Posts by Martin

From my little bit of knowledge of psychology at amateur level, I expect that even sadists can apply Epicurus' philosophy because it provides both feelings and reason as input for making decisions on what action to take.

Sadists who are not psychopaths may trust their feelings as guide because they have compassion, which stops them from excessively harming their masochistic partners. They need reason mainly to carry out sadistic techniques safely to prevent unintentional hazards.

Sadists who are psychopaths need to rely much more on reason to prevent themselves from severely harming or killing people. A life-time prison sentence might not scare them at the level of feelings but reasoning about such consequences might stop them from excessive actions.

Welcome Cleveland Okie!

Welcome Patrick!

That I sometimes say "aeh" was known to me but not that I did it that often during the presentation. It sounds terrible and must be annoying to listeners.

Another blunder was that while explaining a truth table, I repeatedly said "column" instead of "row".

I suggest to remove the following passages:

7:58 - 11:02 (detour on quantum and fuzzy logic)

25:26 - 25:38 (wrong statements about Slide 12)

25:50 - 26:32 (my confusion about premise and conclusion)

around 27:17 ("I mixed them up" because if 25:50 - 26:32 is removed, it does no more apply)

28:53 - 28:58 (another reference to my confusion)

On dialogical logic

C. F. v. Weizsaecker's uses dialogical logic to justify usage of statements on the past in logical arguments in the book which I mentioned as reference in comment #10. (That justification does not work for statements on the future.)

Blunders during my presentation

As mentioned and corrected in my additions and during the presentation, the truth table for OR on Slide 11 of the tutorial is wrong. While presenting, I wrongly mentioned that the examples on Slide 12 were wrong, too, but no, I merely got confused by the "ands" in the text. The examples for OR are correct.

My second blunder was to wrongly identify q as a premise at the beginning of my explanation of Slide 13. I corrected it immediately but the confusion may have lead comments off track.

The motivation for making the presentation was to show that a false premise in a syllogism does not necessarily mean that the conclusion is false, too. This mistake is easily made because often it is actually the case that the conclusion is false, too. That experience may misguide our intuition. Toward the end of my presentation, I made my third blunder by myself making that false inference to call a conclusion false upon finding a premise of an implication to be false but became aware of it only after the session. So, we need to make sure that my withdrawal of that statement accompanies the podcast.

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Do you have any specific references on those two categories (1) timeless sentences (2) future events?

Currently, my references are only in German:

Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker's German original "Aufbau der Physik" of "The Structure of Physics", English edition by Thomas Görnitz, Holger Lyre, Springer Science & Business Media, 2007, ISBN 1402052359, 9781402052354:

https://books.google.co.th/books/about/The_Structure_of_Physics.html?id=DeexONN0zDgC&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y

In that book, the book "Quantum logic" from P. Mittelstaedt is referenced. I still have the notes from attending his lectures at University of Cologne about 35 years ago.

Some articles in "Physik Journal".

A variable in the tutorial (or proposition as I denote it more specific in my additions) is a place holder for a sentence, whereby that sentence needs to be meaningful to the extent that it can be true or false.

Epicurus knew and even Aristotle was aware of that binary logic might be applicable in full only to timeless sentences and those which refer to past events but not to events in the future. If everybody gets a good enough understanding on Monday and there is time left, we can expand the discussion into the pitfalls of applying logic to future events and how quantum logic avoids those pitfalls. It will still take several months until I finish a book from which I hope to gain a deeper understanding and more confidence in applying quantum logic. I know enough to say something about it but a complete stand-alone presentation on quantum logic will have to wait until 2022.

The part of propositional logic which seems to be most relevant for this discussion on logic is explained in the tutorial

https://www.iit.edu/sites/default/files/2021-02/basic_propositional_logic_workshop.pdf

Please see my additions in the attachment.

In case you travel to Copenhagen, I recommend to visit the Amber Museum there.

The ancient Greeks are of course excused because they did not yet have a sufficiently worked out theory of electromagnetism. They were the giants who started it, and on whose shoulders Maxwell and the likes stood when they worked it out. What I referred to was "(which has magnetic properties when rubbed or heated)", which appears to be an insertion of Richard McKirahan, who lives in our time and should have referred to electrostatics.

Richard McKirahan is inaccurate with amber (cf. comment #2). The rubbing of amber on fur incurs electrostatic charges, which is not a magnetic phenomenon.

I noticed with other PD's, too, that Saint-Andre's translation appears to be the most consistent with Epicurus' philosophy as a whole as we usually interpret it here with quite some consensus.

Welcome AGB!

The video is impressive, especially when the feathers, after falling with the same speed as the ball, bounce off the target to a considerable height, which they do not do to a visible height at atmospheric pressure. However, Brian Cox misrepresents the difference between Einstein's take on gravity and Newton's. Actually, Einstein concluded from his theory that we cannot distinguish the effect of gravity from that of an accelerated reference system locally from the movement of test masses, but not that there is no force.

Martin started a new event:

Event

International festival of philosophy phil. Cologne 2021

The international festival of philosophy phil. Cologne is schedules for September 2 - September 8: https://www.philcologne.de

The "international" is quite exaggerated because the program indicates that all events are held in German language.

Most of the events are on current problems and overlap more or less with politics.

Most events cost up to 19 Euros, so attending several will become costly. Even on-line attendance needs payment.

None of the events appear interesting enough for me to attend.…

Thu, Sep 2nd 2021, 2:30 pm – Wed, Sep 8th 2021, 5:00 pm

Martin

August 28, 2021 at 5:25 AM

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The international festival of philosophy phil. Cologne is schedules for September 2 - September 8: https://www.philcologne.de

The "international" is quite exaggerated because the program indicates that all events are held in German language.

Most of the events are on current problems and overlap more or less with politics.

Most events cost up to 19 Euros, so attending several will become costly. Even on-line attendance needs payment.

None of the events appear interesting enough for me to attend. Epicurus is not even mentioned in the program but might very well be mentioned by some presenters. (I had to use the not fitting category "Epicurean Events" to get the post submitted.)

Among the many presenters, Richard David Precht is the only philosopher with whose name I am familiar.

Let me know before September 2 if you see something of particular interest in the program. I might reconsider to attend and report about it here.

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Except for the "No", I agree with Godfrey's comment #61.

In my comment #43, I used "map" in a loose meaning in the sense of a model just because I was referring to a quote using the word "map" and did not notice that my statement becomes wrong when applying a proper definition of the word "map". A model could be anything, e.g. a set of markers.

Regarding syllogisms, I meant the internalization such that we do not need to write down a truth table every time we consciously apply logic. My personal observation at the end of #43 is an indication that we cannot subconsciously perform logic in a reliable way while we are not fully conscious. Logic is apparently performed in a part of the brain which actually turns off when we are not fully awake.

When (binary) logic is taught, it is usually exemplified by combining statements which are obviously true.

Logic works only with crisp (100% true) and timeless statements (or statements on events of the past or present). If any of the premises is not 100% true but only with some probability, the conclusion is not reliably true.

In fuzzy logic as applied technically in designing control loops, you can still get a conclusion with a high probability of truth if the examined system is linear.

In (practical or philosophical) cases which are not obvious, the premises are typically not crisp, their probabilities of truth are not known and it it is not known whether the probabilities of truth of the premises are linearly connected with the probability of truth of the statement to be proven.

Epicurus knew that proponents of dialectics misrepresent the reasoning as crisp while it is actually not, was aware that logic may not fully apply to future events and saw that rhetors can confuse an untrained audience with paradoxons.

Therefore, it makes perfectly sense that he excluded logic from the canon of truth regarding daily life and philosophical discussion.

Nevertheless, he did use logic in his syllogisms and in what he called "true reasoning".

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"if the premises are false, the conclusion is going to be false."

No.

If the premises are false, the conclusion is not necessarily false.

Otherwise, you could "refute" a true statement by presenting it as the conclusion of false premises.

The truth table of a syllogism looks like this (you can verify by thinking it through line by line):

You can see from this table that the conclusion may be true if any or both of the premises are false.

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"We don't consider maps necessary to our being able day-to-day to navigate in reality, and we shouldn't consider syllogistic logic to be a requirement of our being confident in our day-to-day thinking either."

No.

We don't consider maps necessary to our being able day-to-day to navigate in reality because we have internalized them and use them intuitively without realizing it.

Similarly, we have internalized "syllogistic" logic such that we use it in our day-to-day thinking when fully awake without realizing it.

Interestingly, when I am very tired but still awake, logic does no more work but the results from the associative thinking which continues are often lousy because no logic has been applied as a sanity check.