News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

postmodern100

Re:Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks on Thursday September 04, 2025 @05:35PM (#45132486)
My brain (the one in my head) can only interpret red or green, given its makeup and the rest of the state of the universe including the display that I'm looking at.

Therefore, it's a fact that my brain interprets red instead of green, or vise versa. It's a fact for someone else's brain that they interpret it as green instead of red.

Re:Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks on Thursday September 04, 2025 @05:32PM (#45132457)
> There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category.

My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choice/ZFC).

The math humanity practices today is a result of tuning the axioms to be: self-consistent, and, useful for explaining phenomena that we can observe. I don't believe this math is correct in a universal or absolute sense, just locally.

Re:Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks on Thursday September 04, 2025 @05:16PM (#45132294)
(Sorry I already forgot the password to my recently created account!)

> There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.

This to me reads as semantic games; let me rephrase your example:

"Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently."