The problem of proving a negative is that every possible scenario must be accounted for.
And even then, there’s no guarantee that things might switch up the very next moment and allow for what you just proved there wasn’t.
So for general cases, the problem of induction assures you can’t prove a negative.
However, for past events, the problem of induction doesn’t apply as future events have been discounted right off the bat.
Instead there’s a different problem of the reliability of records of the past since you can’t travel back in time to confirm them.
And even with perfect reliability of records, the volume of information required from them is all but unviable, especially if it comes down to tracing each instance of the entire lifetime of millions of votes - so Gloom presents you with goalposts that are way too high even if you did have the resources.
This would be the point of your thread, if I’m not mistaken.
However, “proof by contradiction” can prove a negative. For example, we can prove there are no square circles simply by examining the definitions of the terms and finding internal contradictions.
There is no internal contradiction as far as I can see to some person commiting fraud in an election.
But there is one with regard to your God example:
God must be at least in part beyond human conception
(if God were wholly within human conception then He would be entirely mundane with no divinity and therefore not God)
Human conception is limited to that which is not in any part beyond human conception
All within human conception does not qualify as God
So we see that the essence of what makes God “God” is incompatible with human conception by definition.
All attempts by humans to posit “that which is beyond human conception” are within human conception so cannot bypass this internal contradiction.
Even something beyond human conception can only present itself to humans within human conception - any success here would reduce that something to being entirely within human conception and therefore no longer qualifying as God.
With any “God” only ever possibly presenting as “not God”, even the initial human concept of God at all in the first place was a fallacious one, so even trying to make something fit it was necessarily never going to work, as is any imagination that there’s ever going to be a point where humans can conceive beyond human conception and thus be able to have something that qualifies as God validly presented to us as God.
Just like proving there are no square circles, something as simple as “God doesn’t exist” can be proven.
“There was no election fraud”, however, is not as simple - and no doubt this was simply rhetoric and intentionally so - thus a little dishonestly so.
Of course I’m condescending to someone who condescends truth. Those who don’t condescend truth only see sweet nectar in my words. That’s lots of beings in the cosmos who see my words as nectar (male and female incidentally).
You and mag are caught up in trash brains. Do you really think you and mag are the cream of the crop of an infinite number of women in all of existence?
Not even close!
I don’t specialize in EVERYTHING!!!
But! I am one of the acknowledged creative geniuses amongst the creator realms. I’m also someone who earned the respect of ignoring the trappings of your garbage brains to take on the big picture.
Deal with it. You’re not the best women in the cosmos.
Actually, a coward and an idiot is a person who doesn’t have the strength to quote someone in entirety and respond to each point.
Phon. You’re not in the creator circle. Deal with it.
You’re pissed at me for being a man as well.
You know… when you get tested by gods, they don’t fuck around. To say I’ve been “vetted” is an understatement. You would have never survived my vetting.
But here you are, and this bears repeating, everyone wants to be seen as a conqueror… you and mag for sure. People who get my job, they know one thing…
In order to be great, you must make everyone great.
You haven’t figured out zero sum reality yet, you still bow to it, rather than give it the middle finger and walk off. You have trash-brain.
Are you saying that if the question is posed, “How can I prove that 2+2 is not equal to 5” your response would be, “It can’t be proven because maybe someday it will”?
It’s not rare for Ecmandu to be completely and persistently off-topic. I suppose the only reason he isn’t banned from this forum is because noone is moderating it.
He actually agrees that one can prove a negative. He states later on in his post that “proof by contradiction” can “prove a negative”. He merely thinks that not every negative can be proven. He’s saying that you cannot prove that a thing does not exist at some unspecified point in space because such would require one to observe every point in space which would take more time than even the longest human life can afford. And that’s true provided that we interpret the word “proof” to mean “extremely rigorous proof”. But when I asked Kropotkin in that other thread to “prove a negative”, an extreme proof of the sort Silhouette is speaking wasn’t what I demanded from him. I merely asked him to expose his rationale and compare it to those of others. So what Silhouette said kind of misses the point.
If his actual intent was to say that every possible negative cannot be proven, I can go along with that - because contrary evidence cannot necessarily be provided even if it actually exists somewhere.
Thank you for accurately summing up what happened just a few words later in my post for the benefit of obsrvr - I get the impression he’s a little butthurt by me at this point and will jump at the first hint that there might be a flaw in what I say, even if just a little more reading will show it’s not there.
From the opening post, I wasn’t aware that he was responding to you with respect to this “other thread” - he only mentioned Gloom, so I guess I was responding to what he said about him and not you. Unless you’re the same people, but I don’t get that impression at all.
Asking PK to expose his rationale and compare it to those of others sounds perfectly reasonable to me - it’s something I recently asked of obsrvr in fact, and it was no surprise that he had none. I hope you have/had better luck with PK, and I guess that means I didn’t “kind of miss any point” - but thanks again for looking for where I might have.
It wasn’t, but sure, every possible negative cannot be proven - that’s well within the scope of what I said if you’ve managed to get all the way to the end of my post yet.
Well, it seems like Pyotr wasn’t aware he was responding to me either. He thought it’s Gloom and that it’s about voter fraud – and it could be the case, I don’t know, perhaps a similar exchange between the two of them occurred somewhere – but I asked him elsewhere (on a thread about COVID-19, not voter fraud) to prove his claim that there are no conspiracies and he told me he’s going to start a thread about it. And here we are. (And by the way, I don’t cultivate multiple accounts.)
It’s an attempt to make this place less of an echo chamber and more of a place where people hold real conversations. A futile one, of course, but an attempt nonetheless. It’s always worth trying.
