On "logical proofs"

[jrmu <jrmu@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Zinov and IRCNow-Offtopic,

I do not think Aquinas and Laotzi/Zhuangzi mean the same thing; at least, not
so clearly.  There's no way I would have drawn the conclusion about imaginary
numbers being valid truth from your excerpt of Aquinas.  I believe God is the
essence of truth/logos, and since mathematics falls under logical truth, I
suppose what Aquinas and Laozi said are equivalent. The
Logos in Greek was translated as the Tao in Chinese in many of Bible
translations, instead of the Word like in English. So, it makes sense that the
Catholic conception is similar. (Incidentally, this belief
is why I cannot reject mathematical platonism)

Yet there's no way I *personally* would have jumped from the Summa Theologica
to imaginary numbers. I can, however, make that jump from the thesis that "the
Tao is ineffable".  I don't think the Summa Theologica's ineffability of God is
a core tenet of Catholicism, but 1) if it were, and 2) were it clearer that
ineffability applied to mathematical truth, then yes 3) I would consider
Aquinas prescient.

Do you have any arguments against my thesis that "the search for truth is what
leads to a productive culture?" That is my main thesis, not that I'm choosing
or rejecting analytical philosophy. I might read it eventually, but not for
now, because for now I want to determine the universe of worthwhile philosophy,
and I am unwilling to completely rule out Zhuangzi or the Tao Te Ching just
yet. I have obviously not ruled out analytic philosophy because I downloaded
all of Russell's books. But this heuristic will let me immediately reject some
books in the Western Canon like Freud and Nietzsche, since they deny the
existence of truth.

As for your approach to philosophy via rationality, is requiring rational
"proofs" an arbitrary decision?  There may be valid reasons for why
Laozi/Zhuangzi and others do not approach their philosophy with "proofs":

1) They believe the truth to be self-evident (their most likely reasoning)

This is also done in the West. For example, the declaration of independence
states: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal". No effort is made whatsoever to justify the beliefs. It does not
imply the conclusion is wrong.

2) The proof is left as an exercise to the reader (since the author finds the
proof boring and tedious)

I do this all the time! So did brilliant thinkers like Fermat -- "I have
discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to
contain." Fermat, of course, had no real proof: he just found the task tedious
and boring.

3) It is also entirely possible that the author is a fraud or cult leader

For Zhuangzi, his reasoning more likely lies with 1) and 2).

I wonder what benefit step-by-step "logical proofs" offer us. Lucretius' On the
Nature of Things, for example, offered us many "proofs" of atomism. Many of
those proofs are now obviously based on 1) incorrect premises and 2) absurd
inferences logic which lead to 3) incorrect conclusions.

For example, Lucretius argues that taste and smell are based on how atoms hook
together. The foul smells and tastes are due to sharp piercing hooks between
atoms contacting our nose and tongue. This, he explains, is how all sensations
occur from all things beind made of the same form of matter.

The 1) premise, the 2) inference, and 3) the conclusion are all wrong.

Is such a logical "proof" even helpful? Since the entire system of logic
Lucretius uses is fallacious, how is it any better than Zhuangzi who simply
omits the proof altogether?

The vast majority of the "proof-based" philosophical works are just as flawed
as Lucretius. Bad proofs are not much different from no proofs at all.

Again, look at Plato's Parmenides and the One and the Many. Comically absurd
logic arriving at a conclusion that may indeed be correct. In the end, what
matters is the conclusion is correct.

It is enough for a mathematician to propose an interesting and *correct*
conjecture without offering any proof. Goldbach's conjecture is interesting
despite no proof. I am not obsessed with proofs, I am obsessed with arriving at
the truth as quickly as possible. Fermat's Last Theorem recently was solved:
"Together, the two papers are 129 pages long[4][5] and consumed more than seven
years of Wiles's research time." "Only a small number of people were capable of
fully understanding at that time all the details of what he had done". What a
waste of human talent.

-- 
Aaron Lin
jrmu@xxxxxxxxxx
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