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To: The Philosopher who wrote (38091)	5/12/1999 2:55:00 PM
From: Chuzzlewit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Sorry Christopher, you are playing semantic games. There is no point arguing definitions -- it gets us nowhere. Your success in debating using that approach is a facile but specious way around the real issue. Defining up as down does not change the laws of gravity anymore than representing an unknown in an equation with z rather than x changes the answer. Show me one set of logical assumptions (that is consistent with real-world observations) where 2+2 does not equal 4. I will not accept internal representations nor will I accept definitional ambiguities as proof of your assertion. I also will not accept rules of logic that are internally inconsistent. Some decades ago Bertrand Russell commented, during the course of a lecture on logic, that using a false premiss allowed one to prove anything. A heckler in the crowd challenged Russel to prove that he was the pope given that 2 equals three. Russell replied that if two equals three, then by subtraction 2 equals 1. Since he and the pope were 2, and since 2 equals 1, then he and the pope were 1. That's the danger in engaging in definitional and semantic arguments. They may be fun, but they prove nothing. TTFN, CTC

To: The Philosopher who wrote (38091)	5/12/1999 3:23:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

There is something special about math. Perhaps it comes from the simplicity of the rules of the game. Humans are good at playing with abstract idea structures. Math is a collection of such, and the only immutable rule I can find is one of internal consistency. Applying that rule of internal consistency, 2+2 is 4 each and every time. E helped me realize that my black hole jape was not numeric in nature, but metric. (This suggests a simple answer to Del's question of the seventeen objects. Break one of them into two...) It is one of the beautiful things about math, and especially its bedrock of arithmetic, geometry and algebra, that it does seem to be proof against premise swaps. The internal consistency requirement quickly disqualifies the impostors. I cannot prove this. But I suggest that if a separate, internally consistent math were conceivable, someone would have found it and described it. A lot of very bright people took a lot of very powerful drugs and spent some time thinking so far out of the box that a coffee cup and a doughnut WERE indistinguishable. :-)