fishfry

What's your definition of magic? Computers are based on perfectly well understood science and technology. Software runs on the hardware. Hardware is b...

Ramanujan said that his mathematical ideas came to him from the Goddess Mahalakshmi of Namakkal. "The mathematician said that he dreamed of the Goddes...

I just disagreed with you about that. Do I have to say it again then you send me another Youtube video and I re-reiterate my disagreement? I'm not uni...

Not true as I understand it. We do not weight our childrens' brain nodes and backtest the weights repeatedly until we get good results. Current approa...

This is not remotely true. We don't know how we think. We know a bit about how our brains are organized. But we don't know how we think. That's a neur...

Like those who voted for serial hair sniffer and public molester Joe Biden? Credible accusations of sexual assault were leveled against him. Kamala Ha...

My understanding is that this is a simplistic description of what happened. The Pope was scientifically literate and buddies with Galileo. Galileo wen...

Five feet of heaven in a ponytail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5-HHxwoa98

You dug up a four month old thread to troll me with this? You'll have to do better.

I read through the entire Newton thread, really enjoyed myself. Thanks for posting those links. Before this I knew nothing of Hume, but it turns out I...

LOLOLOL. After you keep claiming it is. "Any rationalist" would agree. Your own words. Funny I was going to say the same about you. The funny thing is...

I'm happy to take the other side of that bet. That of course is the idea of the Turing test, a purely behavioral standard. But that test does not dist...

What did I miss? Who got banned?

Bostrom's argument makes an analogy between the primitive video games of the 1980s, and the realistic ones of today. But that's silly. Nobody thinks M...

If you're in hell it's much more likely that the creator of your troubles is you, and not some mythical programmer in the sky.

Simulation of what?

Good luck.

I haven't followed the posts in this thread for a while but just so you know, @Meta doesn't think 2 + 2 and 4 refer to the same mathematical object. Y...

Everybody knows This is nowhere Some questions just remind me of songs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwQyX_osSLY

Order makes no difference whatsoever to the argument. But if you insist, if the set of regions is countably infinite, it's ordered by picking any bije...

I'm sorry, what? You don't think the negative integers are ordered as I said? Which is smaller, -4 or -3? Did you miss that day in 8th grade? Even as ...

My reading of section 1, Form of the Argument, seems to agree with my interpretation. But I am no expert on this, I think Craig is a charlatan. In any...

There are many variations of the cosmological argument. If you want discussion on a specific version, you should post a link to, and/or summarize, the...

That's not what William Lane Craig says. He says that everything that BEGINS to exist has a cause. He is thereby sneakily baking in his conclusion to ...

My mind has blocked them out as traumatic experiences. What's incoherent is you objecting to 4 = 4 as an instance of the law of identity; and claiming...

You're welcome. Honestly it confuses me too, it's just one of those things that you "get used to," as von Neumann said. He famously said that in math ...

Doesn't work that way. There are only countably many rationals and uncountably many irrationals. The rationals have measure zero in the unit interval ...

I regularly need to debunk this entirely fallacious claim, which is ubiquitous on the Internet and everywhere else. Consider the infinite sequence 1, ...

I confess I didn't understand the OP at all. They seemed to be saying that there is only one mathematical object, all of math. I couldn't parse that. ...

Nice having an intelligent chat with you.

Good point, I knew better than to start. Don't know what I'm thinking. This can't end well. Well, mathematical objects are abstract objects. But I agr...

And the left, the home of Russiagate and Hunter Biden's laptop as Russian disinformation, are the modern rationalists? I'll take the other side of tha...

Can you name one such? Structuralism is in these days. It doesn't matter if you call sets "beer mugs" as Hilbert pointed out. It's the properties and ...

I don't know what that means. Your example was triangles. Triangles are identified up to similarity by their angles; and up to congruence by the lengt...

I just wanted to note that for general info, especially since the linked article and the article that it referenced both made the same error. Sean Car...

A point of clarification. The multiverse and the many worlds interpretation are two entirely separate ideas. The multiverse refers to the fact that pa...

No worse than typing on a computer whose components are made in exploitive third-world factories. You might recall that a while back, Foxconn employee...

Good one! You can misbehave all you like because in some other world you were Godly. I would not believe a word anyone writes about the subject unless...

I got plenty of nothing And nothing's plenty for me I got no car - got no mule I got no misery Folks with plenty of plenty They've got a lock on the d...

How is this substantially different from waking up from a dream? Are you a man dreaming you're a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming you're a man? How ...

Krauss is full of bullpucky. He presupposes the laws of physics and the quantum soup, neither of which are nothing. He's another one of these dumb sma...

A better question, given the nature of the 2008 and 2020 bailouts, is what is the entitlement of the rich to a claim on the public trough? As the Occu...

Oh I see, you're right. My parser got confused.

Okay. In preparation for this response I read the introductory material in Hamkins's paper, Pointwise Definable Models in Set Theory. This is his form...

Yes sorry typo.

Duty calls for other stuff this evening, will get back to you later tonight or tomorrow to continue this interesting convo. But who on earth ever sugg...

I only meant to add clarity. It's a small point. The OP has disappeared and I was hoping he'd return long enough to comment on my observation that the...

That's a lot of negations, but for clarity, there does exist a definable yet noncomputable real, namely Chaitin's Omega. I haven't mentioned it becaus...

I have a point that might be of interest to you. Wiki is correct that if you take the standard rules of math, you can logically deduce the existence o...

You gave an existence proof without naming any specific noncomputable number. And in order to do so you needed a cardinality or a measure theoretic ar...