject you'd stand around doing nothing until something killed you.Did you really need me to spell that out for you? Seems obvious to me.

Like the man just said, and like it's been repeated a hundred times, and like anyone who really cared about what logical reasoning can and can't do should know: you can't prove a negative!We're not the ones saying a heaven and a hell exist. No one's ever been able to find them. There's no evidence that they exist. Therefore it's not our job to prove that they don't exist. Otherwise we'd have to prove the non-existence of every ridiculous thing anyone comes up with.You're the one making the positive claim: Heaven and/or Hell exist. So prove it. That's your job because you made the claim.And for the record, I never tried to impose my belief on you. If you want to believe in heaven and hell, fine. I personally don't because there's no evidence that they exist. If you can live with a belief in something for which no evidence exists, that's fine. I can't live like that.

You're probably right, Mr. P. I should have qualified that statement a little farther.But I think my point was clear, that if the onus was on us to prove that something non-obvious doesn't exist, then we'd have to do so for every ridiculous thing that could be imagined.

Maybe what we're trying to say is that you can deduct a negative (which you have done), but you can't induct a negative. Ultimately, science is the process of induction (generalization from repeated observations), not one of deduction (derivation from postulates). Deductive science hasn't been considered a good way to arrive at truth since... Bacon, was it? Or Galileo? Certainly Aristotle was the prime proponent of deductive science, as I remember... Honestly my history of science is not coming back to me the way I wish it would. Time to hit the books...

But not in the real world. In the real world, true squares and circles don't exist.You're confusing what you can do within axiomatic systems and what you can do in real life. You can't make accurate deductive statements about reality because we're not privy to reality's axiomatic conditions - we can only approximate them through induction.You can deduce negative statements but you can't induct them, and I guess that's the point. And deduction isn't a process you can apply to things that exist in the universe.

Yeah, see, the thing is, it's not possible to conclude that X has not occured because it's always possible to say "Well, X occured where we weren't looking" or some such thing.You've basically reduced a negative to another negative, which you can't prove.As they say, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." It's always possible we haven't found it yet.The question then becomes, is it reasonable in most cases to assume that that which we do not observe does not exist? It usually is, but that's just an assumption.

One-word dismissals like this make you sound needlessly arrogant. Are they really appropriate in a friendly discussion? What if I'm an invisible, faster-than-light ninja able to replace them with identical copies faster than you can observe? What if what you're seeing doesn't really exist, you're just in the Matrix?What if I propose any number of infinite ad-hoc scenarios able to explain how I was able to take your keys without you seeing it?Of course, you could counter that there's no evidence for those scenarios, but I could respond with more scenarios to explain the lack of evidence, and so on ad infinitum. Ultimately, you can't prove I didn't take your keys; the best you can do is say that the most reasonable explanation is that I didn't take your keys. You can't prove the negative, but you can argue that it is the most reasonable model to fit the data. Deduction can only happen where the basic axioms of the system are specified. This is not the case in reality; we can only approximate the "axioms" of reality through induction. Unless you're privy to the fundamental laws of the universe? Because a lot of people would be pretty interested in those.Even if you try to deduct from those axioms that you have inferred, your deductive conclusion is limited in accuracy by your initial inferences.

Sure, it's axiomatic only in situations where axiomatic reasoning is appropriate. Real life never consists of these situations, therefore, negative deduction can never be more accurate than the inferred axioms that it is built on.It's like this - if I'm in a real-life situation, and I'm only, say 95% sure (a meaningless and arbitrary number, to be sure) about the axioms that I have inferred, then I can only be confident about the accuracy of any deduction from those axioms to the same degree - my deduction can only be assumed to be 95% accurate.Deduction only proves things in situations where the axioms are well-defined and assumed to be true. In real life, this never occurs.So, basically, Rrhain has proved (neither clearly nor concisely, I'm afraid) that you can deduct negatives in situations which never occur in real life. Congratulations, I guess.Generally, I agree: "absence of evidence is evidence of absence." But that can't ever prove absence, just suggest that it is a reasonable explanation.

Illogical only in informal logic used in inductive, real-world situations - because we assume that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. In deductive, absolutist logic, there's no such thing as an ad-hoc scenario - merely a potential counterexample.If you're going to proceed deductively, you can't dismiss my arguments as ad-hoc because in the context of deduction my scenarios are valid counterexamples.There's some circular reasoning going on here, or maybe just your own error - using terms from inductive logic to defend deductive logic - but honestly this is hard to wrap one's brain around, don't you agree? I agree. But in the real-world there's no situation where the axioms can be assumed true with absolute accuracy. This was the error of greek philosophers - assuming they could deduct truisms about the real world.In the real world, we have to infer truths, not deduce them. That's why modern science has a better idea of what is going on then ancient greek philosophers.

uh, you did, when you specified "absolute" knowledge about his keys. Unless you think "absolute" can be taken to mean less than everything? Which would be a pretty novel interpretation of the word. That doesn't even make sense. Math is just a symbols game. In what form would it exist if not in our heads? Where is math when we're not thinking about it? Where was it when it was waiting to be discovered? What physical form can symbols take?You've made the mistake of confusing the model with the reality. This can't ever happen in reality. The exhaustive set of all possibilities can never be outlined in a universe of imperfect knowledge. Our knowledge can increase sufficiently to decrease the error term of our set of possibilities to within acceptable confidence intervals but it can never be reduced to zero. I can always think of possibilities that you haven't thought of. You've taken one flippant, simplified statement of mine as my entire position. To be most exact, I should have said "in the real world, it is impossible to induct a negative statement about the existence of something."So far you've proved over and over again that you can deductively prove a negative from axioms assumed to be true. Great. Nobody's disputing this. What we're saying si that has nothing to do with real life because the axioms for the universe can't be known. They can only be inferred.If you're going to go on proving that you can deduct negatives, then we're arguing at cross-purposes. I hate doing that. If you have comments that are relevant to the inductive proof (in the absolute sense) of negatives in the real world, I'd like to hear them.

That could very well be; although I have in the past been accused of misunderstanding platonism, so if you would be kind enough to perhaps briefly outline what that means to you, I'd appreciate it. I'm familiar with Plato's Cave (I think I am, anyway); I assume you mean something to do with an idea that signs have an inherent referent that exists beyond the words we use to describe them. Or something? As in, do the apples have some kind of inherent "two-ness?" I don't believe they do. I mean, simply the act of equating two discreet apples into a group of cardnality "2" is a linguistic assumption about the interchangability of objects. It is convievable a culture could exist that sees each discreet object so unique in it's self-ness (or whatever) that to group objects simply doesn't make sense. Well, strictly speaking, the color isn't "real", it's just a name we give to certain wavelengths as percieved by our eyes and brain. I have no idea what you're talking about. Seriously. It's clear that you've made a significantly deeper study of philosophy than I have, which is fine. Personally I find little utility in philsophy. What I meant was, it isn't possible to exhaustively outline all the possibilities to arrive at a certain situation. For any list you could provide I'm sure I could construct outlandish, ad-hoc scenarios to arrive at the same results as your more reasonable explanation. I'd probably have to recourse to ninjas, aliens, fairies, etc. but my explanations would be possible, if highly unlikely.Ergo, eliminating the "impossible" to arrive at a single conclusion is not, strictly speaking, possible. There's always an infinite number of explanations you have to eliminate, not because they are impossible, but because they are unreasonable. But that's a judgement call and not a strictly logical process.

I don't see that addition or equasion have a verifyable physical existence. Your keyboard does. I don't understand why you can relate the two. No, of course not. If I'm going to say I have two apples, it's because I've agreed to play by the rules of numbers.I could argue, however, that numbers aren't relevant to my apples and decline to number them. Color is a property of a single thing. If you take one of my two apples and examine it all by itself, nothing about the apple could tell you it was ever in a group of two. "Two-ness" is a property of the "set" of my apples but the set itself has no existence - just the apples. My decision to group them into a set to count them is a purely arbitrary function of symbolic thought. Let me pose a counter-question: do the individual apples act differently if they're grouped into two or three?I may not have thought the color argument through very well; it may have an existence beyond our perception of it. Certainly light has existence and behavior beyond our perception. I don't really see the relevance but I won't defend my points on color. That come sup in literary criticism so I guess I approach it from that angle. I may indeed have a highly utilitarian philosophy. The ramifications of that I'm not qualified to say. Suprise! One of them is secretly an orange. The ninjas confused you with very clever paint. You inferred they were both apples based on the evidence, but you were wrong. New evidence reveals the truth - you have an apple and an orange. How can this be true without perfect knowledge of the axiomatic conditions of the universe? You can infer the laws of the universe to a reasonable extent, but your deductions will always be limited by those inital inferences. Deduction can never be more accurate than induction in the real world.

BumpRrhain? Nothing further?

Not generally for things I've already argued the other side for, no.