Zierro

I'll let you in on a little secret: It wasn't a joke. It was a point to show that sarcasm doesn't travel across the internet as easily as some of you seem to think, and I have proven this by being blatantly sarcastic and having the same people who are pointing out how the OP was being blatantly sarcastic failing to detect it. Yeah... "nice internet defense mechanism" wasn't exactly the wisest thing to say when it's apparently normal behavior for you to sweep your mistakes under the carpet, you know, by conveniently skipping over my point explaining how your claims were dead wrong. So you really are that type of guy who thinks they can never possibly be wrong, and when he gets caught in the act, rather than admitting his mistake and learning from it, instead plays the denial card and slithers his way out of the discussion. Interesting.

This forum is actually for people who like to rant about ranters. You have entered the realm where all complaints and annoyances are inherently childish and unwarranted, except for theirs. Regardless, you've given sufficient evidence that entitles your ranting: Now, how the users decide to put themselves on an intelligent high horse and make it look like you don't know your own nose from your grandma's elbow is just a matter of grabbing the popcorn, kicking back, and enjoying the show. Although this thread isn't that bad (in relativity to how circus-oriented Rants can get), I can still see the ever-so-helpful posters copy-pasting "It's the WILDERNESS, people will kill you, deal with it", while ignoring the fact that "It's the RANTS forum, people will complain, deal with it."

The discussion in this thread is toilet-worthy.

That is grotesquely brilliant. People back then were actually creative.

Feigning sarcasm to your hide your stupidity? Okay. Pretending that you didn't just get tricked to hide your stupidity? GF I WIN DAT EZ! :thumbsup: Crusty: 7 Obtaurian: -2 nice internet defense mechanism Coming from the guy who is now trying to defend his mistake because his TIF rep is on the line? Yeah, nice internet defense mechanism there. I thought "lazy mooch" was a dead give-away, but apparently YOU CANNOT DETECT SARCASM ON THE INTERNET - JOKE'S ON YOU LOL. Moral of the story: I didn't misread. The way the thread was going, it was all set up for me to easily get someone to fail at detecting sarcasm on the internet while they were criticizing somebody else's inability to detect sarcasm on the internet. Now would probably be a good time to admit your mistake, since you yourself have proven to be all about pointing out the mistakes of others. So what about when it comes to your mistakes, hmm? Please don't tell me you're going to be that guy.

That basically just destroyed whatever little faith in humanity I had left... I hope you just mean it destroyed your faith in the US. There's still hope elsewhere. Really I find this pretty interesting... Pearl Harbor, a military action, warrants a disaster killing thousands of innocent citizens who had no relation to WWII at all? Was directly nuking their citizens not enough? I remember watching a video about the guy who dropped one of the bombs, and he made sure to get the point across that he didn't feel any sort of human empathy whatsoever ("I just pressed the button and took a bite out of my sandwich, and went on my day."). It's quite literally the "Don't care unless it's me," mentality, a sickly widespread disease I see throughout my country time and time again.

And I get the feeling that this is a huge influence of one's pro-gun anti-gun attitudes. For example, I live a couple streets down from where the Deltona Massacre occurred. Long story short: Group of gangsters break into unoccupied house, setting up their Xbox and everything, girl returns to find them there, contacts officials, thugs get in trouble. Thugs feel they need revenge on this girl because she "disrespected them" and caused them to lose their Xbox. Thugs break in and beat her (raped her body), beat her five friends, and her dog to death with metal baseball bats (not guns). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltona_massacre If this is how my society functions, I'd like to be prepared. And I can see why people in other areas around the world feel there is no need for self-defense - because in their home, there virtually isn't. I would love to change the world and nip problems, such as the one I cited, at the bud. Just one question though: How? People will kill over the most ridiculously absurd of reasons. This has been occurring since the beginning of mankind. The most proactive way I can think of combating this issue is to obstruct their inevitable efforts.

So by this logic, the three-sided patterns (the concept behind a triangle) on a snake's skin does not exist in reality, but the snake itself does? My point here is that abstract ideas stem from physical observations. They essentially go hand and hand, which is why I have a hard time understanding why you are drawing some strange imaginary line between the two. The debate was initially about deciphering things that are impossible in our realm, and you asserted that this was impossible. Then you changed your point to, "Only abstract ideas can be impossible." But the thing the word "hole" represents (a lack of matter) is very much so objectively existent if you want to assert that something like the thing the word "mug" represents is objectively existent. So basically what you're saying is the "laws of physics" are really only the "theories of physics"? :unsure: For every physical object, there are a fixed amount of sides it can "land on". If you wish to change the coin into a non-coin, then sure there are different outcomes. I've went over this point before: Saying "things would be different if things were different" is a pretty pointless point to make. The whole reason I used the word "coin" instead of "random geometrical shape" was to limit the outcomes. And this is my point all along: it is possible to decipher some limited outcomes in the world around us. Judging by your last examples, you seem to be forgetting that part of logic is taking into account a wide amount of factors. For example, if you saw someone go into Door A and come out of B, and you made the "logical deduction" that if someone goes into Door B then they can come out of Door A, but you are not taking into account the possibility that A --> B is a one-way path and there is no way to travel from B --> A (let's say a one-way revolving door is on the other side), then you have skipped a logical step, therefore your "logic" was actually "illogical". By definition, logic is correct inference, not incorrect. If somehow you reached an incorrect premise, then apparently your "logic" wasn't completely logical. Uhhh, you just said the same exact thing I said. You're contradicting yourself again: "No, we actually don't know this. You don't know for sure that the world you see even exists, and I don't know for sure that we exist in reality. However, one of the working assumptions of scientific reasoning is that the things we see exist and that we exist in reality." You keep going back to ignoring the blunt truth of the situation: that everything is subjective. You seem to be under the impression that human perception is infallible or something. It's fine and actually natural to think that, but that doesn't change the fact that we simply do not know a world without us and have no means of possessing the absolute knowledge that that rock is actually there. Also, you didn't respond to the "observer effect" in quantum physics which was a very important element of my point. Oops, paradox. Refer to my point about the pattern on a snake's skin. Is it abstract or physical? If it is abstract, then the snake itself is too. Again, you're contradicting yourself and I don't know which side I should be arguing. "You act like "Oh god maybe we are wrong..." but that doesn't even make sense." ??? Not to mention those five paragraphs were you reiterating what I just gave a rebuttal to. Ahh, thank you. And the same can be said for mathematics, philosophy, and everything else, no? The reason we formed them into abstract ideas, is because we were inspired by nature. If we saw "one" rock, and then took a couple of steps and saw "two" rocks, we'd get a pretty good idea that there are differing numerical values in the world around us, hence "the concept behind numbers exist".

And the IDEA behind "existence" is still entirely artificial. As you yourself admitted, nature does not know "existent" from "nonexistent". "Existence" is nothing but a word, until we ascribe meaning to it. Are you really going to contradict yourself by now arguing that IDEAS can exist in nature? It can't even be an "idea" until man says so. Like I said time and time again, when you're arguing, debating, making claims, forming ideas, etc. you're ALWAYS going to be using language as your medium for doing so. There's no way to get around that. Yes, we invented math and we invented what a square is. Because something in nature caused us to. It still represents something. And as far as it being abstract, can a hole exist without humans? Here's a hint: Yes and no. The word for it obviously wouldn't exist, but would there still be chunks missing out of all the pieces of Swiss cheese in the world? Yes. We decide what the word means but our definition of this word doesn't impact the physical thing that the word represents. "Can Santa fly around the world in one night?" I agree that he can't fly around the world in one night if he can't fly. We don't even need to say that though, because going at those speeds and accomplishing that amount of work in such a small amount of time really is a physical contradiction. According to Carl Sagan, going faster than the speed of light would just add more time to the clock. Yet again, your Santa Claus theory has been scientifically debunked. But then that geometric shape would still be the dictator of which sides it could possibly land on. So basically your definition of "logic" is educated guesses with plenty of room for error...? We can and should work from that assumption in order to get the most accurate understanding of the world we can possibly get our hands on, but it doesn't change the cold hard truth that it is still an assumption nonetheless. Not a very good debating tactic though. If I were debating whether water causes things to get wet or dry, and my opponent blurted out, "Well it doesn't matter because you don't even know if you're real," it would do nothing to the fact that water makes things wet - at least in the world we think we live in. And with that trivial asterisk about the entire world we live in, I for one am not bothered. I'm going to live my life as if I'm real, and debate as if I'm real, even though I acknowledge it's technically an assumption. I don't see it as that much of a life-altering thing. If humans never existed, nobody would be around to tell a lie. Or I could be sneaky and say... aliens? On another note, some animals have pretty in-depth forms of communication, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were occasions where one animal would use a cry/call/signal/sonar/etc. to send purposefully misleading messages for their benefit ("come here for food" = "come here, I want to eat you" [AKA: a "lie"]). It's a stretch, but possible. "Existence", we couldn't truly know, could we? As a matter of fact, since quantum mechanics has already been brought up, what's your take on the observer effect? So yeah... humans are basically required to even talk about this stuff. It's an assumption to believe the concept behind "lies" and "existence" are actually real because we simply do not know of a world without us. We didn't create the thing we are talking about when we say the word, but we still decided to conceptualize it.... Just the fact that you are going to represent something means "abstract". And my point is that all knowledge is essentially abstract because you can never cut the middleman (us) out of the equation. Knowledge of "concrete physical existence" will always be based on an [abstract] assumption.

Feigning sarcasm to your hide your stupidity? Okay. Pretending that you didn't just get tricked to hide your stupidity? GF I WIN DAT EZ! :thumbsup: Crusty: 7 Obtaurian: -2

It's called sarcasm. ;) Learn2detect.

No I didn't.

1. That it sucks and it's better to be prepared? 2. I'm not the type to kill over territorial purposes, but it definitely shouldn't be considered shocking that someone gets hurt after severely disrespecting another person. That's nature. You can't go around being an inconsiderate ass and expect nothing but good to come your way. When it comes down to it, a person stealing somebody else's things, in their home, in front of their nose, chose to put themselves in such an awful position. And the fact that a stranger broke into your residence is reason enough to be on the defense. Too bad home invasion and murder/rape have such an upsetting correlation, or else maybe people wouldn't feel the need to be on the defense so much when they hear their back window cracking. You don't know what they're there for. Simple as: You shouldn't be there. GTFO.

Try being a little less careless and maybe you won't lose your money, lazy mooch.

Looks like my work leaves a pretty substantial impact. Never knew I was such a renowned psychologist around these parts. Thanks I guess. :-P Don't take it the wrong way. I still agree that they are douches.

USA Florida 1. Shirt 2. Road 3. Turning Signal 4. Trunk 5. Saltines 6. The Public 7. Condominium 8. Mudflap 9. Tar 10. Elevator 11. Candy 12. Popsicle 13. Soda 14. Garbage Bin 15. Porch 16. Pampers 17. Flashlight 18. Goalie 19. Dungeon 20. Tracksuit

But "it" doesn't "exist" until we define what "it" is and what the word "exists" means. No matter what type of claim you make (abstract, physical, philosophical) it will always roll back into semantics and language. We even define what the word "is" is. How can we strip all subjectivity out of our claims and our ideas? It is yet another impossibility. And the concept of a square has been conceived before the word "square". That's the purpose of having the word in the first place - to articulate and distinguish this type of geometric shape from that one. Would it be right to say "squares can't exist without humans"? On a ridiculous technical level, yes, but we know there are observable things in nature that directly inspired us to come up with the word "square". A "square" has been observed in nature (not a perfect square obviously), and thus someone felt the need to create a label for it. Wait a second, so a hole is not relevant to the physical world? Sure it's a lack of an object. I don't see how this changes the fact that ripping one off is physically impossible to do and that we have means of knowing this knowledge. So far your point keeps trickling down to "We do not know everything about physical matter", while acknowledging that there are loads of other things that are impossible in our world, when this debate was about being able to decipher impossibilities at all (such as Santa's story being full of logical/semantic/abstract inconsistencies). Inform me of the other possible sides it could land on. It isn't about what magical trick the coin can do in the air - it's about which of the sides it can possibly land on. There are only three possible outcomes here. It is physically impossible for the coin to land on anything aside from those three. Well, I would say we know it through both. How can you have science without logic? Precisely - the classification of "existent" is very much determined by man. This is what I was getting at: "Existence" is just as abstract of a concept as a "lie". You cannot prove objectively that one is any more "real" than the other.

But they need to get their self-esteem somewhere, don't they? It's the only thing keeping them from committing suicide, so I say let them have their crown of thorns.

I just beat Reach and Bioshock on their hardest modes, so now I decided to pop in FF13 and get that 1000/1000. I've also recently been exposed to Battlefield 2. Leagues ahead of any CoD...

On my first playthroughs, I usually just stick with my good old gamer intuition, exploring and figuring out puzzles on my own. When I'm trying to achieve a "perfect file" by getting all the items and such, I'll use an internet FAQ because I have a phobia for missing missables.

We also get to decide what the word "exists" means. No matter what, it's always going to come back to the language behind the claims/ideas. Quantum mechanics is a good point to bring up. Matter and energy aren't as predictable as we once though, so the cog thing wasn't such a great example. However, there are still many other physical impossibilities that even the quantum world cannot account for: It is impossible to rip someone's mouth off their face. Why? Because a mouth is a hole and there is no physical way to "rip" a "hole" off of something. Of course now you will probably say, "But that's only due to language!" And to that my response would be, "So? It's still a physical impossibility." Of course the outcomes are restricted - that's the whole point behind an impossibility. Let's put it this way: If aliens came down to earth and we can assume they have eyes like ours, which sides could they see the coin land on? 1. Side with man face. 2. Side with human construct. 3. Thin round side. The shape of the coin dictates which sides are possible to land on. If you want to blame it all on language, then I can do the same thing for the word "existent". Yeah, by logic I wasn't referring to faulty logic. My point is that there are some things logic can tell us with absolute certainty: "Having sex can lead to pregnancy." Does nature know existent from non-existent? Sorry for such a late reply. Family came down to visit and I've been busy.

Why? I hate the feeling of not having any form of structure in life. What good is being broke and bored?

Well, they don't literally require extraordinary evidence... You can still make the claims, but in order for the person who made that statement to take you seriously, then extraordinary evidence is definitely required. The extraordinary evidence that he requires extraordinary evidence in order to take things seriously lies within the fact that he just wants it that way.

I was working under the assumption that you could deal with implied redefining. Here is what I did: 1. tossed out the old meaning for "tri" 2. This in turn tossed out the old definition for triangle. 3. Which then replaced the old definition of "4-sided" with "3-sided" 4. Thus I now have "square" for the new definition of "triangle". I was working under the assumption that you would understand my point. Unless we make it a game of semantics and change definitions around, there are things that can be physically impossible. But that's the thing, you guys are going through mental gymnastics in order to change the rules of "up" and "down". In that case, yes, nothing is impossible because we can simply just tweak ideas around until they finally do work. For example, a creature can't both be physically alive and dead at the same time, until we just change the definition of "dead" to "alive". But in actuality, a fossil (what we did define as a "fossil") cannot breathe (what we did define as "breathe"), which was my point. What is the difference between the concept of something "existing physically" and the concept of "someone lying" in this respect though? How do you know this? Don't forget that even "seeing something" is a subjective concept. For example, some animals only see in black and white, insects see transparent objects as opaque, females are blind to the crustiness of men, etc. Yeah, I like to think of god as a cheater. I won't pretend to know about the in depth nature of physical matter, but I still want to question whether you have evidence that this could possibly work? Obviously the cogs going through each other is a requirement for spinning to be possible, but what I want to know is how that could even work. Touche. Now allow me to reword the question: Is it possible for the coin to land on anything besides tails, heads, or sides? But if I did? ? Please elaborate on this. It all dives into the realm of human classification of things. It seems to me like you're picking and choosing at a whim. We dictate what it takes to "exist" just as we dictates what it takes to "be alive". Correct me if I'm mistaken, but are you saying that physical impossibility is possibly possible, but just that we can't "know"? :-s

And to which my response was and still is, "A 'god'/'mug' does not exist until we call it that." Do we really have to go in another circle? I mean, I already have my response to what I'm pretty sure your rebuttal will be. ("But the physical object in front of my desk is there no matter what we call it." "But the act of someone intentionally telling another a falsity is there no matter what we call it.") Something sitting still is either a truth or a falsehood. We ascribe what it takes to constitute as "sitting still" or "moving", just as we ascribe what it takes to constitute as a "truth". Again, you are speaking of nomological possibility, since you claimed the laws would need to be altered in order for these things to actually occur. This is as obvious as saying a "square" would be a "triangle" if we decided to call it such. It's saying nothing but, "If things were different, things would be different!" I'm talking about actual possibilities in reality - not possibilities in different dimensions of time and space. We actually do have a system that dictates this is impossible - it's called logic. Do you think it is logically possible for these cogs to spin? If you can provide a logical explanation as to how these three cogs can turn, you win the debate. I'll be waiting. I'll even link you to a few hints: http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/impossible.htm I wouldn't claim something like that is impossible, as I really do have no idea. However, there are certain things that I do believe to be impossible because of logical contradiction. We can start with a cliched coin flip argument. A coin can land on heads, tails, or maybe if you are very lucky, the side. There are three possible outcomes. It is impossible for the coin to have any outcome that isn't one of those three. Same goes for my other examples. It is a logical contradiction for a traditional fishing rod line (a couple meters long) to reach the sun which is millions of miles away. It is a logical contradiction for a 1 gram of food to instantly make you gain 100 lbs. It is a logical contradiction for something dead (a fossil) to also be alive (breathing). By saying these are possible, you are merely asserting a baseless claim. When I say say they are impossible, I am asserting a logically supported claim. Again, this is why I love debating with atheists. They prove to act just as religiously and imaginative as the people they make a passionate hobby out of ridiculing. The irony of the situation knows no bounds. Are you kidding? I've answered these questions before, but you just swept them under the carpet. I do have a new one though: Either the universe has a first cause, or it has an infinitely recurring amount of causes. Neither seem to make logical sense to us, so whatever the answer is, it probably transcends our traditional logic. Now don't take this as evidence for god - take it as evidence that god is allowed to break more rules than Santa Claus. Like I said, the origin of the universe is a much bigger mystery than who gives us presents. Of course there are flaws in this reasoning - just not as much as there are for Santa Claus. Lolwat. But the thing is, we didn't. For all intents and purposes, in our world, a triangle has three-sides. A "triangle" cannot have anything more or less than three sides. The whole point I'm trying to get at is this: It is physically impossible for something to have three sides and four sides at the same time. Now why can't this apply to other fields of knowledge?