Jarhyn
Wizard
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2010
- Messages
- 14,518
- Gender
- Androgyne; they/them
- Basic Beliefs
- Natural Philosophy, Game Theoretic Ethicist
So, let's discuss two topics which, I will admit, is a bit of a pet peeve of mine to see treated as the same:
Nonsense:
"Your claim that Jimmy is older than Tom, and was born later two days later is nonsense" is an example of nonsense:2.
"Your claim you saw a pig flying with little fairy wings across my property is an absurdity" is an example of absurdity:1.
"That game was an absolute absurdity, you got dealt five royal flushes." Is an example of absurdity:2
The reasoning for being precise in these terms is that in philosophy, there is great value in distinguishing the two.
The fact that there is a machine sitting in the room next to me right now running a universal simulation of a completely different set of physical laws on fundamental particles which are instantiated by fundamental particles of our own host physics, wherein the hosted physics generates an observable set of deterministic agents that make decisions, live, die, go insane, and all manner of other silliness... That's an absurdity.
Notice how it really makes no sense why any of that would "need" to exist other than the fact that something had to, and this is what reality eventually shit out of that soup of quarks and gluons in this place.
A floating point random number generator returning exactly 1, similarly, is an absurdity.
Contrast this with "nonsense":
While absurdities exist, while everything that is may be an absurdity by varying degrees and relative in their absurdness to any given point in time, nonsense is something that does not describe any thing even capable of existing.
When you wish to describe something as "nonsense" and instead use the phrase "absurdity" you are explicitly stating that the thing CAN exist but you are incredulous about that existence. This is, in fact, argument from incredulity, and so an argument from ignorance.
Claims of absurdity may be answered with examples and evidence.
Claims of nonsense can only be answered through proof of sensibility and of noncontradiction under non-trivializing axiom.
People who make this fundamental error weaken their own arguments.
Nonsense:
- The utterance of a statement which does not parse sensibly;
- The invocation of a contradiction; a modal construction which contains a true=false relationship
- A situation which is extremely unlikely, and so is assumed not to exist.
- Something which has no reason for being except ridiculous happenstance.
"Your claim that Jimmy is older than Tom, and was born later two days later is nonsense" is an example of nonsense:2.
"Your claim you saw a pig flying with little fairy wings across my property is an absurdity" is an example of absurdity:1.
"That game was an absolute absurdity, you got dealt five royal flushes." Is an example of absurdity:2
The reasoning for being precise in these terms is that in philosophy, there is great value in distinguishing the two.
The fact that there is a machine sitting in the room next to me right now running a universal simulation of a completely different set of physical laws on fundamental particles which are instantiated by fundamental particles of our own host physics, wherein the hosted physics generates an observable set of deterministic agents that make decisions, live, die, go insane, and all manner of other silliness... That's an absurdity.
Notice how it really makes no sense why any of that would "need" to exist other than the fact that something had to, and this is what reality eventually shit out of that soup of quarks and gluons in this place.
A floating point random number generator returning exactly 1, similarly, is an absurdity.
Contrast this with "nonsense":
While absurdities exist, while everything that is may be an absurdity by varying degrees and relative in their absurdness to any given point in time, nonsense is something that does not describe any thing even capable of existing.
When you wish to describe something as "nonsense" and instead use the phrase "absurdity" you are explicitly stating that the thing CAN exist but you are incredulous about that existence. This is, in fact, argument from incredulity, and so an argument from ignorance.
Claims of absurdity may be answered with examples and evidence.
Claims of nonsense can only be answered through proof of sensibility and of noncontradiction under non-trivializing axiom.
People who make this fundamental error weaken their own arguments.