- Dec 10, 2003
- 23,896
- 9,864
- Country
- Australia
- Gender
- Male
- Faith
- Christian
- Marital Status
- Single
You don't think numbers are part of reality? Are you assuming physical reality is the only reality?
Upvote
0
Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
lol, I note how you left off exploring reality.
"There is also one other world, though many find difficulty in accepting its actual existence: it is the Platonic world of mathematical forms. There, we find the natural numbers 0,1,2,3,..., and the algebra of complex numbers. We find Lagrange's theorem that every natural number is the sum of four squares...
The natural numbers were there before there were human beings, or indeed any other creature here on earth, and they will remain after all life has perished. It has always been true that each natural number is the sum of four squares, and it did not have to wait for Lagrange to conjure this fact into existence." -- Roger Penrose
You just had them in their own domain, and now they are back in reality.You don't think numbers are part of reality?
No. Tell us about these other realities that you have alluded to, and how you know about them, as a scientist.Are you assuming physical reality is the only reality?
Dr. Penrose isn't proposing that numbers exist outside of the natural universe.
You just had them in their own domain, and now they are back in reality.
No. Tell us about these other realities that you have alluded to, and how you know about them, as a scientist.
Is that a "yes" to you believing (in contrast to Penrose and me) that reality = physical reality?
Are we going to hear about these other realities that you alluded to or not?
Let me say that (1) your level of impoliteness has crossed the threshold where I will no longer respond,
Where?and (2) I already answered that point.
Here, by the way, is a redrawn version of the diagram that appears in several of Penrose's books:
I think best way to investigate reality is to do just that. You question, ask why, observe, interact, feel, think, engage in conversation, intuit, remain skeptical, (but also flexible to change if required) ) get out into the world.
The resultant experience of those things is information from reality, its subjective.
If I want to investigate the human body, the cosmos etc, I'll go to the scientific model to gain the information.
thus I have no religious faith
From your statement below ("the human body, the cosmos etc") I assume you mean physical reality, in which case I agree 100%. However, I would add the use of scientific instruments to supplement and extend naked-eye observations, and the importance of sharing observations (if you and I and several other people all see the same thing, the observations are more reliable than if only you can see it).
Yes physical reality. Or course more than one person seeing something is relevant, but then I have to have seen it too, otherwise its just others opinion, or their experience. If you said- " We all saw an amazing view from the top of the mountain" I'd understand that experience, so I didn't need to see it or be present to understand it.
Do you mean objective?
No I meant subjective, that's why I used the word.
I'm not sure what you mean here, exactly. A range of scientific models have been built in physics, chemistry, biology, etc. They rely, ultimately, on the experimental data used to test them.
Its that science is an extension of reality, but its objective. I can't experience DNA for example, I have no subjective experience of it.
Yet, oddly, you have a religious faith icon, rather than an atheist or agnostic one.
Lol, yes well, as I said I have no belief mechanism, that's not to say I'm not working on another religion. The religion of life perhaps.
No I meant subjective, that's why I used the word.
Its that science is an extension of reality, but its objective. I can't experience DNA for example, I have no subjective experience of it.
In that case I don't understand you at all. To a first approximation, I would say science = observations + instruments + sharing + theories (with complex interactions among those 4 things, especially in testing the theories). Consider the following steps:
1) I extract some DNA (this can be done at home -- see Find the DNA in a Banana - Scientific American)
2) I determine the chemical composition of DNA, using a variety of scientific instruments.
3) I hypothesise a structure for DNA, and build a model, like Watson and Crick:
4) From this, I hypothesise a mechanism, using DNA, to explain Mendel's empirical inheritance rules:
Which of these do you think are objective? Do you see the theoretical steps 3 and 4 as more objective than the data on which they are based?
You can't have an experience of DNA. It's an objective understanding. That said I could see it under certain lab conditions and experience it subjectively in that manner.
I think we are using the words "objective" and "subjective" in such radically different ways that further discussion probably won't be helpful.
Davian made a pretty interesting paraphrase of Churchill by saying, "science is the worst way to investigate reality, but all the others have been tried."
I would say that science is the tightest, most reliable way of getting to the truth; however this technically can't be the case because science involves falsification, which means you can only get at varying degrees of certainty and never certainty that you have the truth. Yes, even with evolution, which it would be worth betting the life of yourself and your entire family is true.
Radagast said:He certainly is. Like me, he's a mathematical Platonist. Read his books.
"What right do we have to say that the Platonic world is actually a world, that can exist in the same kind of sense in which the other two worlds exist? It may well seem to the reader to be just a rag-bag of abstract concepts that mathematicians have come up with from time to time. Yet its existence rests on the profound, timeless, and universal nature of these concepts, and on the fact that their laws are independent of those who discover them. The rag-bag if indeed that is what it is was not of our creation. The natural numbers were there before there were human beings, or indeed any other creature here on earth, and they will remain after all life has perished." -- Roger Penrose
And I'd be interested to hear what it means for the number 2^57,885,161 - 1 (or better yet, all the infinitely many digits of pi) to exist within the physical universe.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?