Your boyfriend is never MORE himself than when he's drunk. Get a clue before this gets worse.

I am I think sensible, I only spend what I have. I do not borrow, and have never had a credit card ( yes never ) I am on the low side of the equation and as thus have to budget very very carefully. — Nort Fragrant

@Bitter Crank has your last disposible nickel in his sights. He (and others sharing his opinion) claim he'll only soak the rich. But there aren't enough rich to soak. If someone lays out some numbers that refute my point I'll stand corrected.

Why do governments waist so much money on irrelevant stuff they can not afford? — Nort Fragrant

Cutting government spending is never on the agenda of the wealth confiscators. Have you noticed that?

I was going to take the lion's share — Bitter Crank

I would just like to see someone show me some numbers. So many dollars from this many people with such and so net worth and/or income.

The game is to feed the four trillion dollar annual expenditure of the government.

Bear in mind that we don't actually even collect the $4T in revenue now. We collect three and spend four. I hope nobody thinks that's sustainable.

But just show me some numbers. Bezos and Buffet and Gates have what, around $250B among them? An obscene amount of wealth, I might grant you that. But it's a quarter of a trillion; and you have to fund FOUR trillion per YEAR. So if you strip Bezos and Buffet and Gates to the clothes on their back, you can run the government for 1/8 of a year ... about six and a half weeks. After that, those three are dead broke and you still need a lot more revenue, every single year.

So just show me some numbers. Make some estimates. Show me a Wiki link that says there are X people with Y amount of money, and you are going to take it all, and tell me how long that runs a four trillion dollar a year government.

It's a simple exercise for anyone serious about confiscating wealth.

My point is that the question is not about the morality of "clawing back" money. The problem is that the rich literally don't have enough money. In the end you will soon be "clawing back" a coffee house waitress's tips.

Show me some numbers.

Your analysis misses a major point: Were we to claw back many trillions of dollars from the richest 1% (whose total wealth, as I cited above, is very huge) and distribute it among the remaining 99% of the population, the government would have plenty of money to maintain its operations .., — Bitter Crank

Which part of my arithmetic do you dispute?

If you take a billion dollars from every billionaire in the country you can run the government for six weeks. Do you disagree with that analysis?

If you take a million dollars from every millionaire, you can run the country for a little less than three years ... after which you've wiped out the entire middle class. Do you dispute my numbers?

You say I missed something but you didn't say what I missed.

Wow. No. Not even close. It's fun to do some back-of-the envelope calculations.

The US currently has 11 million millionaires according to this article. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/life/features/2018/03/24/heres-how-many-millionaires-there-are-in-the-us/33205747/

Suppose we go to each millionaire in the US and we tax them a flat one million dollars. Some of them, like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, won't even notice. Most of them probably only have a million or a little bit more, and those we'll strip down to the clothes on their back if we have to. If you have a net worth of a million or more we take a million. That's basically the life savings of all the middle-class couples from the heartland. They own a house, he's a teacher and she sells real estate, they put a couple of kids through college. We'll strip them bare, take the house and throw the kids out of school if they haven't finished yet.

How long could we run the government of that? Well the government spends about $4 trillion a year. Eleven million people times one million dollars is 11 trillion dollars.

So we can run the government for a little less than three years. Not bad, perhaps. But there aren't that many Bezos's and Gates's. You just wiped out the wealth of a lifetime for most of those 11 million people. And in three years when the government was broke again? All those people would be gone. You'd strip the country bare and be back to zero in three years.

That's the baseline for the discussion. There aren't enough millionaires to even strip naked to run the country for more than three years. And after that, there's no more money.

Billionaires? There are 540 of them in the US. Take a billion dollars from every billionaire. Again, Bezos and Gates won't be troubled much. But most billionaires only have that one billion. We'll strip them down to the clothes on their back.

That's 540 billion dollars. Enough money to run the country for about six weeks.

Moral of the story: There are not enough rich people to pay the government's $4T annual tab. The poor have no money. It's the working class, those people working hard all their lives to accumulate whatever they've got, who fund the government. After you soak the millionaires and billionaires you are into the everyday working stiffs. The guy who fixes your car and the guy who drives a bus.

Any redistributionist scheme to "soak the rich" must INEVITABLY, as a matter of simple arithmetic, very soon cut into you and your neighbor and everyone else who works for a living but hasn't accumulated much wealth. That's pretty much everyone.

I never doubted it. — T Clark

Now that's not true! But no matter. I posed specific questions, you declined to respond. It's all good.

We're not getting anywhere. We both just keep repeating the same things over and over again. I think it's time to give up on this subject for now. No reason you can't keep it going with others. — T Clark

I made perfectly sensible points that were different from what I said earlier. I'm making an earnest effort to understand your point of view. I'm disappointed that you prefer not to address the direct questions I posed.

Is "Person 2"'s claim have a slightly higher probability of being correct due to the number of eye witnesses they claim are available? — coolguy8472

Not in the least. The sole arbiter is the issuing authority of the lottery, whether a country or a state or a church group. No number of non-arbiters, no matter how large, can confirm a win. If a thousand people see your winning ticket, the lottery authority can always claim machine error. Here is a real life case. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/28/574070736/how-the-glitch-stole-christmas-s-c-lottery-says-error-caused-winning-tickets

A sufficiently detailed and complex simulation of a universe would be indistinguishable from a "real" one. I'd go further and say they are the same thing. — T Clark

Someone a few posts back already noted that a perfect simulation of the universe would suffer from infinite regress. If I have a box on my desk that perfectly simulates the universe, then the simulation must itself contain such a box, and so on ad infinitum. This already presents scientific and philosophical problems.

Ah here it is ...

Building a computer seems to require a universe in which to build... — Banno

Perfectly correct.

But if by simulation you don't mean a simulation on a digital computer, what do you mean? We could play word games and say that the universe perfectly simulates itself, which of course it does. But I think you must mean something more than that. Some subset of the universe must somehow be a perfect simulation of the universe. I'm afraid I haven't got that much imagination, but I'd like you to try to further explain this concept to me.

1) If it's not a computation, what is it?

2) How can a part of the universe simulate the whole?

Well actually that second question has an interesting mathematical analog, since there are bounded subsets of the real number line, namely open intervals, that are topologically identical to the entire line. This is the idea of a continuum. So perhaps a part of a continuum can be identical to the whole. Is this where you're going?

Or perhaps a poetic metaphor, "To see the world in a grain of sand" and so forth.

I did try to discuss my understanding of some of the metaphysical implications of such a view. — T Clark

Uh-oh now I am confused again. I thought I was understanding you to say that you do NOT necessarily restrict a simulation to be a computation, in which case I ask what you mean by simulation.

But if you are trying to understand the metaphysical implications of the computable universe, that's exactly what I've been doing. If the universe is computable, then either it's constrained by Turing's work, which imposes limitations on the laws of physics; or else we need a new definition of computation. That's exactly the point I've been making.

All in all, your posts have been relevant to the OP. I don't have any problems on that score. — T Clark

Ok well that's a start. I'll read the rest of this tomorrow. The computable universe hypothesis is in the air, put forth by people smarter than me. I disagree with it. So perhaps some of my talking points are more aimed at the general subject than at what you said. I did actually think I was responding to something you said, but I gather you don't see it that way.

That's not the same as what you claimed I wrote. — T Clark

For what it's worth, based on how I read your statement, I could not respond any differently than I did before. Given the statement:

A sufficiently detailed and complex simulation of a universe would be indistinguishable from a "real" one. I'd go further and say they are the same thing. — T Clark

I still feel, even in retrospect, that I responded perfectly in kind. But I gather now that you don't think I understood you at all. So we do agree on the point we disagree on. I always regard that as progress.

Of course the OP and the entire thread is about computers. — T Clark

Ok. So we agree on that after all.

The OP specifically referenced the idea of a computable universe. — fishfry

Ok. Just tell me what you think the post was about.

The point is simply that as soon as one talks about computers, one is constrained by the laws of computability. Some things are computable and some aren't. Newtonian gravity, for example, the classic paradigm of a deterministic, mechanical theory, is known to not be computable. That should make people reflect about their understanding of the limitations of computation.

It's true that some people believe that quantum physics is computable. The jury's still out but we don't know for sure either way. I don't recall reading anything about whether people believe general relativity is computable. There's a guy named David Deutsch who believes that all the physical processes of the universe are computable. I did expect half a dozen people to jump out at me with his name but nobody did. I'd be happy to debate the issue. I think Deutsch is wrong.

So the moment one says, "What if God could create a computer ..." then they are agreeing that God is constrained by the laws of computation, the theory of what is and what isn't computable and what it means for something to be computable. Those constraints are quite severe. I would honesty think that finding out that Newtonian gravity is not computable would give people pause to think.

But you keep saying that I'm misunderstanding the OP. Ok fine. I accept that for sake of discussion. So tell me what you think the post is about.

You did make the statement that you think the actual universe and an inaccurate simulation of a historically contingent model of the universe are "the same." That's the statement you made that I challenged by outlining the three levels of discourse: Metaphysical truth; historically contingent mathematical models, expressed as differential equations that we cannot solve; and computer approximations of the mathematical theory. You claimed that the first and third are "the same," your words. If I misunderstood you, perhaps you could try to explain what it is you meant.

Could God not just have built a computer with us as disembodied programs? — Devans99

[These and all following boldings mine]

References to computers and programs.

Then I thought, maybe if I was God, I’d do something like Tron

Tron was a movie about a computer.
— Devans99

Have a virtual world — Devans99

Virtual worlds refer to digital computer simulations.

with immortal ‘programs’

Programs.

— Devans99

1. Computers break down — Devans99

Computers.

2. Maybe AI is not true life? — Devans99

AI. Universally understood to refer to digital computers.

Could God embody a computer program with emotions? — Devans99

Computer program.

3. Who wants to be a disembodied program? — Devans99

Program.

This is not true. Not even close. — T Clark

I'm perfectly willing to allow that I might have misread the OP. But in light of the references I bolded, can you tell me what you think the OP was about, if not digital computer programs as understood by Turing and by all computer scientists ever since?

You say the OP was not about computers. Ok. Then just tell us what you think it was about.

I was hoping someone with more knowledge would speak up and clarify. — T Clark

Some people can dish it out but can't take it.

Calculation is not the same as simulation — T Clark

The OP specifically referenced the idea of a computable universe. If you have a different definition of simulation, please supply it so that we can know what you are talking about.

Of course not all calculation is simulation. But in the context of a discussion on the computable universe, all simulation is calculation, or more precisely computation. The meaning of computation was explicated by Turing in 1936 and nobody's been able to alter or improve on his definition since then.

All descriptions of the universe are metaphors, stories — T Clark

Of course. But that is not what the OP claims. The OP claims that the world IS a computer. That claim is false for any number of reasons which I'm happy to debate. But now you don't even seem to be making that claim. If you're not talking about the subject of the thread, that explains a lot. You changed the subject evidently. Read the OP's post. OP thinks the world is a computer. I do not think the world is a computer. That's the point I'm discussing. If you're discussing some other point (metaphors) you are in a different conversation.

I was hoping someone with more knowledge would speak up and clarify. — T Clark

You have already admitted to not knowing anything about computability. But that's what we're talking about. Could it be that ysomeone with more knowledge IS speaking to you and you don't know enough to recognize that? If one claims the universe is a computer, then the universe is subject to the rules of computability theory as laid down by Turing in 1936 and still operative. There are certain things computers can't do. Many things in fact. Implementing the universe is one of them.

I do acknowledge that the claim in my last sentence is an opinion not universally shared. But that's the subject being discussed. And you appear to lack the requisite knowledge to discuss it.

Thats no problem, I'd be glad to explain it to you. But with your attitude I see no reason to bother.

I'm not a computer guy or a physicis — T Clark

You could read the links I gave if you chose to. Claiming ignorance isn't much of an argument.

Surely you can understand that an approximation to a historically contingent theory is not to be taken as the same as the underlying reality. A computer simulation of gravity does not attract nearby bowling balls. But worse, a computer simulation of gravity can't even accurately model gravity. Our scientific theories are expressed as differential equations that cannot be exactly solved. They can only be approximated; and the accumulated rounding errors cause the model to be wildly inaccurate.

The universe on a computer we're discussing is not a model of some other universe outside the computer. It is it's own separate phenomenon. — T Clark

Yes I understand your point. But you've presented no evidence or argument that the universe is computable.

Honestly when I first suggested that the universe is not computable, I expected half a dozen people to jump in and say, "Oh yeah what about David Deutsch? So there!" You might enjoy looking him up to better understand the argument for your own position.

To me a strong meta-argument against the computable universe is the timeliness of the argument. The ancient Romans built great waterworks, and they thought the mind was a flow. In the Newtonian age we thought the mind was a mechanical device. Now in the computer age we think the mind is a computer. Any metaphysical speculation that claims the world or the mind is made up of the latest technology is suspect for exactly that reason. The theory is as historically contingent as the technology.

A sufficiently detailed and complex simulation of a universe would be indistinguishable from a "real" one. I'd go further and say they are the same thing. — T Clark

I can't make sense of that claim at all.

Consider the three levels of discourse here.

Level 0: Ultimate reality, the true nature of the world. Such a thing might not actually exist ("turtles all the way down") but for sake of discussion let's say it does. So the universe out there has a truth to it about how it works.

Note that any claims at this level are metaphysics and not science.

Level 1: Historically contingent theories about level 0. Aristotle's gravity, Newton's gravity, Einstein's gravity. Mathematical models that provide a descriptive and predictive framework for experiments. These days, they typically take the form of a collection of differential equations without analytic solutions.

Level 2: Computer approximations to Level 1. We can't solve the differential equations of Newtonian or Einsteinian physics, so instead we implement linear approximations on a digital computer to get a few decimal digits of agreement with experiment.

How you can conflate level 2 with level 0, I can't imagine.

A good case study is given by classical Newtonian gravity. This is a perfectly deterministic theory in which if we knew the position and momentum of every particle, we could use Newton's theory to predict all future states.

But it turns out that we can't do that! We can't solve the differential equations of the n-body problem even for the solar system. And when we program approximations to these equations into a digital computer, the rounding errors accumulate and throw the results wildly off. That's due to chaos theory, in which tiny changes in the initial conditions lead to huge changes in the eventual outcome. That's the famous "butterfly effect." This theory is quoted a lot but understood far less. It says that tiny rounding errors in a computer approximation can result in massive errors after a number of iterations of the model.

In fact we don't even know if the solar system is stable under Newtonian gravity, even though the theory is perfectly deterministic.

So how can you say that an inexact approximation to a historically contingent theory can be taken as the same as the actual truth?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_System

Computer simulation is the reproduction of the behavior of a system using a computer to simulate ... — T Clark

Looks circular.

Suppose I program a computer to simulate gravity. Does the computer attract nearby bowling balls? No. A simulation is not reality.

But computer "simulations" of compex phenomena such as weather are approximations. They use techniques of linear algebra to approximate nonlinear phenomena. And as chaos theory tells us, rounding errors in approximations can lead to huge differences in the outcome.

You don't claim that some computer simulation of weather or gravity is how the universe actually works, do you? Aren't mathematical models of physical phenomena historically contingent and subject to revision, as Aristotelian gravity gave way to Newtonian and then Einsteinian gravity?

To put this another way, "simulate" is being equivocated here. In the OP, simulate means to run the universe EXACTLY as it is via a computation. But when we simulate the weather or a biological process for example, we first build a mathematical model that is itself an approximation to reality (as Newtonian and most likely Einsteinian gravity are approximations to reality) and then we FURTHER approximate by substituting linear approximations for the analytically unsolvable differential equations of our model.

The latter kind of simulation is definitely NOT what the OP had in mind when referring to God simulating the universe as a computation.

Current computers and programs are capable of doing simulations of the world's climate, — T Clark

You're confusing simulations with approximations.

Jesus fucking christ, are you really going to claim that Boomers solved racism in America? — Akanthinos

Is that a claim that I made?

Since we're not programs, the question is moot. Most of the phenomena of the universe are noncomputable. An interesting example is determining if a real number is zero. That is not a computable problem. No computer can determine whether a real number is zero. If you can't say whether a given physical value is zero, you can't program the universe.

If the universe is some sort of computer, it's a computer operating on principles beyond what we currently regard as a computation. We would need new physics and a new theory of computation to go beyond the theoretical limitations of Turing machines, which is what we currently understand computers to be.

Boomer here. I have personally seen, with my own eyes, a Whites Only sign on a restroom in Florida in the 1960's. People have no idea what the world was like before the Boomers made it much much better. No fucking idea at all.

A. An infinite regress has no initial cause (start).
B. That implies cause and effect don’t hold — Devans99

No this is simply false. As usual, consider the order type of the integers:

..., -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ...

Suppose each integer stands for a cause. so that event n causes event n + 1.

You now have a universe in which every single event, without exception, has a cause. There's simply no first cause. This example is standard in the literature.

Again:

* Every event has a cause; and

* There is no first cause.

What say you?

↪fishfry ok sure. — Rank Amateur

Ok. And yet ... $\pi$ is forced on us. A crude measurement of the ripple circles will give us a couple of decimal places. Archimedes calculated $\pi$ to three decimal places using mathematical reasoning.

I'm not denying the out-there-ness of $\pi$. I'm a Platonist on weekends. But to me the case isn't as obvious as it is to others. Sure, we don't have any choice in whether 5 is prime. So it's out there. But where is it? Was it there before the Big Bang? Platonism is not as obvious as some think. How do we know that math and logic aren't qualities of our own minds and not so much of the world? Just as a bat thinks the world is full of informative sounds. We are very human-centric in these matters and I wonder if someday we'll get past that.

↪fishfry I wasn't being nasty, I was pointing out circles exist in nature, and the ratio of the circumstances to the diameters of these circles exist in nature. — Rank Amateur

Ah. Ok! But those aren't circles. There aren't any idealized circles in nature. Mathematical abstractions are idealized versions of things in nature. Mathematical circles are inspired by circle-like things in nature, but the circle-like things aren't mathematical circles. I confess I'm surprised to have to be continually explaining this point, which I thought was universally agreed to. If you could freeze a moment in time and carefully measure the circumference and diameter of a circle of water in a pond, you would not get $\pi$ for two reasons:

1) The water's made of molecules, the molecules are made of atoms, the atoms are made of quarks and gluons and such, and the quarks and gluons themselves are just probability waves. You couldn't find a circle if you tried; and

2) All physical measurement is approximate. A physical measurement consists of some number that's the output of a physical apparatus; along with some error bars; along with a probability distribution that tells you how likely it is that the number you got is within the error bars of the "true" value, if there even is such a thing. So even if there was a perfect circle in the world (which of course there isn't) you could not measure it to arbitrary precision.

I recall writing these exact words just a day or two ago here. All physical measurement is approximate.

It's worth noting that the most accurate physical measurement we know of, something or other about the electron in quantum chromodynamics, is good to 12 decimal places. That's plenty good for a physical theory, but not very precise for a mathematical real number.

↪fishfry go throw a rock in a pond — Rank Amateur

That's your heartfelt defense of mathematical Platonism? I've seen better. Try these for a start.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/mathplat/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/

Can you frame a coherent argument in support of your claim that $\pi$ has some sort (what sort?) of existence prior to the existence of any mind?

The ratio of a circle to its diameter existed before it was observed, named and quantified. The ratio was not invented it was observed. — Rank Amateur

Where did it exist? And what else might exist in the same realm? The baby Jesus? The Flying Spaghetti Monster? Captain Ahab?

I have trouble with Platonism.

By the way FWIW, $\pi$ is defined these days as the smallest positive zero of the sin function; which itself is defined by an infinite series or else in terms of the complex exponential. No circles are harmed or even involved.

and if one argues that a planet might describe a circle like this, in its orbit, one would run up against the same problem.... — wax

Yes indeed. In fact planets don't revolve in circles, which is what Copernicus believed. He gets way too much credit for getting heliocentrism right but getting the orbits wrong. It was Kepler who figured out that the orbits were ellipses; and Newton who figured out why.

But of course they are not perfect ellipses. The planets fall toward the sun. Or they are falling farther away. And they all act gravitationally on each other. So that in fact nobody knows whether the solar system is stable. Not only that, even if you knew the exact position and state of motion of each planet (which you can in classical physics) AND you perfectly modeled Newtonian gravity in a computer, you could STILL not determine the stability of the solar system. The reason is chaos. Tiny rounding errors in the computation would accumulate and be subject to the "butterfly effect." A small change in the input state leads to a large change in the output state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_System

Nothing in physical science is certain. It's just building models. The question of ultimate truth belongs to metaphysics, not physics.

I guess maybe I would argue that there is no zero dimensional co-ordinate in the pencil end — wax

No, that does not correspond to physics. A pencil point is made of chunky particles of graphite, which WIkipedia says is, "... a gray crystalline allotropic form of carbon ..." I'm not a chem major so I'll have to take their word for it. But it's certainly made of atoms, and atoms are made of quarks and gluons and whatever else atoms are made of these days. And at the bottom, according to physics, are probability waves undulating through various fields, every possible thing that can possibly happen all happening at once and then appearing to only do one thing the moment we look at it. That's modern physics.

None of this has anything to do with mathematical limits. There's no magic mathematical point at the bottom. And even if there WERE a zero-dimensional mathematical point at the end of a pencil, we could not know it! Because all physical measurement is approximate. A physical measurement is a value and a set of error bars and a probability distribution that tells you how likely it is that the value you got is actually within the error bars of the "true" value -- assuming there even is such a thing in nature.

We use math to build abstract models of the world; but the world itself is not the model. The models are just our best way of interpreting the date from the experiments we can do. And our experiments are limited by what we can build with the technology and resources we've got at any given historical moment. Science is a highly contingent enterprise.

Do not confuse the map with the territory!

I didn't read any of this thread yet but if I had to prove that 1 + 1 = 2 I'd start from the Peano axioms and define $n + 1 \overset{\text{def}}{\equiv} S(n)$where $S$ is the successor function given by the axioms. The symbol 0 is also given by the axioms. Then I'd define the symbols:

$1 \overset{\text{def}}{\equiv} S(0) = 0 + 1$

and

$2 \overset{\text{def}}{\equiv} S(1) = 1 + 1$

and I'm done.

Well, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter doesn't change how big or small a circle is. And I can point out what these two lengths are with a drawing. Now where this is on the number line is another question, but the ratio does stay the same. — ssu

There is a profound difference between a physical drawing, and an abstract, idealized geometric shape. You can't draw a mathematical circle with a pencil and paper. Nor could you ever make a physical measurement of any irrational number. Do you understand that? I'm asking just to make sure we're not talking past each other on this essential point.

I think there is somewhat of a hang-up on when the numbers come into existence. Pi is not the best example to try to bring up though as even if we contend that Pi is infinite, it is only infinite in one direction. The beginning of Pi is clear and defined, meaning 3. There are no numbers to the left of Pi. For the lack of a better or more established term at the moment it can be thought of to have 'forward infinity' meaning extending into the future. — GigoloJoe

You're confusing the number pi with its decimal representation. There are plenty of numbers to the left of pi, namely {x ∈ ℝ : x < pi}. Pi does not begin with 3, its decimal representation does. Nor is pi infinite. It's a finite real number (there's no other kind) strictly between 3 and 4. Nor does a decimal expression "extend into the future." The entire decimal expression exists all at once, as a mapping from the positive integers to the set of decimal digits.

an inevitable near- term social collapse due to climate change. — Abstract

We've been hearing this doom and gloom for decades. Centuries if you include Malthus. In the 1970's people feared global cooling. The doom and gloom never comes true, but it's a winner when it comes to political fundraising.

Is making a drawing computation? — ssu

If you can make a drawing of a mathematical circle, more power to you. I wouldn't think I'd need to make this obvious point here. You can't define pi with a drawing. You can only define pi using a train of logical deduction in a mathematical framework. And that's a computation.

Umm... geometry doesn't need calculus. You can draw geometry, you can draw a circle, you know. With geometry you already get the mathematical constant called Pi. No computation needed. — ssu

You did do a computation. You gave a finite-length description of a particular real number. The numbers for which you can do that are the computable reals.

And if with the exception of Chaitin's constant all mathematical constants are computable numbers, don't fixate on just the computability. — ssu

If all you have is the computable numbers, your real line is full of holes. The computable real line is NOT a model of Euclidean geometry. For example two lines in the plane made up only of points whose coordinates are computable, may pass through each other without intersecting.

OP is making in a naive way a very subtle philosophical point that I don't believe is being adequately addressed. Defining pi using English words amounts to computing it. Hence arguments along the lines of "pi existed first, nyah nyah" all fail.

Of course pi is the output of a computation, as is the number 3. Most real numbers, and most points on Euclid's line, are not the output of any computation or finite-length description. So if people are closet Platonists, just admit that you think pi exists in God's mind before the universe was created. That's the opposite side of the proposition that pi doesn't exist before it's calculated. Let alone the noncomputables. Do they exist before there are minds to appreciate them?

Ultimately, you arrive at either a) nothing, or b) something. — GigoloJoe

Consider the integers as a model of time:

..., -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ...

Each integer has an immediate predecessor. You never arrive at "the beginning." You never ultimately arrive at either something or nothing, because you never "ultimately" arrive anywhere. You just keep on moving to the left one step at a time forever.

This example falsifies most of the bad philosophy around infinite regress.

Does the number three start with calculation? — ssu

That's a pretty good question. Does it?

↪Marchesk {{{{{...}}}}} — Banno

That notation is not supported by the axioms of set theory. It's meaningless unless there are a FINITE number of bracket pairs. You may indeed have {}, {{}}, {{{}}}, ... one term for each positive integer; but to go beyond that you have to take their union. You can not take a limit of this notation.

How do you define nothing?
— Christoffer

Absence of anything. — Marchesk

Doesn't absence make the heart grow fonder? In which case, absence is a thing.

I'm not only using wordplay. Absence is a thing. Suppose you come upon a universe that is empty. You say, "Oranges are absent. Pears are absent. Pomegranates are absent ..." That's a lot of absence, and it takes a mind or an observer to notice it. In a universe containing nothing, there is nothing ... not even absence. This is the same conceptual error the OP is making. Nothing is nothing. There can't be anything. No concepts, not even absence. If you notice there are no oranges, who is doing the noticing?

What does the word absent mean? Something that is supposed to be there, isn't. A student who is supposed to be in class, isn't there that day. She's absent. But a person who isn't enrolled in that class in the first place, is not regarded as being absent from class. You agree? If the class has 30 people enrolled and 29 show up, one is absent. Not seven billion.

The Pippen didn't say ''S = the set of all sets''. He said the ''E = set of everything''. I'm paraphrasing a little bit. Do you mean E = S? Why? Afterall the OP is talking about physical stuff (matter and energy) and not about mathematical objects. — TheMadFool

Point certainly taken. I didn't really want to suppress @Pippin's perhaps interesting ideas. It's just that when someone invokes set theory and Russell's paradox, to me that brings in a whole host of baggage. Suppose you do have the empty set {}. Then by the laws of set theory you have its powerset {{}}, and the powerset of that, {{},{{}}}, and the powerset of that, and so forth. You can take a power set for each positive integer; then you can take the union (via another axiom) to get an infinite collection of iterated powersets, and then you can take the powerset of that, and keep on going.

So it's generally a bad idea to call something a "set" if you only mean a collection or perhaps a class. Collections and classes don't have the mathematical baggage that sets do.

But I don't think my criticism was wrong. The OP said the set of "anything (that exists)." That's the literal quote. Then he took its complement, which is an operation on sets, to get the empty set. I'm perfectly within my rights to treat sets as sets.

Perhaps @Pippin can rephrase his ideas without invoking the machinery of set theory.

1) By definition my set contains only things that exist (non-contradictory). That excludes Russell's set. No Russell's set, no problem. In other words this set is defined like: containing everything that does not lead to a contradiction somehow. It should be clear that such a set is clean of problems by definition alone, don't u think? — Pippen

I agreed that your argument is stronger without trying to define the empty set as the complement of the set of everything, since the latter provably doesn't exist. In any event, you are still misunderstanding Russell's argument. There is no claim that the set of all sets contains sets that don't exist. We start with YOUR claim that there is a set of all sets that DO exist, and we immediately derive a contradiction. But again, you don't need this in your argument. Just posit the empty set if you must. But now you just produced something from nothing.

2) I think nothing has to be the empty set very naturally since otherwise only sets with members could be available that obviously couldn't serve as nothingness. — Pippen

There's an analogy. Suppose we deny infinite sets. We all have an intuition that there are infinitely many counting numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, ... (with or without zero, I don't care). That does not give us an infinite set; only infinitely many individuals.

The axiom of infinity says that there is a SET containing all the natural numbers. That's a huge leap beyond merely saying that there are infinitely many natural numbers.

Likewise, I can perfectly well imagine an empty universe. But now you have a SET that is empty; and that is a thing that you claim exists. You are going beyond the idea of emptiness to the idea that there is a CONTAINER for the emptiness that also happens to be a SET. So you have made an extra ontological assumption; not only that nothing exists; but that nothing is CONTAINED in a SET. That's a lot more ontological baggage than a merely empty universe.

3. You are right that the empty set is itself a thing and just basically postulated. But as I wrote in my note: that's how we have to interpret nothingness, there's no better way. — Pippen

Just say the universe is empty. Because if you put the emptiness in a SET, that's a huge additional assumption. It is an act of creation out of nothing! You start with nothing and now you have a set! You just defeated your own argument, didn't you? You created the empty set out of nothing.

We simply cannot postualte a further-going nothingness since it would lead to contradictions/falseness. What we mean when refering to "nothing" is the empty set — Pippen

But NO. The empty set is not nothing. It's a particular set. We've been over this. You start with nothing; and a moment later you have a SET containing nothing. That's a huge leap of creation. Out of nothing.

(or e.g. in logic the conjunction ~p1 & ~p2 & ...), that's "our" nothing, — Pippen

Lost me there, what are p1 and p2 etc?

beyond that is just a brainf*ck that doesn't mean anything, — Pippen

Beyond what? Are you insulting your own argument? You lost me here too.

just like when we talk about the universal set that SEEMS alright but isn't (as Russell showed). — Pippen

This last paragraph got a little tangled I think. Let's go back to the key point. You have an empty universe. Now you have a SET containing that emptiness. Where did the set come from? Isn't that a creation out of nothing?

To make this more concrete, isn't the empty set just an idea? And if it's an idea, who is the mind having that idea? If you are a Platonist who believes that the empty set exists independently of minds, that's perfectly fine with me ... but if the empty set exists, it's not nothing. It's the empty set. I guess I can't say that anymore, I've said it several times already. The empty set is a particular thing.

The empty set CONTAINS nothing; but the empty set itself IS something. It's the empty set. To prove that, we can form the set containing the empty set, {∅}. That's a set containing exactly one element, namely ∅. That shows that ∅ is something. It's something that can be a member of a set! By your own definition it exists. Since things that don't exist can't be members of sets. I agree with you about that.