Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Doctordick
Well, I had been hoping for an intelligent response to this thread. It has been over a month since I posted and only seventy nine people have even read it so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The fact that so few people have even taken the trouble to look appears to imply that "Defining the nature of rational discussion" isn't an issue held in high regard here.
|
Well, one piece of advice: even smart people have short attention spans, and the length of your initial post in combination with the lack of a summary of your thesis in the first paragraph probably lost a lot of people early on. To a great extent too, now that I've read it, it seems to be a bit on the "obvious" side, so I think a lot of people may have had few "complaints" so didn't bother to respond, or like Q, ended up with what you might have considered a somewhat flip response.
Now the only issue I was really interested in in your post is that you seem to be missing the connection between logical and "squirrel" thought: It seems your definition of logical though is restricted to the process of actually going through the steps of a proof, and instantly if you skip over these steps, you're in squirrel-land. In fact what the squirrel is doing may well have been based on a logical proof, but once proven gets built into "instantaneous reaction based on input". No you don't think about your reaction, but you "know" its right, you don't have to go through the proof again everytime it happens. Moreover, logical proofs can be reasonably approximated by inference: its not an "absolute" proof, but through practice and/or genes, that squirrel knows what muscles need contracting to hit that second limb (and as your wife says, some times they goof, but its still based on "logic"). None of this really "contradicts" any of what you've said, its just clarifying some nuances.
Also, 79 is not a bad number of hits for a thread with no followups: you get lots of hits because the thread keeps getting bumped to the top.
In general I like formalism, but a lot of people can't be bothered. If you really want to get into an argument here (or anywhere else for that matter) you've got to say something controversial, and yes, do say it in the first sentence, or better yet the title....
Cheers,
Buffy
