News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality by kessog on Thursday August 08, 2024 @12:26PM (#41193283)
Excellent. I tried to get at something similar in a comment I made earlier today but was immediately downvoted and thus had my account automatically rate limited. It seems questioning the materialist presuppositions many hold around concepts like life and death can be a sore spot for some on HN. Am I correct in thinking you're circling Christian theology, specifically the Orthodox Christian idea of Theosis?
Re:A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality by rowanG077 on Thursday August 08, 2024 @05:10PM (#41196303)
It's because anything non-materialist is by definition non-physical and thus hogwash bullshit until you can actually prove it. By proving it you have made it physical.

There is zero evidence that anything non-materialist actually exist, literally zero. But what we do have is an island of things people have claimed is non-materialist to get smaller and smaller over time. Childish arguments like "But you can't prove this rock isn't conscious" is just the standard god of the gaps argument in a purple shirt that has been done to death.

Re:A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality by rbanffy on Thursday August 08, 2024 @05:50PM (#41196702)
> "But you can't prove this rock isn't conscious"

My favourite one in this line is “you can’t prove there isn’t an invisible pink unicorn in the middle of your living room and we can still agree it’s very unlikely to be there”.

Re:A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality by kessog on Friday August 09, 2024 @04:40AM (#41199978)
Is mathematics hogwash bullshit? How about logic? Or knowledge? Ethics? Reason?

You've just appealed to a wide array of necessary non-physical concepts while making the claim that non-physical concepts are unprovable - don't you see the contradiction here?

This is Aristotle 101, no need to rehash this debate because it's been settled in this exact form for thousands of years.

Re:A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality by rowanG077 on Friday August 09, 2024 @06:42AM (#41200540)
Some mathematics is hogwash. Some isn't. The game of mathematics is to define some axioms and sees what falls out of that. If your axioms are chosen such that they match reality it's not hogwash. For example boolean algebra is made physical in, among others, digital circuits. That's why mathematics also isn't considered a physical science by most.

I didn't make any claim to anything non-physical.

Re:A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality by kessog on Friday August 09, 2024 @07:04AM (#41200646)
> the game of mathematics is to define some axioms

Is an axiom physical? Can I touch a mathematical axiom? Can I kick it down the stairs?

> Boolean algebra is made physical

So what was it before it was "made physical"? This statement necessitates Boolean algebra having had some other, metaphysical form before physical instantiation.

> I didn't make any claim to anything non-physical

Yes you did. And you did again just now. "I" - appeal to the self. Non physical. "Didn't" - appeal to the past. Non physical. "Make any Claim" - appeal to truth or falsehood. Non physical.

Again, these are debates that have already been hashed out millennia ago. I don't want to appear rude or condescending, which is near impossible not to do over written debate, but I would highly suggest putting in the work to learn the history of fundamental philosophical concepts like Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Ethics before engaging in debate over them.

Re:A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality by mensetmanusman on Friday August 09, 2024 @02:26PM (#41204201)
The plane of consciousness and imagination is non physical.
Re:A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality by rowanG077 on Friday August 09, 2024 @03:28PM (#41204688)
Prove that it isn't just signals in the brain then. Untill then the best you can say is we don't know. a few hundred years ago people might have said pain is non-physical but look how that turned out. Just because we don't know now how it works is not an argument that it is non-physical.

In fact there is evidence it is physical. We have been able to decode low fidelity images of stuff people are imagining using brain imaging. That would never work if imagination is non-physical.

Re:A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality by mensetmanusman on Friday August 09, 2024 @08:33PM (#41206511)
This confuses data with runtime.
Re:A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality by rowanG077 on Saturday August 10, 2024 @08:32AM (#41209015)
This makes no sense without further clarification. What is the runtime here? What is the data?