No i don't think it's possible, at least I can't perceive it. Me thinks it's the reason meditation is such a core part in many's lives, to clear there thought.
You can convince your body that it's in a hot climate, when it's actually in a cold one.
You can look and gaze into a mirror admiring yourself for hours, to hovel around in public places with your head down.
These are pretty much like using religion as an example in there own way (coping mechanisms), and are besides the point.
Even double think is more of a one way view (at least how i interpreted it) it was more of a manipulation of the persons brain mapping. getting them to associate something that's good as bad, and vice versa. Would anyone mind clearing that up for me if possible?
what's more maddening?
-A chaotic battlezone
-not partaking in a purpose of any kind, just sitting in time.
but there not utilizing 2 perspectives, it's just one of those limits of the human brain, i think it's beyond the brains incredible. I think the human body by itself is constrained to a biological clock.
Edit: Overall i think that contradicting idea's can exist in a person's brain but to take 2 and believing in them at a simultaneous time impossible. that quote that you shared for example.
You've got a long post there, so I'm just going to sum up your title. It's cognitive dissonance. People are entirely capable of believing contradictory ideas, and holding positions that oppose each other. That often causes a feeling of unease, or concern about those views.
For instance, someone who believes in methodological naturalism (Basically the Scientific Method) who also subscribes to an Abrahmic religion, would be experiencing this.
Or a person who was pro-freedom, but against some freedoms, for instance, against abortion, or against gun liberties.
Even a purely logical being would have contradictions, since a logical argument will only lead to the correct solution, given a correct premise. Meaning, given flawed data, logical people can believe in things just as wrong as one not using logic.
We're all a mess of compromises and contradictions. Most of us believe things that can be found to be at odds with each other.
Well, you get into a question of what defines the classification of something.
Jet fuel, obviously, can be classified as fuel that powers a jet engine.
However, it can also be classified as a liquid fuel with a specific composition of various different molecules.
If you take the first classification, then yes, something either is jet fuel, or it isn't.
(Although, since you can put diesel (or even vodka) in a petrol car and probably get it to run, at the risk of ruining the engine, the mere fact that you are using a particular kind of fuel to power your car doesn't automatically make it petrol.)
But if you take the second, you soon realise that if jet fuel is supposed to consist of a certain number of different molecules, in specific proportions, what do you have if the proportions are off?
Also, since it's composition, while being very complex, is nonetheless quite close to that of several other types of petroleum derived fuels, at what point, exactly does something stop being jet fuel, and start being something else?
The nature of the only two options being It IS jet fuel Or it IS NOT jet fuel, require that there be a specific, well-defined cutoff point where it goes from being one thing, to being something else.
If this were not the case, then there would be a range of possible compositions where there is no definitive answer as to whether this is jet fuel or not.
(And at the end of the day, such ambiguity is far more common in the real world than there being such a hard limit that precisely separates two things from each-other.)
Absolutes aren't real. A mathematically perfect circle is impossible to construct outside of the level of abstraction.
Truth is a trickier matter, because it implies something more than just what something is...
Classification on the other hand, is merely the act of grouping similar things together.
That no two examples of anything are ever 100% identical though, implies that no classification scheme is ever accurate.
Because, by stating that two different things are the same, you are inevitably making a statement that is false in an absolute sense.
Truth therefore, could be argued not to exist to begin with, unless you acknowledge the uncertainty inherent in any statement that does not describe an entirely unique thing unlike any other. (But any such description would be meaningless as a form of communication.)
Can a person hold contradictory beliefs? Very likely. Because it doesn't seem like we actually work out problems based on an underlying idea of what's going on, but rather on the far more flexible idea of how closely two things are related.
We don't group things by this is X, that is not X, but we compare things to other things we are already familiar with, then lump them together in whatever comes closest. We only try to create new groups if things currently lumped together in our minds are causing us problems due to their differences.
So, in a way, contradictions are what prompt us to make new groups of things in the first place.
If A = fish. B = NOT fish.
But C is sort of fish, but not really...
Then it either forces you to say that C is B, or C is A... But alternately, you could just say C is C, since it doesn's seem to be a fish, nor is it NOI a fish.
This works fine in a world where actual mutually exclusive things are very rare.
Black and white? Well what's grey then?
Night & Day? what about sunrise & sunset? Which are those?
To ask if you can believe in a contradiction, you first have to establish something which is in fact a contradiction, and not merely the result of over-simplifying reality.
Can a circle be a triangle? No... But is a hexagon closer to being a circle, or a triangle?
Can something be both small and large at the same time? Not really. But something can certainly be inbetween.
So... Is the mind really holding a contradiction, or is it trying to reduce a contradiction down to something else which actually makes sense?
I thought I'd pre-empted that, by basically saying that if you posit a definition of jet fuel that isn't "fuel for jets", you are positing a wrong definition.
And if you're correctly going about the business of defining things, then as soon as you say "jet fuel" if you do mean something other than "fuel for jets", you already have the possibly-arbitrary cut-off point between them in mind. If not, you shouldn't be using the word, because you don't know what it means.
This barely seems to have anything to do with what I've been saying, this is like re-reading what you said in the last post. Have I been communicating poorly?
It tells you exactly what you're dealing with. It tells you that if you use it to fill a tank that feeds into a jet engine which is otherwise functional, you will be able to use that jet engine.
Consider I hand you a random cup of liquid. How would you be able to tell from the liquid alone, that this is jet fuel, and not, say... Dishwashing liquid?
It's not a very good idea to test this by putting the liquid in a jet engine, because if you use the wrong thing, the engine could be destroyed.
Thus, you need some way of determining, solely from the properties of the liquid itself, what it is.
Jet fuel, thanks to it's name confuses the issue.
Consider a diesel engine. You can run a diesel engine on certain blends of vegetable oils.
By you definition, vegetable oil would be diesel, because you can run a diesel engine with it.
Yet diesel and vegetable oil are not the same thing.
Also, consider cars in general.
You can have a car that runs on petrol, or a car that runs on diesel. They're both cars, the design of the engine is slightly different, but otherwise they're very similar.
What happens to a petrol powered car though if you pour diesel in it? (Hint: It's not a good idea to try it.)
Now, think about this for a moment:
Question: What is diesel?
Answer: It is the fuel used by diesel engines.
Question: What is a diesel engine?
Answer: It is an engine that runs on diesel.
So... If I give you an engine at random, will you be able to tell me if it's a diesel engine, or something else?
And... If I give you some fuel at random, how will you know if it's diesel or not?
Remember, a diesel engine can run on a variety of different fuels. The mere fact that it runs doesn't tell you what it is you've put into the engine...
You cannot define things that way without running into serious practical problems.
Well, it's a good thing we have other words, like "kerosene" which have different definitions.
No, by my definition "diesel engine fuel" would be diesel or vegetable oils or whatever else will run a diesel engine. "Diesel" would just be diesel, with the definition being pretty much the same as the legal definition of diesel that tells you what can and can't be legally sold as "diesel".
The ENTIRE POINT of saying "Jet fuel" instead of "Jet A-1" or naming another commercial aviation fuel is to AVOID DEALING WITH THIS MEANINGLESS CRAP and getting straight to a simple definition that can be worked with.
Well, you get into a question of what defines the classification of something.
Jet fuel, obviously, can be classified as fuel that powers a jet engine.
However, it can also be classified as a liquid fuel with a specific composition of various different molecules.
If you take the first classification, then yes, something either is jet fuel, or it isn't.
(Although, since you can put diesel (or even vodka) in a petrol car and probably get it to run, at the risk of ruining the engine, the mere fact that you are using a particular kind of fuel to power your car doesn't automatically make it petrol.)
But if you take the second, you soon realise that if jet fuel is supposed to consist of a certain number of different molecules, in specific proportions, what do you have if the proportions are off?
Also, since it's composition, while being very complex, is nonetheless quite close to that of several other types of petroleum derived fuels, at what point, exactly does something stop being jet fuel, and start being something else?
The nature of the only two options being It IS jet fuel Or it IS NOT jet fuel, require that there be a specific, well-defined cutoff point where it goes from being one thing, to being something else.
If this were not the case, then there would be a range of possible compositions where there is no definitive answer as to whether this is jet fuel or not.
(And at the end of the day, such ambiguity is far more common in the real world than there being such a hard limit that precisely separates two things from each-other.)
Absolutes aren't real. A mathematically perfect circle is impossible to construct outside of the level of abstraction.
Truth is a trickier matter, because it implies something more than just what something is...
Classification on the other hand, is merely the act of grouping similar things together.
That no two examples of anything are ever 100% identical though, implies that no classification scheme is ever accurate.
Because, by stating that two different things are the same, you are inevitably making a statement that is false in an absolute sense.
Truth therefore, could be argued not to exist to begin with, unless you acknowledge the uncertainty inherent in any statement that does not describe an entirely unique thing unlike any other. (But any such description would be meaningless as a form of communication.)
Can a person hold contradictory beliefs? Very likely. Because it doesn't seem like we actually work out problems based on an underlying idea of what's going on, but rather on the far more flexible idea of how closely two things are related.
We don't group things by this is X, that is not X, but we compare things to other things we are already familiar with, then lump them together in whatever comes closest. We only try to create new groups if things currently lumped together in our minds are causing us problems due to their differences.
So, in a way, contradictions are what prompt us to make new groups of things in the first place.
If A = fish. B = NOT fish.
But C is sort of fish, but not really...
Then it either forces you to say that C is B, or C is A... But alternately, you could just say C is C, since it doesn's seem to be a fish, nor is it NOI a fish.
This works fine in a world where actual mutually exclusive things are very rare.
Black and white? Well what's grey then?
Night & Day? what about sunrise & sunset? Which are those?
To ask if you can believe in a contradiction, you first have to establish something which is in fact a contradiction, and not merely the result of over-simplifying reality.
Can a circle be a triangle? No... But is a hexagon closer to being a circle, or a triangle?
Can something be both small and large at the same time? Not really. But something can certainly be inbetween.
So... Is the mind really holding a contradiction, or is it trying to reduce a contradiction down to something else which actually makes sense?
I thought I'd pre-empted that, by basically saying that if you posit a definition of jet fuel that isn't "fuel for jets", you are positing a wrong definition.
And if you're correctly going about the business of defining things, then as soon as you say "jet fuel" if you do mean something other than "fuel for jets", you already have the possibly-arbitrary cut-off point between them in mind. If not, you shouldn't be using the word, because you don't know what it means.
This barely seems to have anything to do with what I've been saying, this is like re-reading what you said in the last post. Have I been communicating poorly?
It tells you exactly what you're dealing with. It tells you that if you use it to fill a tank that feeds into a jet engine which is otherwise functional, you will be able to use that jet engine.
Consider I hand you a random cup of liquid. How would you be able to tell from the liquid alone, that this is jet fuel, and not, say... Dishwashing liquid?
It's not a very good idea to test this by putting the liquid in a jet engine, because if you use the wrong thing, the engine could be destroyed.
Thus, you need some way of determining, solely from the properties of the liquid itself, what it is.
Jet fuel, thanks to it's name confuses the issue.
Consider a diesel engine. You can run a diesel engine on certain blends of vegetable oils.
By you definition, vegetable oil would be diesel, because you can run a diesel engine with it.
Yet diesel and vegetable oil are not the same thing.
Also, consider cars in general.
You can have a car that runs on petrol, or a car that runs on diesel. They're both cars, the design of the engine is slightly different, but otherwise they're very similar.
What happens to a petrol powered car though if you pour diesel in it? (Hint: It's not a good idea to try it.)
Now, think about this for a moment:
Question: What is diesel?
Answer: It is the fuel used by diesel engines.
Question: What is a diesel engine?
Answer: It is an engine that runs on diesel.
So... If I give you an engine at random, will you be able to tell me if it's a diesel engine, or something else?
And... If I give you some fuel at random, how will you know if it's diesel or not?
Remember, a diesel engine can run on a variety of different fuels. The mere fact that it runs doesn't tell you what it is you've put into the engine...
You cannot define things that way without running into serious practical problems.
Well, it's a good thing we have other words, like "kerosene" which have different definitions.
No, by my definition "diesel engine fuel" would be diesel or vegetable oils or whatever else will run a diesel engine. "Diesel" would just be diesel, with the definition being pretty much the same as the legal definition of diesel that tells you what can and can't be legally sold as "diesel".
The ENTIRE POINT of saying "Jet fuel" instead of "Jet A-1" or naming another commercial aviation fuel is to AVOID DEALING WITH THIS MEANINGLESS CRAP and getting straight to a simple definition that can be worked with.
No definition of anything is simple unless you gloss over the details.
Tbe only reason the definition "Jet fuel" = "Fuel for Jets" is a valid definition is because of the huge body of associated definitions.
It is far from simple, because it depends on a million other definitions.
Since we started from the idea that the human mind uses 'wrong' definitions, you do have to be incredibly careful with what is and is not a definition.
And a definition as complex as "Jet fuel = Fuel for running a jet engine", with all of it's implicit assumptions is the very opposite of simple.
It merely seems simple because the definition appears short.
But it only appears that way because the definition depends on terms that are in and of themselves very complex, and not at all fundamental.
And none of this actually addresses the problem we started with...
Which was, after all, "Is it possible to believe in a contradiction."
Which then led to questions about what it means to believe something,
and somehow on to the point of how the human mind classifies information.
(I'm curious as to the implication that the brain does this 'incorrectly', when the only alternative method I can think of would render a person incapable of functioning in the real world...)
Well, you get into a question of what defines the classification of something.
Jet fuel, obviously, can be classified as fuel that powers a jet engine.
However, it can also be classified as a liquid fuel with a specific composition of various different molecules.
If you take the first classification, then yes, something either is jet fuel, or it isn't.
(Although, since you can put diesel (or even vodka) in a petrol car and probably get it to run, at the risk of ruining the engine, the mere fact that you are using a particular kind of fuel to power your car doesn't automatically make it petrol.)
But if you take the second, you soon realise that if jet fuel is supposed to consist of a certain number of different molecules, in specific proportions, what do you have if the proportions are off?
Also, since it's composition, while being very complex, is nonetheless quite close to that of several other types of petroleum derived fuels, at what point, exactly does something stop being jet fuel, and start being something else?
The nature of the only two options being It IS jet fuel Or it IS NOT jet fuel, require that there be a specific, well-defined cutoff point where it goes from being one thing, to being something else.
If this were not the case, then there would be a range of possible compositions where there is no definitive answer as to whether this is jet fuel or not.
(And at the end of the day, such ambiguity is far more common in the real world than there being such a hard limit that precisely separates two things from each-other.)
Absolutes aren't real. A mathematically perfect circle is impossible to construct outside of the level of abstraction.
Truth is a trickier matter, because it implies something more than just what something is...
Classification on the other hand, is merely the act of grouping similar things together.
That no two examples of anything are ever 100% identical though, implies that no classification scheme is ever accurate.
Because, by stating that two different things are the same, you are inevitably making a statement that is false in an absolute sense.
Truth therefore, could be argued not to exist to begin with, unless you acknowledge the uncertainty inherent in any statement that does not describe an entirely unique thing unlike any other. (But any such description would be meaningless as a form of communication.)
Can a person hold contradictory beliefs? Very likely. Because it doesn't seem like we actually work out problems based on an underlying idea of what's going on, but rather on the far more flexible idea of how closely two things are related.
We don't group things by this is X, that is not X, but we compare things to other things we are already familiar with, then lump them together in whatever comes closest. We only try to create new groups if things currently lumped together in our minds are causing us problems due to their differences.
So, in a way, contradictions are what prompt us to make new groups of things in the first place.
If A = fish. B = NOT fish.
But C is sort of fish, but not really...
Then it either forces you to say that C is B, or C is A... But alternately, you could just say C is C, since it doesn's seem to be a fish, nor is it NOI a fish.
This works fine in a world where actual mutually exclusive things are very rare.
Black and white? Well what's grey then?
Night & Day? what about sunrise & sunset? Which are those?
To ask if you can believe in a contradiction, you first have to establish something which is in fact a contradiction, and not merely the result of over-simplifying reality.
Can a circle be a triangle? No... But is a hexagon closer to being a circle, or a triangle?
Can something be both small and large at the same time? Not really. But something can certainly be inbetween.
So... Is the mind really holding a contradiction, or is it trying to reduce a contradiction down to something else which actually makes sense?
I thought I'd pre-empted that, by basically saying that if you posit a definition of jet fuel that isn't "fuel for jets", you are positing a wrong definition.
And if you're correctly going about the business of defining things, then as soon as you say "jet fuel" if you do mean something other than "fuel for jets", you already have the possibly-arbitrary cut-off point between them in mind. If not, you shouldn't be using the word, because you don't know what it means.
This barely seems to have anything to do with what I've been saying, this is like re-reading what you said in the last post. Have I been communicating poorly?
It tells you exactly what you're dealing with. It tells you that if you use it to fill a tank that feeds into a jet engine which is otherwise functional, you will be able to use that jet engine.
Consider I hand you a random cup of liquid. How would you be able to tell from the liquid alone, that this is jet fuel, and not, say... Dishwashing liquid?
It's not a very good idea to test this by putting the liquid in a jet engine, because if you use the wrong thing, the engine could be destroyed.
Thus, you need some way of determining, solely from the properties of the liquid itself, what it is.
Jet fuel, thanks to it's name confuses the issue.
Consider a diesel engine. You can run a diesel engine on certain blends of vegetable oils.
By you definition, vegetable oil would be diesel, because you can run a diesel engine with it.
Yet diesel and vegetable oil are not the same thing.
Also, consider cars in general.
You can have a car that runs on petrol, or a car that runs on diesel. They're both cars, the design of the engine is slightly different, but otherwise they're very similar.
What happens to a petrol powered car though if you pour diesel in it? (Hint: It's not a good idea to try it.)
Now, think about this for a moment:
Question: What is diesel?
Answer: It is the fuel used by diesel engines.
Question: What is a diesel engine?
Answer: It is an engine that runs on diesel.
So... If I give you an engine at random, will you be able to tell me if it's a diesel engine, or something else?
And... If I give you some fuel at random, how will you know if it's diesel or not?
Remember, a diesel engine can run on a variety of different fuels. The mere fact that it runs doesn't tell you what it is you've put into the engine...
You cannot define things that way without running into serious practical problems.
Well, it's a good thing we have other words, like "kerosene" which have different definitions.
No, by my definition "diesel engine fuel" would be diesel or vegetable oils or whatever else will run a diesel engine. "Diesel" would just be diesel, with the definition being pretty much the same as the legal definition of diesel that tells you what can and can't be legally sold as "diesel".
The ENTIRE POINT of saying "Jet fuel" instead of "Jet A-1" or naming another commercial aviation fuel is to AVOID DEALING WITH THIS MEANINGLESS CRAP and getting straight to a simple definition that can be worked with.
No definition of anything is simple unless you gloss over the details.
Tbe only reason the definition "Jet fuel" = "Fuel for Jets" is a valid definition is because of the huge body of associated definitions.
It is far from simple, because it depends on a million other definitions.
Since we started from the idea that the human mind uses 'wrong' definitions, you do have to be incredibly careful with what is and is not a definition.
And a definition as complex as "Jet fuel = Fuel for running a jet engine", with all of it's implicit assumptions is the very opposite of simple.
It merely seems simple because the definition appears short.
But it only appears that way because the definition depends on terms that are in and of themselves very complex, and not at all fundamental.
And none of this actually addresses the problem we started with...
Which was, after all, "Is it possible to believe in a contradiction."
Which then led to questions about what it means to believe something,
and somehow on to the point of how the human mind classifies information.
(I'm curious as to the implication that the brain does this 'incorrectly', when the only alternative method I can think of would render a person incapable of functioning in the real world...)
A definition doesn't have to explain everything it relates to, dictionaries aren't encyclopaedias. The definition doesn't have to explain what a jet engine is, so it's still pretty simple when fully expanded.
I may have been miscommunicating. From my perspective, you kept dragging the issue over to this debate about the meaning of words, which I wanted to drop (hence my frustration).
The categorization itself doesn't matter, we don't understand the brain well enough to accurately describe it, but I would say with confidence that it's a messy arrangement that would horrify an actual computer programmer, and nothing more than that need be accepted. Things are stored messily, and so if you have a complicated belief that would be contradictory in some circumstances, and those circumstances come about, you might accept that the circumstances are the case but not bother to update the belief, and so you continue believing something that if you thought about more closely would be a contradiction.
Well, you get into a question of what defines the classification of something.
Jet fuel, obviously, can be classified as fuel that powers a jet engine.
However, it can also be classified as a liquid fuel with a specific composition of various different molecules.
If you take the first classification, then yes, something either is jet fuel, or it isn't.
(Although, since you can put diesel (or even vodka) in a petrol car and probably get it to run, at the risk of ruining the engine, the mere fact that you are using a particular kind of fuel to power your car doesn't automatically make it petrol.)
But if you take the second, you soon realise that if jet fuel is supposed to consist of a certain number of different molecules, in specific proportions, what do you have if the proportions are off?
Also, since it's composition, while being very complex, is nonetheless quite close to that of several other types of petroleum derived fuels, at what point, exactly does something stop being jet fuel, and start being something else?
The nature of the only two options being It IS jet fuel Or it IS NOT jet fuel, require that there be a specific, well-defined cutoff point where it goes from being one thing, to being something else.
If this were not the case, then there would be a range of possible compositions where there is no definitive answer as to whether this is jet fuel or not.
(And at the end of the day, such ambiguity is far more common in the real world than there being such a hard limit that precisely separates two things from each-other.)
Absolutes aren't real. A mathematically perfect circle is impossible to construct outside of the level of abstraction.
Truth is a trickier matter, because it implies something more than just what something is...
Classification on the other hand, is merely the act of grouping similar things together.
That no two examples of anything are ever 100% identical though, implies that no classification scheme is ever accurate.
Because, by stating that two different things are the same, you are inevitably making a statement that is false in an absolute sense.
Truth therefore, could be argued not to exist to begin with, unless you acknowledge the uncertainty inherent in any statement that does not describe an entirely unique thing unlike any other. (But any such description would be meaningless as a form of communication.)
Can a person hold contradictory beliefs? Very likely. Because it doesn't seem like we actually work out problems based on an underlying idea of what's going on, but rather on the far more flexible idea of how closely two things are related.
We don't group things by this is X, that is not X, but we compare things to other things we are already familiar with, then lump them together in whatever comes closest. We only try to create new groups if things currently lumped together in our minds are causing us problems due to their differences.
So, in a way, contradictions are what prompt us to make new groups of things in the first place.
If A = fish. B = NOT fish.
But C is sort of fish, but not really...
Then it either forces you to say that C is B, or C is A... But alternately, you could just say C is C, since it doesn's seem to be a fish, nor is it NOI a fish.
This works fine in a world where actual mutually exclusive things are very rare.
Black and white? Well what's grey then?
Night & Day? what about sunrise & sunset? Which are those?
To ask if you can believe in a contradiction, you first have to establish something which is in fact a contradiction, and not merely the result of over-simplifying reality.
Can a circle be a triangle? No... But is a hexagon closer to being a circle, or a triangle?
Can something be both small and large at the same time? Not really. But something can certainly be inbetween.
So... Is the mind really holding a contradiction, or is it trying to reduce a contradiction down to something else which actually makes sense?
I thought I'd pre-empted that, by basically saying that if you posit a definition of jet fuel that isn't "fuel for jets", you are positing a wrong definition.
And if you're correctly going about the business of defining things, then as soon as you say "jet fuel" if you do mean something other than "fuel for jets", you already have the possibly-arbitrary cut-off point between them in mind. If not, you shouldn't be using the word, because you don't know what it means.
This barely seems to have anything to do with what I've been saying, this is like re-reading what you said in the last post. Have I been communicating poorly?
It tells you exactly what you're dealing with. It tells you that if you use it to fill a tank that feeds into a jet engine which is otherwise functional, you will be able to use that jet engine.
Consider I hand you a random cup of liquid. How would you be able to tell from the liquid alone, that this is jet fuel, and not, say... Dishwashing liquid?
It's not a very good idea to test this by putting the liquid in a jet engine, because if you use the wrong thing, the engine could be destroyed.
Thus, you need some way of determining, solely from the properties of the liquid itself, what it is.
Jet fuel, thanks to it's name confuses the issue.
Consider a diesel engine. You can run a diesel engine on certain blends of vegetable oils.
By you definition, vegetable oil would be diesel, because you can run a diesel engine with it.
Yet diesel and vegetable oil are not the same thing.
Also, consider cars in general.
You can have a car that runs on petrol, or a car that runs on diesel. They're both cars, the design of the engine is slightly different, but otherwise they're very similar.
What happens to a petrol powered car though if you pour diesel in it? (Hint: It's not a good idea to try it.)
Now, think about this for a moment:
Question: What is diesel?
Answer: It is the fuel used by diesel engines.
Question: What is a diesel engine?
Answer: It is an engine that runs on diesel.
So... If I give you an engine at random, will you be able to tell me if it's a diesel engine, or something else?
And... If I give you some fuel at random, how will you know if it's diesel or not?
Remember, a diesel engine can run on a variety of different fuels. The mere fact that it runs doesn't tell you what it is you've put into the engine...
You cannot define things that way without running into serious practical problems.
Well, it's a good thing we have other words, like "kerosene" which have different definitions.
No, by my definition "diesel engine fuel" would be diesel or vegetable oils or whatever else will run a diesel engine. "Diesel" would just be diesel, with the definition being pretty much the same as the legal definition of diesel that tells you what can and can't be legally sold as "diesel".
The ENTIRE POINT of saying "Jet fuel" instead of "Jet A-1" or naming another commercial aviation fuel is to AVOID DEALING WITH THIS MEANINGLESS CRAP and getting straight to a simple definition that can be worked with.
No definition of anything is simple unless you gloss over the details.
Tbe only reason the definition "Jet fuel" = "Fuel for Jets" is a valid definition is because of the huge body of associated definitions.
It is far from simple, because it depends on a million other definitions.
Since we started from the idea that the human mind uses 'wrong' definitions, you do have to be incredibly careful with what is and is not a definition.
And a definition as complex as "Jet fuel = Fuel for running a jet engine", with all of it's implicit assumptions is the very opposite of simple.
It merely seems simple because the definition appears short.
But it only appears that way because the definition depends on terms that are in and of themselves very complex, and not at all fundamental.
And none of this actually addresses the problem we started with...
Which was, after all, "Is it possible to believe in a contradiction."
Which then led to questions about what it means to believe something,
and somehow on to the point of how the human mind classifies information.
(I'm curious as to the implication that the brain does this 'incorrectly', when the only alternative method I can think of would render a person incapable of functioning in the real world...)
A definition doesn't have to explain everything it relates to, dictionaries aren't encyclopaedias. The definition doesn't have to explain what a jet engine is, so it's still pretty simple when fully expanded.
I may have been miscommunicating. From my perspective, you kept dragging the issue over to this debate about the meaning of words, which I wanted to drop (hence my frustration).
The categorization itself doesn't matter, we don't understand the brain well enough to accurately describe it, but I would say with confidence that it's a messy arrangement that would horrify an actual computer programmer, and nothing more than that need be accepted. Things are stored messily, and so if you have a complicated belief that would be contradictory in some circumstances, and those circumstances come about, you might accept that the circumstances are the case but not bother to update the belief, and so you continue believing something that if you thought about more closely would be a contradiction.
Yes, so we might have been talking past eachother here.
By 'definition' I was referring to whatever internal rules the mind uses to figure out the difference between one thing and another.
That's something very different from a dictionary entry.
As for programming... I am a computer programmer, but I've also done some research into artificial intelligence.
We may not have a proper idea of how the brain works, but we have some clues.
And artificial intelligence has come up with several models that cover various ways of classifying information.
These do actually give some insight into the question.
To begin with we have the brute force methods of calculating something, such as how a computer plays chess by calculating every possible outcome.
'Expert systems' create long lists of rules, devised by carefully asking an expert how they do things. (not an easy task, considering most experts don't actually know how they really do things.)
Both of these methods are very inflexible, because the information used is all hard-coded and has to be very simple, and you have to be able to state with extreme precision what makes something one thing or another.
We then have Neural networks. - These are mathematical models derived from studies about how brains work. They may not accurately reflect how real neurons work, but they are a reasonable model based on what we know so far.
Neural networks are incredibly useful for tasks that computers are otherwise incredibly bad at. A neural network is incredibly useful for spotting patterns from incomplete information. (Actually a very important task, on the whole).
The neural network can give you a reasonable answer as to what something is, even if it is not quite like anything it has ever dealt with before. (Sound familiar?)
But for a programmer, a neural network is a bit of headache.
You can't 'program' one, you have to 'train' it. (Give it examples of the kinds of things you want it to recognise).
Worse, while a properly trained neural net can work incredibly well, it can exhibit highly unpredictable behaviour.
On top of that, if you look at the raw data that defines the network, you can't tell anything meaningful about what it does, so you have no real way of knowing if it does what it's intended to.
There are many other techniques, but the other main concept frequently used in AI, which is the most useful to this discussion is fuzzy logic.
Fuzzy logic is a different way of determining what something is from incomplete information.
Where boolean logic implies:
This thing is either X or Y.
Fuzzy logic says:
I give this a 70 chance of being X
Or a 50 chance of being Y
there chance of it being Z is 2
The chance of it being Q is 1
You might notice this isn't a percentage. (It adds up to 123 in this example).
The ratings also aren't at all precise.
It doesn't matter much how precisely the numbers are determined. (Think of them like game ratings; These are not objective, nor do they rank games into which is 'best' in any absolute sense.) The whole point is that all of these values are somewhat uncertain, because you simply don't have a good idea what is accurate.
So what is the use of this? Well, if you must pick a specific answer, you can obviously say, well, it's X, since that has the highest chance of being correct.
But... You don't have to actually choose a specific answer. It can, in fact, be quite useful to say you have both an X and Y.
If this is meant to determine what action to take, rather than take one action or the other, you can take an inbetween action, relative to which is more likely.
(Let's say you have a game with an AI character that is supposed to attack if it has high health, and run away if it's health is low. - How do you decide which action to take?
One way would be to say if the health is below 30%, run away, otherwise attack.
But, if you use fuzzy logic, you can say for instance, run away if health 30%. While this has the same effect when the health value is below 30%, or above 50%, in the range of 30-50%, the result would be indeterminate using traditional logic, but using fuzzy logic, the behaviour would be a smooth blend between the two actions. (Such as moving away more slowly - or hanging back at a distance, rather than advancing or backing off.)
The impressive thing here is that this results in a whole range of other behaviours which aren't clearly one thing or another, and weren't explicitly programmed for.)
(There is, incidentally, a hybrid method between neural networks and fuzzy logic, called a fuzzy associative matrix. It seems to function similarly to a neural network, and you can 'train' it in a similar way. But it results in a list of 'fuzzy' rules which are much easier to study, so it gives a much better sense as to what the network is actually doing.)
OK, so as useful as all that is in certain areas of programming, what does it actually have to do with what we're discussing?
Well, neural networks are perhaps the closest approximation to how people think, but it's as difficult to study one of those as it is to study an actual person.
Fuzzy logic is much easier to analyse, and still likely to be much closer to how the brain deals with information than the binary logic most of us in the west are used to thinking with, and which computers are built around.
Does fuzzy logic give any insight into believing a contradiction?
Well, it certainly gives us a clue as to what might be going on.
Let's say again we have 2 positions.
X, and Y.
We don't necessarily know which is true, but since they are contradictions, traditional logic tells us:
If X is true, Y is false.
If Y is true, X is false.
Since binary logic also implies that something can only be true, or false, then it follows that if this were how people thought, they would be incapable of believing a contradiction.
(If I believe X is true, I must, by definition, believe Y is false.)
So, what changes if we use fuzzy logic instead?
We still have the same basic rules:
If X is true, Y is false.
If Y is true, X is false.
But, and here's the crucial thing, we no longer have absolute definitions of which is true.
I can for instance say:
I believe X to a degree of 88
and I believe Y to a degree of 40
(Remember these are not percentages, and the numbers are meant to be assigned arbitrarily. They are 'informed gut feelings', and relative values, not absolute. Like, say, film reviews rather than a temperature scale or bank account)
What does this tell us? Well, the first thing we see here is that neither belief is absolute.
There is uncertainty involved, and we don't actually know which is the correct answer.
The second thing we note is that we actually hold a belief in both options. (X and Y), even though they are contradictions.
We know they are contradictions, but we still believe both, because we aren't thinking in absolutes, and are to some extent evaluating both independently.
Further, if anyone insists choices are binary, and asks us to answer which we believe, we will clearly answer X. Since we hold this to be the more likely answer.
This does not, however, mean we don't still have this (weaker) belief in Y.
This sort of resembles aspects of quantum mechanics. Is the cat alive or dead? Well, if it's in a quantum superposition, we know it's both.
Even though 'alive' and 'dead' are mutually exclusive, quantum mechanics doesn't just tell us we don't know the answer, it insists both answers are true until we force things into a situation where only one answer is possible.
So... This study into fuzzy logic (which may not be an accurate reflection of the brain, but certainly a closer approximation than binary logic) does imply you can believe a contradiction, for the simple reason that it is a system which makes each statement independent of others.
Binary logic states that since X and Y are mutually exclusive, your belief in either says something about your belief about both of them, because they are related.
Fuzzy logic states that your belief of X and your belief of Y are independent variables. Your belief in their relationship (Ie. That X and Y are mutually exclusive) is then a third variable, and not directly a part of the belief in either.
The belief that X and Y are mutually exclusive would clearly make you more likely to adjust your beliefs about the correctness of X and Y, but they still remain independent ideas.
OK... That's a lot of text. Hopefully you can follow along with it. (I think we were getting lost in arguing semantics, and missing the actual point of what each of us meant.)
Well, you get into a question of what defines the classification of something.
Jet fuel, obviously, can be classified as fuel that powers a jet engine.
However, it can also be classified as a liquid fuel with a specific composition of various different molecules.
If you take the first classification, then yes, something either is jet fuel, or it isn't.
(Although, since you can put diesel (or even vodka) in a petrol car and probably get it to run, at the risk of ruining the engine, the mere fact that you are using a particular kind of fuel to power your car doesn't automatically make it petrol.)
But if you take the second, you soon realise that if jet fuel is supposed to consist of a certain number of different molecules, in specific proportions, what do you have if the proportions are off?
Also, since it's composition, while being very complex, is nonetheless quite close to that of several other types of petroleum derived fuels, at what point, exactly does something stop being jet fuel, and start being something else?
The nature of the only two options being It IS jet fuel Or it IS NOT jet fuel, require that there be a specific, well-defined cutoff point where it goes from being one thing, to being something else.
If this were not the case, then there would be a range of possible compositions where there is no definitive answer as to whether this is jet fuel or not.
(And at the end of the day, such ambiguity is far more common in the real world than there being such a hard limit that precisely separates two things from each-other.)
Absolutes aren't real. A mathematically perfect circle is impossible to construct outside of the level of abstraction.
Truth is a trickier matter, because it implies something more than just what something is...
Classification on the other hand, is merely the act of grouping similar things together.
That no two examples of anything are ever 100% identical though, implies that no classification scheme is ever accurate.
Because, by stating that two different things are the same, you are inevitably making a statement that is false in an absolute sense.
Truth therefore, could be argued not to exist to begin with, unless you acknowledge the uncertainty inherent in any statement that does not describe an entirely unique thing unlike any other. (But any such description would be meaningless as a form of communication.)
Can a person hold contradictory beliefs? Very likely. Because it doesn't seem like we actually work out problems based on an underlying idea of what's going on, but rather on the far more flexible idea of how closely two things are related.
We don't group things by this is X, that is not X, but we compare things to other things we are already familiar with, then lump them together in whatever comes closest. We only try to create new groups if things currently lumped together in our minds are causing us problems due to their differences.
So, in a way, contradictions are what prompt us to make new groups of things in the first place.
If A = fish. B = NOT fish.
But C is sort of fish, but not really...
Then it either forces you to say that C is B, or C is A... But alternately, you could just say C is C, since it doesn's seem to be a fish, nor is it NOI a fish.
This works fine in a world where actual mutually exclusive things are very rare.
Black and white? Well what's grey then?
Night & Day? what about sunrise & sunset? Which are those?
To ask if you can believe in a contradiction, you first have to establish something which is in fact a contradiction, and not merely the result of over-simplifying reality.
Can a circle be a triangle? No... But is a hexagon closer to being a circle, or a triangle?
Can something be both small and large at the same time? Not really. But something can certainly be inbetween.
So... Is the mind really holding a contradiction, or is it trying to reduce a contradiction down to something else which actually makes sense?
I thought I'd pre-empted that, by basically saying that if you posit a definition of jet fuel that isn't "fuel for jets", you are positing a wrong definition.
And if you're correctly going about the business of defining things, then as soon as you say "jet fuel" if you do mean something other than "fuel for jets", you already have the possibly-arbitrary cut-off point between them in mind. If not, you shouldn't be using the word, because you don't know what it means.
This barely seems to have anything to do with what I've been saying, this is like re-reading what you said in the last post. Have I been communicating poorly?
It tells you exactly what you're dealing with. It tells you that if you use it to fill a tank that feeds into a jet engine which is otherwise functional, you will be able to use that jet engine.
Consider I hand you a random cup of liquid. How would you be able to tell from the liquid alone, that this is jet fuel, and not, say... Dishwashing liquid?
It's not a very good idea to test this by putting the liquid in a jet engine, because if you use the wrong thing, the engine could be destroyed.
Thus, you need some way of determining, solely from the properties of the liquid itself, what it is.
Jet fuel, thanks to it's name confuses the issue.
Consider a diesel engine. You can run a diesel engine on certain blends of vegetable oils.
By you definition, vegetable oil would be diesel, because you can run a diesel engine with it.
Yet diesel and vegetable oil are not the same thing.
Also, consider cars in general.
You can have a car that runs on petrol, or a car that runs on diesel. They're both cars, the design of the engine is slightly different, but otherwise they're very similar.
What happens to a petrol powered car though if you pour diesel in it? (Hint: It's not a good idea to try it.)
Now, think about this for a moment:
Question: What is diesel?
Answer: It is the fuel used by diesel engines.
Question: What is a diesel engine?
Answer: It is an engine that runs on diesel.
So... If I give you an engine at random, will you be able to tell me if it's a diesel engine, or something else?
And... If I give you some fuel at random, how will you know if it's diesel or not?
Remember, a diesel engine can run on a variety of different fuels. The mere fact that it runs doesn't tell you what it is you've put into the engine...
You cannot define things that way without running into serious practical problems.
Well, it's a good thing we have other words, like "kerosene" which have different definitions.
No, by my definition "diesel engine fuel" would be diesel or vegetable oils or whatever else will run a diesel engine. "Diesel" would just be diesel, with the definition being pretty much the same as the legal definition of diesel that tells you what can and can't be legally sold as "diesel".
The ENTIRE POINT of saying "Jet fuel" instead of "Jet A-1" or naming another commercial aviation fuel is to AVOID DEALING WITH THIS MEANINGLESS CRAP and getting straight to a simple definition that can be worked with.
No definition of anything is simple unless you gloss over the details.
Tbe only reason the definition "Jet fuel" = "Fuel for Jets" is a valid definition is because of the huge body of associated definitions.
It is far from simple, because it depends on a million other definitions.
Since we started from the idea that the human mind uses 'wrong' definitions, you do have to be incredibly careful with what is and is not a definition.
And a definition as complex as "Jet fuel = Fuel for running a jet engine", with all of it's implicit assumptions is the very opposite of simple.
It merely seems simple because the definition appears short.
But it only appears that way because the definition depends on terms that are in and of themselves very complex, and not at all fundamental.
And none of this actually addresses the problem we started with...
Which was, after all, "Is it possible to believe in a contradiction."
Which then led to questions about what it means to believe something,
and somehow on to the point of how the human mind classifies information.
(I'm curious as to the implication that the brain does this 'incorrectly', when the only alternative method I can think of would render a person incapable of functioning in the real world...)
A definition doesn't have to explain everything it relates to, dictionaries aren't encyclopaedias. The definition doesn't have to explain what a jet engine is, so it's still pretty simple when fully expanded.
I may have been miscommunicating. From my perspective, you kept dragging the issue over to this debate about the meaning of words, which I wanted to drop (hence my frustration).
The categorization itself doesn't matter, we don't understand the brain well enough to accurately describe it, but I would say with confidence that it's a messy arrangement that would horrify an actual computer programmer, and nothing more than that need be accepted. Things are stored messily, and so if you have a complicated belief that would be contradictory in some circumstances, and those circumstances come about, you might accept that the circumstances are the case but not bother to update the belief, and so you continue believing something that if you thought about more closely would be a contradiction.
Well, you get into a question of what defines the classification of something.
Jet fuel, obviously, can be classified as fuel that powers a jet engine.
However, it can also be classified as a liquid fuel with a specific composition of various different molecules.
If you take the first classification, then yes, something either is jet fuel, or it isn't.
(Although, since you can put diesel (or even vodka) in a petrol car and probably get it to run, at the risk of ruining the engine, the mere fact that you are using a particular kind of fuel to power your car doesn't automatically make it petrol.)
But if you take the second, you soon realise that if jet fuel is supposed to consist of a certain number of different molecules, in specific proportions, what do you have if the proportions are off?
Also, since it's composition, while being very complex, is nonetheless quite close to that of several other types of petroleum derived fuels, at what point, exactly does something stop being jet fuel, and start being something else?
The nature of the only two options being It IS jet fuel Or it IS NOT jet fuel, require that there be a specific, well-defined cutoff point where it goes from being one thing, to being something else.
If this were not the case, then there would be a range of possible compositions where there is no definitive answer as to whether this is jet fuel or not.
(And at the end of the day, such ambiguity is far more common in the real world than there being such a hard limit that precisely separates two things from each-other.)
Absolutes aren't real. A mathematically perfect circle is impossible to construct outside of the level of abstraction.
Truth is a trickier matter, because it implies something more than just what something is...
Classification on the other hand, is merely the act of grouping similar things together.
That no two examples of anything are ever 100% identical though, implies that no classification scheme is ever accurate.
Because, by stating that two different things are the same, you are inevitably making a statement that is false in an absolute sense.
Truth therefore, could be argued not to exist to begin with, unless you acknowledge the uncertainty inherent in any statement that does not describe an entirely unique thing unlike any other. (But any such description would be meaningless as a form of communication.)
Can a person hold contradictory beliefs? Very likely. Because it doesn't seem like we actually work out problems based on an underlying idea of what's going on, but rather on the far more flexible idea of how closely two things are related.
We don't group things by this is X, that is not X, but we compare things to other things we are already familiar with, then lump them together in whatever comes closest. We only try to create new groups if things currently lumped together in our minds are causing us problems due to their differences.
So, in a way, contradictions are what prompt us to make new groups of things in the first place.
If A = fish. B = NOT fish.
But C is sort of fish, but not really...
Then it either forces you to say that C is B, or C is A... But alternately, you could just say C is C, since it doesn's seem to be a fish, nor is it NOI a fish.
This works fine in a world where actual mutually exclusive things are very rare.
Black and white? Well what's grey then?
Night & Day? what about sunrise & sunset? Which are those?
To ask if you can believe in a contradiction, you first have to establish something which is in fact a contradiction, and not merely the result of over-simplifying reality.
Can a circle be a triangle? No... But is a hexagon closer to being a circle, or a triangle?
Can something be both small and large at the same time? Not really. But something can certainly be inbetween.
So... Is the mind really holding a contradiction, or is it trying to reduce a contradiction down to something else which actually makes sense?
I thought I'd pre-empted that, by basically saying that if you posit a definition of jet fuel that isn't "fuel for jets", you are positing a wrong definition.
And if you're correctly going about the business of defining things, then as soon as you say "jet fuel" if you do mean something other than "fuel for jets", you already have the possibly-arbitrary cut-off point between them in mind. If not, you shouldn't be using the word, because you don't know what it means.
This barely seems to have anything to do with what I've been saying, this is like re-reading what you said in the last post. Have I been communicating poorly?
It tells you exactly what you're dealing with. It tells you that if you use it to fill a tank that feeds into a jet engine which is otherwise functional, you will be able to use that jet engine.
Consider I hand you a random cup of liquid. How would you be able to tell from the liquid alone, that this is jet fuel, and not, say... Dishwashing liquid?
It's not a very good idea to test this by putting the liquid in a jet engine, because if you use the wrong thing, the engine could be destroyed.
Thus, you need some way of determining, solely from the properties of the liquid itself, what it is.
Jet fuel, thanks to it's name confuses the issue.
Consider a diesel engine. You can run a diesel engine on certain blends of vegetable oils.
By you definition, vegetable oil would be diesel, because you can run a diesel engine with it.
Yet diesel and vegetable oil are not the same thing.
Also, consider cars in general.
You can have a car that runs on petrol, or a car that runs on diesel. They're both cars, the design of the engine is slightly different, but otherwise they're very similar.
What happens to a petrol powered car though if you pour diesel in it? (Hint: It's not a good idea to try it.)
Now, think about this for a moment:
Question: What is diesel?
Answer: It is the fuel used by diesel engines.
Question: What is a diesel engine?
Answer: It is an engine that runs on diesel.
So... If I give you an engine at random, will you be able to tell me if it's a diesel engine, or something else?
And... If I give you some fuel at random, how will you know if it's diesel or not?
Remember, a diesel engine can run on a variety of different fuels. The mere fact that it runs doesn't tell you what it is you've put into the engine...
You cannot define things that way without running into serious practical problems.
Well, it's a good thing we have other words, like "kerosene" which have different definitions.
No, by my definition "diesel engine fuel" would be diesel or vegetable oils or whatever else will run a diesel engine. "Diesel" would just be diesel, with the definition being pretty much the same as the legal definition of diesel that tells you what can and can't be legally sold as "diesel".
The ENTIRE POINT of saying "Jet fuel" instead of "Jet A-1" or naming another commercial aviation fuel is to AVOID DEALING WITH THIS MEANINGLESS CRAP and getting straight to a simple definition that can be worked with.
No definition of anything is simple unless you gloss over the details.
Tbe only reason the definition "Jet fuel" = "Fuel for Jets" is a valid definition is because of the huge body of associated definitions.
It is far from simple, because it depends on a million other definitions.
Since we started from the idea that the human mind uses 'wrong' definitions, you do have to be incredibly careful with what is and is not a definition.
And a definition as complex as "Jet fuel = Fuel for running a jet engine", with all of it's implicit assumptions is the very opposite of simple.
It merely seems simple because the definition appears short.
But it only appears that way because the definition depends on terms that are in and of themselves very complex, and not at all fundamental.
And none of this actually addresses the problem we started with...
Which was, after all, "Is it possible to believe in a contradiction."
Which then led to questions about what it means to believe something,
and somehow on to the point of how the human mind classifies information.
(I'm curious as to the implication that the brain does this 'incorrectly', when the only alternative method I can think of would render a person incapable of functioning in the real world...)
A definition doesn't have to explain everything it relates to, dictionaries aren't encyclopaedias. The definition doesn't have to explain what a jet engine is, so it's still pretty simple when fully expanded.
I may have been miscommunicating. From my perspective, you kept dragging the issue over to this debate about the meaning of words, which I wanted to drop (hence my frustration).
The categorization itself doesn't matter, we don't understand the brain well enough to accurately describe it, but I would say with confidence that it's a messy arrangement that would horrify an actual computer programmer, and nothing more than that need be accepted. Things are stored messily, and so if you have a complicated belief that would be contradictory in some circumstances, and those circumstances come about, you might accept that the circumstances are the case but not bother to update the belief, and so you continue believing something that if you thought about more closely would be a contradiction.
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