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Posted

Does Logic Actually Not Work All
of the Time?


Suppose there is a plastic bottle of pills with 100 pills on
your counter in your house.

You take 50 of the pills out of the bottle, and you stick
them into a different empty paper container.

You then close the plastic pill bottle.


You then move the paper container that you had put 50 pills
into to somewhere else or destroy or burn it.

You then walk outside your house and close the opaque door.

Now let's evaluate the situation at this moment:


You can't see the 50 pills in the plastic pill bottle.

 

You can't hear the 50 pills in the plastic pill bottle.


You can't smell the 50 pills in the plastic pill bottle.


You can't taste the 50 pills in the plastic pill bottle.

 

You can't feel the 50 pills in the plastic pill bottle.

Yet you know that they're there, and based on experience,
when you check, the fifty pills will at least as far as I know, always be
there.

How can this be and how can you know the amount or existence
of the pills in the plastic pill bottle?

Does this affect resource estimates or the Schrödinger cat?


More instances:

1. A room in a hotel costs x. The
minibar is in the room. The minibar probably has no warning signs. Therefore
the items in the minibar are free.

2. There is no reason why object x is in front of me instead of object z, and
no reason object z can't be in front of me, but object x alone is in front of
me, so logic is wrong.

3. Any explanation of reality would require further explanation or be inside
something else in order to exist, but then reality would be indefinite. It
would therefore have no definition. It therefore can't exist.

Posted

None of the three conclusions in your example actually follow logically from the preceding statements. I suggest learning some formal logic because it'll make it a bit easier to pick out the mistakes in faulty reasoning.

Posted (edited)

Windevoid, on 24 Jun 2013 - 11:29, said:

How can this be and how can you know the amount or existence

of the pills in the plastic pill bottle?

Our brains are capable of a feat known as object permanence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence This is something we learn as our brains develop, and usually well established by 2 years old.

 

This isn't really a logic question, though, as ACG points out. And neither are your scenarios 1 through 3.

 

1 is a convention, which isn't always true. It isn't a question of logic whether a hotel charges for items in he minibar or not.

 

2 is nonsense, as near as I can tell. Just because 'there isn't any reason' for something to happen doesn't mean it will happen or should happen. (Reminiscent of Mike Smith Cosmos' Lingual Theory of Everything here...). Farcical example: there isn't formally any reason someone can't walk into my office in the next 30 seconds and hand me $1 million. I'm not really counting on that happening, though, nor should it happen.

 

3 sounds something related to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Though if you are stumped by the 'logic' in the first parts of your post, my assessment is that you are not ready to understand Godel. It is fairly complex and requires a significant level of understanding true logic before you should attempt it.

 

Nothing wrong with not being at a certain ability to do something, so I do hope you don't think that that assessment is a personal attack. I am not at a level in my golf ability that I can compete on the PGA Tour nor am I at a level of my dancing ability to perform Swan Lake for anybody. It is just an assessment of by ability, and not an attack on me.

Edited by Bignose
Posted

I remember a line from Robert Heinlein's Glory Road, (paraphrase) "logic is a way of saying that if it didn't happen yesterday, it can't happen today."

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