GTM's Philosophical Corner

[MattKestrel]

o_O

Basically just a place to throw around philosophical concepts and discuss them.

For today, the Tortoise and Runner paradox. Ah. Despite it's obvious fallibilities it remains very hard to disprove as the entire argument shown can be considered to be true. So how is it impossible?

[sheganican]

eh. the first one seems the most sensible because it adds a limit on how much you discuss about a subject, and that was theres constantly a different subject to discuss (assuming you can withhold that responsibility ;)

maybe you should explain the aforementioned philisophical paradox for those who have never heard of it or dont fully understand it (like me)

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

The entire Discussion and Debate subforums are "just a place to throw around philosophical concepts and discuss them." The TheRealN Forums (TM) encourage you to provide input on any issues within these subforums in their respective threads, as having a single thread devoted to multiple topics is significantly less sensible, especially since you are effectively instating yourself as the arbiter of such discussion.

As for the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox, it is, as I said in a different thread somewhere in Debate or Discussion, laughably easy to invalidate as a paradox given minimal knowledge of calculus. The argument is very definitely false; you might win a Nobel Prize if you managed to find a way that it could actually be a genuine paradox, since doing so would invalidate centuries of development of physics and mathematics. This problem was solved 300+ years ago, and the dead horse has only been kicked increasingly harder since then.

[MattKestrel]

Well yes, we can certainly say that, were the practise to be done in real life, the athlete would overtake the tortoise with ease. However, I'm not completely sure but the argument only states that as the athlete moves to the tortoise's last position, the tortoise moves incrementally further, and if the athlete only ever moved in these incremental steps, he would not overtake the tortoise, which is true. However, ultimately he doesnt, so whilst the actual scenario is not supported by the argument, I personally wouldnt say the proposed argument is false, at least if we were only given the above facts.

Also, I think the forum users would find multiple philosophy threads slightly, spammy, for lack of a better word. Plus, this maintains a nice structure and keeps the topic moving along spontaneously. The only way in which I'm an arbiter atm is that I'm managing the thread; people are free to drop in new topics as they please (unless they specifically state that I should maintain a role as an arbiter.

[Atilla]

What? No. The Discussion/Debate forums are intended for multiple philosophical threads. Good gods, man, there are half a dozen "Grout the Bathroom Tiles of the Person Above You" threads. We're not going to yell at people for creating multiple philosophical topics, as long as they actually have something to discuss. Also, multiple threads are much more organised because people can actually see what topic is being discussed. If you try to use one topic, you'll get people looking at the first page and making irrelevant comments when the discussion has moved on. Also, threads without a specific topic of discussion tend to get spammy fairly quickly.

[MattKestrel]

Hmm, good reasoning. Would this be remedied somewhat if I put todays topic only in the first post?

Other than that I can see the merits of using multiple threads.

[Twistkill]

Good gods, man, there are half a dozen "Grout the Bathroom Tiles of the Person Above You" threads.

I realize this post of mine contains no relevant information, but I just have to say I literally lol'd at this.