God Says ..., Science Says ...

[TagliatelliMonster]

You don't want a conversation, you want to argue. And I honestly just don't care what you believe.

I'll take that as a refusal to clarify and answer the question.

 

[McBell]

Why? We all know what truth is. To say of some P that P. And any "P" is true iff P. The only way to make a conversation like this more painful is by insisting we define terms we all know perfectly well how to use.

If only that were true.
But given the different definitions used for the letter grouping "truth", I find it is best to find out specifically what the OP means when using that specific letter grouping.

Stick around long enough and you will see the why.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Why? We all know what truth is.

One would think so.

However, @PureX 's typical MO is to invent his own wonky definitions for common terms, use them based on his own definitions without telling anyone, let everything get confused for a few pages, and then when everyone else realizes what's going on, he gets mad at them for not realizing that his wonky definition is the only valid definition for the term.

... so I think asking is useful here.

 

[PureX]

Why? We all know what truth is. To say of some P that P. And any "P" is true iff P. The only way to make a conversation like this more painful is by insisting we define terms we all know perfectly well how to use.

Except that homosexuals are not particularly gay, and gay people are not especially homosexual. So when we obuse these terms because we think everyone else should know what we mean, we are being deliberately selfish, and quite stupid. Because we had the appropriate terms available to us, and we didn't use them. We didn't bother to think about or care about the confusion we would cause.

To put an even finer point on it, is it true that we don't have access to the truth of things?

Yes, it is. We have access to SOME information, but we have no way to know how it fits into the information that we don't have. Nor do we have any idea how much of that unknown information there is.

So we can sit around telling ourselves how smart we are and how much we think we know, but the truth of it is we have no way of knowing how smart we are or how much we know because we have no idea how much we don't know, or how much of that we can't know because we're incapable of understanding it.

Such a rookie move, having your pre-philosophical skepticism/anti-realism about truth checkmate itself.

The rookie move is wallowing in the blind bravado of presuming to know what you don't and can't know, and then denigrating anyone that dares to point it out. That's "rookie" to the point of raging stupidity.

 

[shunyadragon]

Why? We all know what truth is. To say of some P that P. And any "P" is true iff P. The only way to make a conversation like this more painful is by insisting we define terms we all know perfectly well how to use.

To put an even finer point on it, is it true that we don't have access to the truth of things? Such a rookie move, having your pre-philosophical skepticism/anti-realism about truth checkmate itself.

No we do not know what truth is. Scientific knowledge of our physical existence is closest, but no 'truth.' It is the evolving reliable knowledge of our physical existence. Claims of knowing "what truth is" is an egocentric delusion.

 

[shunyadragon]

Silly. As I said, we know precisely what truth is. Truth is what happens when P, and we say that P. Saying "P", when P. The Tarski sentence.

Not only knowable, but trivial. The people objecting to this are arguing for hopeless philosophical masturbation instead of linguistic clarity (and deflation is itself a philosophical tool and position, of course- a superior one).

I do not consider this exercise of trivial pursuit remotely has anything to do with what :truth" is,

 

[paarsurrey]

God Says ..., Science Says ...​

Science has its limitations and it can have access to "the truth of things" maximum as stipulated in the "Scientific Method" and not beyond that, right?

Regards

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

God Says ..., Science Says ...​

Science has its limitations and it can have access to "the truth of things" maximum as stipulated in the "Scientific Method" and not beyond that, right?

Regards

Humans have limitations. Knowledge has limitations. The limits of science are only the limits of inductive reasoning, rigorously applied.

These limits apply to any conclusion arrived at inductively, including most if not all religious claims... or at least they do if the claims are being approached in an intellectually honest way.

 

[shunyadragon]

God Says ..., Science Says ...​

Science has its limitations and it can have access to "the truth of things" maximum as stipulated in the "Scientific Method" and not beyond that, right?

Regards

Yes. Then what?!?!?

 

[paarsurrey]

God Says ..., Science Says ...​

Science has its limitations and it can have access to "the truth of things" maximum as stipulated in the "Scientific Method" and not beyond that, right?
The Ethical, Moral and Spiritual aspects of human life are not covered by the Scientific Method, right?

Regards

 

[Banach-Tarski Paradox]

@PureX​

​

Oracles Are Subtle But Not Malicious​

Scott Aaronson

Theoretical computer scientists have been debating the role of oracles since the 1970's. This paper illustrates both that oracles can give us nontrivial insights about the barrier problems in circuit complexity, and that they need not prevent us from trying to solve those problems.

First, we give an oracle relative to which PP has linear-sized circuits, by proving a new lower bound for perceptrons and low- degree threshold polynomials. This oracle settles a longstanding open question, and generalizes earlier results due to Beigel and to Buhrman, Fortnow, and Thierauf. More importantly, it implies the first nonrelativizing separation of "traditional" complexity classes, as opposed to interactive proof classes such as MIP and MA-EXP. For Vinodchandran showed, by a nonrelativizing argument, that PP does not have circuits of size n^k for any fixed k. We present an alternative proof of this fact, which shows that PP does not even have quantum circuits of size n^k with quantum advice. To our knowledge, this is the first nontrivial lower bound on quantum circuit size.


Second, we study a beautiful algorithm of Bshouty et al. for learning Boolean circuits in ZPP^NP. We show that the NP queries in this algorithm cannot be parallelized by any relativizing technique, by giving an oracle relative to which ZPP^||NP and even BPP^||NP have linear-size circuits. On the other hand, we also show that the NP queries could be parallelized if P=NP. Thus, classes such as ZPP^||NP inhabit a "twilight zone," where we need to distinguish between relativizing and black-box techniques. Our results on this subject have implications for computational learning theory as well as for the circuit minimization problem.

[cs/0504048] Oracles Are Subtle But Not Malicious

 

[gnostic]

Different tools for different jobs.
I would not use a chainsaw to remove a nail from a board.

I would…ok, perhaps not.

Perhaps I would use a hand grenade?