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At computers base they view everything through a lense of true (1) or false (0). Computers are the best logical machines we have created because of this but because of this a computer doesnt know what grey is. (I use grey as an example but if this is true it means computers can never know anything ever.)

For instance I can create an if statement that says: if a = true (1, black) and b = false (0, white) then c = 1001(grey).

The computer didnt actually create grey like we would with two colors in the real world because actually combining 1 and 0 into a new number doesnt make sense when it only sees things through a lense of true and false. No logical operator can combine anything. If you have one stick then another stick you have two sticks. You didnt combine the sticks. Put in another way, according to logic, you cant combine true and false.

When you use logic to find out what something is you automatically begin to slice that thing up in an attempt to get to its fundamental properties but due to this slicing, you automatically eliminate the possibility of knowing something for what it is.

Perhaps the only way to know something for what it is is to experience it. I can describe to you grey as a combination of black and white but that is how you create grey, it isnt grey itself. Grey is a color, but that doesnt give us anything either. Grey is white but 50% blacker I could also say that grey is black but 50% whiter. Both of those are true, yet they still dont get to the idea of what grey is. Its possible that i could show you black and then grey so saying that grey is 50% whiter than black wouldnt make sense to you because youve never seen white. Yet you know what grey is.

So do combinations defy logic?

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    I'm not sure how to answer this. Your first paragraph was closest: Computers are wholly symbolic and don't have any information about the ontic world. This isn't related to binary logic; analog computers don't know anything either. For example, tide clocks don't know what water is.
    – Corbin
    Commented May 6 at 15:48
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    @MauroALLEGRANZA I didn't say that grey is both. I said that grey is it's own color. My point is that describing grey in terms of black and white is actually pointless and misses the whole perception of grey. Describing grey in black and white is an attempt to use logic to define grey but as you said grey is neither. So to truly know what grey is you can't break it down/use logic. Commented May 6 at 16:10
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    The computer didnt actually create grey like we would with two colors in the real world – it did. Just like in the real world, it took an amount of black and an amount of white and blended them. they view everything through a lense of true (1) or false (0) – untrue. The binary digits are arranged in groups, so the computer has a concept of number as well as true/false. And whether one 'bit' represents 'true' and 'false' or some other binary pair of properties (such as black/white), is a matter of context. In computers, where everything is a number, context is all. Commented May 6 at 16:43
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    @WeatherVane The computer did not create grey. At the assembly level the computer believes that grey is an order of 1's and 0s. If I print out a computer's representation of grey and show it to anyone no one will say that it is grey. The computer can never truly comprehend color (or anything in the real world) even though it can never be illogical. Commented May 6 at 16:59
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    @WeatherVane Yes, you are correct. A computer doesn't even perceive concepts. It literally perceives nothing. If you want to use logic to break down a computer...it is essentially a calculator at it's core. Yet we distinguish computers from calculators because we know that it's more than the sum of it's parts. Therefore you can conclude that computers can never even perceive themselves. Commented May 6 at 17:15

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Two points. First, computers are wholly symbolic and don't have any information about the ontic world. This isn't related to binary logic; analog computers don't know anything either. For example, tide clocks don't know what water is either.

Second, by Tarski's undefinability, most semantic concepts are non-logical and undefinable; "grey" is as logically nebulous as "truth", "love", "beauty", etc. Logic does not know what colors are. This doesn't mean that we can't have a logic which talks about wavelengths of light and other optical phenomena; it merely means that such a logic can only teach us about the world to the degree that we told the logic about the world.

Logic isn't a microscope. Logic isn't about empirical observations, but deduced conclusions.

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    I actually don't think that answers the question. You've defined that logic is a language but you haven't said whether or not the language logic can describe the world we live in. You just assume that we can create a language that can. Not that logic is that language. Commented May 6 at 19:24
  • @WayneIrving: I'm not seeing the distinction between logics and languages, sorry. Formally, a logic is a language equipped with rewriting rules; we can use those rules to transform one sentence into another, performing logical deduction. There's no problem with adding e.g. colors to a logic; in my spare time, I formalize Lojban, and it has color words, so I have notes on how to formalize colors. (If you don't mind reading Lojban, you can look at the theorems too.)
    – Corbin
    Commented May 7 at 4:30

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