9/11 happened 1 trillion milliseconds after the unix epoch.
1,514 karma · joined October 14, 2011
What does this mean?
A larger and more devastating argument I've heard recently is that in order to even create logical statements, you need to be arguing from a worldview that can give an account for the existence of logic that isn't arbitrary (e.g. not "it just is"). And the argument goes that if you can't justify the existence of the tool, you can't justify its usage. This is devastating because if you believe it, then you suddenly must recognize that something prior to and higher than logic must exist in order to inform you of its existence, and it is not subject to the bounds of any logical system founded arbitrarily, but becomes the means by which logic itself coheres into something meaningful.
One way to discover that we necessarily have worldviews outside of logic is to look at a statement like this, and realize it appeals to something outside of logic (feelings) to critique how someone else is only pretending to follow it.
Link to paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.08176
Surprising that it’s just two equidistant azimuthal projections, centered on the poles.
I see matter as reality’s “tip of the iceberg” that consciousness sees. But the stuff beyond matter is probably not just more invisible material (i.e. not just “stuff” all the way down).
All signs point to the invisible not being dead stuff, but spirit, process, pattern; like a source or spring of “aliveness”. This is not impossible to check if we find the mysticism already latent in our beliefs that we aren’t accustomed to critically evaluating. Then from there, evaluating what we trust and why, then leaning more on traditions which have accumulated wisdom on how best to connect to that mysticism.
Anyway, it’s a very mystical question you asked. We don’t have to insist that the amazing tools we have for ascertaining material reality are universal to understanding all parts of it. By analogy, sure, subjective experience might arise from invisible material. But I prefer the top-down view of reality, where life is just presumed first.
Disclaimer: I’m an orthodox christian
I agree, we’re struggling with the idea that our technological systems have more agency than us. I think it’s hard for technologists to see this as an actual spiritual reality, even though we borrow it metaphorically for argument.
Interesting that science by design is the inversion of this— to only show concern with the parts of every encounter which must always recur.
They’re not, but some scientific terms might help demystify the actual point being made—
1. Emergence means that higher levels of matter can have behaviors that are not determinable from its constituents (e.g. chemistry).
2. In cybernetics, Downward Causation means that the constituents’ behaviors can actually be influenced by behaviors at higher levels.
I’m not a physicist so I’m not sure how much of the “quantum” weirdness can be isolated to its domain, but complex systems appear to be mysterious across the entire hierarchy.
> They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs... beliefs aren’t knowledge and they aren’t science
Science is an instrument for verifying beliefs about very specific things though. My favorite definition of science is that it is a system for drawing out the patterns (regularities) of nature that are the same across space and time. It can only focus on “common denominators” of reality (not the whole of it) in order to reduce it to the parts which can be predicted (material prophecy). But it’s not an instrument that you can use to verify beliefs about segments of reality that it’s designed to ignore. Like it can’t deal with its own foundational question (i.e. “can we truly deduce the unseen by only what is seen?”), and surely Truth is larger than we can know by any single tool for ascertaining it.
> Of course, many of these paradigms are useless in practice, such as the empty paradigm (no concepts)[1] or paradigms with only one concept.
> [1]: Similar reasoning explains why Baskin-Robbins has exactly 31 flavors of ice cream. We postulate that they have only 5 flavors, which gives 2^5 − 1 = 31 combinations with at least one flavor. The 32nd combination is the empty flavor. The taste of the empty flavor is an open research question.
> some things can be represented in finite digits in base x but require infinite digits in base y.
Very good summary. Binary to decimal is very straightforward until fractions require infinite digits. I don’t think dec64[1] is even a tradeoff—it’s just better. The significand stays a normal binary number— but it encodes the decimal point in gasp decimal. No infinities required for the numeric language that we all think in.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal64_floating-point_forma...