h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's true I was being flippant.

Or facetious or one of those words.

Many thanks anyway .

While one cannot prove that something is possible (vaguely reference David Hume,) it is possible to disprove that something is possible.

Example: Rutherford in relation to playing the bagpipes.
You can't prove that he cannot play them, for a number of reasons and variables, but you can disprove that he can.

What's the difference between "disprove that he can" and "prove that he cannot"?

Alright, Hume talks about experiencing things in relation to proving.

For example, I can disprove that any law of nature, but first I'll show you the difference between disproving, and proving wrong:

take gravity for example...the law of gravity that is. The law states that gravity will be in effect, basically. Now, if I can find one time when something doesn't obey the law of gravity, that law is void. I have disproved it, however, I have not said that either that law will never be in effect, or that gravity does not exist.

Now to disprove the law of gravity in Hume's style:
First, how do we know that things will always fall when we drop them? Merely because we've seen them drop many times before. In fact, each time we've dropped things in the past, they've fallen. So we can say we've experienced (key word) things falling when dropped, but we haven't experienced them always falling.

The Professor
Societas Eruditorum

Ah; a special Hume usage. By his criteria there are no proofs outside mathematics, only experience and more-or-less shrewd guesses; and yet he allows a normal meaning to "disprove". Does a floating magnetic top (I have one here) disprove the law of gravity? No, it applies it.

The word "prove" used to mean "test" and could stand equally for "disprove" -- as in "The exception proves the rule" (Exceptionem probat regulum). It's the same word as "probe".

Happy Halloween

*Wallows in Hume- induced delight*

yosarian,

"man is an end in himself"-Ayn Rand


thanks!

Welcome Yosarian, Sporkite, Assasin, member of The Cult of Dictionary Readers, and a Warrior of The Light. Dictionary reading is one of the many good reasons for playing Scrabble! But outstanding above all others is Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. If you leave one by your toilet you will have a numb bum every day.

This is a plea for help:

Do any of you, off hand, know any good sites or books for information on dualism? I have rather a long project to do on it and it's for a weeks time and I'm very disorganized...

Don't go doing strenuous digging on my behalf though.

ill look in to it for you. ill post the sites here if thats ok
yosarian

Thanks very much.

I'm doing my own digging, of course, it's just every little helps.

Try googling mind body problem.

For classical philosophy Descartes; and for the refutation of dualism on metaphysical grounds the first chapter of Spinoza's "Ethics"

Noggin

Ah, Ethics. I'll give it a looksee. I've read the Meditations through and through, I've even been caught murmuring the Wax example in my sleep.

"A cause must be at least as great as its effect" Descartes

In the first philosophical essay I ever wrote (for my Introduction to Philosophy evening class) I added

"An effect must be at least as great as its cause. This implies a Conservation Law for Cause and Effect."

My tutor wrote "This needs a deal more explaining." *I* think it explains itself.

Noggin

"An effect must be at least as great as its cause"

So when Radu Lupu plays a middle C, that is a particularly great middle C?

What's quality got to do with quantity?

Noggin

I would have put "The effects must be at least as great as the cause" as very seldom does a cause have but one effect.

That's right Recumb', the guarantee is a good point because in all eternity all things are possible. If one believes that time is eternal (infinite) then eventually any scenerio, and every scenerio, will occur. Kinda like the overdone example of the monkeys, typewriters, and whatever work of literature you wish to plug in. Its an "inevitable eventuality."

Nemo you've rather over-agreed with me there (Nemo was replying to post 418, where I mentioned I was taken to task for "guaranteeing" that you'd win over a small number of bets when your odds were 2:1).

I won't enter into any guarantee over infinite time, even though as you say *everything* is guaranteed to happen then.

On the contrary I would be happy to guarantee that monkeys will *never* type Hamlet by random stabs. The size of world needed for that to happen is quite unhospitable to humans: it is analogous to Borges's "Library of Babel" where every possible book (all possible combinations of letters, symbols and spaces) is stored in random order. Richard Dawkins calculated the odds against finding any book that contains a readable sentence in a lifetime there, and he calls them "vanishingly small".