Are there limits to logic? (moral, beliefs, moral, verse)

[standing_on_one_foot]

Logic is all fine and good (although it's a tool, not some goal in life, I should hope), if you're being completely logical about it. Humans tend not to be. We'll twist stuff, forget to look at something, jump to conclusions, assume things (you have to assume to survive...say, assuming that bears are dangerous and getting the heck away is helpful, even if that particular bear you're looking at has no intention of attacking, so it's not always helpful to sit and think everything out, natural selection would select against that, not for it)...yes, I think the universe is logical, at some level, I just don't think we are.

[Fluffy]

Quote: (Originally Posted by lilithu)
Another thing that logic does not describe is humour, especially ironic or sarcastic humour.

Nor does it describe beauty.

Logic, in and of itself, doesn't go very far to make life worthwhile, but those things that you mention, Lilithu, do.

And logically, they really shouldn't .

[hoomer]

Logic has an end...reality(God) has no end....

http://www.miskatonic.org/godel.html

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem

In 1931, the Czech-born mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated that within any given branch of mathematics, there would always be some propositions that couldn't be proven either true or false using the rules and axioms ... of that mathematical branch itself. You might be able to prove every conceivable statement about numbers within a system by going outside the system in order to come up with new rules and axioms, but by doing so you'll only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements. The implication is that all logical system of any complexity are, by definition, incomplete; each of them contains, at any given time, more true statements than it can possibly prove according to its own defining set of rules.

Gödel's Theorem has been used to argue that a computer can never be as smart as a human being because the extent of its knowledge is limited by a fixed set of axioms, whereas people can discover unexpected truths ... It plays a part in modern linguistic theories, which emphasize the power of language to come up with new ways to express ideas. And it has been taken to imply that you'll never entirely understand yourself, since your mind, like any other closed system, can only be sure of what it knows about itself by relying on what it knows about itself.