Timeline for How can something exist, but never be created?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 19, 2014 at 18:46 | comment | added | ben rudgers | @AndrewC My criticism has been solely within the comments. I took the question seriously despite it 'not showing what code you have tried'. My answer was a philosophical analysis of the question based its premises and intermediate conclusions. My answer is structured such that its premises and conclusions are available for further philosophical analysis. One can say, "No reductio ad absurdum is not applicable here because..." or "No, a coherent theory that 'x is the cause of y' does not depend on the existence of x and y for these reasons..." I can chat about your and my religion elsewhere. | |
| Aug 19, 2014 at 17:57 | comment | added | AndrewC | ..and now we're off-topic on an argument about where a criticism of a question should be written, so it's perhaps time to agree to differ about whether it should have been a comment in the first place! <chuckle/> | |
| Aug 19, 2014 at 14:01 | comment | added | ben rudgers |
@AndrewC Exactly. (eq? 'regex 'regular-expression) is false even though "regex" and "regular expression" are generally used as synonymously right up to the point where the discussion becomes technical. The idea behind the QA format of StackExchange is to provide technical expertise and produce canonical answers on the web [I've listened to about 90% of the SO and SE podcasts, recently]. A good answer to ` Why does 2 + 4; create a syntax error in Racket? It works in JavaScript. I am not going to use a different language ` is still "Here is how Racket works".
|
|
| Aug 19, 2014 at 12:49 | comment | added | ben rudgers | @AndrewC Among the risks of doing philosophy is it turns out that it's not Athens, it's you. Some will drink the Hemlock, some will accept Pascal's Wager, and some will enquire more deeply. Theology is the discipline where religious beliefs get special dispensation when employed as premises. That is where we are obliged to bring the mountain to Mohammed. Philosophy pursues different types of heavy lifting. | |
| Aug 19, 2014 at 12:02 | comment | added | AndrewC | (Incidentally, html has a context-free grammar, so using a Turing machine to parse it is unnecessary. You should use an html parsing library rather than reinvent the wheel. Also, most regex libraries parse more widely than just regular languages, so can't purely use FSAs by definition.) | |
| Aug 19, 2014 at 12:01 | comment | added | AndrewC | Language wars never resolve and are a distraction from productive Q&A between people content with their choice. That's why my example is a closer analogy than yours for your introduction of a theism vs non-theism argument instead of answering the question. | |
| Aug 18, 2014 at 13:25 | comment | added | ben rudgers | @AndrewC On Philosophy I'd flag the question as off topic. On StackOverflow, I'd flag it as low quality - perhaps after a delay in which I requested more information via comment. This is a better parsing analogy: stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/… Using regex to parse html is confused because it fails to distinguish between pattern matching and parsing at the surface level and between discreet finite automata (or their equivalent) and Turing machines at a deeper level. This problem is more common in philosophy. | |
| Aug 18, 2014 at 13:05 | comment | added | AndrewC | Proof by contradiction is fine if it answers the question. You wouldn't answer "How do I use lisp to parse this grammar?" with "Lisp is a toy language only used in academia. Use C.", because it's not an answer, regardless of how passionately you felt about it or how important your mission of convincing people not to use lisp is to you. It's a comment. It doesn't address the question. | |
| Aug 18, 2014 at 12:51 | comment | added | ben rudgers | @andrewc Recognizing incoherent concepts has been an important means of answering philosophical problems at least since the advent of Socratic dialogs. For much of the previous century, careful attention to the way propositions are formulated from language dominated the philosophy of science. The later Wittgenstein gave us the generalized case of ordinary language analysis. I say this because surely you cannot be suggesting that a providing a proof by contradiction does not fit the StackExchange model in general [never mind Philosophy]. | |
| Aug 18, 2014 at 8:45 | comment | added | AndrewC | Nevertheless, on Stack Exchange "Your question is nonsense becuse..." is a comment, not an answer. | |
| Aug 18, 2014 at 5:15 | comment | added | ben rudgers | @AndrewC [a] I am observing that non-skeptical causality (e.g. something other than Hume's skeptical argument that saying 'x causes y' is nothing more than saying 'x happened before y') has to rest on a foundation where the existence of 'x' and 'y' is not in question. I am not claiming that non-skeptical theories of causality are reasonable. [b] Philosophy is getting to the bottom of things and sometimes all that's at the bottom is a muddled mismash of illogic. The importance of distinguishing good from lousy ideas is why one is willing to drink the hemlock. | |
| Aug 18, 2014 at 0:53 | comment | added | AndrewC | Your second two paragraphs seem to be a slightly obfuscated "don't mix religion with science if you don't want contradictions". It's amusing to hear a contratheistic argument which works by concluding that the universe was wholly created, but in all seriousness, I think it's worth attempting to answer the question as posed at some point, rather than purely criticising it, since the box is marked "Answer" rather than "Respond". | |
| Aug 18, 2014 at 0:41 | comment | added | AndrewC | If I read you correctly, you're arguing that causality is a reasonable assumption rather than a known permanent attribute of the universe, and hence you can't make conclusions about existence using causality. But it's easy to shoot down any argument this way: "we can't know X, so you can't rationally deduce Y from it." - in the first two paragraphs you're basically saying "ah, but epistemological nihilism, so you're wrong". Do explain or edit if I've misunderstood you. | |
| Aug 18, 2014 at 0:07 | history | edited | ben rudgers | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 240 characters in body
|
| Aug 18, 2014 at 0:02 | history | answered | ben rudgers | CC BY-SA 3.0 |