Math people seem to have this more than other engineering/science etc ; math, and this is actual bloody Godel, seems so perfect and beautiful that is has to have a creator. Everything else is incredibly sloppy (including most software).
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Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
41–50 of 184 posts
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#42Math people seem to have this more than other engineering/science etc ; math, and this is actual bloody Godel, seems so perfect and beautiful that is has to have a creator. Everything else is incredibly sloppy (including most software).
Well, Maxwell was so impressed by the perfect similarity of the hydrogen molecules he concluded that they must have been created! > No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction. > None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have…
They never thought of infinite multiverses with random variations in each, and survivor bias.
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You’ll get an answer with all of the linguistic flavor of Gödel’s texts and absolutely none of his insights or reasoning. LLM is a language model, not Deep Thought from the hitchhikers guide.
It works on embeddings, which are concepts. So it would at least be manipulating a similarly weighted network of concepts, though much shallower. It would be an answer from his literal domain of discourse. It would be evocative rather than authoritative.
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#44Funny 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.
> For a possibly not useless proxy, train an LLM on his oeuvre and ask it.
all major LLMs are likely already trained on his works, so you can already ask: "Hi, ChatGPT, pretend to be Kurt Godel"
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#45Math people seem to have this more than other engineering/science etc ; math, and this is actual bloody Godel, seems so perfect and beautiful that is has to have a creator. Everything else is incredibly sloppy (including most software).
Yeah there is a nice crossover also in religion, where some sects have agreed that theories like the Big Bang are not incompatible with a creator. But my initial take on Godel’s belief here is that even if he is correct, and the order of the universe demands that there is more to existence than this, why do Humans get the afterlife? Parameciums don’t have the inherent consciousness or great individual potential, so t…
I think that at the end of the day, every rationalization of an afterlife is personal - people believe humans get an afterlife so they can assure themselves of life after death.
Of course it's entirely possible for the universe to have been designed and still operate under purely naturalistic rules, without any hint of supernatural elements, but what would be the point of believing that?
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peterson's a psychologist, an important field that many evolutionary biologists and HNers sadly don't quite understand, though they do very good work otherwise.
> Just for the record since people can't see it, I had tons of upvotes before I added the part about Peterson. All the "logicians" here suddenly were not able to like (an emotion) the part of my comment that they had previously liked :) Please don't turn an unrelated topic into a flamewar about Jorpson
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Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#47Math people seem to have this more than other engineering/science etc ; math, and this is actual bloody Godel, seems so perfect and beautiful that is has to have a creator. Everything else is incredibly sloppy (including most software).
Yeah there is a nice crossover also in religion, where some sects have agreed that theories like the Big Bang are not incompatible with a creator. But my initial take on Godel’s belief here is that even if he is correct, and the order of the universe demands that there is more to existence than this, why do Humans get the afterlife? Parameciums don’t have the inherent consciousness or great individual potential, so t…
> But my initial take on Godel’s belief here is that even if he is correct,
He was/is correct about many things, but not about the afterlife. It's just because some people are so lucky to see the face of god by deep and hard mental studies, they believe there is such a thing. And if you have been told all your life that is reality and you 'saw' it, why question it?
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#48Math people seem to have this more than other engineering/science etc ; math, and this is actual bloody Godel, seems so perfect and beautiful that is has to have a creator. Everything else is incredibly sloppy (including most software).
Yeah there is a nice crossover also in religion, where some sects have agreed that theories like the Big Bang are not incompatible with a creator. But my initial take on Godel’s belief here is that even if he is correct, and the order of the universe demands that there is more to existence than this, why do Humans get the afterlife? Parameciums don’t have the inherent consciousness or great individual potential, so t…
Humans are "special" in the sense that at least in genesis god creates humans in his own image:
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."
More simply, if you're creating a moral system that values human life to prevent a number of bad things, it's useful to put humans apart from other beings, so that you can justify commandments like "don't kill yourselves please" at the same time as the people being commanded see all other animals killing each other, and themselves need to kill other animals for survival. Put more bluntly, how do you get masses of uneducated people to not behave like animals? You tell them they are special, and definitely not like animals, and you hold them to a higher standard.
Most of everything in the bible at least is used as an illustrative reason to guide you towards some specific behavior. If man isn't made in the image of god and isn't special there's a bunch of things in there that get harder to demand or explain.
In post modern philosophical thinking, there's a reinvention of nature where animals are more "all the same" and should have similar rights to humans, should not be killed etc, which is part of the wider movement to treat the whole earth as our home and to see humans as a part of a wider system rather than special.
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I like Jordan Peterson's evolutionary take on these philosophical questions Why when actual evolutionary biologists disagree with Peterson on most of his "takes"?
Peterson's a psychologist, an important field that many evolutionary biologists and HNers sadly don't quite understand, though they do very good work otherwise.
> You seem to be a person of faith, there's no arguing with people of faith.
Can you describe the methodology you used to determine that this is necessarily true, with zero exceptions?
> I just understand the limits of what we can actually know...
Ah, a perfectly rational human....this is like the 50th or so I've encountered this week!
Careful...faith is fundamental to human consciousness, and cultures, it comes in a wide variety of forms, and those who suffer from it typically are rendered unable to self-diagnose.
Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your point exactly? Oh I see, should we care. I don't. You can reason it either way. As for alchemy it's a meditative practice that makes sense if you understand it. Where the external alchemists went wrong was no one told them what the symbols meant so they thought it was a physical transformation of base metals rather than of consciousness, which is what it is. In fact, the alchemists aimed for direct spirit…
What does your second paragraph even mean? I don't mean to come across as disrespectful btw. I just honestly don't understand what you're trying to convey.
It means there's a meditation that is supposed to provide direct spiritual realisation. As this involved a transformation of consciousness, it was known as alchemy - change.
However, historically the instructions were kept secret and shared using coded language. All that philosophers stone business, changing lead into gold etc. But they were just symbols which basically refer to sexual energy and consciousness.
Here's an example of some of the symbology from the Taoist tradition: https://www.mantakchia.com/inner-alchemy-level-iv-lesser-enl...
So, as far as someone like Newton was concerned, a quest for direct spiritual experience rather than just belief makes sense. Some of us just have to know.
This experience - raising the kundalini underpins most major religions IMO. A simple look on reddit should convince you this is a very real phenomenon [1]. Gopi Krishna is the canonical case illustrating the dangers, which is likely one reason the meditation was kept secret.