Another Suggestion: If You Want to Refute Marx or Miss Chan, First Get Their Ideas Straight -- Don't Fabricate!
It seems I'm rather suited to being a lawyer, since I'm now defending the arguments of Marx and Miss Chan. But at the same time I've discovered a problem: the attackers haven't even understood the ideas of their targets before they set up a signboard, flail at it wildly, then declare victory. Is the forum really so fond of playing Ah Q these days? Roughly grouped by faction, those who attack Marx are all rightists; those who attack Miss Chan are all leftists. So this problem transcends factions and is a universal phenomenon. Just take today's posts as an example:
For instance: " [Falanxi Dacai Shifu] posted on 2006-08-11 14:13:37
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Congratulations again, Tangfen, for knowing to approach from physics.
I said before:
Mathematical arguments are not impervious. They can be refuted from physics. But the Chan girl choosing to refute from mathematics was a grave error.
Those who oppose Miss Chan's proof all make the same mistake: they don't realize that the examination of human thought must be conducted simultaneously in mathematical and physical space. Humans are real humans, not abstract symbolic tokens. So using examples of all finite natural numbers to refute Miss Chan is obviously barking up the wrong tree, and also reflects the metaphysical aspect of the opponents' thinking."
But everyone, look at Miss Chan's proof: "Because the leftist hypothesis states that 'all linguistically expressible human thoughts can be stored in a binary computer,' these thoughts constitute a set A, where thoughts are denoted by an, with n representing natural numbers. Since the universe will perish, and the time interval for humans to produce a thought cannot be infinitely short (otherwise it would violate the principles of quantum mechanics), we can know that the elements in set A are finite, though the quantity can be very large. Then we construct a thought as follows: U (the expression of this thought differs from thought an), where U represents logical conjunction, and an represents all elements of set A. This thought is obviously not in set A, and it cannot be simplified into any thought in A, because this thought speaks of expression, so any tricks of logical simplification are useless. Since set A is finite, the expression of this thought is also finite, and this thought is obviously a human thought. The contradiction can only come from the leftist hypothesis that 'all linguistically expressible human thoughts can be stored in a binary computer' -- meaning this hypothesis is absurd."
Doesn't Miss Chan's mention of "otherwise it would violate the principles of quantum mechanics" constitute examination from the physics side? How did it become purely mathematical? Miss Chan's proof has been up for many days now, and today there are still people like this. Isn't this problem a bit too serious?
More important than Miss Chan's problem is the issue of Marx's labor theory of value. Marx never, at any point, treated any single factor or a priori premise as the sole determinant of value. Anyone who has truly understood Marx knows this. Yet for over a century, those who supposedly refute Marx or defend Marx often commit this very error, sometimes even deliberately. Is this really a scientific attitude? Today, I just wrote that "labor time determines value" is NOT Marx's view -- it is precisely the view Marx criticized. This can be verified by consulting Marx's critique of Proudhon. But immediately two people continued to pin this slander on Marx. See:
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[Chuanliu] posted on 2006-08-11 14:26:44
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If you replace 'labor time' with 'Tangfen's will'
If the proposition that labor value determines price holds, then the proposition that Tangfen's will determines price also holds. As long as you replace labor time with Tangfen's will, you can clearly see that the correctness and absurdity of these two propositions are almost identical."
"[Yunguzi] posted on 2006-08-11 14:22:13
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In summary, nothing can exist in isolation, and nothing can be determined by a single factor. Therefore, abstract labor, expenditure of living labor, mere congealment of undifferentiated human labor -- such single factors cannot determine the value of commodities. The labor theory of value is an incorrect theory."
All of the above are typical examples of people who haven't figured out what Marx actually said, yet shout that Marx has been defeated. The most important thing in scientific research is objectivity, and it's the same in debate -- first get the other person's views straight. Is that really such a high demand? If the forum's level is to rise further, this bad phenomenon must change, otherwise it will be very difficult!