Message from @folk

Discord ID: 384500449459437570


2017-11-27 00:10:10 UTC  

No, philosophy isn't science. It's not non-science either.

2017-11-27 00:10:50 UTC  

It's principles you use to think and communicate. You need them to do science, you need them to reason, to do politics, even to do arts.

2017-11-27 00:11:34 UTC  

Yes, ancient philosophers thought they could figure out nature by just thinking really hard about it.

2017-11-27 00:11:39 UTC  

That part wasn't science.

2017-11-27 00:13:46 UTC  

I can figure out nature by thinking really hard about it.

2017-11-27 00:14:19 UTC  

Yes but the second you start actually forming legitimate hypothesis with fail and success states that follow the scientific method you are no longer doing philosophy

2017-11-27 00:14:24 UTC  

Maybe you're outside of the inane endless struggle of humanity.

2017-11-27 00:14:58 UTC  

Philosophical ideas need not be necessarily unscientific but they are speculation by definition

2017-11-27 00:15:10 UTC  

Logic still came from philosophy.

2017-11-27 00:15:30 UTC  

Ok, but that doesn't mean it's science

2017-11-27 00:15:39 UTC  

Logic isn't science.

2017-11-27 00:15:50 UTC  

But you better derive your scientific conclusions with logic.

2017-11-27 00:16:14 UTC  

Yea

2017-11-27 00:16:42 UTC  

Philosophy was also important in figuring out that seemingly logical constructs can construct absurd inquiries. We call them paradoxes.

2017-11-27 00:17:24 UTC  

In Computer Sciences, this shows up as undecidable problems.

2017-11-27 00:24:25 UTC  

e.g. "I'm lying"

2017-11-27 00:25:21 UTC  

I'm not quite sure how to respond, because it obviously depends on the subject matter and also - whether we like it or not - how you've grown to interpret "paradox", but I've never considered undecidable problems in computing to be paradoxes at all

2017-11-27 00:26:02 UTC  

to me, a paradox is when you start with a reasonable preposition or whatever, and then the conclusion is not what you'd expect

2017-11-27 00:26:04 UTC  

roughly speaking

2017-11-27 00:27:10 UTC  

Undecidable problems are questions that describe problems in a way that make them appear answerable, but they aren't.

2017-11-27 00:27:30 UTC  

oh, then we disagree on what an undecidable problem is

2017-11-27 00:27:55 UTC  

"An algorithm that can check if a program enters an infinite loop or eventually stops."

2017-11-27 00:28:16 UTC  

right

2017-11-27 00:28:21 UTC  

that's not a paradox

2017-11-27 00:28:36 UTC  

the conclusion is entirely what I expect

2017-11-27 00:28:49 UTC  

Since the only way to know what happens is to actually run the program, the algorithm analyzing the program has to compute the same thing as the program itself. Therefore, analyzing is the same as computing.

2017-11-27 00:29:22 UTC  

So if it enters an infinite loop, the analysis will also loop, and therefore you'll never get an answer.

2017-11-27 00:30:28 UTC  

So the question really was, can we know the final result of a computation without running the computation?

2017-11-27 00:30:41 UTC  

The proof is actually very lengthy.

2017-11-27 00:30:41 UTC  

I'm not sure, should I just repeat myself?

2017-11-27 00:31:01 UTC  

>A paradox is a statement that, despite apparently sound reasoning from true premises, leads to an apparently self-contradictory or logically unacceptable conclusion.

2017-11-27 00:31:08 UTC  

this might appear like a paradox to someone who doesn't know the subject matter, but like I said, the conclusion to this algorithm is entirely expected for me

2017-11-27 00:31:57 UTC  

Probably every paradox can be reworded in a way that makes the contradiction in the question evident.

2017-11-27 00:32:41 UTC  

>Some paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One example is Russell's paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves" would include itself, and showed that attempts to found set theory on the identification of sets with properties or predicates were flawed.[7] Others, such as Curry's paradox, are not yet resolved.

2017-11-27 00:32:50 UTC  

I'd say that provided the wording of the supposed paradox includes the word "arbitrary" or equivalent, it's not actually a paradox

2017-11-27 00:36:44 UTC  

a paradox is always resolved, by my own definition of the word, like I said, so we don't really agree on the basics of the semantics

2017-11-27 00:37:28 UTC  

which is fine, and almost always the case, it just means I should not have said anything at the outset

2017-11-27 00:38:41 UTC  

So "your definition" of paradox says it's always resolved? No unresolved paradoxes?

2017-11-27 00:39:04 UTC  

I'm not sure why you're asking that now, I made this clear in my 2nd sentence

2017-11-27 00:39:09 UTC  

[1:26 AM] folk: to me, a paradox is when you start with a reasonable preposition or whatever, and then the conclusion is not what you'd expect

2017-11-27 00:40:06 UTC  

like I said, this is always a problem when you're discussing on a higher level than "beer", which is why I started my reply with a caveat or two, and laid out my definition immediately