From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2002 8:26 PM To: Alt.Atheism.Moderated Subject: Re: Science & atheism are cultures. "Paul Holbach" wrote: > > Then your objection "if there is no world .." is nonsensical. > > If I'm defining what it means for a world to exist, and you agree > > with my definition, then you can't complain that the world > > (whose existence I'm defining) doesn't exist. > > A world of ontological nothingness is not definable in a logically > tolerable way! You utterly fail to address my point, and instead (re-)invoke an argument against a claim that I haven't made. Do you have any idea how tiresome such behavior is? > > Only for the logical sense of "be". > > There is only one onto-logical sense of "to be", namely that which is > expressed by the existential quantifier No, that is the logical sense of "be". > > Logic can tell us what is ontologically impossible, but I know of no > > demonstration that logic can tell us what is ontologically necessary. > > logic tells us that relational propositions such as (Ex)(Ey)Rxy are > false if there is either no x or no y. Yes, where "is" refers to the logical (not ontological) notion of bindings in some specified domain. By contrast, ontology is about what REALLY EXISTS -- i.e. about things that are causally related to other things, and are not just logical stipulations. > > If you don't agree that a set can be defined/specified by a pair > > of braces and a (possibly zero-length) series of items between > > them, then we just don't have enough in common to make further > > discussion useful. > > The sign {} symbolizes the empty set but it doesnīt define it. No, it can be taken as a definition of the empty set. See, I told you futher discussion wasn't useful... > > I don't know what you mean by "essential", but if you mean > > "required to be in the proposition list of the world model", > > then your claim is blatantly false. > > Yes, thatīs exactly what I mean! I dare render your "your claim is > blatantly false" as "I donīt like your claim" because I consider your > reproach as groundless. Would you be so kind as to quote some > authoritative source that in fact proves (!) me wrong? Easy: I quote me, since I authored the definition of 'world' that you claim to be using, and nothing in that definition requires what you say it requires. QED. > > I defy you to point to anything in my definition of 'world' that > > in any way requires such a proposition for the list to be a > > "true counterpart" of the empty domain set. On what basis do you > > decide what constitutes a "true counterpart"? It can't be on the > > basis of the definition you allegedly agree with, so it must be > > on the basis of some unspoken extra assumptions about what a world > > must be. Thus our only disagreement here is that I seem not to > > share those extra assumptions (whatever they may be). > > There are no "extra assumptions" or "extra stipulations" whatsoever! > That the domain set is empty MEANS that nothing exists, and so > "Nothing exists." IN FACT belongs to the proposition list. Do you seriously think that restating your assertion -- with "IN FACT" thrown in -- constitutes an argument? I defied you to point to something in my definition, and you instead just typed "IN FACT". Now try again: type a double quote, copy and paste something from my definition, type another double quote, and then explain how the quoted material requires what you say it requires. I DEFY YOU TO DO THIS. > > It's instead a consequence of your apparent > > assumption that the proposition list of a world model must include > > every possible self-referential meta-observation about that > > world model. > > That nothing exists is an "object observation", so to speak, and no > meta-perspective. It's a meta-observation in the sense that it is not in the transitive closure of all the propositions you can deduce from those in the PL -- and there aren't any there to deduce any others from. -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net