Interesting, to say the least. My question as to what the end product of the union/merger of God with the universe is is to, at the end of the day, ask what are we dealing with here?

Is it a coincidence that the word "irrational" means illogical/makes zero sense?
— Agent Smith

Consider the root of "rational" is "ratio". Now think about an irrational ratio such as that expressed as pi, and you'll get a glimpse at the problems which pervade mathematics. — Metaphysician Undercover

Irrational numbers can't be expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers. That didn't jibe with the way math was supposed to be in the eyes of the Pythagoreans. If memory serves Pythagoras discovered that harmonious musical notes were rational i.e. the note combinations were pleasant to the ear when the length of string producing one was a whole number multiple of the length of string producing another. Since music is numinous in nature, it being somewhat of a bridge between us and the universe, the Pythagoreans probably extrapolated the math found therein to the universe itself.

The discovery of irrationals, kind courtesy of Hippasus of Metapontum who was thrown overboard to prevent word of this getting out, threatened to overturn what was up to that point a perfect world. A simple and yet magnificent way mathematics could serve as the foundation of the universe had to be abandoned. I wonder what Max Tegmark has to say about this?

Will we, somewhere in the future, come across a kind of number that would do to us (mathematical universe hypothesis) what $\sqrt 2$ did to the Pythagoreans (mathematical universe hypothesis)?

Can you elaborate on that.

To my knowledge there existed terms like effeminate and manly that were applied to men and women respectively for ages. The LGBTIQ phenomenon is simply these variations in gender/sexuality coming to a head or like a submarine, until now underwater, finally surfacing for all to see. There isn't anything that wasn't there already, it's just that in the present this community is in the limelight because they've decided to make a stand, it's now or never! Given how sensitive the issue is, especially since being anti-LGBTIQ is bad for businese & political careers, how much it's trending nowadays, it makes sense for these folks to, well, strike while the iron is hot!

As for biology & psychology, as these disciplines view whatever is placed in front of them as either well or sick, they've got a lot on their hands, navigating this treacherous terrain is going to be an uphill task.

That sounds more like post hoc rationalization than hypothesis testing. — Relativist

Ad hoc modding of a hypothesis, adjustments, in order to compensate for counterevidence.

Pantheism in a nutshell: God = Universe i.e. God is a synonym for universe. God, universe, same thing!

It's worth investigating what happens to the properties of theism's god and the universe. How do they interact and what's the end result of this interaction?

Descartes proposed Substance Dualism as an alternative to the monism of Materialism, which denied that Mind was immaterial (spiritual). But e pluribus unum (plurality is fundamental) versus e unum pluribus (unity is essential), is an ancient unresolved philosophical argument, dating back to the Greeks. For example, Atomism was both pluralistic and monistic, depending on how you frame the situation. If the atom is defined as having no smaller parts, it is locally monistic. But, if an indivisible atom is just one of a multitude of elementary objects, it is globally pluralistic. Apparently, the reason for making such fine distinctions is to give us something to argue about. — Gnomon

Yeah, just "something to argue about". Reminds of those how-to-keep-an-idiot-busy jokes.

On a more serious note, monism can be justified if we, Daniel Dennett style, say that the other offending opposite is an illusion. So declare the mind is an illusion and we have materialism; on the other hand, if we state that matter is an illusion, we have idealism. The other option is to assert the official positions of these two antithetical ideas i.e. matter depends on mind in one case and that mind depends on matter in the other.

An interesting bit of trivia that may pave the way for deeper insight into the issue:

Mrs. D, a 74-year-old married housewife, recently discharged from a local hospital after her first psychiatric admission, presented to our facility for a second opinion. At the time of her admission earlier in the year, she had received the diagnosis of atypical psychosis because of her belief that her husband had been replaced by another unrelated man. She refused to sleep with the impostor, locked her bedroom and door at night, asked her son for a gun, and finally fought with the police when attempts were made to hospitalise her. At times she believed her husband was her long deceased father. She easily recognised other family members and would misidentify her husband only. — Passer and Warnock (1991)

Main page: Capgras Delusion

Postmortem scenarios

1. Awesome: Heaven
2. Bummer: Nothingness
3. F**k: Hell

Which of these 3 obtains is, luckily/not, past our event horizon. What determines which of these 3 outcomes will come to pass is also very doubtful (no pattern that could've come in handy in solving this puzzle holds).

It's not a testable hypothesis, so explain what you mean. — Relativist

I wouldn't say the God hypothesis is untestable. An intelligent being would, since intelligence & order are correlated, ensure that their creation (the cosmos) is ordered rather than chaotic. I had a muslim acquaintance who attempted to convince me of Allah's existence in this way.

There's this video on the value of a human life. A safety board took a proposal to attach warning labels on a toxic chemical because it endangered the lives of people. The cost-benefit calculations were based on how much income would be lost if a person got injured/lost their life and projected a net loss. The proposal was rejected instantly.

The safety board then consulted an expert who informed them they were doing it wrong. He showed that the value of a human life should be based on risk of dying. They did the math and a human life came out to be worth $10,000,000 (1980s). This immediately turned the tables in favor of the safety board as it translated into a net profit if they stuck warning labels on the containers of toxic chemicals. The proposal was given the green signal.

An option we should work on: Let's not try to change the system, but instead work within it. If it's money everyone cares about, prove that being unethical is something we can't afford à la economic sanctions that make waging war suicide despite some exceptions.

Yeah, I feel pity for them too, who wants to be a caged canary? The first to die if the gas escapes, but yeah, perhaps they don't die in vain. We can learn to work harder to solve excessive human suffering due to their complaints regarding their own conceptions of what they regard as their own intolerable lives or what they exemplify as the intolerable lives of others. — universeness

With great power comes great responsibility. — Uncle Ben

Danke!

Exactly. It is very complex to get into Nirvana and Buddhism because it is a very deep content. Understand the history of India is pretty important too though.
I have learned in the past months that there are even different schools about Buddhism. So I imagine how complex is to have a clear vision inside Buddhism. — javi2541997

I concur and looks like nobody most of us don't know how deep the leporidaen hole goes. It must be obvious to you then that this is the heart of skepticism; in fact as per skepticism, every epistemological projects is a dead end (we can't even get to the hole let alone plumb its depths).

Nirvana must then be the realization of anatta, that there is no self, but then there's metempyschosis. The best response I can muster is the madhyamaka (reject both nihilists & eternalists). Generalizing, all pragmata are anepikrita (undecidable) due to the fact that they're adiaphora (logically undifferentiated). If you go the whole nine yards, even that which I said is of doubtful veracity. Enter pragmatism. The rest, as they say, is history.

Yin-Yang (Taijitu). Worst $\to$ Good $\to$ Better $\to$ Best $\to$ Bad $\to$ Worse $\to$ Worst. Return to base immediately pilot!

Yep, uncertainty is the millstone around our necks, the cross we havta bear. I propose we play ... with expectation (worst) and hope (best). If given a choice, I prefer paranoia (le choses sont contre nous), but Forrest Gump showcases pronia, fictional though he may be.

My definition then. Language skepticism is the position that language is (too) flawed to perform the tasks we assign to it and that includes everything spoken, written, signed. It can be summed up as trying to measure the correct length of a rod (find truths) with a defective scale (with a faulty language). It's quite odd that nobody's tried to invent/create the perfect language, powerful enough to get the job done.

Give Heraclitus a bell. Let him know the bad news. :chin: — apokrisis

:rofl: Heraclitus, the change guy, would've said that

1. Panta rhei
2. Min-Max

Hey presto!, creatio ex nihilo.

irrationals — Real Gone Cat

Is it a coincidence that the word "irrational" means illogical/makes zero sense? I recall starting a thread on how irrational numbers could be the smoking gun that there's something seriously wrong with mathematics and the universe itself.

I remember watching a video about how math teachers generate problems with numbers such that the answer is a nice whole number. The point? If you're ever find that your calculations lead you to an answer that has a decimal expansion then you've made a mistake. As you can see even ordinary fractions (rationals) are red flags, forget about an irrational number as an answer.

As for series sums, what about modulus arithmetic?There is no 13 o'clock on an analog watch; there's 1 o'clock though.

was NOT expecting a Benjamin Franklin quote...well now I know you're not a Brit. — GLEN willows

I go one step further than Diogenes who claimed he was a cosmoplitan (citizen of the world), I'm a cosmopolitan (citizen of the universe). :smile:

What about language skepticism? Anything to report?

:smile: Good day señor!

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. — Benjamin Franklin

Ok! Google should help you find the relevant pages! Bonam fortunam.

It's not so much that you don't meet a standard of rigor, it's that you lie about the subject. — TonesInDeepFreeze

:rofl:

collaborating — GLEN willows

I second that motion! In medicine they've come to the conclusion that a multidisciplinary approach is the best approach to treatment.

You should take a look in the Shoutbox. Hanover and I were just discussing a right wing commentator who wrote that casting a black woman as the lead in "The Little Mermaid" was scientifically inaccurate. I think your comment is almost as dumb. — T Clark

To be fair, this "right wing commentator" has a point. Not a lot of sunshine in the depths and that would translate to lighter skin tones.

I have seen black fish though.

:confused:

The argument for the claim I made is a simple one and perhaps it doesn't meet the standards of rigor required in mathematics.

ok.....it's not something I totally understand. Can you recommend a thinker...Frege? Wittgenstein? — GLEN willows

You're asking the right questions to the wrong person. Go to Joshs.

Do you not think science is at least doing something interesting things in neuroscience these days? — GLEN willows

Indeed, neuroscience has made great strides, but it's a work in progress.

There are critics of X, therefore there is something very wrong with X.

That is a risibly stupid argument. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Criticisms by mathematicians (finitism is a mathematical movement), to my knowledge, aren't usually baseless.

I agree, as do most, if not all rational people imo. Excess suffering remains a problem to be solved and human science is clearly motivated to continue to try to solve it. Advocating a solution of extinction or non-existence, is simply stupid. — universeness

(Hyper)sensitive peeps, among which number antinatalists, are for me canaries in coal mines - their hyperalgesia is kinda a superpower, buying time for "normal" folks to respond to imminent danger. You could say, in a sense, that hyperalgesics/antinatalists are the nociceptive system of the superorganism that is humanity.

@Joshs

Language skepticism, to my reckoning, is a devastating blow to philosophy and everything else that depends on language. If it is the case that a tool is defective, it'll quite naturally manifest in the work we do with it. Philsophers, writers, speakers, time to request a product recall!

In some sense religion is science (god hypothesis)

In some sense science is religion (Is god a mathematician?)

disinformation — TonesInDeepFreeze

Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

While I do agree that mathematicians have achieved some kinda broad consensus on the role of $\infty$ in mathematics, probably this is your area of expertise, the existence of finitism suggests to me that there's trouble in (Cantor's) paradise!

Interesting OP! Matter is energy and energy is matter, they transform into one another. However, they aren't opposites in a yin-yang sense (vide the problem of causation with mind-body dualism). Opposites, to give a rather obvious example, like light and dark can't transform into each other (re Parmenides, what something is can't be derived from what that thing is not; ex nihilo nihil fit). These are ancient principles of course, but they do make sense at some level and I appeal to that to make the point.

My problem is that once we posit monism,, opposite qualities like the one I mentioned above can be accommodated only if we introduce concepts like aspect/side/facet and so on. Just get it over with and adopt dualism/pluralism, oui? You're already at, perhaps even past, the halfway mark between monism and dualiem/pluralism anyway.

That said, we could say that monism with facets/sides/aspects is an in-between, a compromise of sorts, the madhyaka/the middle path.

Most fascinating!

Ok!

Nice!

Is there any reason for monism rather than dualism/pluralism?

Is it a case of simplification (novacula occami)? Is pluralism/dualism overkill, marked by superfluity/redundancy/extravagance? Dual-purpose tech? Depending on how you use a surgical scalpel, you could save/kill.

:up:

Well, take Cantor as an example - while most others were loathe to get involved with $\infty$, he leapt at the opportunity and what do you know?, the answer to the question "what is $\infty$?" lay in an ancient method for counting, the one-to-one correspondence (unique pairing of items in one group with that of another). That's like solving an engineering problem in spaceflight using a ploughshare, oui?

We need another Cantor to make the next leap in our understanding of $\infty$. I hope he's out there somewhere. Fingers crossed.

My interest in finitism hearkens back to the Greeks I suppose. $\infty$ defied common sense intuitions e.g. an infinite set and its proper subset have the same cardinality which in colloquial terms means a part is equal to the whole. Some might disagree on this point, but there are peeps who say this is exactly what the mathematics says. $\infty$ maybe the internal combustion engine of math - creates more problems than solutions.

Well, we could say this:

1. What we wished for: Philosophy
2. What we got: Science

Our genie isn't exactly the best there is out there.

Yet the definition of real is - as has been pointed out - up for debate. — GLEN willows

You should talk to Joshs on language skepticism.

Interesting take on defying programming. Definitely on topic as it is about the ironic nature of freedom being its opposite. Freedom is as you say having and doing what we like but is not free because these are deterministic factors that affect what we do. Im not sure the negation is free. I havent solved the problem. — introbert

That's ok, free will is a hairy problem. It's, as some would say, the pacyhderm in the room - it's existence/nonexistence is vital to us, but people prefer to discuss other, what I feel are, less-important, less-sensitive, stuff.