With Best Play for both sides Chess is a Draw--So Why Do We Play?

Yeah these debates are all in good fun, I mean I do not take them as seriously as some people do. I just like to debate.

Epistemology definitely plays a role here, but I see Elubas's point.

"A certain individual ABC may not personally call a statement XYZ a fact without ABC himself having prior knowledge confirming that XYZ is indeed a fact, irrespective of whether XYZ is indeed factual or not."

Sure, that's true, although pretty trivial. I mean, the ability to call something a fact and knowledge are essentially the same thing aren't they? 

So yes, the person being able to claim something as a fact relies on knowledge, but the ability for something to be a fact does not. If something isn't a fact, it's not because people don't believe it; it's for some other reason. It might even be the case that something is not a fact and people don't believe it, but they're not causally related (at least not in both directions) -- if people suddenly started believing in that thing, it wouldn't suddenly become true.

It is hard to get people to realize that something may be true even though no human knows it is true and even though it has not been proven true.

You know, there is a fair chance that we are all Martains--that life on earth originated on Mars so it could be that Martians knew Mars and Earth revolved around the sun millions of years before humans did.

For those who like debate there is a group called Open Discussion and there are no real limits on the debate--religion-politics-logic anything.

In the very post you are quoting I was fending off LoekBergman putting things into my mouth I didn't say, and lo and behold, you proceed to put the exact same nonsense into my mouth that I did not say anywhere.

Nowhere did I say that the knowledge of a person or a lack thereof had influence on something actually being a fact or not. A lack of specific knowledge however prohibits that person from calling something a fact.

If you don't understand the difference, then I cannot help any further. But, stop trying to twist things around by putting stuff into people's mouths they never said and trying to base an argument on it.

(Another ridiculous claim that I supposedly said "something can only be true if someone knows about it" which I never did.)

Surely stuff might be true without you knowing it! But, based on what would YOU want to rightfully proclaim that it's true IF YOU DON'T KNOW IT???

perfect play implies there is no better move which implies any other move is worse than the perfect move and will allow the opponent who plays "perfect" moves to take advantage of it and win in the end

"Nowhere did I say that the knowledge of a person or a lack thereof had influence on something actually being a fact or not."

Calm down. Ok, so now you have gotten that out; now you should be able to sleep at night knowing that I know that you did not argue for this. As my last post indicated, I agreed with your statement, and then proceeded to say that another statement wasn't true (the one about knowledge influencing truth) -- whether or not that was what you were arguing (which I know now it isn't), I wanted to nonetheless make that clear.

You know, the irony of this whole debate (seems like this often happens when it's about philosophy) is that I think we both agreed the entire time, but thought we disagreed with each other because we didn't know what the other person was arguing.

Perfect play does imply there is no better move. but in any given position, there may be several moves which are equally good. Acttually there are several moves just as good and these include

1. c4    1. d4  1. Nf3  1. g3   

This is not logical

I made a perfect move

this means all other moves are not perfect

The above is not logical because there can be several perfect moves in any position

saying

not knowing you were asleep = not sleeping

thats like saying 

not knowing wether I will loose = not loosing

which makes no sense

It is kind of funny though that jaaas has said like three times that he was done with this debate, when he never actually was ;)

Yep, exactly. My goal was to make the argument look as bad as possible, so that people would realize it was so. The above was a representation of a position that I did not hold, but I thought BMeck did (although I guess it turns out he didn't).

perfect implies that it is the best move in the given position and there can't be 2 best moves .They will all differ a bit and one of those moves will give you a better advantage.

That is the best move for the position.

You understand that numbers are not real... we made them. The number pi did not exist before us

Ummm, that's like saying snow didn't exist before we made a word up for it...

actually numbers are just abstract concepts that we can use to predict the functioning of life to a certain level of precision only because there are a lot of variables which would have been eliminated if numbers were real.

Actually, perhaps a perfect game of tennis... never ends 

Maybe I'm wrong, but no matter how good the serve is, if the defender is perfect why would we assume they can't have a counter to anything the server does? Are we just going to arbitrarily say that, for example, a serve of 7890 mph can't be returned? If we have a "perfect" tennis player that should include being able to return that serve. After the return the server will hit the return back, and so on, and no one would ever lose the point.

In fact perfect tennis should be impossible because there are an infinite amount of speeds at which an omnipotent player could choose to serve, all of which will have a speed higher than whatever they choose. For example, if you serve at 98402 mph, you're not perfect because you could have served 98403 mph, 98404 mph, etc.

Perfect  play in terms of tennis means what the best human being currently capable of existing can do.  Human reaction time is 0.3 seconds.  You can do the math and demonstrate a tennis court width that prevents a perfect server's ace from being volleyed even by another "perfect" player.  The returner of serve has to either wait for the ball to be struck, or guess at where the prefect serve will bounce.

This is not really any different than soccer shootouts...a "perfect" goalie cannot block a "perfect" shot on goal from penalty distance unless they guess correctly at where the shot is going.  It's not humanly possible.  And if it ever came to pass that goalies could reach perfect penalty shots, they would widen the goal...because that is part of the game design.  You don't want goalies blocking all shots; that makes the game boring.

Actually when you are asleep you know quite a bit. For example you often know you are asleep.  My wife has occassional nite mare but she knows I will gently wake her if she is having one. [she knows this while she is asleep]

Oten you can control the events if you dream.   For instance you can make yourself fly off the ground very high but do not get too high as then hard to control...

idk what u are talking about.

when you are asleep dreams take over so you think something real is going on all the time.

the cotroling of dreams thing is called lucid dreaming but it only happens when you are almost awake.

There are method to reproduce lucid dreaming at other times but those are actually just methods that help you know you are dreaming and let you take over manually. Sometimes this leads to lack of sleep and other really bad side effects so it's not recommended.

You are starting to confuse the meaning of perfect here.

A series of perfect moves must lead to a must win position.

+1