Thread: What if science/mathematics is necessarily the same thing as spirituality/religion?

Originally Posted by tempusername

I find it inconceivable that truths come in degrees of certainty. The relativity of so many things within the universe surely constitutes the ubiquity of particular truths, especially when it comes to Earthly or human things. Though I can't correlate relativity to degrees of certainty. Certainty is more so a property of human understanding than truth, no? People can have different levels of clarity/certainty/understanding about a truth but that doesn't effect the tangibility of the truth.

This really comes down to semantics; I didn't really define what I meant by truth properly. I was pretty drunk so I wasn't bothered. Basically what I'm saying is that any assertions with meaning are basically of the form, 'this is a pattern in experience'. For instance, stuff falls down to Earth with nothing supporting it. This truth is extremely ubiquitous, which in my terminology is equivalent to saying that it is virtually always observed. We don't really 'know' it as some kind of general principle, universal and detached from reality, though. It could fail to work between 12.00am and 12.05pm tonight; we can raise no logical objection. And there are many instances in the past where something was assumed to be universal but just turned out to be extremely common in the limited domain that was previously observed; there were rare or hidden counter examples.

It isn't. And now that I've relearned this bit about functions thanks to you I might actually be able to back up nietstein's claim. Though I am sort of hesitant to defend it after seeing you retort basically as Xei expected, nietstein ;\

But hey

All I can think about is Russel's Paradox. In defining ∅ as a set with no elements do we not instantaneously ascribe that the set cannot be an element--that it cannot be a member of itself? By distinguishing ∅ at all, do we not create a Russel set? ∅ cannot be a member of itself because it has no elements, yet in satisfying that definition of itself, it inevitably and contradictorily becomes a member of itself, an element, a 1.

So

??

No, for Russel's paradox to work, you need to be considering the SET OF SETS which are not elements of themselves. There's nothing wrong with just a set on its own that is not an element of itself. In fact the definition of number I provided comes directly from Russell himself (c.f. An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy). And Russell banished such paradoxes from his foundation by ruling out putting sets inside sets (this basically banishes self-reference), so in fact all sets are trivially not members of themselves ({}, N, whatever), precisely because they are sets, and thus by definition can't be found inside themselves, as 'themselves' are not allowed to contain any sets.

Originally Posted by nietstein

can't create an injective function
definitions of zero and infinity (both are sketchy, the concept of infinity has changed before, and may change again)

Yet again you've failed to pick up on the basic message people have been giving you from the start. WORDS AREN'T REAL, SINGULAR THINGS. This should be extremely easy to understand. You're talking about infinity: this means you PICK a definition for infinity, you PROVIDE it, and you STICK TO IT. The statement, 'the concept of infinity could change', is absolutely absurd and fatuous. Words are tools by which we communicate concepts. You are the one who chooses the concept you want to discuss, and denote it by some word. If somebody comes along tomorrow and decides that they're going to use the word 'infinity' to refer to 'dog', it has zero bearing on this conversation whatsoever. Why on Earth do you think it does? They will be having a conversation about dogs. Your conversation will still be about whatever it was that you defined. Do you think words are some kind of divinely ordained incorporeal objects, floating around the universe and capriciously changing their singular and ultimately authoritative meaning? That's incredibly sloppy thinking.

Originally Posted by nietstein

Riddle me this:

.9~=1
1/3=.3~
2/3=.6~
3/3= ... .9~ or 1? Which is it? Can there be .9~ spoons? There must be one spoon according to our system, how could there be .9~ spoons?. Does the spoon exist or not?

There is no spoon...

They're just different expressions for the same number. Just like you can simultaneously have 0.5 + 0.5 spoons and 1 spoon.

Yet again you show your extreme confusion about how definitions, words, and meaning works.