A question which is still a bit confusing for me. Is it symantics?

[shykitten55]

Hello, but I am sorry if this is silly.

I remember this question from a long time ago.  I am not sure I shall word it correctly, but I hope someone can help me with the technical details.


He question is:
How far can a fox run into a forest?

The answer is:
Half way.

The rational is that once past the middle of the forest, it is running OUT of it.

Ok, I can sort of accept that, but I se a flaw with that response.

If, at the halfway pint (or middle) it is then running OUT, then it changes what it is doing from running IN to running OUT.

So I put forward that it is "ALL THE WAY".  Because once it reaches the middle, it is running out - as claimed by the original answer - and so is therefore no longer running IN but OUT, so that revokes the question.

Am I missing something?

Thanks in advance.

[Paul Hutchison]

Given the assumption that the forest is at least large enough to contain the fox, I'd agree that the fox can run INTO the forest all the way.  Once the fox is IN(side) the forest it can keep running IN(side) the forest (indefinitely, if it runs in circles or the forest is arbitrarily large) until such time as it runs OUT of the forest by breaching the forest boundary.

I think the original question (and yes I vaguely remember this from many years ago) is an attempt at a pun playing on a technicality...that technically isn't really a technicality unless the forest is half as deep as the fox is long - in which case the fox can only run half way (half its length) into the forest before the nose begins to exit the other side.  That makes for a very small forest, such that it probably wouldn't be called a forest.

Oh, yes - I'm great fun at parties.  Give me another one.

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[shykitten55]

Well, there is the one which I "made" which goes:

Things that are different, by definition, are the same.

Is that true?

[Paul Hutchison]

"4 and 6 are different, therefore by definition they are the same"

It doesn't sound quite as good when you say it like that, does it?

Now, you could think of it like a vector in that "4 and 6 each differ from the other by the same magnitude, ie. 2, but in opposite directions", or in general terms, "A differs from B by exactly the same amount as B differs from A, but in reverse".

With that out of the way, my question to you and others is this:

If (as you assert) two things being different is, by definition, the same, is the opposite also true?  What about multiple things?

[shykitten55]

Paul,

The assertion is based on how we catagorise things.

We have a refrence point and compare things to it.  If they are the same, we put them in the box marked "same".
If they are different, we put them in the "other" box labelled "different".

So as an example:
We have a pile of cubes of all sorts of colours.  We want the blue ones.

We put all the  blue cubes in box a, and all the others in box b.

When finshed, the cubes in box a are all the same.  they are blue.

I put to you the cubes in box b are also the same, in the fact they are NOT blue.

[Kris]

I would say they all have the same classification rather than being the same.

On 12 February 2016 6:27:13 AM AEDT, shykitten55 <fuzzywu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey Paul.

My statement was more about classification.

We geoup things that are " the same" and things that are not are classed as "different".  How ever, by then putting them in the group of things "different" to that we are looking, they are all share the common label of "different". Therefore by defining them as that, they are all "the same" by virtue of what we have called them.

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Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[Paul Hutchison]

TL;DR Exactly, same colour is quite different to same classification.

My point however was that you speak of "difference" as being a property that each thing has, and by one thing having that property that makes the other thing also have the same property.

I assert that either you need to consider difference as a property of the comparison between two things (hence there is only one difference to be spoken of, and saying "they are the same" is nonsensical), or you use my vector analogy and assign each thing a difference relative to the other.

In the latter case, by definition, they only differ by the same magnitude, but the direction is opposite. Applying this to your coloured cube analogy, say you wanted to alter a red and blue cube to be the same, you can either make the red one "more blue and less red" or you can make the blue one "more red and less blue", the vector between them is the same, but opposite direction.

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[shykitten55]

I guess I only have myself to blame for all this.

Appart from the fact I shot myself in the foot with the spelling of semantics.

The idea is that, like most thing in science, it depends on your point of reference.

I read a book (or still am) and it discusses how zero is not real.  It is more a "filler in" when there isnt any value to go there.

Or something like that.

People have mentioned "classification" but that is just the point I was asking,

Is it semntics playing games?
Is it aso like that saying "my enemys enemy is my allie"?

It all depends on where you base the comparison, or reference point.

The question has in it the word DEFINITION which means that the things are being compared to a thing.
And if they are all "different" then they share that quality, whic makes them the same in that respect.

There was another one similar:
What is the smallest uninteresting number.

Cant paste the inks sorry.