It was the 2nd Leeds Ruby Thing last night and a great time was had again. A smaller turnout than last time but some of the highlights included:

• Jamie from Engine Yard in a Brightbox t-shirt
• Dom discussing the pain that the Northcrew feel about Tom Smith’s “Northpack must die” article
• The trouble with smoking crack (it’s very moreish)
• Paul’s plans to quit his day job and join the ranks of the mercenary freelancers

And myself and James talking about philosophy. In particular how Wittgenstein and Nietsche were idiots and Descartes was the greatest ever.

Mainly because Descartes signed up for the army, in order to see the world. He then proceeded to spend the vast majority of his time laid up in bed. That’s how to be a soldier!

But also because of his solution to the “Mind-Body Problem”.

For those that don’t know, the Mind-Body Problem is an intractable one. Our senses lie to us. That is apparent. I thought I saw a person out of the corner of our eye but it was actually a tree stump. You misheard what I said. The water feels cold to this hand and hot to the other hand.

Thinking this through to its logical conclusion (as philosophers tend to) this means that actually, you can’t really trust anything your senses tell you. How do you know that you are not a brain in a jar, being fed false sense data continuously by some evil demon? Logically, there is no way of knowing. So Rene concludes his treatise by saying that the solution to the Mind-Body Problem is to have faith in God, for God is good and would not consistently lie to us.

This is also why Science is wrong. Science depends upon inductive logic. The “Scientific Method”, at its core, is about repeatability. If you repeat an experiment with identical conditions then the same outcome will occur. It takes hypotheses and proves them through consensus. This is not logically consistent. What if the demon is feeding you false sense data? You think the scales read 15g but actually you are weighing a three ton elephant? Just because yesterday the three ton elephant read 15g, and Dave in Hawaii weighed his three ton elephant and reads 15g doesn’t alter the reality that you were both weighing a 3 ton elephant.

You see, ultimately, science relies on faith too. Faith that what happened yesterday, in the absence of any other change, will happen again tomorrow. That is experential, not logical.

Logically, science is wrong.

The Second Leeds Ruby Thing happens on Thursday the 6th March at Mr Foley’s, purveyor of York Brewery ales. No agenda, just excellent beer and talk about Ruby, Rails and all things geeky. And I promise not to talk about punching dogs again (ok - maybe that’s taking it too far).

As a taster, here is an example of the kind of quality guest you can expect: Gravy in yer Server.