If we are indeed in a simulation, and even if Bill Gates is the only playable character, there is no reason for him to think the simulation would make him famous by design.

I was looking at Steffan's slideshow — noAxioms

Mind you, an in-house mathematician has criticised some of the content in the slideshow (and in the article). Here is our exchange (I don't think he will mind me leaking DMs in this case):

Start with the first one: Cantor did not attempt to axiomatize mathematics. Cantor provided an understanding of mathematics in terms of sets, but he did not offer an axiomatization.

I got that statement off Vincent's slideshow slide 15 that I linked in the first paragraph "He did this by establishing set theory in an axiomatic way.". Is it wrong?

One might argue that informally implicit are the axiom schema of unrestricted comprehension and the axiom of extensionality; also the axiom of choice. But I don't know that Cantor articulated them as axioms.

Indeed, it is common in the basic literature to distinguish between, on the one hand, Cantor's work (sometimes called 'naive set theory') that was not formally axiomatized and, at best, deserving to be called 'an axiomatization' in only a overbroad sense and, on the other hand, actual axiomatizations such as those of Frege, Whitehead and Russell, and Zermelo.

Another babbling special-needs individual who can't do middle school math, somehow even worse than OP.

Please solve the following equation:
$x^{2}-3x=0$

I am almost 40 years old. — chiknsld

That is too young for Alzheimer's.

Fictionalism is an approach to theoretical matters in a given area which treats the claims in that area as being in some sense analogous to fictional claims: claims we do not literally accept at face value, but which we nevertheless think serve some useful function. — Stanford Encyclopedia - Modal Fictions

Thanks, bookmarked. One of the schools of mathematical nominalism is fictionalism.

Ad hom...is another logical fallacy. :blush: — chiknsld

You don't know what "ad hom" means. Pointing out "fallacies" (where there is none) is not impressive or interesting after high school.

In any case, I did a short breakdown of the topic here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15080/grundlagenkrise-and-metaphysics-of-mathematics
Tones, who knows about the topic much more than me, had a few corrections to make about it, some of which I have implemented already.

So you deny that numbers exist? Really? — Ludwig V

I don't have a very strong stance on this debate exactly, I am aversed to dualism in objects, so positions like platonism irk me immediately. For me, numbers exist more like Superman exists or an equation exists rather than how my hand exists.

Is it perhaps because you think people should not say mathematics is thus and so, but be more specific? — Ludwig V

Because I think people should not claim X when whether X is far from being settled by specialists. Not exactly the same but close to how you put it:

Or because people so often say that mathematicians think this and that when it is plain that only some mathematicians think those things? — Ludwig V

If truth is objective, then propositions are true or false stance-independently.
If propositions are true or false stance-independently, then a proposition, X, cannot be true or false relative to a belief about it.
If a proposition, X, cannot be true or false relative to a belief about it, then the only way one can express X in a way that would be true or false relative to a belief about it is by writing a new proposition, Y, that is "I believe X". — Bob Ross

This argument seems to be: truth-apt propositions are stance-independent, the MS claims that moral propositions are stance-dependent, so — for the MS — moral propositions are not truth-apt, thus they are not propositions at all unless the MS rewrites it as "I believe X", which is not moral anymore. Is that right?

It is another episode on TPF of Europe-bashing. Sorry that Europeans led the world in science and technology, led the world in conquest, led the world in philosophy, led in globalisation, led in humanitarianism (for a much longer share of time than you would expect from such a tiny peninsula). The strategy of the weak, because it is weak, is to demonise the consequences of the strongest, even though the weak, if it were in the position of the strong, would have acted much much worse.

Between 500 and say 1500 Europe was neither technologically, nor militarily or scientifically more advanced then China, Islamic Egypt, the Ottoman empire, the Mongolian khanate etc. — Tobias

The Mongolian Empire was more advanced than Eastern Rome and France in the 1300s? I don't think you have any clue what you are saying.

Why is that a compliment? Only if you have some sort of normative commitment to violence being a good thing might this be construed as a compliment. — Tobias

It is a compliment, unless you want to admit to being a hypocrite, lightly bringing up the Mongol Empire "as more advanced" without any condemnation of Gengis Khan being a mass rapist and his reign killing off almost 20% of the whole population of Eurasia, estimated around 37.75–60 million.

It would be merely picky to ask whether "+" and "-" are objects, because it is obvious that they are operations to be carried out on objects. — Ludwig V

I don't know what platonists say about mathematical operations. Perhaps they would say they are relations among numbers (which for them are real things). Most kinds of dualism for me are overly problematic and I think only nominalism is really sensible when we get to the bottom of things.

Does anyone deny that numbers exist? — Ludwig V

Putting it bluntly, nominalists and conceptualists and every kind of anti-realist strictly defined.

Does anyone claim that they are concrete in the way that bricks and timbers are? — Ludwig V

In a way, immanent realists do.

Before that it generally followed developments in the more advanced civilizations of the East. — Tobias

Europe overtook the East starting in Antiquity, it is not a recent thing.

It is through conquest that 'Europe' became a thing. — Tobias

Thanks for the compliment :strong: :fire:

I found again the story I was looking for earlier from the Efé Pygmies, it is called the Forbidden Fruit.
The Efé Pygmies have been shown to be one of the oldest intact cultures on Earth by dNA studies. — Sir2u

Very cool. I found this website, that says:

Their mythical story of death begins with the existence of a supreme being who made a man known as Baatsi out of clay, covered him with skin and filled his veins with blood.He later made the woman a man's companion and instructed them to bear children.He forbade them from eating the fruit of the Tahu tree.Baatsi fathered many children, who consequently fathered more children, continuing his lineage.Everyone obeyed the rule, and they lived with so much joy.When they got old and tired, they went happily to heaven.Everything was smooth until a pregnant woman craving the Tahu fruit convinced her husband to give her one.The moon saw the man picking the fruit in the dark and told the creator. He got angered by their actions and punished them with death. — https://lughayangu.com/post/the-forbidden-tahu-fruit

Honestly, I am quite skeptical of how much of this is true, given by how many parallels there are. And if it is true, I would imagine that the story comes from contact with Christian missionaries. I think that because that is exactly the Genesis story. Pygmies and Jews are separated by almost 200 thousand years, and the stories mirror each other so neatly while groups much closer to each other (and to Jews) don't have such similatiries.
It may seem like I am playing hard to catch but I studied a bit of anthropology and some red flags are being raised for me.

This website tries to defend that the pygmy story is original https://stellarhousepublishing.com/garden-of-eden-originally-a-pygmy-myth/ but there you see implied that the majority opinion is otherwise. Besides, I can't find any reliable sources beyond blogspot posts online about this topic, the Tahu fruit of the Efé.

But for one thing, the creation of life from clay is something that appears all over world religions.

If you are referring to some kind of Platonic math that's already known by God, that we are just discovering, that's an entirely different discussion.

Am I understanding you correctly? — fishfry

Yes.

Besides, math can't "represent the world," simply because there are Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. They can be used to represent the world; but they can't both be true, hence they can't both "represent the world." They can only be used to represent the world.

Math can not tell you what's true about the world. It can only be used to model various aspects of the world. That's different. — fishfry

You are assuming a non-realist view of mathematical entities again. You can still have Euclidean and non-Euclidean facts in the world as different facts just like algebra and calculus are different facts. Many philosophers think mathematical objects are real objects that exist outside of space and time.

Your whole comment is a lot of self-fellating nonsense about how you are so much more enlightened than others without giving any reasons at all for other to believe it — in fact you couldn't even read my post properly, even though it is a very short and simple post. Next time try actually making a good post with information in it.

X is a winged purple donkey more perfect than whatever can be imagined.
A Y that is real is greater than a Y that is imaginary only
The winged purple donkey is an idea in the mind and not real, therefore we can imagine a Z that is more perfect.
We can't imagine anything more perfect.
Therefore the winged purple donkey is real.

I don't quite get what "anti-realist" means here — Ludwig V

The idea that mathematical entities aren't real, especially that they aren't abstract objects.

My point is that this is wrong:

there was no "Europe" until Charlemagne's reign — 180 Proof

And the Magna Carta wasn't that relevant for Europe or the world. England at the time was an offshot of French civilisation and wouldn't have significant impact on the world until centuries later.

Europe and Asia in Ptolemy's Geographia:



The border he drew seemed to be around the western Russian border.

there was no "Europe" until Charlemagne's reign — 180 Proof

The landmass was already called Europe since ancient times.

Nothing proves that the Hebrew creation myth is anything more than a story made up by a bunch of old men with nothing better to do while waiting for an animal to fall into a trap. — Sir2u

Well we didn't say anything about that did we.

But there are a few old African stories, possibly including that of the Yoruba, that were passed by word of mouth from generation to generation well before the Jews existed and contain elements of the creation story related in the bible. — Sir2u

Like?

We only know about them from when they were made contact with so we have no idea how old their stories are. — Sir2u

So how do you know they are older than the Jews?

Maybe they did copy some ideas from the Egyptians — Sir2u

Pretty sure the Yoruba had no contact with the Egyptians.

Proto-languages are human inventions, so the oldest one is the oldest one.

However, it is impossible to say that African versions of this story are the originals. There is no written material coming out of SSA that is as old as the Mesopotamian sources. The Yeruba people didn't emerge until millennia later and the Asante are a good deal later than them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Or that.

A direct refutation of the idea is that such a hypothesis can only be supported by finding two groups in Africa whose religious myths are related and there are common elements between them and Hebrew mythology, and these two groups being isolated from each other by several tens of thousands of year. The way that these similarities between religions cannot be chalked up to coincidence or recently areal contact instead of actually coming from a common source is by establishing a proto-language between the two groups. Unfortunately, the oldest proto-language is Proto-Afro-Asiatic, which is not even 20k years old, and it is not quite sub-Saharan.
Even if such a fact could be established in comparative religion, they are still a distinct group from Eurasians, and the fact that the myths around the world have little in common with each other would not allow us to say with confidence that the connection between Hebrew and those African tribes is in fact from a common source instead of something that died out in the Eurasian branch and then developed independently again among the Canaanites.

None of that proves that the Hebrew creation myth comes from Africa.

There's something going on here about ends and limits. I understood that the issue here is that although the series does have a limit, it doesn't have an end. — Ludwig V

Yes, but the meaning of limit here isn't the same as it is used in Calculus. It is in the sense used here.

His analogy/metaphor implies that mathematics is something that we impose onto the world instead of something that we derive from the world. His position is anti-realist therefore. If he was right, platonism about mathematics wouldn't be such a strong position today.

The story of creation was not actually a christian idea — Sir2u

He says "Biblical story of creation", not that the story of creation was invented by Christians. Obviously not, since Genesis is in the Torah.

it came from African tribes and was already ancient when the christians adopted it — Sir2u

Source? Businessinsider articles don't count.

I'll be advocating for that gas attack as well as virtually any method necessary to destroy them — BitconnectCarlos

Everything is allowed when it comes to self-defense, but bombing civilian targets because it improves the chances of winning a war is several jumps away from self-defense.

Here's a litmus test for any moral theory: does it say the Nazi's were evil? No? Then that moral theory is a philosophical piece of shit. — RogueAI

First it was Germans, then Nazis, when pressed further, you will change the script to the say the ideology is evil instead. But the comments defending the murder of German civilians will remain. Funny.

Scholasticism was the syncretism of ancient thought with Christian theology, it bloomed when the Latin west recovered ancient texts that were well-known in the Greek east but not in the west, adding later the Judeo-Islamic knowledge that comes when the Christians take Iberia back.
This was all centuries after West Rome came apart, and what does Genesis have to do with it?
The thread doesn't have a clear topic.

broken link

Tegmark's trolling. And the world is mathematical to us just as it's sound to a bat. The world does whatever it's doing. We do the math. — fishfry

That is the view that mathematical is somewhat of an empirical endeavor. Many disagree however, and think that mathematics is something fixed and representative of the world.

Of course, and the statement that propositions are "objective and absolute" says nothing about either the subject or the predicate of that clause. Which is why I said it makes no sense. You haven't proven that MS equates X and "I believe X".

Do you not think what the values that we define necessary for those two to be defined (majorly by evolution)? — Lionino

Man, what the hell did I even mean by this. Fixed now.

says who? — flannel jesus

I did, see above.

If something is not necessarily right then it could possibly be wrong — BitconnectCarlos

Only if you see it as a matter of black and white and not as a spectrum.

necessarily thrive or self-actualize — BitconnectCarlos

Do you not think that the values that we define as necessary for those two are given (majorly) by evolution?

Although the head may err, the blood will never be wrong. — Nakajima Atsushi

Well, you're free to explain if you want to. — Hallucinogen

The others have already done so. If you can't figure out what's wrong with #2, you are not thinking or engaging in good faith.

This doesn't seem to be relevant to the argument. — Hallucinogen

It is comical that God intentionally bothers to mysteriously appear to random people at random times and yet stays quiet when a little Nepali child is being ripped to shreds by a Bengali tiger. Curing children from cancer is somehow a violation of free will, but turning a little lump of blood into liquid like in the "miracle" of Saint January doesn't violate free will at all, does it?
Given God's utter silence, any talk of miracles is a stark contradiction of Christian theology.

Examples; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31162335/ , https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20472012/ , https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00070/full — Hallucinogen

You are scurrying through abstracts like a politician to find convenient statements while ignoring the actual research and any other research that is inconsistent with your politics.

Not necessarily right or rational, but not possibly wrong or irrational.

And humans aren't? — Vera Mont

The ones I like aren't.

Of course it does. Who can deny that our morality is strongly influenced by evolution?

I've tried to make the case to him that this would still count on the basis of the wiki articles criteria for MS since the truth of these propositions is still dependent upon the person's attitude in some necessary way while maintaining some cognitive component. — Moliere

Yeah. The only place I found a coherent definition with the OP is Wiki — which is not a source —, other places say stuff like:

A subjectivist ethical theory is a theory according to which moral judgments about men or their actions are judgments about the way people react to these men and actions—that is, the way they think or feel about them

the nature of a proposition: they are always objective and absolute — Bob Ross

I see no meaning in this phrase.

the MS under attack believes that beliefs are true or false, and the value of T/F is not dependent upon another belief (or itself) — Moliere

The MS under attack seems to be the one that thinks «I believe one ought X» and «one ought X» are the same thing. I am not sure that follows from MS. Being so, the inconsistency is avoided by not equating the two.

But it can be modified pretty easily by noting that 2 can be changed to "feelings/the world make moral propositions true or false" — Moliere

That would no longer be MS, would it?