An inconvenient truth: environmental perspective film vs digital

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Andre Weil- "God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it." I think he said this after Godel's work.
 
As for the environment, my dad always said,"Don't sh_t where you eat". Or maybe where other generations eat, if you care about that.
 
Gabriel M.A. said:
Mathematics seems to get stumped on the concept of "Infinity" (or as some would rather call it, "undefined"). Many see in this Divine implications. To tell you the truth, I have.

But work is underway to publish recently rediscovered work by Archimedes where he came about solving the "issue" of Infinity in math. People closely involved with recovering this find admit that this is "huge" (no pun intended). The pseudofunny thing is, that this sole copy of this work was recycled by a monk so he could make a copy of Scripture.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/archimedes/infinity.html

We'll see.
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True Gabriel, but if you read my post carefully you will notice that I did not say that mathemathics can prove everything, Goedel actually proved that any (non trivial) formal system is incomplete, and that within every formal system there are true statement that can't be proved to be true, and false statements that can't be proved to be false.

My point was that once a statement has been proved to be true (and becomes a theorem) within the framework of the axioms used to form the basis of the formal system, that statement can be considered irrefutably proven, and this is not true for any other discipline.

About the proof of the existence of God, it may seem blunt but I think it s a job for idiots, if God existence could be proved, that would automatically cancel any need for faith (since believing in something that has been proven does not require any faith at all), thus negating the very reason for religion to exist.
 
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aizan said:
who says god likes religion? 😀
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Very wise point, a lot of people think that believing in God and being religious are the same thing, others believe that religion does not come from God, it comes from men.

It is a distinction worth making, there is no proof that, if there is a God, religion has anything to do with it.
 
fgianni said:
True Gabriel, but if you read my post carefully you will notice that I did not say that mathemathics can prove everything
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I didn't say you did; sorry, I went on my own tangent there. We're doing a lot of that here.

Mathematics can prove at least that I am not the best when it comes to numbers, though. 😉 Somehow I've been able to do some pretty far-out math in my head, but normal, uncomplicated math, I'm dumb as a doorknob. 😕

What were we talking about? Oh, yeah. Go, Gophers! 😀
 
fgianni said:
My point was that once a statement has been proved to be true (and becomes a theorem) within the framework of the axioms used to form the basis of the formal system, that statement can be considered irrefutably proven, and this is not true for any other discipline.
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It's the same thing, however, that makes mathematics really fall short a bit in comparison with the natural sciences; if you think about science in a very strict way (as in formulation of hypotheses and testing them against observable evidence), then mathematics isn't really a science, as there is no observable evidence to test it against and mathematical reasoning has no way of "testing" things beyond consistency checks against its own axioms. It's really more like a thought exercise in finding out what weird things you can derive starting from a few simple axioms; in this respect it is not unlike philosophy, technically not a science either under a narrow definition. Maths is considered a science largely by convention, because it's taught in universities and because it's such a useful tool for many sciences.

Philipp
 
fgianni said:
About the proof of the existence of God, it may seem blunt but I think it s a job for idiots, if God existence could be proved, that would automatically cancel any need for faith (since believing in something that has been proven does not require any faith at all), thus negating the very reason for religion to exist.
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The need for religion has nothing to do with faith. Organized religion has always been a method to control people and leave the power to rule in the hands of the few.
 
rxmd said:
Maths is considered a science largely by convention, because it's taught in universities and because it's such a useful tool for many sciences.
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Well, Mathematics is the science of numbers, wouldn't you agree? Everything about the study of numbers can be solidly verified by its laws, most theorems and axioms. Quantities in the real world are real. Let's not confuse one nonapplication of a study as a complete fallacy of the whole, if it is not founded on it.

The study of numbers in Mathematics is more rigid and verifiable than, say, Numerology and Philosophy. Nature is also rigid, but many things are yet to be verified; on wouldn't think that by this the studies related to it could not be sciences.

It's dangerous to assert that something is a science mainly because it's a useful tool for many sciences and it's taught in universities. In that case, Rhetoric would be a science by these criteria alone. It is not.
 
ywenz said:
Organized religion has always been a method to control people and leave the power to rule in the hands of the few.
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One method, yes.

IMHO that doesn't discount the legitimacy of religion and faith as such, though. A lot of other good things have been abused in such a way; and by now we've seen enough societies that control people and leave the power to rule in the hands of the few, and some of them managed to do so quite well without the banner of religion, so I think religion isn't really the heart of all evil here. (Some of them even managed to give us nice cameras in the process, just to come around full circle to the topic of this forum 😉)

Philipp
 
Gabriel M.A. said:
Everything about the study of numbers can be solidly verified by its laws, most theorems and axioms.
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If I remember my mathematical logic lectures properly, it was precisely the point of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem that not every derivation from a system of axioms can necessarily be verified by these axioms. 🙂 That's why it was such a devastating blow to the earlier positivist school of mathematics of Hilbert etc., whose stance on mathematics was not unlike what you describe here.

Gabriel M.A. said:
The study of numbers in Mathematics is more rigid and verifiable than, say, Numerology and Philosophy.
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Actually I think you are not doing the philosophers credit here, at least some of them; most analytical philosophers and logicians I met, for example, would have every right to be offended if you told them that their approaches were less rigid and verifiable than a mathematician's. (And "verification" really does not mean the same thing as in any natual science; it makes a difference whether you verify a system against observable facts or against itself.)

Gabriel M.A. said:
It's dangerous to assert that something is a science mainly because it's a useful tool for many sciences and it's taught in universities. In that case, Rhetoric would be a science by these criteria alone. It is not.
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Hm, mathematics is far more important nowadays than rhetoric (and incidentally the classical Greeks considered rhetoric a science, but then we've come a long way since then...). I think a more interesting candidate for an analogy would be semiotics.

Philipp
 
ywenz said:
The need for religion has nothing to do with faith. Organized religion has always been a method to control people and leave the power to rule in the hands of the few.
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Faith may have nothing to do with religion, but religion has everything to do with faith. Either you have faith in a set of beliefs, or you don't; this is one of the things that defines "religion": a common faith. That there are bureaucratic and complex OCD/lithurgical aspects to many of them, specially western religions, that's another matter.

Organized religion is a way to control people, but not all organized religions are a "method" to control people. Agnostics and Buddhists, for example, are an exception; they do not believe in the enforcement of their beliefs upon others as a means to have a "uniform" religion or thought. Either you believe or you don't believe, and the course is your own. Discipline is distinct from religiousness.

Organized religion is unfortunately also a proven way to exploit uninformed, blind masses. It is also a way to have cohesion. "Religion" as a generic term is one of the most undemocratic institutions, for there is no room for dissent and questioning, at odds with the "me" human nature. Language is both uniform and yet expresses the "me" differences of one people from another.

When society has such identity crises with its cohesion, it is no small wonder it resorts to pseudonationalism.

One thing is for sure, when powers of the world have a big sense of "me"-ism, they will do as they please, even if it means s_iting on the same place they and others eat, religion or no religion.

World, nation, religion, language...they all exist because of each one of us. If we don't do anything, besides the sarcastic call to cease to breathe, there really won't be any breathing left for anybody. Including those who are right, those who are wrong, those who have no clue what that means, and those who would just rather not think about any of this.

So...who knows how to make henna-based emmulsions? 🙄
 
rxmd said:
It's the same thing, however, that makes mathematics really fall short a bit in comparison with the natural sciences; if you think about science in a very strict way (as in formulation of hypotheses and testing them against observable evidence), then mathematics isn't really a science, as there is no observable evidence to test it against and mathematical reasoning has no way of "testing" things beyond consistency checks against its own axioms. It's really more like a thought exercise in finding out what weird things you can derive starting from a few simple axioms; in this respect it is not unlike philosophy, technically not a science either under a narrow definition. Maths is considered a science largely by convention, because it's taught in universities and because it's such a useful tool for many sciences.

Philipp
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Actually there is a lot of truth here, some mathematicians consider maths more like a rigorous language that a science, we could see it as the language spoken by scientists.
But of course it is just a point of view, somehow I feel we are starting to split hairs here.
 
rxmd said:
Actually I think you are not doing the philosophers credit here, at least some of them; most analytical philosophers and logicians I met, for example, would have every right to be offended if you told them that their approaches were less rigid and verifiable than a mathematician's. (And "verification" really does not mean the same thing as in any natual science; it makes a difference whether you verify a system against observable facts or against itself.)
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If we're going to talk about "specialized" fields, then you're right. As a general statement, I believe what I said is true. I didn't say Philosophy isn't "rigid"; I said Mathematics, as a whole, was more so.

Logic is an interesting "creature", for it spans disciplines that are apparently so different from one another. You are right, I can see why some would be "offended" at some of my statements.

I'd actually like to see people being offended at things worth being offended by, not by semantical oversights which, Kant would perhaps argue, were not intended to offend. 😉
 
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