Culture: Language: Logical
Inverse Text=Negation   (+2)  [vote for, against]
Interpret text display as a large integer with a truth value which whose complement has the opposite truth value

I'm seeing this page as black text on a white background. If I were using a bitmapped font, it might well actually be easily interpreted as a string of binary integers. Concatenated, those integers might form a large integer. For instance "I AM HERE" is potentially equivalent to something like: 00000000 00010000 00010000 00010000 00010000 00010000 00010000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00111100 01000010 01000010 01111110 01000010 01000010 00000000 00000000 01000010 01100110 01011010 01000010 01000010 01000010 00000000 00000000 01000010 01000010 01111110 01000010 01000010 01000010 00000000 00000000 01111100 01000000 01111100 01000000 01000000 01111110 00000000 00000000 01111100 01000010 01111100 01000010 01000010 01000010 00000000 00000000 01111100 01000000 01111100 01000000 01000000 01111110 00000000

i.e. a number of the order of 4722366482869645213696. Similarly, "THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT" can be expressed by a fifty-two digit decimal integer. Clearly variations in font, case, language and the like would mean the same meaning could be communicated by a large set of very large numbers. Therefore, in a sense that very large integer means the proposition it expresses and that can be true or false.

In terms of Boolean logic, these are strings of truth values. Therefore, their complement is the opposite truth value.

This means that if the display of the text is assumed by the person sending it to be black on white but is read by the intended audience in an inverted form, it will have the reverse truth value to that intended.

This is helpful because of the fact that we often undertake legal and other agreements online. We read a long wall of text (or don't) and tick a box next to a sentence saying something like "I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions".

Therefore, what we need is a software control for the display which will invert the terms and conditions, so we can affirm the black on white text which says that we've read the terms and conditions, which when we actually click on them displays them as inverted text, meaning that we have actually agreed to the opposite, i.e. the negation of every statement made in those terms and conditions. However, this software control needs to be installed without the user's consent so that they can't be seen as having done it deliberately, and they then need to be informed that they have done so.

That way, everything we do online in terms of these ToCs, which include all sorts of things such as paying for stuff, is thereby negated beyond our control, and nothing is binding or our fault.

It needs to be argued by a good lawyer of course.
-- nineteenthly, Nov 22 2014

I don't mean any of this http://imgur.com/Tux5C36
...and didn't agree to the Terms and Conditions [nineteenthly, Nov 22 2014]

Would it not be simpler just to view the screen from the other side?
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Nov 22 2014


I've always been faintly disappointed that, as soon as you take a logical operator bitwise, its semantics disintegrate. They (the semantics) don't seem to explode, or twist themselves into a knot, or anything interesting; they just up and die.

I applaud this idea as a blow struck against that disappointing seeming. [+]
-- pertinax, Nov 22 2014


Hey [nineteenthly] I wanted to talk to you about "carrying the weight" vs. "free bird".
-- rcarty, Nov 22 2014


There are so many variations on negating text, though. The cat sat on the mat =/= the cat did not sit on the mat. Or the uncat stood on the unmat. Or the mat sat on the cat. Or the tack sat on the tam. Or absolutely everything happened all throughout time except for the cat sitting on the mat.
-- RayfordSteele, Nov 22 2014


What I had in mind was just sticking something like "not" in front of the main verb of every sentence, so "the cat did not sit on the mat" or "I am not here".
-- nineteenthly, Nov 22 2014



random, halfbakery