Wow. Sort this out for me…
It is always related to personal subjective experience, which is meaningless to all but the individual.
IMO, there is only one Universal truth and that is of a mathematical nature and governs the interactions of intrinsic “values” in all things.
I think Tegmark is on the right track. The mathematical constants of the universe have never changed. It is man’s subjective understanding of the mathematics that has changed.
Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
First published Sat Jul 18, 2009; substantive revision Tue Mar 28, 2023
Platonism about mathematics (or mathematical platonism) is the metaphysical view that there are abstract mathematical objects whose existence is independent of us and our language, thought, and practices. Just as electrons and planets exist independently of us, so do numbers and sets. And just as statements about electrons and planets are made true or false by the objects with which they are concerned and these objects’ perfectly objective properties, so are statements about numbers and sets. Mathematical truths are therefore discovered, not invented.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
This was wonderfully demonstrated by Ricky Gervais.
Really? Tegmark? Gervais? Come on.
Yes Tegmark and Gervais, And every scientist who uses mathematics in the practice of science to uncover universal values and functions.
Mathematics work because it is all mathematical.
Did you find a flaw with Gervais’ comparison of the persistence of universal mathematics v the 3000 different universal gods throughout history?
Colbert, a religious person, was impressed with his analogy
Tegmark is a physicist teaching at MIT, and knows what he is talking about.
He agrees with the “Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics” that universal mathematics are discovered, not invented. What science invented is the symbolic codification of universal mathematics and which accurately describe the “known” universal mathematics .
What I don’t understand is that everyone has some objection to the concept of a universe that functions via mathematical logic, without offering a viable alternative.
Mathematics work! What better proof can be offered? I can’t. Can you?
Everyone who discounts a mathematically based universe, ends up saying that:
“if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is NOT a duck”.
But where is the logic in that?
Applied mathematics allowed us to “create” the Higgs boson from the Higgs Field.
Until we built a collider that could produce the correct mathematical values and functions, bosons were suspected but unobservable. Applied maths allowed us to tease the Higgs boson from the Higgs field and make it real for an instant.
Applied maths allowed us to build the atom bombs that ended WWII.
Simply said, without descriptive mathematics there is no way to describe reality.
The only way the Universe values and functions can be described is via mathematical differential equations, not some unknowable God.
Nothing to do with my question
Neither Atheism Nor Theism Are Closer To The Truth (Here’s Why)
I use several steps to sort questions out quickly. Some will take time. This one not so much.
One is common factors.
Common factor of Atheism, Theism. Would be God.
Truth. What is the root of “Truth”. deru, meaning something firm, solid and steadfast – like wood.
Root word for God. Would be “knowledge”
Thus, we have now created a base line or datum point to work from. Which would be – “Neither true nor false knowledge can always be solid and steadfast in the minds of humans”.
Keep it simple. Deal with what you can. Remember one of the oldest questions is. Everything on earth came from the stars. Where the stars came from. Mankind may never know. Ricky Gervais has got a handle on it.
And that statement is one of the oldest questions in pre-history. It hasn’t changed because it is a root question of science. I find science works better if simplified. Break religion down and you end up in the root – science.
My point of view is that neither guy would be sitting there playing with a puzzle if they understood Genesis.
Right away, he says atheists and theists, and I guess agnostics, have a sense of sacredness, embodied in a personal being, and there is a need for a correct set of beliefs. After that, he only talks about theism, so I think he just missed the mark there. I’ve been listening to his lectures, and I would even say he misspoke his own understanding. But that doesn’t get corrected, so who knows.
More worthwhile, is what he says about “no-thing-ness”. That we don’t get insights out of the blue, and we don’t find meaning in the same way we find a lost item. We participate in a discovery of reality by accepting that the things we interact with didn’t pre-exist in some form, then pop into the form we now experience. Rather there is a no-thing that is not a place, certainly not a being, that we can have a sense of, even if that sense is not what we normally refer to as “understanding” or “knowing”.
In the 3rd minute, he scrambles some partial sentences. I’m not sure if I missed something, or he didn’t complete what he was trying to say.
No, you have not created a baseline at all. You are committing a category error.
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The questions seem to be coming from off the cuff.
I felt like it was a couple monks talking.
After the:
Search for meaning.
Meaning is at a deeper level than beliefs and propositions.
I lost interest. So, I just took the subject title and broke it down to a simple workable form.
There is no timeline that is being used. There didn’t seem to be a problem of those types in the Egyptian religion for example. They started in the Hellenistic era. They were answered. These guys are stuck in the Pauline era of today. And of course, Pauline is “beliefs”. Atheism and Theism in the Pauline relate to idealism.
Epistemological idealism (or “formal” idealism) is a position in epistemology that holds that all knowledge is based on mental structures, not on “things in themselves”. Whether a mind-independent reality is accepted or not, all that we have knowledge of are mental phenomena.
Is this an example of atheism moving the same questions in the Pauline religion into a repackaged atheist format.
What I would say is the biggest miss. Is the fact that people don’t always need an understanding of knowledge. Example. You don’t have to have a desire to understand the human body to have surgery. But you want the doctor to have an understanding. The source (Theists or Atheist) that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy. That’s just a commonly understood human factor. That’s how the knowledge bases used by AI are put together too.
I would just round file the video and get on to something entirely different.
Like how AI would find the answers to their questions.
First it would have to understand the questions. Would it need to create a datum line to work from?
Yea, it is not for everyone. You could call it a math system that reduces the pathways that can be taken to one per factor. Without doing a datum point you could have a million pathways. That would be like Christianity trying to answer the same questions for 1500 years. Where as using a datum point can get the answer in a day.
It’s comments like these that have turned this forum into the backwater that it is. Rather than attempting to build a dialog, commenters simply play off a few words, state their favorite theme, and call it a conversation.
It is more than that. What was your question. Was it about the theory of the facts of Atheism or Theism or your goal of understanding how these guys think? I couldn’t figure out what you were trying to sort out.
The facts show the issues I follow the most have the larger number of comments. When I have not been on the site for a long period the numbers have gone down. Do you agree with those numbers?
You are doing a great job. It is like you are working full time on this site.
I would look at the cast and political direction as causing the forum to be in the backwater. Just like the posting subject here, people want the Truth.