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Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

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Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#2
Hopefully as an FYI that is free of too much skeptical criticism (I mean... I actually get it, but I just don't want to deal with negativity right now), there's actually a rapidly growing number of NDE accounts on YouTube right now. I am putting together a playlist of the most compelling ones: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvnDbwjRqIOkgR1eUMfpn...

Some of these are from well-educated people like doctors, former skeptics and at least 1 neuroscientist.

Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#3
Funny this came up. Just today I was reading about a letter Gödel wrote to von Neumann in 1956 asking him about an idea relating to the precursors of P vs NP and Hutter search (https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/46ae...).

Gödel was quite ahead of his time. Even though he tended to prefer theory over practical applications, it would be really interesting to have his thoughts on prediction and induction as they relate to the recent advances in machine learning.

Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#4
TLDR Godel believed we lived in a rational world. "Precisely in virtue of the fact that our lives consist in unfulfilled or spoiled potential makes him confident that this lifetime is but a staging ground for things to come. But, again, that is only if the world is rationally structured."

Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#7
post #2

Hopefully as an FYI that is free of too much skeptical criticism (I mean... I actually get it, but I just don't want to deal with negativity right now), there's actually a rapidly growing number of NDE accounts on YouTube right now. I am putting together a playlist of the most compelling ones: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvnDbwjRqIOkgR1eUMfpn... Some of these are from well-educated people like doctors, for…

NDE is an initialism for “near death experience” here.

Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#9

Funny this came up. Just today I was reading about a letter Gödel wrote to von Neumann in 1956 asking him about an idea relating to the precursors of P vs NP and Hutter search ( https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/46ae... ). Gödel was quite ahead of his time. Even though he tended to prefer theory over practical applications, it would be really interesting to have his thoughts on prediction and in…

> it would be really interesting to have his thoughts on prediction and induction as they relate to the recent advances in machine learning.

For a possibly not useless proxy, train an LLM on his oeuvre and ask it.

Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#10
post #5

[flagged]

> I don't think it's news that clever people can believe utter nonsense

Not that I necessarily agree with Godel’s specific views on the topic, but why do you get to determine what is “utter nonsense”? There’s clearly no consensus on the matter nor has there been for most of human existence. We’re not talking about some fringe belief like “brushing teeth is bad” that Feynman held.

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