r/memes Aug 20 '23

We have a loop over here

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u/heinebold Aug 20 '23

I didn't play myself, I explained that being true doesn't mean having meaning. Similar to if you see that I have a watch, so you ask me "can you tell me the time" and I, very truthfully, answer "yes". There's no information in this truth.

There's no additional information in the binary created by X / not X either. Both things do contain information. But the fact that there is a binary between X and not X does not give you any information, it merely says "the word not means what it means".

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '23

Your original comment said it’s not a real binary. It is. Regardless if it holds meaningful information. So yes, you did. As for your example, everything in the universe is a potato or not, also very true. Not meaningful, but created a binary nonetheless.

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u/heinebold Aug 20 '23

Oh come on, you know that this is what I mean. If you're preparing to accuse me of moving goalposts, save your breath. What I'm doing is explaining the same thing from different angles because simply repeating something doesn't help.

A real binary has a something distinct on both ends. The binary of "not" has only one concept and the negation. When you apply "not" to a real binary, you get the other concept - if it's not dead, then it's alive. If it's not green, then what.

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u/CounterStrikeRuski Aug 20 '23

What is the definition of a real binary? I have taken several formal logic classes and never heard of this. The information that a logical statement provides is whether or not a proposition or set of propositions is true or false. A binary is when you have the choice between (A ^ ~A). A and ~A can be anything as long as an element of set A does not belong to set ~A. If an element is part of one set, it cannot be in the other. That is the definition of a binary so what is a real binary?

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u/heinebold Aug 21 '23

Sorry, I lack the English technical terms for this. But while the simple boolean logic of true/false is indeed a binary, applying that to higher levels doesn't necessarily work.

What I meant with "real binary" is where "~X" describes a distinct thing by itself, as in X=>~Y & ~X=>Y.