Philosophy Now Forum

It seems that we can, but I don't have the mathematical tools to prove such a proposition and it seems suitable for philosophical discussion and debate. What say you to this?

PhilX

If you dig a tunnel, but let a small undug space be in the middle of the tunnel (but only small and not for the entire length of the tunnel), you could dig a hole inside that remaining structure...

The question you're asking is not whether you can put a hole inside a hole, but what constitutes the "inside" of a hole since a hole is thought to be "empty" and that is what makes it the hole and not something else. This kind of thinking is impractical, but not wrong.

If you want to refer to just the hole of the hole and not any contents or deviances from the shape of it, you refer to its "space" or "empty space", and so there is no need to actually think that a hole does not also suggest its contents and imperfections.

In a doughnut, the hole is air-space left by the removal of some quantity of doughnut from the whole. So it's negative doughnut, the opposite of which would be doughnut. If you inserted a little island of doughnut in the center of that air-space, that would be subtracted from the hole, but not added to the body of the doughnut. That's if you could arrange for its suspension in the air-space, without touching the doughnut at any point. But if you drilled a hole in that hole with a dowel, that would not constitute a negative doughnut hole, because its opposite, or positive, would be a hole in a plank of wood.

So, it depends on the matrix. In abstract math, you can make a hole anywhere, any time, in any insubstance.

Don't know, but we might be able to put a hole inside a hole, without the superfluous and ugly 'of'.

Yubbut, there is a subtle difference between putting a hole inside a hole (as box inside box, which is no problem, as long as the inside box is smaller than the outside box) and drilling a hole in the inside of a hole (as, shoving a box into the side of another box, which would put two of the three dimensions of the shoved box in the fourth and possibly fifth dimension(s) of the original box) and drilling a hole from the inside of a hole through to the outside of the same hole (and then, how could you tell whether you arrived at the outside of the same hole from the inside of which you'd begun drilling, (or invented fasted-that-light space travel.....( if and only if you could only find your way back to the Alpha Quadrant!))) .

...drilling a hole in the inside of a hole.... That sentence needs 'of' in it. The other one doesn't.

Philosophy Explorer wrote:It seems that we can, but I don't have the mathematical tools to prove such a proposition and it seems suitable for philosophical discussion and debate. What say you to this?

Your threads seems nothing but fool's errands, could you post something with more meaningful content?

If you put nothing into nothing, do you have twice as much nothing? I used to think not, but that was before I met Mr Hammer.

vegetariantaxidermy wrote:...drilling a hole in the inside of a hole.... That sentence needs 'of' in it. The other one doesn't.

True. But in that last sentence, I made two mistakes (that I've noticed), one a wrong key-stroke, the other a repeated word. I can imagine a poster, who also knows better, making similar mistakes. (And now that I've mentioned them, I can't edit them away. They're going on my permanent record!)

A hole in a doughnut is filled with air, that is a mixture of oxygen and other elements.

We could make a hole of vacuum in this mixture of air.

But what would the walls of this hole be ?
To keep the hole of vacuum from dissolving into the mixture of air.

Philosophy Explorer wrote:It seems that we can, but I don't have the mathematical tools to prove such a proposition and it seems suitable for philosophical discussion and debate. What say you to this?

I'd say, 'What do you mean by "hole" in this instance?'

Arising_uk wrote:

Philosophy Explorer wrote:It seems that we can, but I don't have the mathematical tools to prove such a proposition and it seems suitable for philosophical discussion and debate. What say you to this?

I'd say, 'What do you mean by "hole" in this instance?'

With respect to this being the math section, I mean a perfect hole with absolutely nothing inside of it, perfectly round and one-dimension in depth. Also assume that the surrounding material is highly stretchable.

PhilX

Philosophy Explorer wrote:With respect to this being the math section, I mean a perfect hole with absolutely nothing inside of it, perfectly round and one-dimension in depth. Also assume that the surrounding material is highly stretchable.

PhilX

Can Math describe such a thing? What is one-dimension in depth?

If you have a big hole like 10x10 meters, and dig a minor hole 1x1 meters, then you have a hole in a hole ..viola!

Very simple!

Arising_uk wrote:

Philosophy Explorer wrote:With respect to this being the math section, I mean a perfect hole with absolutely nothing inside of it, perfectly round and one-dimension in depth. Also assume that the surrounding material is highly stretchable.

PhilX

Can Math describe such a thing? What is one-dimension in depth?

'Math'?? I assumed you were British. 'Math' is like fingernails scraping on a blackboard. 'Math' is American manglish.