Sunday, August 18, 2013

How To Tell If You Are NOT An Atheist

While many people seem to like to define atheism with definitions like those in a dictionary, that method ultimately fails for many reasons.  Being an atheist is not like most other things where certain properties or attributes can be found in all atheists.

However, quite a few people especially in the New Atheist movement or Evangelical Christian movement would like to invent some kind of characteristic test to classify some group as atheists.  Generally the goal of this kind of endeavor is to define the group “atheists” either as widely or as narrowly as possible.  The obvious reason for this is try to claim the group is either bigger or smaller than it actually is as part of an appeal to popularity.

One thing common to both of these groups of people is they have a stick up their ass about the existence or non-existence of a god.  To avoid confusion, I call them the theists and the anti-theists.  The theists want to push the idea a god exists and the anti-theists want to push the idea that the theists are wrong.

Obviously, believing in god with no verifiable evidence would make you not an atheist or anti-theist for that matter. But the fact the thing you believe in is a god is simply irrelevant.  Too many times both sides want to claim the belief in a god is the central concept.  Reference that stick up their ass.  If each group would remove the lumber they had intentionally inserted into their own recta, they would notice there is a more subtle meaning behind the word atheist.

A fundamental concept of science is at play here.  Both groups don’t seem to have a problem with the idea that if evidence is presented and verified, any conclusions drawn from it are more likely to be correct.  Notice I didn’t say “are more correct”.  Only that they are more likely to be correct.

In the case of the concept of a god, simply put, there is no verifiable evidence that a god exists.  However, both sides ignore that there is no verifiable evidence that a god doesn’t exist either.  The simple reality is that regardless of the claim of existence or non-existence the level veracity of the claim is exactly the same.  Because of this the concept known as “hard atheism”, the belief a god does not exist, is no more atheism than the belief a god does exist.

The idea of “hard atheism” is based on an attempt to split New Atheists away from the typical definition of atheism used by theists.  Because theists know they believe in a god and atheists are different, they claim atheists believe a god doesn’t exist.  The so called “soft atheist” doesn’t believe a god exists or doesn’t exist.  While this is closer to atheism than “hard atheism” it’s still not there.

As is typical in a discussion where terms like “hard atheism” and “soft atheism” are used, it’s not long before the terms “gnostic” and “agnostic” are introduced.  The “gnostics” know and “agnostics” don’t know.  The normal way this is introduced is to provide a 2 dimensional graph with “hard/soft” on one axis and “gnostic/agnostic” on the other.

The idea is to paint the New Atheist into the quadrant that is both soft and agnostic.  They don’t know if there is a god or not and they justify that position with their lack of knowledge.  While this is all well and good for not sounding irrational, it’s really a worthless non-position.  It’s basically an attempt to claim the theists are wrong because of a kind of “I don’t know, you don’t know” type of argument.   It’s basically an argument from ignorance.

A group that has a non-atheistic yet coherent argument is the “igtheists”.  This group contends the whole question of the existence of a god is meaningless.  Without a good meaningful definition of what a god is, it’s pointless to even ask the question let alone try to come up with an answer.  This group is trying to avoid the question by claiming that it is not significant.

The interesting thing about igtheists is that they are diametrically opposed to one aspect that is common to theists, anti-theists, and atheists.  While the igtheists don’t think the question is significant, the other groups do.  This is important if you want to think about the value of coming up with an answer to the question.

One thing common to the group that calls themselves “agnostic atheists” is they claim while they don’t have an answer now, they believe it is possible to have an answer in the future.  This makes them NOT atheists.

They seem to think that if some new piece of evidence is provided, they COULD choose one answer or another.  However this is a pretty significant belief in itself.  It seems to be based on a 19th century conception of logic that ignores the advances in mathematics made in the 20th century.  It appears to assume all questions do have answers.

This is clearly an incorrect view based on a lack of consideration of what it means for there to be an answer to the question.  There is a big difference between some question having an ultimate answer and being able to obtain that answer.  Simply put, the ultimate answer is rather insignificant if you cannot obtain it.

Such is the basis of atheism.  Until you provide the verifiable answer to the question, what you claim is the answer is just plain insignificant.  It has no purpose.  I cannot be used as the basis for any rational decision making process.  It’s not a sound basis for the formulation of law.  It’s not a justification for doing anything at all.

So to summarize, here is a list of “so you might not be an atheist” questions:

1.      Do you believe a god exists?
2.      Do you believe a god doesn’t exist?
3.      Do you believe the theists are right?
4.      Do you believe the theists are wrong?
5.      Do you believe the anti-theists are right?
6.      Do you believe the anti-theists are wrong?
7.      Do you believe the question of god’s existence is insignificant?
8.      Do you believe there are answers to all questions?
9.      Do you believe it’s possible for more evidence to convince you?
10.   Do you believe the answer is significant?
 
If you need more tests, substitute the word “believe” in each question with “know”, “think”, or “assume”.  If you answer “yes” to any of these questions you are NOT an atheist.

67 comments:

  1. For those I've answered:

    1. Do you believe a god exists? YES.
    2. Do you believe a god doesn’t exist? YES.
    3. Do you believe the theists are right? NO.
    4. Do you believe the theists are wrong? NO.
    5. Do you believe the anti-theists are right? YES.
    6. Do you believe the anti-theists are wrong? YES.

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    1. Wonderful. SO you are NOT an atheist. You carry beliefs you cannot support with any evidence and make judgements about what others believe.

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    2. But if an evidence is supported it must be supported by something other than the evidence in question.

      Let's say that the question is unverifiable, can't we draw such a conclusion from something like Rice's theorem?

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    3. Actually it's worse then that. Godel showed that no nontrivial system can actually support itself. Consistency without support, or inconsistency with full support is the best you can hope for.

      The best conclusion you can draw from something like Rice's theorem or even simple undecidability is that a claim of a positive or negative answer to some equestions is nothing but a demonstration of a lack of understanding about the limitations of rational thought.

      If you want to claim YES to any of the questions the burdon of proof is on you to demonstrate you are defining the questions as total functions. Not an easy task as the set of total functions is a recursively enumerable set so any function to identify total functions must be partial in itself.

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    4. Then isn't the claim of consistency wihtout support a evidence for incorrectness, in this case being wrong, at least if it is claimed togheter with completeness. This would make some theists and atheists wrong.

      But, isn't it the case that trivial systems are what support non-trivial systems?

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    5. You seem to be laboring under an outdated 19th century conceptions that all question must have answers. The work of the 20th century PROVED that idea was childishly nieve.

      By what criteria would you claim there is something right or wrong? You cannot show the system you are using to decide the question even meets your desire for both consistency and completeness.

      No simpler systems are just SUBSETS of more complex systems. They don't support them, they are only identifiably simpler regions of the bigger set. For example no matter what you do with a regular language you will never be able to contruct a context sensitive language from it. You should study the Chomsky Hierarchy.

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    6. I think I meant to say that a claim based on inconsistency equals being wrong. (without evidence of completeness).

      The criteria for there being a right and wrong would be as you put it the "big difference between some question having an ultimate answer and being able to obtain that answer."

      I will try to study some of the topics, can you expand a little on what is meant by " defining the questions as total functions", if it doesn't require too many characters as an explanation.

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    7. I may be out of scope from Rice's theorem, but the idea would be that you cannot claim a god exists (that would be a false statement), unless god is trivial.
      And maybe from this that non-trivial systems are trivial, or the contrary?

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    8. Inconsistency is NOT wrong unless you arbitrarily decree that consistency is more important. But as soon as you do that you place major limitations on your reasoning system.

      If your question falls into the decidable region, being right or wrong does make sense. However, in the undecidable region, the question is nearly meaningless because there will never be any hope of comming up with an answer.

      Total functions are functions that always finish calculations so therefore always produce answers. Partial functions will never finish for some imputs so they don't always produce results. For example they contain an infinte loop.

      You should look into the study of recursion theory and computational complexity. The Hopcroft and Ullman book is a relatively gentle introduction. It's titled: "Introduction To Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation". It's a little dated but a good start.

      You cannot claim god exists or doesn't exist not because god is non-trivial, but because the human reasoning system is not trivial. Within that system, the labeling of something as god is one of those properties Rice was talking about.

      Unfortunately for the intelegent design fans, the irreducable complexity of their own minds means their CLAIM of god's existence is wrong. Specifically because their answer to the question is neither right or wrong due to limitations of the human reasoning system.

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    9. On the question on how to tell if you are not an atheist it seems that you did not introduce the question of a definition of a god, which, without entering in details here, would also entail the question of a definition of evidence. Or what is god, and what is evidence.

      And, that is so, because the range of those groups would be bound within the question of decidibility. Now, besides the concept of a god wouldn't most concepts fall into the same problem?
      While a system would be something akin a language.

      But what you refer to the idea that "all questions must have answers" is more likely to be based on the law of the excluded middle. That either it is the case that "god exists" or it is not the case that "god exists".

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    10. The question of your favorite definition for god is simply not relevant. Atheism is WITHOUT god, not with some specific definition of god. As far as evidence, simply use the standard scientific definition.

      No, the bounds on those ranges are NOT decidable. If they where everybody would find the exact same bounds.

      The question is the level of complexity of some problem. Sure simple problems are decidable. However recognizng that there is not enough information in the system to answer some questions is specifically what undecidability is all about.

      A language is a specific rule set that operates within a system. For example every human language works perfectly well in the system of the human mind.

      Specifically the work in the 20th century proved that the excluded middle concept in general is invalid. Sure a question might HAVE only a positive or negative answer, but it's quite easy to setup situations where nobody can EVER decide which answer is correct.

      This is why the CLAIM of a positive or negative answer can by definition be wrong on a trivial basis. You have to demonstrate decidability BEFORE a claim can be evaluated as correct or not.

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  2. "You cannot claim god exists or doesn't exist not because god is non-trivial, but because the human reasoning system is not trivial."

    What about the claim that god cannot be something complex, it is something simple. Something complex can be divided into parts, while god cannot be divided into parts, it may not even have a 'being'. As a via negativa that denies any property to god.

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  3. LOL so you don't understand what it means to be complex. It doesn't matter how many simple things you stick together it will still be a simple thing. Bigger is not more complex. If god WAS so simple, he would not mathematically be able to create the complexity we see in the world. You need to investigate the mechanism and limitations of a reasoning system that can handle the actually complex things in this world. It's easy to find non-trivial things a non-trivial system cannot handle. However it's just as easy to prove that ALL the simple things can be handled. If your claim that god was simple was actually true, we would already have the power of god at our disposal now.

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    1. The argument goes as this things are either simple or composite, a composite thing is made of simple parts, so god is either composite or simple, and for whatever reason god is simple (if you call a composite thing god a part can make what god really was).
      If bigger does not make more complex then complexity is a simple thing? Maybe I don't understand complexity at all, for sure.
      There are various reasonings to think that we have the power of god at our disposition as the soul or other metaphysical propositions.

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    2. You definely don't understand complexity. Composite refers to the amalgamation of various things. These things can be simple or complex. However the amalgamation of simple things only leads to a bigger simple thing. Just like the amalgamation of complex things leads to a bigger complex things.

      You really need to study the differences between various formal language types. For example regular languages, CFL's, CSL's, recursive languages, and recursively enumerable languages.

      You should also study the type of computational systems that are nessisary to deal with each of this language types. For example FSA's, PDA's, LBA's, and TM's.

      Your argument is failing on basic structural grounds. It doesn't matter if your propositions are correct or not. If you build up the argument based on misunderstandings of things like the basic difference between simple and complexe things, you argument will fail even if your propositions are all perfectly correct.

      However the proposition that a god exists has no factual support, The proposition that god is simple has no factual support. The proposition that a soul exists also has no factual basis.

      You really need to stop jumping back and forth between material logics and formal logic. There is a MAJOR difference between contingency and neccessity. You cannot make a material logic argument and attempt to strengthen it by sprinking in aspects of formal logic.

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  4. I mean if existence is NOT a property of things, what is the point of argument between atheists and theists. It's just bullshit.

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    1. What does the philosophical argument about how properties are associated with things have anything to do with the argument between theists and atheists?

      You declaring it as bullshit doesn't make it so.

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    2. Doesn't it hangs on the existence of god? No thing exists or doesn't exists, that's an phantasy of mind.

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    3. NO. It's like saying it all hangs on the existence of a tea pot in the orbit of the 3rd planet out from Alpha Centauri.

      If you can't get there to look, the question is rather pointless.

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    4. Think of a tea pot in front of you. The question of wheter it exists or not is pointless in the same way.

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    5. No, you can see it, touch it, and smack someone else up side the head with it.

      It's existence is far from pointless.

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  5. Everything in front of you it is the same, or do you want to something or someone else to validate your experience?

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  6. Maybe you live in world where everything in front of you is the same. Everybody has quite a different experience.

    So exactly why would you need someone else to validate your experience? Did it just go by too fast and you are afraid you missed something?

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    1. God exists like anything else in front of you.

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    2. Except for one little detail. Everything else I can physically prove exists. God not so much.

      Claiming god exists doesn't make god exist.

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    3. You may claim something exists? How do you prove it? Proof is a mathematical concept.

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    4. WTF. You want to play existential games???

      OK, what's god's mass that can be independently measured by different people?

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    5. By saying that something can be independently measured you are circumventing my question of how to do it. Do you think that if we put something on a balance and agree on it the thing was independently measured?

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    6. WTF, now you are pretending you don't know concepts that where covered in the 17th and 18th centuries?

      LOL, so know are you going to claim 5 kilograms is not 5 kilograms when measured by somebody else?

      Or are you now pretending to be a skeptic that can't bridge the gap. That might just be a problem if you believe in a god.

      There is a simple solution. If hit you in the face with a baseball bat, I am going to bet you will STRONGLY believe that baseball bat really does exist :-)

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    7. That's part of the problem, someone can bypass belief by using force pretending it is an belief. Uncounsciousness is no argument for something that requires conciousness to work - cousciously.

      Existence is not a unit of measurement, 5 kilograms is 5 kilograms, and because of that there's no difference between 5 kilograms that exist and 5 kilograms that doesn't exist.

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    8. Yes the problem is that a meaningless belief can bypass another meaningless belief. So how exactly does that explanation help?

      LOL, I would should like to see that non existent 5 kilos push down a scale so it reads 5 kilos :-)

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    9. You may imagine 5 kilos, and then think 5 kilos of wood, when you are thinking of 5 kilos of wood you are adding something to the concept.

      When you imagine 5 kilos, and then think of 5 kilos that exists you are adding nothing to the concept of 5 kilos.

      That's how existence is different from other properties.

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    10. WTF are you talking about? A quantification of the mass of a object has absolutely nothing to do with what kind of object it is.

      The choice of material isn't suppose to modify the definition of the quantification. The quantification provides an amount of whatever material it is.

      So exactly how is something that lacks any mass/energy anything more than a fantasy?

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    11. It's about you and no one perceiving the tea pot orbiting jupter, you are talking about something you imagine to be, and every existence is an artifact of imagination.

      To ask wether anything exists is to mistake imagination for reality.

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    12. WOW, so you don't get that a god is also nothing more than something people imagine to exist.

      So you thinking you exist, is just your imagination at work. LOL.

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    13. Actually this argument that existence is only a mental product is used to refute St. Anselm demostration of god where god is the 'greateast think one can think of' adding existence to it.

      Unless you can show and convince people that there's a tea pot in jupter it is your imagination, and bashing people in the head isn't part of the process of doing it.

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    14. It doesn't refute anything. No argument for or against the existence of a god can refute or confirm anything but it's own presuppositions.

      So you really don't understand how the logical positivists fell dead on their faces in the philosophy of science.

      Science NEVER proves something to be true. To be true, it must NEVER be able to be proven wrong. But everything in science must be falsifiable or it's simply not scientific.

      Nothing in science can EVER be proven. Claiming it doesn't exist because you have not seen it, is just delusional thinking.

      You would have to look at the entire content of the universe (past, present, and future) before your claim was anything more than a wild ass guess.

      Whether some dick head works in religion or science it makes no difference. They are both equally right based on the presuppositions or their respective "faiths".

      If you cannot figure out the idea of how something can be indeterminate, you will forever run around chasing after doing something we already know cannot be done.

      Sure it's imagination, but saying it's right or wrong is nothing more than pure zealotry.

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    15. Existence is not a property of things, so it makes not much sense of talking about things existence or non existence. So claiming something exists or doesn't exists is delusional.

      No one has direct acess to past, present, and future, is there any direct way to deny that? Because there's some access if one is to trust memory and some forms of evidence.

      Sure, science and religion may stand on the same ground as beliefs, there are some places in discourse when they may overlap, but they are also distinct things, so they are not the same "faith" are they?

      The very first thing about indetermination that comes to my mind it seems accepting limitations, but how could I say that the unlimited or what is beyond the limitation is indeterminate, when everything points to indetermination being a reference to an individual capacity of perceiving stuff?

      Right or wrong seems like a re-edition of true and false if some implications.

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    16. So are you saying it's delusional to claim that a god exists ????

      And since nobody has complete access to past, present, and future both religion and science never can identify any absolute truth.

      It's called a limit because it's a hard boundary that you cannot reach. Any talk about something beyond that limit is simple intellectual dishonesty.

      Right and wrong are moral judgments. True and false are simple Boolean values.

      Indeterminacy is telling you it's not a dichotomy. The relationships are: something, the converse of something, and YOU CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE. You cannot determine which it is. It's indeterminate.

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    17. People who claim that god exists are often delusional, no doubt about it.

      But past, present, and future, doens't matter much in maths for example? I mean that's on way of denying absolute truths but it comes from the limitations of how we experience the world.

      I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, if I asked you, who was the third president of the US, isn't that a right or wrong question? I get that there's no right or wrong for some kind of questions.

      Ah, indeterminated in that sense, sorry to ask this too, how does one determinate anything at all?

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    18. No people that claim theists are delusional are actually the one that are delusional.

      Pretending like those limitations don't matter much is just plain ridiculous.

      Playing games like asking questions about the recorded past completely misses the point. Who is the 500'th president of the US is more to the point.

      You REALLY need to study your computer science. What can be determined and what cannot be determined are very simple basic concepts that are very well studied.

      For example, the Chomsky hierarchy can easily identify what can be determined and what can not. In addition it tells you what kind of computational machinery you need to accomplish the task.

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    19. I mean people who claim to be talking to gods and mix it with fairy tales of their own as if there was no subjectivity in their experience.

      Philosophy is fun here, as I've cited Aristotles and Aquinas elsewhere, Aristotles proposed that there are statements that are indeterminated as those of future states, Aquinas said that god is not onminiscient as it is knowledge itself or something like that.

      It's always good to answers questions when you can do so. My only problem is if you are not technicizing the issue and limiting the issue in doing so.

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    20. WTF is wrong with you? Everything YOU do has exactly the same level of subjectivity as what they do. Why the fuck don't YOU prefix everything you say with "it's only my subjective opinion".

      When are you going to get that ALL of philosophy is conjecture. Including the ideas that you attempt to put forth.

      But when you attempt offer answers for things we already know you cannot have an answer for we call you a wacky religious kook.

      Putting them in a technological form simply tells us about the specific kind of kooky religious beliefs YOU have.

      Stop lying to yourself and others. Your only "problem" is you cannot support your position any better than any other religious kook that thinks people should think like you do.

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    21. People have said to me that they saw a light and it was jesus. That someone saw a light I'm okay with, but that it was jesus seems to be more than I could take for it.

      You've to make an argument for why all philosophy would be conjecture.

      What is the difference between saying someone is delusional and calling them a religious kook?

      Bringing names again I think Kant said that the question of philosophy hanged with the unbounded, unlimited (which he thought cannot be know), I thought you may be using indeterminated in that sense which doens't seems to be the case. Sure if you have an precise description, that is what it does, it describes that and nothing else.

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    22. So you just dismiss their experience because you don't like what they said.

      Once again, you need to take a class in philosophical logic. Maybe then you would begin to understand what a conjecture is and why it's nothing more than just another guess.

      Delusional is a diagnosable medical condition. Being a religious kook is somebody the pushes their unfounded beliefs on others.

      There are lots of things that are unbounded and unlimited but still completely known. On the other hand indeterminate thing are cases where regardless of the bounds you still cannot distinguish one thing from another.

      Once again, you need to understand the difference between recursive sets and recursively enumerable sets. Until you understand why there can be no procedure to classify things into one of these sets, you can never understand what being indeterminate means.

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    23. Isn't there a difference between someone's experience and actuality? I was thinking of delusional as something like that distinction. Of seeing a pink elephant and saying that there's a pink elephant out there.

      At least computation starts with a finite distinction as with 0 and 1, and the infinite repetition of zeros and ones.

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    24. So how would anybody be able to tell the difference between their experience and reality?

      You are using delusional as a derogatory to discredit the experience of some one else.

      Where you there when they say they saw a pink elephant? We know they exist. We know there are such things as coloring.

      Actually computation can be defined without constants like 0 and 1. You should study a functional language like Church's Lambda Calculus.

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    25. Someone saw a light, that's a statement, that the light was jesus, it seems that they are taking their experience and using it as substantive, mixing for example houses in general with a specific house. So substantives and adjectives in language, or taking language as if it were litarally real may have something to do with distinguishing experience from reality.

      Not really derogatory as I think someone delusional could be functional, I'm using the term in a way that if you think things exist you could be considered delusional.

      A flying pink elephant, all right?

      It use just lambdas? Isn't like lambda(x) or something. My point is it is limitation squared.

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    26. You can see EM radiation. Unless jesus is nothing more than a run of mill EM wave, they didn't see jesus.

      Once again, you really need to study linguistics. English has very flexible word formation rules. It has nothing to do with distinguishing experience from reality.

      No you are using it a derogatory way and people are going to take it in a derogatory way. If you are not using it in a derogatory way than you just picked a poor way to express your thoughts.

      A elephant painted pink in a flying plane is a flying pink elephant. They do exist.

      WTF is "limitation squared"? Squared by what operator in what domain?

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    27. Actually I'm pretty sure the person who said that saw the light that was jesus had some sort of psychological problems, I'm not a professional so I cannot say that person was delusional from such position, I really just didn't asked why a light would be jesus.

      Isn't there a way of saying someone is wrong only when they talk blatant contradictions? It's kind of limited, maybe I really just don't understand language.

      It's some kind of distinction and extention for that. Sure if we talk about integers they don't cover the real numbers in representation alone.

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    28. Are you so desperate to have someone tell you the truth that you are running around attempting to treat what they say like a formal language statement that needs to be verified?

      Contradiction is not indicative of a lie. It's only a case where the specific system in use doesn't have the needed expressive power to handle the contradiction.

      The mistake is thinking the real numbers are a superset of the integers. No, it's a completely different system with different rules. A few similarities doesn't mean the systems are even remotely related.

      Think about it. You have one means to think about something. That mechanism has it's own built in regularities and rules. Is it so surprising that there are so many similarities between real numbers and integers?

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    29. It just seems that people don't have the expressive power to say anything. I'll disagree if wish so. But really how much normally people are talking things as if it were a formal language when they are speaking?

      Between the very first expression of a distinction there is a myriad of things you cannot express with it that lies between it.

      Maybe there's a real question here, formal languages are always less expressive than content (when taking something like experience in), it is form.

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    30. All you have to do is listen to someone trying to explain something and you will see them attempting to use formal language to attempt to lend credibility to what they are saying.

      Are you lamenting the fact that natural language has to live in a real world that is not entirely defined?

      Formal languages are always perfectly capable of expressing everything within their universe of discourse very accurately and precisely.

      Natural language can never precisely express everything in its universe. This one of the reasons most words have many different definitions. We don't have enough domain members so we have to use individual members for multiple purposes. But that leads to ambiguities making the language less expressive.

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    31. I don't want to dismiss the possibility of the real world being described by language.

      If we use one word for all members, like 'everything', while it doesn't have explanatory power it is the explanation for things.

      Dumb question: Are integers to reals the same way computation with limited time and space is to the computation without limits?

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    32. Sure the real world can be described by language. But it's not going to be a precise description.

      The problem theist have is they use the word everything and then exclude god from the everything. So the word "everything" is VERY ambiguous. But then their definition of something like a universe is not very precise and misunderstandings begin to arise in many different contexts.

      Integers and Reals are simply two separate mathematical systems. One has a higher cardinality than the other and a greater number of inverse operations.

      If you study computation where time and space are not limited (aka a Turning Machine) you will quickly find that limits on space and time don't really change what can and cannot be calculated.

      For example the recognition of a language as being recursive is not helped by infinite time and space.

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    33. Taking everything itself, it ignores how any parts relate to each other, god just means that it is everything and not a part. Following Plotinus the One overflows from that we get forms and at last matter.

      Without the one you would have no numbers (the one itself doesn't exist or not exist if existence is taken to be something other than the one, as having something other than the one would make the one two). Number itself is a relation coming from the one.

      But what operation real numbers have that reals don't have?

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    34. When dealing with everything as a whole, the relationships between the members is irrelevant.

      Half of your thought cannot be formulated outside a universe while the other half is inside a universe. To do that you would have to equate inside with outside. Then any statement that applies to one equally applies to the other. And suddenly you have an inconsistent system.

      There are more number systems than the ordinals. It's quite easy to define systems without a successor operator so they have no order.

      All reals have the same set of operations. A mathematical system is defined by it's members and operators.

      For example natural numbers don't have an inverse to the addition operation. Integers don't have an inverse operation for the multiplicative operator. Rationals and Reals don't have an inverse for exponentiation operation. But Reals have more members than Rationals.

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    35. You have an inconsistent system, then you have faith which is outside of it. You cannot describe it inside but it is there.

      Isn't the logarithm the inverse of exponentiation? The reals have more members than rationals because between two different numbers there's also another one. But all those relations comes from there being the one by whatever way you measure it.

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    36. There is no more wrong with an inconsistent system than there is for an incomplete system.

      Reals don't have square roots of -1. No it's not that they are the "one", but that the space of reals is compact. Measuring it requires a metric which for reals we do have.

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    37. A complete system is transcendental to being so a consistent system would be a better value.

      Without the first comparison of things from the origin to somewhere else there are no numbers or nothing at all.

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    38. So you don't know what a complete system actually is. That makes me wonder if you have a basic understanding of the limitations of a consistent system.

      You really don't get concepts like comparison operators, numbers, or even what an origin actually is. It's trivial to create systems with numbers, and without comparison operators, and no basis so no origin.

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    39. A complete system is one where you can get true or false values for every proposition.

      To separate operators and numbers you need the biconditional. Withouth it operations fuses with numbers and vice versa.

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    40. No a complete system is one in which all the assumptions of the system can be proven within that system.

      Don't you get that numbers and operators are exactly the same thing? You need to study the work of Church and his Lambda Calculus.

      What makes a biconditional special? Any of the operators can be used to deduce all of others. In fact the same system arises form simple composition of functions with only one input. Maybe you should look into the work of Haskell Curry.

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    41. What I should get from lambda calculus? The biconditional says that sameness and different, are not the same or different. You can get the same in the different and the different in the same, and the distinction that the bicon makes that is not it.

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    42. You might try to get a basic understanding of the limits and bounds on what computational systems are capable of doing.

      Playing games with different equivalence relationships doesn't do anything but show the relationships are different.

      So why this hang up on the exclusive nor operation? It's as if you have never studied the Boolean space very well. Come on, it's just 4, one input functions and composition?

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    43. Being is one because anything that in the same or different in it is part of the one. But sameness and difference in themselves are two.

      It's like saying two things the same without the biconditional and two things are different because of it.

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    44. All you want to do is reduce everything down to the equivalence relationship. What possible value would that have?

      So you want a system that is completely inconsistent even at the level of the basic equality relation?

      Taking an automorphic system down to a domain of one point makes existence and nonexistence indistinguishable :-)

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