More of the Same in Iran

Iranian government just instituted even stricter laws about the Islamic dress code.

This comes at the one year anniversary of the start of those riots when that girl was beaten to death for showing too much hair. I’m not surprised about this but it’s still a shame that things won’t change after all those protesters’ deaths.

I am surprised that a culture that spawned mathematics is so blindly clinging to a concept of Intelligent Design.

Mathematics in the medieval Islamic world

Mathematics during the Golden Age of Islam, especially during the 9th and 10th centuries, was built on Greek mathematics (Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius) and Indian mathematics (Aryabhata, Brahmagupta). Important progress was made, such as full development of the decimal place-value system to include decimal fractions, the first systematised study of algebra, and advances in geometry and trigonometry.[1]

Arabic works played an important role in the transmission of mathematics to Europe during the 10th—12th centuries.[2]
Mathematics in the medieval Islamic world - Wikipedia

Why do you think you feel that way? Maybe you are assigning more power to math than it has. It can be known but it can’t alter the mind. When I do math i feel like i have to shut out the regular flow of thoughts and noise. I enjoy solving an equation but it’s not the same as feeling the wind on my face. I can remember there is math that describes the wind and that adds something for me but I’m just as happy not thinking about it.

I have done maths all my life, as have you, whether you realized it or not.

Mathematics: The Beautiful Language of the Universe

JUNE 6, 2015 BY [JOSHUA CARROLL]

Let us discuss the very nature of the cosmos. What you may find in this discussion is not what you expect. Going into a conversation about the universe as a whole, you would imagine a story full of wondrous events such as stellar collapse, galactic collisions, strange occurrences with particles, and even cataclysmic eruptions of energy.

You may be expecting a story stretching the breadth of time as we understand it, starting from the Big Bang and landing you here, your eyes soaking in the photons being emitted from your screen. Of course, the story is grand. But there is an additional side to this amazing assortment of events that oftentimes is overlooked; that is until you truly attempt to understand what is going on.

Behind all of those fantastic realizations, there is a mechanism at work that allows for us to discover all that you enjoy learning about. That mechanism is mathematics, and without it the universe would still be shrouded in darkness. In this article, I will attempt to persuade you that math isn’t some arbitrary and sometimes pointless mental task that society makes it out to be, and instead show you that it is a language we use to communicate with the stars.

Right. And God hasn’t existed for all of everyone’s life, but that doesn’t change that there is something about the human mind that has feelings that there is something causing all of the motion of the universe. We can explain a lot of it, but there are still mysteries.

In fact, there is a theoren that we can’t prove everything.

But our minds have evolved to live with that. You talk like that doesn’t matter. Without that skill, we wouldn’t be here. Millions of years of evolving happened before formulas were written down.

Yes, and those formulas are an approximation of naturally occurring equations.

One of the Mars Rover’s engineers observed that in reference to landing on the moon, mathematical mechanics don’t always need to be exactly right as long as they are right enough.
And agrees with Anil Seth’s “controlled hallucinations”.

I think it was the Mesopotamian groups like Babylonians who started math as we know it. Iranians are not Mesopotamians, but some of the big figures in that era were Iranian – like Avicenna. Also, the connection between intelligence and lack of religion is only seen in Western Europeans.

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You are avoiding this question. If you say that you feel this way because the math led to that, then you agree with me that math also can explain religious feelings. So, if you think about it, you shouldn’t be surprised.

This addresses what I see as your error. You have a particular definition of math, and if conclusions don’t match that, you think something is wrong.

The story assumes that anything which doesn’t fit a particular mathematical model of logic isn’t “logical”.
For instance, assuming that “logic” means “using syllogisms”. Even speculation and testing hypotheses can then be called “illogical”, despite being the foundation of modern science. Heck, even logicians don’t use syllogisms all the time.
Or assuming that all logical choices must make one side better off on an individual basis, without considering cooperation; this is known as a Nash equilibrium, although you’ll never find the actual term mentioned, mostly because the word “equilibrium” is far too logical-sounding for authors claiming its inferiority.

Universal maths are involved in “everything”. That does not make the human use of math in religions necessarily correct.

Why did God speak to Moses out of the burning bush?

The story of God speaking to Moses out of the burning bush is found in Exodus 3:1—4:23. Through this remarkable event, Moses encounters God on Mount Horeb, and God reveals Himself (Deuteronomy 33:16; Mark 12:26).

The burning bush as described in Exodus 3:2 is a theophany, the appearance of God in a form that is visible to man.

The bush itself was most likely some kind of bramble or thorn bush, and the fire burning the bush was in the form of the angel of the Lord who “appeared to him [Moses] in flames of fire” ([Exodus 3:2]

(What does Exodus 3:2 mean? | BibleRef.com)).

Experiencing God’s voice in a burning bush is not mathematically correct.
It’s an uncontrolled hallucination.

What is a controlled hallucination?

If everything is math, as you just said, then reasons for why the person who wrote the story of the burning bush can be described, using math. The math would not prove God, but it would describe the experience. The math would not prove the experience is wrong either. There is no math for that.

Just as their is no math that can interpret the experience to be God, there is no math to judge the experience. Moses didn’t speak with the same being as Abraham, but both of them intuitively connected to the same music of the spheres that you now call math. Their failure, or more precisely the failure of the authors, is in the interpretation.

Unamed people connected to the underlying mathematical reality of the universe and told stories to relate that experience. Those stories were distorted into religions. Much later, similar experiences were interpreted into math. This lifted some of the vail of mystery, but we have a long way to go.

Back to the OP. Those of us that understand there are describable interactions of chemistry that lead to oppressive regimes are responsible for implementing solutions that use that chemistry. Labeling the chemical reactions wrong doesn’t move us in that direction.

Read Anil Seth!

What is an uncontrolled hallucination? And don’t tell me to do my own research.

An uncontrolled hallucination is observing something for the first time.
The brain uses memories of “known” facts to compare against new information.

Religions are uncontrolled hallucinations. The brain has no real knowledge of God, other than what it has been told by scripture which is not founded on testable fact.

As Anil Seth said in his Ted Talk, “if hallucination is kind of an uncontrolled perception, then a perception is a controlled hallucination. […] We have hallucinations all the time, except when we agree on them, then we call it reality”.

You need to get your terms straight. We call it reality. It’s not reality. It’s how we perceive it.

His research has led him to radical positions: the way you see yourself and the world is a controlled hallucination, Seth argues. Rather than passively perceiving our surroundings, our brains are constantly making and refining predictions about what we expect to see; in this way, we create our world.

Checkout this show

Hence “controlled hallucination”!

Irrelevant. You talk like the hallucination is reality, or that the math can describe reality. It’s only an approximation.

Oh, math can describe reality. And when human halllucinations agree, that’s when we call it reality.
It becomes an axiom.

Agreed. The rest is suspect.