"If God Wasn't Real, It Would Be Necessary to Invent Him."

[LMNO, PhD (life continues)]

Every so often, I find it incredibly necessary to troll a pagan site with the concepts of Maybe Logic, just to fuck with people, and to remind/refresh myself.

When we re-launch our TCC raid on 4/1, I may have to do this.

Somewhere in this forum is a pretty good dialogue on it.  I don't have time/too lazy to look for it right now.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Every so often, I find it incredibly necessary to troll a pagan site with the concepts of Maybe Logic, just to fuck with people, and to remind/refresh myself.

When we re-launch our TCC raid on 4/1, I may have to do this.

Somewhere in this forum is a pretty good dialogue on it.  I don't have time/too lazy to look for it right now.

As much as it may sound like RAWIST Fanboism, I think Maybe Logic has been the most useful tool I've picked up in my Discordian life.

[Requia ☣]

What the heck is maybe logic?

I will beat you if you describe modal logic back at me.

[Vene]

Believing in Nothing is still believing in Something.

I'd rather believe there is nothing than I would believe in something that nobody has ever seen (not just with eyes, with any sense or machinery).  Do you think this way about fairies?  How about dragons?  Giant sand worms?

I try to hold no belief on any topic... just shades of probability and levels of usefulness.

Accepting an old Jewish book and its metaphysics, of which we have no supporting evidence, appears to me as not very useful and having a very low probability of being True.
Accepting that we have figured out how the Universe came into existence and how everything works, may be useful when examining some things, but I don't have enough faith in humans to think it highly probable that we've seen nearly enough evidence to come to any conclusions.
Fairies, Dragons, Unicorns etc... I stick in the "Unknown" category. I have seen no evidence that supports their existence, but I don't presume that I've seen all the evidence that may exist.

I'm not sure why so many people feel it necessary to conclude with belief or non-belief when they can just say "maybe" or "I don't know"...

Sounds like agnosticism to me.  Which is just fine with me, I'm mildly agnostic actually.  It's just that when I see no evidence of something existing, the probability is low enough that I just assume that it doesn't exist.  When/if any evidence is found, I quickly change my position.

[Cainad]

Sounds like agnosticism to me.  Which is just fine with me, I'm mildly agnostic actually.  It's just that when I see no evidence of something existing, the probability is low enough that I just assume that it doesn't exist.  When/if any evidence is found, I quickly change my position.

So you would change your position?
How can we, the people, possibly trust someone who doesn't know where they stand?
     \
   :foxnews:

[Vene]

Doh!  How cold I forget, I'm supposed to always believe to same thing, even when proven wrong.


Alternatively, 

[Cainad]

Alternatively, 

 

[Jenne]

What the heck is maybe logic?

I will beat you if you describe modal logic back at me.

http://www.maybelogic.com

[Triple Zero]

jenne, have you actually found a description of the concept of maybelogic on that site or are you just pasting the url from your head?

[LMNO, PhD (life continues)]

It actually is fairly similar to modal logic, truth be told...

But it's nowhere near as formal, AFAIK.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Maybe Logic basically holds that there exists more than a simple IS/IS NOT duality in reality and it attempts to provide a model reflecting such.

Maybe Logic is built on several different points.

First, the concept that 'reality' experienced by an individual human is made up of translated data... signals, picked up by the neurological system and translated into symbols which make sense to us.
Second, that our neurological systems sometimes do a bang up job of translating and sometimes do a fuck all job of translating.
Third, that the human attached to said neurological system may not be able to distinguish between the "bang up" job and the "fuck all" job.
Fourth, that since we can only trust our neurological system about as far as we can throw it, and since this neurological system is the only piece of equipment available to measure reality with... maybe we should be a bit less sure about the data we are collecting.

There's more, but I think that gets the general idea across.

Thus, two-valued logic systems hold IS/IS Not, True/False, P or Not P, etc.

Maybe Logic on the other had provides for True, False and Maybe/Don't Know.

Maybe Logic is closely associated with Model Agnosticism, agnostic as to the model being used... or as RAW stated "Encouraging people to be agnostic about Everything, not just God or Dinosaurs". This isn't to be confused with the post-modern "We create our own Reality", rather it states that we create our own internal model of reality... and as humans it sometimes appears that we aren't the best model makers. Our models could be (and probably are in at least some sense) wrong.

I find, personally, that model agnosticism and maybe logic appear to me as far more brutally honest than the more popular forms of philosophical thought.



"The only thing I believe is that the Universe is far more complex than I will ever understand." - Robert Anton Wilson, Maybe Logic

[Golden Applesauce]

My physics prof. told us something similar, although he didn't use many of those terms.

I think it went something like this:
All of us are constantly building a model of the world, just like scientists build models like Newtonian Mechanics or Special Relativity or The Standard Model, using experiences as our experimental evidence.  Some people's models are different because they use different evidence or weight their evidence differently.  Some people's models don't closely match reality and have little predictive power, some do.  Some people have many different models for use in different situations.  The difference between the truly wise and everybody else is that the wise recognize that all they have is a model, and not the world itself.

I actually projected a lot of my own opinion into that.  Oh well.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

My physics prof. told us something similar, although he didn't use many of those terms.

I think it went something like this:
All of us are constantly building a model of the world, just like scientists build models like Newtonian Mechanics or Special Relativity or The Standard Model, using experiences as our experimental evidence.  Some people's models are different because they use different evidence or weight their evidence differently.  Some people's models don't closely match reality and have little predictive power, some do.  Some people have many different models for use in different situations.  The difference between the truly wise and everybody else is that the wise recognize that all they have is a model, and not the world itself.

I actually projected a lot of my own opinion into that.  Oh well.

That's quite a useful way of describing it, I think.

[Cainad]

I think that this concept of "thinking in models" is something we generally understand that most people do not. Even if you introduce the concept to them, my suspicion is that they'd go through life trying to find the "real" model for everything, which is what people tend to do anyway.

[Vene]

I think that this concept of "thinking in models" is something we generally understand that most people do not. Even if you introduce the concept to them, my suspicion is that they'd go through life trying to find the "real" model for everything, which is what people tend to do anyway.

And that is the problem.  I don't think that humans will ever find AbsoluteTruth™ the best that we will ever have is close approximations.  It doesn't mean that the models are useless, but to keep in mind that they are flawed and there will always be errors of some sort.