Strictly speaking, math is just like theoretical physics: it's a branch of philosophy. The only truth is that there is no truth and that this is true. And also that it is true that it is true that there is no truth. On to infinity? Maybe. (It's only maybe true that it might go to infinity! Godel's snake) I think mathematicians should consider philosophy thru considering substance. Why does a substance have to be one? Can a substance be 9? Then, apply this consideration to numbers.

The weakness of math is its philosophy of truth. The weakness of philosophy is that it "would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it." (Hume)

Or is that it's strength?

Indeed, mathematics is 75% invented, 25% discovered. Whether the exponent is 1 or 0, it clearly means something different from having an exponent of 2 or greater. Stringing random numbers together that look beautiful to you isn't math dude.

"A healthy mind can accept a paradox." Chesterton

If 2 has the exponent 0, the answer can be 2 or 0. Whether we say it means 2 zero times which would equal zero, or 2 multiplied a zero number of times which equals 2, we can see that these things are arbitrary. -2 × -2 can be -4 or +2. Saying it's positive 4 is bringing philosophy into math. And I know mathematicians can hate philosophers :)

Good job flame2, this is great. I told my geometry teacher in college "if an Indian yogi says one plus one is four, something is going on in his mind, and it could be the truth sensation." Now we DO take things as numbers. Isn't three pizzas more than two? Actually , that is culturally determined too! Amazing

Say, how can they even tell there is experience without brain waves. The experience could have in reality happened right before or right after the brain death. I've heard of cases where the patient can latter say what happened in the operating room while he was dead though. Hmm. I still say a warm brain can have experiences. But besides that, maybe the patients brain was so active after death it read the minds of others in the room and in reality had the experience while awaking.

Aquinas says the "more actual" has no length breath or width. Gee, all my favorite stuff! I doubt there are spiritual substances more beautiful than say Susanna Hoffs back in the day. Why believe in stuff you can't sense of measure anyway?

Spiritual-God thoughts make me very depressed. I am not into the fine details of science but I love matter. China has the rock worship tradition i find fascinating. Even St. Bernard said there is much wisdom in rocks, although I look at it from a "strange loop" perspective

It's called dead by fallible doctors. When death happens is debatable. The brain has many avenues for consciousness that science can't reach yet. If you want to get all Thomistic where activity and passivity are the prime factors AND believe that matter is less holy than spirit, that's ok. That stuff is fun. But it's not the only way to interpret reality. I believe I am pure matter, and yet maybe, I wonder, my consciousness will coalesce somewhere in my body at death and I can go to a warm fuzzy and cozy place in the quantum realm. All as my body ceases to be me :)

Aquinas was obsessed with "that which you can't divide", which means the spiritual for him. Well there is dimensionless prime matter too, which for him joins with the simple (partless) soul to form the human person, embodied. I don't know what kind of lsd stuff he was getting from wheat but I want to try.

As long as the brain is warm it can make experiences

Those experiences still come from the meat of the brain, the location of consciousness.

I am a materialist because I believe the holy-sacred-divine is nothingness, not a substantial spirit. I work hard at understanding the world mechanically because the idea of a personal God makes me depressed. In my elated manic-mystical moments I'm open to believing a thing or person as being God, the holy having fully engulfed it or her

The universe tries very hard to hide the secret of its origin.

It's interesting how you can understand past time as "always reaching for nothing but never getting to nothing" as Hawking said, and how they get there by understanding time as "bent" by an imaginary number within a Euclidean approach to quantum gravity.

Rationality Rules said he was interested in a theory of the origin of the universe that finite and doesn't have nothingness as a cause. I don't know if gravity can operate this way, but I will give a try. Two historical analogies first

1) Aquinas said the reason causes or births the will, which it in turn needs to operate

2) Fitche said we create or birth objects outside us, the non-Ego. Yet we are dependent on them in order to act

So, here's my argument. Gravity causes time to start by causing motion. So we can calculate all the motions from now till we get to the first motion, and before that there was no time. So the universe wouldn't be eternal or came from nothing. It's just a contained chain of causality, started by the first attraction of gravity.

I think this is far less fuzzy then Hawkings Zeno-like time. Hegel said infinity and finite reacted into causing the universe. I wanted a more physical definition. Theists will still say "you need a God to make sense out of this brute fact". Well people in India think there are monkey gods in the clouds and snakes in our spines. To them nothing makes sense unless these are true. Physics does not deal with psychology lol

A cosmic DNA? — Jacob-B

Schumann resonances (the pulse of the earth) is the same as human delpha waves and is needed for life to being. There is much interconnection because parts in our environment. They don't prove their is a god. Instead they show how connected we are even to the skies and that is fundamentally the religion people start myths

In The Open Universe Popper presents a neat argument that, if you try to introduce the Laplacean demon into a relativistic framework, the necessary information to "predict" the future (=determinism) can never be available. So the universe must be "indetermined".

It's in section 17, "Is Classical Physics Accountable". — Pantagruel

If compatabilism is true, science is indeed impossible. No longer can you say "I randomly selected this portion" because nothing is random anymore. We are completely at the mercy of a peek a boo universe that can do with us as it wilts

Wittgenstein's argument is essentially against linguistic relativists. We can't see what someone else means, but we can get a gauge on it to the extent that we can play the game. Those who say there are words in some languages you simply cannot translate into English are confounded by Wittgenstein. Anything and everything can somehow be expressed, but we don't know for sure what in this infinity is actually expressed in conversation. Maybe we are all talking past each other, or maybe opponents in debate are actually saying (trying at least) the same thing

To whom it may concern:

Truth is a movement that is not essential and is not substantial. At least that is how Hegel saw it and that is how I've considered it ever since I read his first book for the second time. If you can keep your mind one step ahead of the "but is THAT true then" game, you're a relativist

Zeno broke as much ground with his paradox as Euclid did with all his propositions. The distance from A to A is infinitely divisible (whether speaking of real space or abstract space), yet you can get across it because it's also finite. You don't just cross the finite, you also cross the infinite. Their combination is a wondrous thing, which you are all missing out on seeing. It's not clear exactly how it works. Motion is determinate AND indeterminate, and is like this because space itself is like this. The endless descending fractions as you halve the distance reaches the limit, but what touches the limit? That is the question. There is a fuzziness in there that you can't deny

As for odd numbers having the same cardinality as the natural numbers, it is as obvious to me that *what is greater in the finite must stlil be greater when transcended to infinity* as it is that 2 is greater than 1. Sure, maybe Cantor had some points. But that doesn't cancel what seems obvious to me. This proves MY point (to myself at least) that infinity is a much greater mystery than mathematicians want to admit. In fact I think most of them implicitly want to think infinity is some type of number.

1) how can something have no spatial final term but be finite

2) why can't you compare two infinities by first combining the cardinality with the density in each? Isn't this how you truly compare infinities?

But if someone's dog go missing, why is it unreasonable to assume aliens did it? Is it because this makes the same mistake as the theists when in assuming God's hand? What is closest to us in causality is a mystery, but it seems to be blind force and human agency

A physical cube-shaped object has a finite number of particles in it and can only be divided so many times. — noAxioms

Before you said the object has an infinity of points. Now you say otherwise. If finite figures have an infinity of points, that is paradoxical. Qualities apply to objects, objects have infinite parts with no final term, yet the object solid

The truth has no essence? What does that mean? — tim wood

That's what relativism means. Truth is not truth

So what's your point? — tim wood

Comparing infinities using different measures (density vs cardinality) that contradict each other proves the mathematicians don't have any idea of what infinity is

GR is a philosophical interpretation. Data can never show that colors don't exist, can never show that time doesn't exist, nor can it even show that the data wasn't time dependent and that say the speed of light will change someday. Einstein's work was primarily about philosophy, although he didn't read enough about it do realize Hume was correct. A person who changes speed will change size andthe speed will affect how fast his body moves. But there is no proof that time exists. That's a subjective opinion. Saying "someone traveling very fast will experience so and so" is psychology. Maybe speed affects all our perceptions.

You have weird intuition. — noAxioms

It's the same intuition as Kant's CPR.

There are two aspects here. The finite that is infinitely divisible, and motion over it (Zeno's paradox). If I take a cube, and divide it in half, and then again, ect to infinity and then line them all up biggest to smallest, what is the smallest? Does the series go off into the physical horizon forever? You might say "there is a limit". But there is no final term, so what is right before the limit?

Now motion must travel the infinite series in order to reach the limit. If we add alternating colors to
each descending fraction like I said, what color is the limit? "The series never ends" you say. But motion can get to the limit, so therefore the color can too. So we have a huge paradox here.

I suspect something like dimensions greater than 3 in addition to non-Euclidean geometry might be able to get a handle on this, but aren't we entering Eleatic realms at that point?

Nothingness is more sacred than something, so the latter comes from the former. You are caught up on solidity

Theoretical physics is just a branch of philosophy. How to interpret data is subjective. The sole thing Einstein noticed was the observation that external motion changes the size and some of the rate of change within the object. That's it. Since he didn't do the experiments, he probably didn't even come up with that. He was not a psychologist. He provided no data on how motion affects psychology. So he as kinda a fraud

What, exactly, is finite and infinite? Subdividing a finite segment doesn't affect its total length, so its finite length is unchanged. Also, what's the difference between 'endlessly' and 'endlessly, to eternity'? That's twice you've used that redundant modifier like it means something different than its absence. — noAxioms

I was using "eternal" twice for emphasis. Do you deny that it is unintuitive to be able to divide something finite a literal infinite amount of times?

If you can subdivide a segment endlessly, to eternity, it's finite and infinite. Figures are round triangles then basically by definition. I am tired of reading that crazy man "Cantor proved" so and so. We know nothing of infinity. Kant, a more accomplished thinker than Cantor, wrote "Concepts without intuition are empty". As long as mathematicians continue to refuse to accept the Second Antimony as a true contradiction in the Kantian and Hegelian sense, as they both did, they will always have unintuitive "definitions" and unsolved " paradoxes". The odd numbers are eternally half the natural numbers, so there is no way at infinity they can be equal. To say otherwise is to make infinity a number. That is as air tight an argument as anything Cantor wrote. So we have contradictions among intuitions on infinity and so we say we know nothing. It's a bridge though to Eliatic realms however, a secret door though that mathematicians don't know about

To get from point A to B, a superstar is required, according to human reason. First there is a half length, but since your half there and not there yet, there is another half, and so the process goes to infinity. Yet the endless is within finite bounds. How odd.

Take that infinite series and apply alternating colors to each half step, say green and blue. After this, we can rationally wonder what color is at the end, for the end\limit is there. At this point all our intuitions fail, and we must adopt some form of relativism or say we know nothing of math whatsoever.

Zeno's paradox has for half my life made me wonder how a figure can be both infinite and finite at the same time. Latter i realized that banach-tarski 's paradox stems directly from what Cantor said about points, even if this is not usually how it is derived. Does anyone deny that for Cantor the part of a figure has as many points as the whole? You can therefore, if this is true, take an uncountable infinity out of a figure and have a new figure. My mind blows up when people don't think this strange. If this can be true, I don't see how it might not be possible for the natural numbers to be twice the odd or perhaps for all infinities to be equal. It seems to me we know to little about infinity to say anything about it considering the numerous paradoxes that arise.

That's all I wanted to say. So Douglas can maybe cheer up

It has to do with relativism because something can't be both finite and infinite at the same time with respect to the spatial, yet it is so. Relativism is written into space, geometry, and matter. This has much to do with Hegels philosophy

I am truly interested in learning more. Saying that infinities have two aspects, cardinality and density, confounds me. I never have rearranged the odd numbers to biject them to the naturals in my imagination. If someone picks their favorite direction ( North south east or west) and imagines the naturals going off into the horizon, he can perceive that the odd numbers forever, eternally, objectively can never pass up the naturals. "If it's true for eternity, it's true for infinity" I'm thinken. I'll look into Cantor proof more today. I need to put down the tablet for now and get stuff done

If one contains all its fractions then it is a set too. It's a set that contains itself, which would mean it's solidity as a single number

ye he is very astute

The term "set" and "number" are unclear though. We are free to think of 1 as finite or an infinite collection of fractions. Are sets when separated from their members something truly mathematical? What existence do they have? Are they finite, transfinite, or infinite?

It does. I think there are infinitesimals a violin can hit. And if time has infinitesimals the same applies infinitely to rhythmn. Try alternating the colors

If I pick of an orange blanket and show it to the learning child and say "orange" and then say orange when picking up an orange toy, the child could think the word "orange" means means "picking something up". There are many mazes to go through without intuition and maybe that that autism is. Imagination with intuition is the best. When people make distinctions between classes, sets, and collections, I wonder which of those two they rely on more. Can there be a a hermaphrodite entity that.is half number and half set?

Qwex, auto correct changes your name to weed lol

My brother showed me around 10 years ago that musicians in India has just discovered a brand new note. I don't know why I haven't been able to find the article since but it was in the news. You could probably find it if only on a boring lonely night. Music is infinite and can't be constrained by theory. Even rhythm is infinite

In college i wondered if the world was an illusion but I'm the Cartesian sense. Not as coming from the mind, but not being real nonetheless. I don't think the world comes from a metal, wired computer

The idea of reality is shaded with the idea of truth. "To translate the word truth and especially to define this expression conceptually in theoretical ways, is to cover over the meaning of what the Greeks posited at the basis- as "self-evident" and as pre-philosophical. " Heidegger

And more, I can prove no God exists alpowerful by the existence of colors and math. If God threw a box across space and it split into infinite descending fractions into the alleys of the infinitesimal, and then applied colors to each fraction, I ask what would be the color at the end of the series when God puts the box together..?