It is entirely possible to construct a contradiction (a lie) in most symbolic structures. 2+2=2. This sentence is false. Etc. Contradictions posited in reality are an artifact of poor perspective. ==> On Wed, 02 Feb 2005 13:43:52 -0800, Steve Brust <skzb at dreamcafe.com> said: > I beg to differ. Life MUST contradict itself in order to exist. A living > body is constantly dying and being reborn, adding cells to itself and > sloughing off other cells. Death itself is a process (hence all the legal > problems about exactly at what point in an orgamism "death" occurs. In the > time that it has taken me to write this, some numbers of cells in my body > have died; others have been created. Should this process stop, I would > certainly be dead. The contradiction you speak of comes in our symbolic structure, not in reality, which doesn't need to do anything in order to exist. Where we get tripped up is in trying to drop tiny neat spherical memes like 'life' around things that are so complex as to beggar our imagination. This might be deemed begging the question (hah!) because: Since we must communicate using such symbolic structures, said structures form the only shared means we can use to see the world, so _all_ our windows on reality might transmit contradictions, even if the error is in the transmission, not the reality. But all kinds of religious movements are rooted in the goal of divorcing yourself from conceptual structures in your experience of the world. It's at least worth making the distinction between contradictions inherent in the world around us, and contradiction inherent in our sensory or conceptual apparatus. - Allen S. Rout - This navel-dive brought to you by Bayer (r) (sm) laprascopic equipment.