[MD] Global Warming: Science or Politics?

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Arlo previously]
Why would you want to overlook it? Incompleteness is an aspect of any 
symbolic system.

[Platt]
Including I presume the "incompleteness" of the "fact" that 
incompleteness is an aspect of any symbolic system. (I prefer 
self-contradictory to incomplete because it more dramatically reveals 
the weakness of logic on which we place so much faith to ascertain "truth.")

[Arlo]
What you're teetering around here is Epimenides Paradox, "This 
sentence is false."

I think Case or Ron recently mentioned how this was used in Star Trek 
"Everything Arlo says is a lie." Then Arlo says, "I lied." Hofstadter 
talks about this "self-referentialness", and how it leads to symbolic 
paradox and recursion. Its just a part of the game.

[Platt]
Be that as it may, it seems to me your view amounts to: "In the end 
we know that we can know nothing, even though for practical purposes 
we fool ourselves into thinking we can." Am I wrong?

[Arlo]
Depends on your definition of "know". By all pragmatic counts, we 
certainly can "know" things. And this isn't "fooling ourselves", its 
just a recognition that this is as good as it gets. Its like saying, 
we can get to 99.9999999999999.... % certainty, but we can never, by 
virtue of the game, reach 100%. Is that last .00000000000000001% a 
big deal? No, it is neither something we should deliberately ignore, 
or something we should dwell on incessantly. It just _is_.