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[ChairmanPoo]

I kind of agree.

[Soadreqm]

Logic is seriously overhyped. It only works when all your axioms are correct, and humans aren't really built to do it anyway. It's only really useful for arguing and defending decisions you have already made.

"1) Performing actions likely to harm your friends is wrong. 2) Containers marked "toxic" are likely to contain substances that, when ingested, harm you. 3) Placing a substance in a friend's coffee will likely lead to the friend ingesting the substance. Therefore, placing a substance from a container marked "toxic" into a friend's coffee is likely to harm her. Therefore, doing that is wrong." is logically sound (more or less, I'm sure I missed a few steps), but I haven't proven any of the assumptions. And normal people already know that trying to poison your friends is wrong, so the only thing you're achieving with this nonsense is that you have to spend ten minutes contemplating it while your friend is waiting for you to hand over her coffee.

[RAM]

Logic doesn't achieve anything by itself, it needs something else to define the ultimate goals that it will work towards. But it can come extremely close to defining its own goals, and can produce pseudo goals that will basically function.

It isn't ten minutes, it is running through the coffee checklist and not encountering 'whatever is in that container marked as toxic'. If you have reason to believe that the contents of the container is composed of coffee beans and isn't unusually toxic for coffee beans then it makes perfect sense to use it regardless of whatever the labeller's sense of humour or social statement is...

But I would just like to reiterate that the findings in the first post are completely irrelevant to the topic...

[Soadreqm]

That might be the speed record of a thread sliding off topic.

[RAM]

I bvery much doubt that there is anything new about title/content mismatches...

[de5me7]

logic is just as sceptable to personal opinion and bias as emotion. You can logically justify many things if you think hard enough about it.

we should kill more people to lower the impact we are having on the earths systems

we should kill fewer people so we have more brains thinking about the solutions to the worlds problems.

both whilst far from perfect are logical arguements. I dont believe that logic alone is enough to sustain a workable system of ethics.

personnally i believe in moral absolutes (opens a tin of worms and runs away)

[Soadreqm]

Ah, but your arguments are assuming that impact on earth's systems is bad and solving global problems is good, without explaining why. And if we're allowed to do that, why not just pick "killing is wrong" as an axiom and be done with it?

[Grakelin]

Why is this thread full of people trying to logically prove that logic is fallible?

[RAM]

we should kill more people to lower the impact we are having on the earths systems

we should kill fewer people so we have more brains thinking about the solutions to the worlds problems.

Those are excuses, logically you should process the arguments much more than that before determining a course of action.

Ah, but your arguments are assuming that impact on earth's systems is bad and solving global problems is good, without explaining why.

The current systems have not been fully analysed and may provide information that could furnish people with a logically derived purpose beyond the search for a purpose. Preservation should be practised until the subject has been fully analysed, at which point an evaluation should be made as to whether it is appropriate to alter the subject to facilitate further exploration.

[ChairmanPoo]

Why is this thread full of people trying to logically prove that logic is fallible?

I dont think they are trying to logically prove that logic is fallible. I thnk they are trying to logically prove that logic is limited.

[RAM]

Of course, everything is limited, and at least logic is honest...

[TheDarkJay]

TLDR: Logic doesn't work by itself, it requires undefinable things to be defined.

Happiness, suffering, love, with enough understanding of the inherent workings these could be measured by simply monitoring brain activity. Just because it's not realistic to be constantly keeping people in an MRI machine...and people seem to dislike the idea that things like love are real... (if it's real it must have real world causes and effects. All human behaviour is the result of the brain's activity, so we know where to look...If you think love is magical, you are calling it unreal and therefore effectively stating love does not exist).

If you find something to be undefinable, you simply have made it too complex and abstract: Break it down into it's basic parts, and it can be measured as the sum of those parts. Sometimes we just don't have the technology or capabilities yet to measure those basic parts, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.

[bjlong]

TLDR: Logic doesn't work by itself, it requires undefinable things to be defined.

Happiness, suffering, love, with enough understanding of the inherent workings these could be measured by simply monitoring brain activity. Just because it's not realistic to be constantly keeping people in an MRI machine...and people seem to dislike the idea that things like love are real... (if it's real it must have real world causes and effects. All human behaviour is the result of the brain's activity, so we know where to look...If you think love is magical, you are calling it unreal and therefore effectively stating love does not exist).

If you find something to be undefinable, you simply have made it too complex and abstract: Break it down into it's basic parts, and it can be measured as the sum of those parts. Sometimes we just don't have the technology or capabilities yet to measure those basic parts, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.

A lot of this is begging the question. You make the claim that everything that exists must exist with physical interactions, and then use as evidence that something which is not entirely physical must not exist. While this shows consistency on your part, you haven't proven anything. Just made a claim. Which, itself, must be entirely physical--and here lies the greatest problem--and contains only physical properties. Now you have the tricky situation of explaining how truth is a physical property.

Furthermore, your claim that things must be able to be definable as physically relevant quantities. This is part of your above claim. Again, is this claim true? How can we physically measure the truth value, then? However, you again provide little evidence for your claim. You do acknowledge a critique, to your favor, but merely restate your claim as a rebuttal. 

I don't have much at stake in this fight, but the lack of logic kinda irked me.

[TheDarkJay]

The love stuff was a complete aside, sorry. A mini-ramble completely untied to the rest of the content, as it were =P Bad habit of mine XD

Rewrite:
Happiness, suffering, love, all evidence suggests these are experienced as a result of brain activity. Well, we see a correlation between certain activities of the brain and certain emotions, and the blocking or triggering of the activities (drugs or the like) has been shown to block or trigger the emotions, implying causality. Therefore, it's highly likely with enough understanding of the inherent workings these could be measured by simply monitoring brain activity. Just because it's not realistic to be constantly keeping people in an MRI machine...

If you find something to be undefinable, that's probably because you simply have made it too complex and abstract (language is inherently abstract which doesn't help). If you break it down into it's basic real-world parts, surely it can be measured as the sum of those parts?

[de5me7]

how can logic be honest? does it have a motive, OR IS IT UNDER PINNED BY LIES!