A question of absolutes

[DoPo]

You'll probably have to ask a tutor as I'm not so good at explaining without symbols.

Not a tutor, but I'd try to help.

Ahhhh but by changing the wording you've completely changed the meaning. Your statement is no longer an absolute. "There exist absolutes in life." is not, itself, an absolute statement. It's simply mentioning the fact that there are some absolutes that exist in life. For your statement to become an absolute (and therefore relevant to the context here) it would have to be worded as "All things that exist are absolutes" which is not a paradox, it's just a statement that can easily be proven wrong.

"There exists" is a formal quantifier in predicate logic [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_logic] (the other being "For all"). "There exists x such that R(x)" is equivalent to "¬For all x, ¬R(x)" ("¬" meaning "not").

Let A(x) be "x is absolute". Your statement ("There are no absolutes in life") is

"For all x, ¬A(x)".

The converse is

"¬For all x, ¬A(x)",

which is the same as

"There exists x such that A(x)".

Alright my friend, I'm more than willing to have this debate/conversation with you (not now as I've got to get back to work), but please try rephrasing that last post of yours using words rather than math.

Simply put, what he's saying is that if one claims "There are no absolutes in life"[footnote]presumably that somebody has heard of neither taxes not stupidity. /joke[/footnote], that is directly contradicted by having at least one absolute.

Or to rephrase it a bit further away from literal logical wording (still maths-y, though) the first one is saying "There are zero absolutes", so proving that there is a different number of absolutes ("at least 1" for it's both the easiest and we don't need to concern ourselves with anything else - the result is the same) would prove it to be false. After all, zero is not the same as any other number - 0=3 is false.

 

[FalloutJack]

All absolutes are not, in fact, truly absolute. Exceptions to the rule can, will, and have happened...including this one. The trouble with dealing with absolutes is that that's what computers are suppose to be. They are on/off, yes/no, 0/1, and so on. And you know what? They break down in logic errors because all the lines in their world are not straight, because they don't have margins for error. That is why it's a question of dealing with absolutes-but-not-perfectly-so.

 

[RJ 17]

You're confusing negating the statement with negating the predicate. You'll probably have to ask a tutor as I'm not so good at explaining without symbols.

Alright, I'm going to proceed under the assumption that DoPo knew what you were talking about in the explination that follows:

Simply put, what he's saying is that if one claims "There are no absolutes in life"[footnote]presumably that somebody has heard of neither taxes not stupidity. /joke[/footnote], that is directly contradicted by having at least one absolute.

Or to rephrase it a bit further away from literal logical wording (still maths-y, though) the first one is saying "There are zero absolutes", so proving that there is a different number of absolutes ("at least 1" for it's both the easiest and we don't need to concern ourselves with anything else - the result is the same) would prove it to be false. After all, zero is not the same as any other number - 0=3 is false.

Which brings us back to my original statement that "There are no absolutes in life" is a paradox in itself. One needn't look any further than the statement itself to see how it's self-contradicting. What WoW was asking me to do was prove "There exist absolutes in life" is a paradox as well. Now I can only assume that WoW believes that the statement "There exist absolutes in life" is the inverse of my statement. What I'm saying is that it is not. One is an absolute, therefor its inverse should be an absolute as well. What's the "absolute value" (yay! I remember some math terms!) of -74,957? 74,957. What WoW is saying would be like saying that the absolute value of -74,957 = 74,957 + y. Where'd that "y" come from? That little bastard of a variable represents the vagueness inherent in WoW's statement.

Saying "There exist absolutes in life" is a general statement which means "There are some things that are absolute in life." However, that statement does not rule out the possibility that there are some things in life that are NOT absolute. My statement of "There are no absolutes in life" rules out the possibility of there being anything absolute. For a statement to be the opposite of another statement, it must carry an opposite meaning. WoW's statement is only half-opposite. As I said, for it to be the direct opposite of what I'm saying, it would have to be worded as an absolute itself: "All things in life are absolute." Which brings me back to the point that such a statement is not a paradox, it's just wrong and can easily be proven as being wrong. My statement is a paradox because it both proves and negates itself at the same time. It's the exact same concept behind the paradoxical statement: "This sentence is false."

2+2=4. Always has, always will.

Prepare to get you mind blown:
2+2=11
If you're wandering, it's in Base-3
And this is a true, I'm not just typing randomly: 11 is a correct answer to 2 + 2. And it's an absolute truth, too - Maths says so. Furthermore, "4" is not only an invalid answer, it has no meaning at all.

This illustrates (a bit tangentially and somewhat unwieldy) a problem with something that is "undeniably true" - using new information what we knew may be subject to change. That's the deal with absolute truths - you have to have really extensive knowledge to claim one, accepting one "just because" is not something that should be done lightly.

And all this further proves my paradoxical absolute.

Nevermind the fact that, before my little equation, I used the qualifier "in basic math" meaning grade-school simplicity. I have friends a lot smarter than me in math that have at least tried to explain how such an equation can be incorrect based on things far too advanced for me to understand. But all you've done is shown that even in the realms of math and science there are still things that aren't absolute as one would think 2+2=4 should be. Which, of course, brings us back to the statement of "There are no absolutes in life" which is itself a paradox.

Of course, all of this is under the assumption that WoW was originally trying to say that "There exist absolutes in life" is supposed to be the opposite of "There are no absolutes in life." If that was not WoW's intention, then I honestly have no idea why he brought it up, or what the hell we're even talking about.

 

[RJ 17]

I get the point of the thought experiment we have going on here, but there are some delimmas in life that are arguably absolute.

If they're arguable, then they're not really absolute now are they?

Like I said, I was purely playing devil's advocate, throwing up hypotheticals to show possible exceptions to your rules.

 

[DoomyMcDoom]

Killing a baby is bad. Tell me I'm wrong.

You're wrong, because, Good and Bad are constructs of human society, they are not a universal absolute, therefor nothing is in essence truly good or bad.

What if you came from a society where the sacrifice of infants on a regular basis was considered a sacrificial fertility ceramony, as a symbol saying that enough babies are born that the loss of one now and again by choice proves it, or something of the like, then killing babies is not nessecarily seen as bad, but as good in some circumstances, therefor due to the people's personal/societal definition(which is all good or bad are, opinion, mass opinion for some things, but opinion nonetheless) you become wrong.

Nothing that we define through our societal standards is absolute, right, wrong, good, and bad, nothing but opinion.

 

[RedFeather1975]

I think the closest thing I've come to see as an absolute, is that it all starts with allowances, then moves to the struggle to force commitments, then moves to conflicts, and ends with a binary outcome whose result is less than the antecedent allowance.