Logic has difficulties. But interestingly enough, this logic was proven
valid recently by two computer scientists/mathematicians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_ontological_proof
Basically:
*Gödel's ontological proof* is a formal argument for
God<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God>'s
existence by the mathematician Kurt
Gödel<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del>
(1906-1978).
On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 5:25 PM, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 01/07/2014 02:04 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> > (3) Reasoning illogically -- Clearly violating fundamental rules of
> logic. All swans are white; this bird is a crow; this bird is white.
>
> I think this is the most difficult problem to identify. However, back
> when we were discussing tautologies, this thought nagged at me. The
> validity of conjunction elimination (P,Q => P) relies fundamentally on a
> kind of static, small universe. If the universe is dynamic and/or too
> large, then the use of conjunctive elimination (normally considered a
> truth preserving rule) puts our argument at risk of false conclusions.
> E.g.
>
> Let's assert:
>
> A
> C
> B is, as yet, indeterminate.
>
> A,C => A is a valid rule. But if we later discover B, ~(B^A), then that
> entire link in the _chain_ of reasoning becomes a rat hole... a waste of
> time, perhaps so cognitively jarring as to prevent people from accepting
> B and - from now on - rejecting A. The people wallowing in that
> reasoning link will have forgotten that we had a _choice_ in our
> conjunctive elimination. We could have eliminated A rather than C.
>
> I speculate that utopians like the libertarians do this a lot: i.e. use
> locally valid rules that turn out to be distally invalid. But they
> don't do it because they're stupid, only because they accept
> simplification as a globally valid rule.
>
> --
> =><= glen
>
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