Viliam_Bur comments on Open thread, February 15-28, 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: David_Gerard 15 February 2013 11:17PM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 25 February 2013 04:41:38PM 2 points [-]

Imagine that I offer you a story where some statement X is both completely true and completely false, and yet we can talk about it meaningfully.

And the story goes like this:

"Joe saw a statement X written on paper. It was a completely true statement. And yet, it was also a completely false statement. At first, Joe was surprised a lot. Just to make sure, he tried evaluating it using the old-fashioned boolean logic. After a few minutes he received a result 1, meaning the statement was true. But he also received a result 0, meaning the statement was false."

Quite a let-down, wasn't it? At least it did not take ten pages of text. Now you can be curious how exactly one can evaluate a statement using a boolean logic and receive 1 and 0 simultaneusly... but that's exactly the part I don't explain.

So the "talk about it meaningfully" part simply means that I am able to surround a nonsensical statement with other words, creating an illusion of a context. It's just that the parts of contexts which are relevant, don't make sense; and the parts of contexts which make sense are not relevant. (The latter is absent in my short story, but I could add a previous paragraph about Joe getting the piece of paper from a mysterious stranger in a library.)