Quote from: blendergasket on June 20, 2011, 08:24:46 AM

Quote from: oneforall on June 20, 2011, 08:18:11 AM

Quote from: blendergasket on June 20, 2011, 07:35:01 AM

I guess one of my points is that both the lovers and the haters of Bitcoin are appealing to logic to support their positions. And both sides have proponents who reason impeccably... and those who reason horribly so it's best to look deeper and broader to examine what it is we're doing.

all any of us can do by surrounding ourselves in this is sharpen out minds.

Absolutely, this is one of the more fascinating inventions I've ever seen. Also maybe we can find in it something we believe in and put that in our arsenal of things we are actively attempting to will into existence to make the world better/more beautiful/more fair/more fitting with some preconceived notion of the way the world works/whatever...

It's funny, Bitcoin seems to be (or is definitely about to be) one side of what I assume will be an epic battle but in itself it's a huge battleground with so many sides laying claim to it for so many different reasons.

Quote from: blendergasket on June 20, 2011, 08:20:12 AM

Quote from: oneforall on June 20, 2011, 07:54:06 AM

Quote from: blendergasket on June 20, 2011, 07:31:40 AM

Quote from: oneforall on June 20, 2011, 07:26:58 AM

Quote from: bitcola on June 20, 2011, 07:12:33 AM

Quote from: blendergasket on June 20, 2011, 06:47:19 AM

What "logic" does it fly in the face of? I think that there are a million different sets of axioms flying around here and people are using them to derive logics of all sorts which are all necessarily based on faith (including yours and mine)

Insofar that none of the logic is based on anything quantitative, I agree with you. Even if we call it faith, this forum seems to be trouncing one faith in favour of another when there is no reason to do so.

People here have got to see the other side of the coin (no pun intended). If they just want to deny the obvious then that is more likely to lead to this currency's oblivion than anything else.

This forum is starting to sound like the Iraqi Information Minister. In the eyes of the world = laughable.

How far back does this faith go? did satoshi use faith or logic to create something that has allready impacted the entire world so greatly? Faith is what people use when logic looks like to much work for them, this is why you often see faith and hate so often on the same side of an argument.

No, faith is what defines the axioms and logic is how they derive a workable system from their axioms. My guess is Satoshi created the seed of his idea with faith (epiphany?) and used what seems to be an amazing gift of logic to flesh it out into a system that (my faith tells me) will basically blow up the authority structures defined by the previous faith based monetary system. How are faith and logic antitheses to one another? My view is that they are different dimensions of a powerful system (which Satoshi has created).

An axiom is something that is considered obvious, yet is unproven. I don't think that it is evident that at any point there was an aspect of his work that was unproven to him, if he could envision the entire project and then set about to create it, then faith was never involved any more then i have faith that when i combine the ingredients of a cake and stick it in an oven that it will become a cake. I think that by calling part of what he did faith it gives one an excuse to not be able to create something just as amazing oneself, as if he was 'given' something instead of him 'earning' it through sheer hard work. As if he got lucky that his faith was correct and someone else could work just as hard and merely not be lucky because they had 'faith' in the wrong thing. Faith is a roll of the dice, logic creates weighted dice that land the way the creator of the dice wishes. Bitcoin is to wonderful for me to be able to chock it up to luck or chance, it is a carefully planned piece of art work, a machine.

An axiom is what you base your logic on. How far down does logic go? Is it turtles all the way down? Each step being preceded by a perfectly logical step before it, preceded by a perfectly logical step before it etc.

First, we're arguing about what went on inside another person's mind who we have never met before, which is necessarily an argument based on faith.

Second, the turtles all the way down argument: his logic had to have been based on something right? And that something couldn't really be based on logic or else that wouldn't be what the logic was based on but a step in the logical system he created.

Third, why is faith a weakness? He had an idea, however it came to him, he had that idea and then (I assume) he decided it was the right idea and an extremely powerful idea and he didn't doubt himself, or at least he didn't doubt himself to a point that kept him from seeing his idea through to its manifestation in the real world. That takes a huge amount of faith. That is not a crutch but a massively important virtue. Faith and Will are intertwined and without them all the logic in the world won't get you out of bed.

One of the biggest problems right now in our world I think is that people have an unquestioning and unanalyzed religious sense of Logic and Rationality and Science that makes us attribute all sorts of completely unreasonable things to them and to think that important dimensions like morality can be emergent traits of systems as long as these systems follow logical paths.

I thank you both from the bottom of my heart. It is the fact that people like you two exist that make me thrilled to be alive and drive me to fight for what i believe in Wink

You remind me that I am not alone.