[Ecoste]

> I think that if someone is completely unable to justify an observed truth to others, then it might not be a truth at all.

What if the observed truth that someone is trying to communicate is paradoxical and hard to communicate in and of itself? What if the truth is ambiguous? What constitutes ambiguous or unambiguous?

At the end of the day ambiguity is a real concept, so is a paradox, therefore there will exist things that are ambiguous and paradoxical and pointing that out does have value.

[Kranar]

There is no reason that ambiguities or paradoxes can't be expressed analytically and formally. Math and computer science are full of such things and they are celebrated.

Being hard to communicate is precisely why it's important to communicate rigorously and formally.

[Ecoste]

We have a ton of examples of great mathematicians who also happened to be great philosophers and vice-versa. Some philosophers also tried to incorporate mathematical symbols and such into their work. We value both their philosophical works and mathematical works. They were smart people and chose different mediums to express different concepts.

How can you try to explore the ego, consciousness, unconsciousness, dreams, suffering, life's purpose, subjective beauty, symbolism, truth, religion, god, ethics and whatever else that is not easily formalized? We might very well arrive at a formal and unambiguous description of these sometime in the far future, so are we not supposed to at least try to talk about these concepts now? You use different tools for different concepts, and science and philosophy is just 2 of those tools. At the end of the day philosophy undeniably changed the world, so there is at least some value to it. Philosophy is not anti-logic, it is very much for logic.

[Nevermark]

What is a person?

It is a practical question. Sometimes we need to have or choose a hard answer to make a decision. It inevitably isn't going to be solved formally.

Any more than what is the dividing line between a chair and not-chair. Many patterns we encounter have fuzzy non-formal edges.

Perfect consensus is impossible, but any consensus is valuable. So we invent and argue about the "best" way to "understand" these things.

These arguments are partly objective, partly subjective, partly emergent, and partly just farmed out to favorite "authorities" or social pressure. But important and unavoidable.

--

At the highest level, even how we percieve reality is important. It impacts our values, our motivations, our ethics, how we cope with events, etc. Trickling down to every day choices.

"What is real?" ends up being an important question, no matter how lacking in formal rigor the answers we each have are.