Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

Non-fatal mistakes are learning opportunities. Like my nephew said once: You win Or you lose learn. The point seems to be that once you've survived a lion encounter, the next time round you see one, you'll know exactly what to do ... provided you remember what happened.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Some things in life are one-off, there being no second chances - do/die! A pity, wouldn't you say? To live a life full of regrets, a hell in its own way. :groan:

Danke! Anything more you'd like to share?

There's this book I'm reading titled History's Biggest Mistakes - by your token, they're lessons to be learned and then ... the difficult part ... to apply them.

P. S. (To All)

Does God, a perfect being, ever make mistakes?

duplication of another's view — Jack Cummins

Multiple Discovery

Oh, ok! Danke!

The Paradox of Skepticism: To want evidence is to reject faith, but Agrippa's trilemma shows that reason itself is unjustified which is just another way of saying reason depends on faith. We've come full circle: Faith $\to$ Reason $\to$ Faith. This, I suppose, is one, if not the, key message of fideistic religions.

Stuff that to my reckoning are beyond our comprehension

1. $\infty$ (Cantor)
2. 0 (Brahmagupta)
3. Zen koans, Nagarjuna's tetralemma (it is? No; it is not? No; it is and it is not? No; it neither is nor it is not? No)
4. Paradoxes i.e. contradictions (p &~p, logic bombs that wipe the slate clean, back to a tabula rasa/the mind of a child/the uncarved block)
5. Dimensions > 3
6. The unanswerables (vide Wikipedia, Noble Silence)

:zip:

Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Last I checked, there's absolutely nothing extraordinary about the way Jesus died - painfully, on the crux. If I or you or anyone else were crucified, we would've gone in the same manner. What happened before the cruxifixion and after is where Jesus and we differ (miracles, we can't do 'em). If death were a measure of truth in re mortals like us, to consider Jesus as mythical is quite unwarranted, oui mes amies?

Why would God want a relationship with you? — Bartricks

Good question! PSR.

Why on earth would God want a relationship with us? — Bartricks

The same question but now with hints in the sentence preceding the query.

PSR again.

:zip:

Not guilty (untrue) or Innocent (false)?

Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

Untrue isn't necessarily false in multivalent logic; lucklily or unluckily, I'm unaware of the other alternatives. Some say truth is a continuum [n% true and (100 - n)% false] as in fuzzy logic, others posit a discrete 3^rd option like in trivalent logic. Most of these topics remain above my paygrade. Oh well!

What makes a proposition unprovable? When the axioms are not sufficent to do so (anepikrita/undecidable).

That's all she wrote ...

Theories of truth

1. Correspondence (science)
2. Coherence (math)
3. Pragmatic (religion)

There's nothing wrong with having some fun. — Olivier5

:up: Argumentum ad absurdo? I don't quite understand how funny = bad argument?

As an aside: Science began as skepticism in re religion; now, as a girl said to me a coupla weeks ago, it's being given a taste of its own medicine (climate skeptics). A full circle and not a pleasant one. I suppose climate skepticism is just one of many fed-up-with-science movements. It'll be interesting to watch how it all pans out.

A minute of silence for the fallen on both sides!

:death: :flower:

Trump is a product of the system. I imagine the US, world's largest economy, as a factory/plant churning out not only planes, cars, microwave ovens, but also people, complete with weltanschauungs best-suited for US society. In short, like @Bitter Crank said in another thread, you get out of the sewer what you put into it (GIGO). Don't blame Trump, people made him what he is! :chin:

I have a feeling that some ideas like $\infty$ and nothing cause brain damage - Cantor lost his mind (theia mania) and spent his later years in a lunatic asylum for instance. These concepts & paradoxes of which there are many seem to have a deletorious effect on the brain/mind - constantly mulling over them may lead to a nervous breakdown. Such ideas are more than our brains can handle at present. And yet ... there have been no reports of an epidemic of mental problems among mathematicians. Why I wonder.

You'll find the current location of the main monkey in Book 6. Facilis descensus. — Cuthbert

I've never heard of this book! Do you recommend it? I wonder why you picked this book and not another. The path to hell is easy. Some might disagree for obvious reasons, one of which is the so-called prick of conscience which, if movies & books are to be believed, consumes the soul ... slowly and ... painfully.

THe question is 'how' it harms us, not 'whether' it does. — Bartricks

Good question señor! It would all depend on what mors is, si? So, what is mrityu (death), what is it mon ami?

objects are finite and processes are potentially infinite — keystone

Most interesting — Ms. Marple

$\infty$ isn't and object like for example an elephant or the number 10¹⁰⁰ or the word "elephant", it's simply a shorthand for the procedure 1. n = 0; 2. print n; 3. n = n + 1; 4. go to 2]. :chin:

Well, as far as I can tell, there's got to be a moral instinct akin to survival instinct; what else can explain a pride of lions or a pack of wolves? Wouldn't it be easier for a lion or a wolf to kill one of its own than go through all the trouble of hunting wildebeest and deer? Going by their behavior they don't really look like they're thinking about anything beyond the 4F's let alone ponder about morality. The long and short of it, some aspects of morality are hardwired.

The article in that link was perfect for me, short and sweet + it's exactly what I'd consider errorology. Muchas gracias.

For the benefit of those who'd like a summary vide infra

1. Reach mistakes (those made when dealing with unfamiliar/new types of problems)
2. Aha-moment mistakes (basically wrong inisght)
3. Sloppy mistakes (those made, due to loss of focus, when solving known kinds of problems)
4. High-stakes mistakes (failure is not an option, but still errors are committed)

I prefer Levi-Strauss' neologism entropology (entropy + anthropology) by which I think he proposed 'a study of disorder produced by human (social) activity'. Or Fooloso4's coinage foolosophy for 'fool-wise' (not 'wisdom of fools'). 'Error' is constitutive of disorder & foolery, no? — 180 Proof

Interesting. So in your world mistakes cause disorder. I suspect it's a positive feeback loop (vicious cyle) this, errors lead to chaos, chaos then leads to more errorrs, more errors more chaos, and so on. :groan:

Foolosophy, what is it? 180 Proof says it's not wisdom of fools, so what is it?

fallacies and cognitive biases — Yohan

:up: I wonder if fallacies and cognitive biases are essential for survival (re evolution) and for that reason persists in the population. If they were as bad as philosophers & logicians paint them out to be, wouldn't they have been weeded out by natural selection? Perhaps they're in the process of being deselected and I speak too soon.

patterns of error — Yohan

Oui, oui, monsieur, that's exactly what I'm interested in. Once one/more is/are found, the next step is to explain these patterns and gain insight into the human psyche.

:ok:

Does your theory quantify information like Claude Shannon's does? I noticed that you didn't answer my question. Lemme ask again: Is there any message in Enformationism whose information content is 0 (bits)? Explain both yes and no answers to that question ... please.

You're mistaken, Smith. P1 in the OP is not true; the conclusion does not follow. — 180 Proof

:ok:

Yeah. The argument in the OP is likely unsound (P1 is doubtful), but valid. I'm baffled by this simple mistake of 180's — bert1

Premise 1 is where the problem lies. Belief is independent of proof/evidence. Flat-earthers exist because they're quite clearly ignoring the evidence; hence it's false that If the round Earth exists, then "nonresistant" flat-earthers wouldn't exist.

As for the OP's argument, God & "nonresistant nonbelievers" can coexist if evidence is concealed (hidden God) and so the premise if God exists, nonresistant nonbelievers would not exist is false.

In the first case (flat-earthers) evidence is ignored and in the second (atheism) evidence is hidden.

Paul Feyerabend once played the devil's advocate and defended astrology, and he saw that the arguments against the very ancient tradition of astrology were exceedingly weak. — spirit-salamander

Mr. Paul could have argued well, I wouldn't know - there's always one guy/gal in the ER who insists on continuing the resuscitation procedure even after the patient is beyond all help.

Would you say that this fact is problematic? — spirit-salamander

Not an easy question to answer. I recommend a cautious approach - not dismissive but also not to dive headfirst into it. There must be a very good reason why ideas like astrology didn't make the cut so to speak - academics reject them outright as rubbish.

If you go by academia, the Western mind is (extreme) materialism manifest and doesn't tolerate the preternatural, reflexively dumping such ideas in the trash can. Outside of academia, it's an entirely different story, people are very receptive to the paranormal, including but not limited to astrology. My hunch is that formal & higher education drastically modifies our weltanschauungs - gullibility is replaced with skepticism and the rest is history.

Anyone ever played Civilzation, a turn-based strategy game where you establish a country, choose its government type, and so on? There are downsides to monarchy/fascism/communism/etc. - the social experiments that went horribly wrong - BUT, interestingly, the players receive, get this, bonuses from such governments that are inherited as legacy effects which can make the difference between victory & defeat in the endgame.

The takeaway is quite straightforward - no type of government is wholly good or wholly bad, each one has its time and place and later generations may reap the benefits of seemingly oppressive systems that their ancestors had to put up with. See? :snicker:

Let's look at the liar sentence this sentence is false - we don't need to know, in this case, the definition of truth/falsity; whatever they are, if true is the opposite of false and the law of bivalence holds, the liar sentence is neither true nor false. The long and short of it, "true" and its negation "false" can have any meaning we wish so long as logical rules applied to them are defined well and applied strictly, oui mes amies?

:up: :clap: Magnifique mon ami, magnifique!

As if a man had had his legs bitten off by a shark, and we all earnestly inquire what is the most important problem; that he is drowning, that he is bleeding to death, that he is losing consciousness, that his cries are not heard, or that the shark is coming back for more? — unenlightened

Isn't that (medical) triage? What's missing is an understanding of planetary health - no one has any idea of Earth's vitals, crucial physical parameters, that help doctors tell the difference between ER/OPD cases. Is the Earth sick, is this an emergency or not, what's the etiology, how do I confirm the diagnosis, what's the best course of treatment, how do I monitor the Earth, as it ages, does Earth become prone to specific kinds of illnesses?

If nothing is NOT 0 bits (contains information) then the world is a simulation. Why?, you ask. Because empty space, like the ones between the words in this sentence, is considered a character (spacebar) just like the other symbols (a, #, 2, so on) by computers; for a computer nothing is something; sorry ancient Greeks and way to go Hindus? Indians? both?

P1: if God exists, nonresistant[passive] nonbelievers would not exist
P1: Nonresistant[passive] nonbelievers do exist
C: God does not exist
— aminima
"P1" is not true, ergo "C" does not follow. :point:

e.g.

p1. If the round Earth exists, then "nonresistant" flat earthers would not exist.
p2. "Nonresistant" flat earthers do exist.
c. The round Earth does not exist. — 180 Proof

I sense a disturbance in the Force.

The argument form the OP is using is modus tollens and it's valid. Your counterexample is not a counterexample. If p1 and p2 are true, c follows. c (The round Earth does not exist) just happens to be false, independent of the premises and that probably threw you off.

As for the OP itself, drawing from my past 30 years of life on earth during which I learned people love games - god could simply be playing hide-and-seek with us!

The tone of the OP does not suggest Cantor's theological nonsense. — jgill

That's true. Apologies if my comment offended you in any way.

The OP mentions Aristotle's distinction of actual vs. potential infinities. The Wikipedia page on the subject doesn't explain the difference between the two all that well. My own take is that Aristotle assumes that for something to be actual, that thing has to have an "end"; since $\infty$ has no end (it's synonym is endless) it can't be actual. The only alternative then is to "exist" only as pure potential.

Finitism is kinda sorta echoed by Agent Smith in The Matrix $\downarrow$

Not a mention of God or Jesus or climate change. — jgill

:rofl: Don't be so sure.

To Cantor, his mathematical views were intrinsically linked to their philosophical and theological implications – he identified the Absolute Infinite with God, and he considered his work on transfinite numbers to have been directly communicated to him by God, who had chosen Cantor to reveal them to the world. — Wikipedia

God = $\infty$.

The OP is an atheist, mathematically speaking that is.

So there's this Hindu story about lord Shiva, his wife Parvati and two sons, Ganesha & Kartikeya. Shiva playfully asks his sons to go once around the universe. Kartikeya immediately mounts his peacock and flies off, certain that his brother Ganesha couldn't beat him (Ganesha's mount is a mouse) but when he returns after "some time" he finds Ganesha already there. Kartikeya is bewildered. Ganesha explains "my father and mother are my universe. I simply went around them."

In my estimation going against one's parents is a gateway sin - once you do that, the door to a world of other sins opens wide. Hurting/killing one's parents is to get your ticket to hell confirmed im Buddhism. Kinda slippery slopeish, but to my reckoning the fear is well-founded. Christianity too has its own list of unforgivables.

:up:

The argument makes sense if we rephrase the first premise thus:

1. If there's evidence for God (God exists), nonresistant nonbelievers would not exist.

I believe protestants are dead against natural theology (purportedly evidence-based), relying solely on their faith (sola fidei).

As far as the OP's concerned Jesus, whether mythical or not, hit the bullseye with respect to ethics. The controversy of whether Jesus was/is man or God is the gist of Christianity. You did it Jesus, you did it!

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right, turn to him the other also — Matthew 5:39

Something's gotta give, oui? Evil initiates/perpetuates a vicious cycle of violence (the Romeo & Juliet family vendetta) - in the long run reciprocal animosity is detrimental to both sides (both Romeo & Juliet died) - and that I feel is the rationale for "turning the other cheek". I haven't even mentioned the toll it exacts on other parties not directly involved in the feud - ripple effects!

Also, I find it more difficult to lose than to win - difficult is good, oui?

Democracy reminds me of atheism in the sense it forces us to come to terms with hard facts (there is no god/we can't trust each other) and then once the destruction of our faith/trust is complete to build a better, stronger, more realistic relationship with the world (atheism)/each other (governance). It's healthier to be frank & open in re human folly - we're not gods and for everyone's sakes we better factor that in, everytime & everywhere.

The guy in your office who, when there's a problem, goes "call the expert", that's Plato.

No problemo! Danke again.

:up: