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I have no problem with speculation and wondering, just as long as it's identified as this...it's just that this is a really different activity than making state

by moxious 10y ago

I have no problem with speculation and wondering, just as long as it's identified as this...it's just that this is a really different activity than making statements about reality. When those activities get confused the audience gets confused, and soon after come proposals about what real people should do in the real world based on that speculation and then we're off the rails

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
There's an entire universe (metaphorically, if not literally) of unusual experiences which are routinely dismissed by materialists because they "know" they can't possibly happen, and therefore it's completely self-evident that anyone who claims they do happen is either deluded or dishonest. Therefore no evidence exists, and no investigation is required. This is not actually a scientific approach to reality at all. It may be economically expedient - resources are limited, after all - but let's not confuse tribal scientific tradition with absolute empirical certainty. It's even less scientific to assume that the physics of the world in which we might be being modelled is identical to the physics of this reality. That make as much sense as claiming that we can't possibly live in a modelled world because of Lorentz invariance. I don't think we can even be sure that the math and logic of a possible super-reality is identical to this one. You can't have a universe without rules, and where did the rules for this universe come from? It's a deeper and more interesting question than wondering where energy, matter, and spacetime came from, because it implies that either math exists in some kind of magical eternal Platonic way, or there are processes we don't know about which somehow generate math and logic - before things get real. The point being that speculation and research are far from useless, either scientifically or philosophically.
- CuriouslyC 10y ago
  While the space of possible axioms is infinite, and thus the possible mathematics you can derive from axioms is also potentially infinite, I think that a lot of that space is self-isomorphic, so it is possible that in actuality there are a finite set of mathematical relationships. To put it another way, the possibility space of mathematical systems could be like a mosaic made from a finite set of interlocking tiles. Fundamentally, there has to be a layer of reality with no fixed rules. If the rules are a product of the system then they are affected by that system and it is almost certain that they change at some reachable points in the system's state space. If the rules are not a product of the system, then by definition there is a reality outside that system. That reality outside the system then suffers the same issue - either it has no fixed rules, or it is itself contained.

by moxious 10y ago

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago

There's an entire universe (metaphorically, if not literally) of unusual experiences which are routinely dismissed by materialists because they "know" they can't possibly happen, and therefore it's completely self-evident that anyone who claims they do happen is either deluded or dishonest. Therefore no evidence exists, and no investigation is required. This is not actually a scientific approach to reality at all. It may be economically expedient - resources are limited, after all - but let's not confuse tribal scientific tradition with absolute empirical certainty. It's even less scientific to assume that the physics of the world in which we might be being modelled is identical to the physics of this reality. That make as much sense as claiming that we can't possibly live in a modelled world because of Lorentz invariance. I don't think we can even be sure that the math and logic of a possible super-reality is identical to this one. You can't have a universe without rules, and where did the rules for this universe come from? It's a deeper and more interesting question than wondering where energy, matter, and spacetime came from, because it implies that either math exists in some kind of magical eternal Platonic way, or there are processes we don't know about which somehow generate math and logic - before things get real. The point being that speculation and research are far from useless, either scientifically or philosophically.

CuriouslyC 10y ago
While the space of possible axioms is infinite, and thus the possible mathematics you can derive from axioms is also potentially infinite, I think that a lot of that space is self-isomorphic, so it is possible that in actuality there are a finite set of mathematical relationships. To put it another way, the possibility space of mathematical systems could be like a mosaic made from a finite set of interlocking tiles. Fundamentally, there has to be a layer of reality with no fixed rules. If the rules are a product of the system then they are affected by that system and it is almost certain that they change at some reachable points in the system's state space. If the rules are not a product of the system, then by definition there is a reality outside that system. That reality outside the system then suffers the same issue - either it has no fixed rules, or it is itself contained.