Journals of Toast 12

Posted by ezrast Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:08:00 GMT

The hand-drawn images will be back in a day or two.
Nobody likes Venn diagrams.

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  1. Marmaduke said about 21 hours later:

    They can be quite pretentious, it is true.

    Also, what kind of program are you in at college? or would you rather not say?

  2. ezrast said about 22 hours later:

    I’m just an (indecisive) freshman, and haven’t declared anything yet. I’ll probably end up with a degree in political science and/or math, though.

  3. Marmaduke said 2 days later:

    Do you actually sit down and write these, or do you come up with them during classes?

    All my semi-coherent political musings occur while on the john, strangely enough…

  4. ezrast said 3 days later:

    Usually a strip’s concept comes to me at completely random times. Often they relate to something I’ve been doing (for this strip, it was reading Wikipedia) but sometimes not. After I figure out what the strip is going to be about, then I have to sit down and write it. I usually write the first half of each strip with no idea of what the punchline is going to be; coming up with a punch involves staring at the paper for anywhere between 10 minutes and 10 days. So it’s pretty much half-and-half sitting-down-to-write v. coming-up-with-things-randomly.

  5. anonymous said 178 days later:

    This comic seems to make jumps in logic to reach its conclusions.

    The cell listens only to illogical arguments. Thus, it behooves toast to not waste his effort to communicate only to the cell useful ideas. That is, toast would be making use of speaking by suggesting useful ideas to someone else (whether the cell is there or not), and what the cell has said does not preclude toast from speaking (to the cell, to others, or to no one) for some other reason (such as catharsis). So, toast is accurate when it says that it is illogical for it to suggest to the cell anything useful, as far as toast is concerned.

    The next part is a jump. It only makes sense with two assumptions: 1. that toast acts on what it has just said, only telling the cell things other than useful suggestions, and 2. that everything that is not a useful suggestion is an illogical argument (or some equivalent set of assumptions that reach the same observed results).

    Also, if the cell listens to anything that toast says, and, as said before, toast says only illogical arguments to the cell, then there is no paradox, even though the cell says that there is.

    Toast continues by saying that it would have been more restrictive to say “I never listen to logical arguments”, but that is not the case. If the only things are logical arguments and illogical arguments, then they are equal (so neither is more restrictive), while, if there are things besides arguments, then it is more restrictive to listen only to illogical arguments.

    Also, logicality and illogicality could be complimentary, if we assume against paradoxes and if there is no agent to run around deeming things meaningless.

  6. ezrast said 178 days later:

    Part of the alleged problem is that Battery’s initial declaration is ambiguous—it may or may not rule out Toast’s reply. Toast’s first statement *is * logical, but the act of stating it is illogical (since Battery won’t listen to logical arguments). If Battery considers the latter property sufficient to make the statement listenable, then Battery will listen to any argument Toast could make (assuming that Toast has no ulterior motives for making a logical argument that Battery will clearly ignore).

    Assumption number 1, I feel, is only half necessary. Toast must have knowledge of what Battery has just said in order to make the paradox work, but only useful suggestions are paradoxical ones regardless of what Toast actually says (“useful”, here, means logical in the first sense—which, of course, means illogical in the second).

    You are entirely correct about assumption 2. Battery should have said “to any argument”, not “to anything”.

    For logicality and illogicality to be complimentary you must find a way to make both (x=(x→y)⇒y) and (0^0 = ∞/∞) strictly logical or illogical. If you can do that you are a better logician than I.

    (note: when I wrote the comic I was using ∅ to mean “undefined”. Apparently it actually means something totally different than this! My bad.)

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