
May 25th, 2004, 08:38 PM
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National Security Advisor
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Join Date: Dec 1999
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Re: OT: An Existential Dilemma
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Originally posted by Stormbinder:
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Besides, let's assume for the sake of argument that you are right about historical facts. But than the same logic could be aplied to almost every other none-historical field as well. For example take jurisprudence. One could argue that the jury, (or professional judjes in some cases/countries) when they are declaring "guilty" or "not guilty" verdicts, based upon "beyond reasonable doubts" clause as requred by law, are also operating outside the field of probabilities. But if this is true, that they might as well deciding wether they like the guy or not, without listening to any evidence. Or even throw the coin and see if it is heads or tails. If these all are purely existantial matters and have nothing to do with probabilities than I think one could successefully argue for such aproaches over the ones that is currently employed world-wide. Do you agree?
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That's just misunderstanding a scenario based on the semantic misunderstanding.
Whether events are philosophically deterministic or not is irrelevant, because knowledge is never perfect, and is frequently a very uncertain approximation. You can't predict a jury unless they are all robots running a computer program which you understand and control. And even then, there's a "chance" (i.e. unknowable uncertainty without super-human knowledge) they'll crash, especially if they're running Windohs.
PvK
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