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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

#91

Post by pseudoscienc3 »

nprateem wrote: post #50
7thaccount wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> Gopi Krishna is the canonical case illustrating the dangers, which is likely one reason the meditation was kept secret.

Curious to learn more, kept secret by who? And why was he the lucky one to receive that information?

Just spent the last hour reading his work here: https://www.ecomall.com/gopikrishna/. Sounds like any other charlatan and guru. From his last interview, seems like a lot of his foundation comes from the same principle that Godel invokes: "Now, please tell me, can such a vast creation be purposeless? Can such a vast creation come out of nothing? Can such a vast creation ruled by laws be all composed of dead, insensitive matter? The very idea of being - existence - - comes from the mind. A rock or a mountain or an ocean has no idea of existence, this existence comes from intelligence, and the author of the universe must be intelligent. If we didn't have an intelligent creator, there would be no purpose to this existence. There must be a purpose".

Additionally, the site's claims are frankly funny: "All of these books are scientific wonders—miracles! Each is packed with new information not available to scientists and scholars. It was easier to sequence the human genome than it would be for any person to write the books Gopi Krishna wrote.What do you think will happen as soon as thousands of men and women begin to manipulate human DNA for the “fun of it?” It will easy to do. Wait just two more decades, less than 20 years, and hundreds, if not thousands of bright, young boys and girls will be able to clone just about any animal (including humans). Who will stop this from being done? The reason why Gopi Krishna’s miraculous writings are not known by more than a few is because they are beyond the grasp, or comprehension, of our many of our present-day intellectuals."

Are non-believers are too stupid to comprehend his great works?

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

#92

Post by wahern »

oreegumee wrote: post #85
imiric wrote: post #51

> His rationale for belief in an afterlife is this: > If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it? Far from my petty mind to challenge a great thinker lik…

Great thinkers of old lacked awareness of experimentation and thought that have come along since. That and being a genius was easy when the majority were functionally illiterate disciples of the religion they grew up in.

Gödel lived from 1906 to 1978.

You also seem to be rationalizing an assumption that there were no atheists thousands of years ago, and yet there were.

There's no reason to believe that our critical thinking powers are any stronger today than they were in the past few thousand years, certainly when it comes to metaphysics. To me, at least, the relative prevalence of various beliefs through recored history suggests something very different about how people of any period, including our own, find and adopt knowledge.

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

#93

Post by oreegumee »

wahern wrote: post #92
oreegumee wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great thinkers of old lacked awareness of experimentation and thought that have come along since. That and being a genius was easy when the majority were functionally illiterate disciples of the religion they grew up in.

Gödel lived from 1906 to 1978. You also seem to be rationalizing an assumption that there were no atheists thousands of years ago, and yet there were. There's no reason to believe that our critical thinking powers are any stronger today than they were in the past few thousand years, certainly when it comes to metaphysics. To me, at least, the relative prevalence of various beliefs through recored history suggests som…

[dead]

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

#94

Post by defrost »

bardsimpson wrote: post #70
imiric wrote: post #51

> His rationale for belief in an afterlife is this: > If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it? Far from my petty mind to challenge a great thinker lik…

Rationality is not an inscribed property but rather a natural consequence of observing the order in place. For example, the table of elements expresses the properties of integers as inherent to reality. As such, it is rational and rationally-ordered. This is not so much “philosophy” as it is “logic”, it is the conclusion of philosophy and mathematics and the subsequent origin of the computational reality.

One of the distinctive properties of integers is that there are at least 200 of them.

Oh, and some of them (either nearly or exactly half) are negative.

The table of elements falls a little short here.

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

#95

Post by plorkyeran »

voxl wrote: post #63
freejazz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>First of all, the world being rational is a property humans ascribe to it. On an atomic level matter follows specific rules, yes, and we extrapolate a certain order from this on a higher level. But I don't see how any of it can be defined as rational, or having any sort of deeper meaning. You might not be read in philosophy, but surely you understand the word "if"

Right, the parent attacks the axioms as-if they where the argument while simultaneously attacking the source as egotistical. The axioms are of course suspect, but if you give reasonable interpretations to them then the conclusion is not far fetched as they basically necessitate some kind of creator.

The choice of axioms presented is in fact part of the argument. It's very easy to pick a set of axioms from which your desired conclusion will logically follow. Gödel was not discussing a hypothetical; he was arguing that an afterlife actually did exist, which relies on the axioms he presented applying to the real world. If you disagree with those, everything that comes after that step in the argument is irrelevant.

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

#96

Post by madaxe_again »

aliasxneo wrote: post #88
madaxe_again wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, particularly with the advent of AI and modern computer technology as a whole, Gödel would today be a simulationist of Bostrom’s cut. If we ever have the means to accurately simulate reality - which we already do, at small scales and with significant time dilation - then it becomes almost inevitable that we reside within a simulation, as the simulations would vastly outnumber physical reality, and therefore t…

> I prefer to look at this not as woo-woo, or belief, but rather logical deduction based on sound premises. Are you saying that belief is woo-woo? Curious to understand how you're relating the two.

Yes. Belief is grounded in nothing - hence it is belief. One could believe in moon Nazis, or Bigfoot, or god - without a shred of evidence for any of them.

Knowledge is based upon rationale and testable hypotheses.

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

#97

Post by Tainnor »

cushpush wrote: post #67
Xcelerate wrote: post #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 in…

Reflecting deeply on Gödel's Completeness and Incompleteness Theorems, I'd like to contribute to the discussion. The essence of Completeness lies in the notion that a system, constructed on foundational axioms (such as facts, truths, or mathematical operations), encompasses all possible facts derivable within its framework. Interestingly, this completeness paradoxically begets contradictions. It implies the existence…

"A system encompasses all facts derivable within its framework" is a very vague sentence, but the way it's written I would consider it false. Second order logic is incomplete, for example.

The fact that different set of axioms lead to different conclusions is... kind of obvious? And not at all what logicians (or probably anybody) mean by "contradiction". Moreover, incompleteness doesn't at all prevent that. You can take ZFC + CH and ZFC + not(CH), both are incomplete, but they obviously entail different conclusions.

In more standard terminology, there are systems that are free of contradictions, such as Presburger arithmetic or propositional calculus.

Gödel's completeness and incompleteness theorems are really about entirely different things, completeness is about first-order logic as a system, incompleteness is about consistent, effectively axiomatisable theories of sufficient strength.

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

#98

Post by aliasxneo »

madaxe_again wrote: post #96
aliasxneo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I prefer to look at this not as woo-woo, or belief, but rather logical deduction based on sound premises. Are you saying that belief is woo-woo? Curious to understand how you're relating the two.

Yes. Belief is grounded in nothing - hence it is belief. One could believe in moon Nazis, or Bigfoot, or god - without a shred of evidence for any of them. Knowledge is based upon rationale and testable hypotheses.

Maybe this is just semantics, but the statement, "I believe my wife loves me," would necessarily be grounded in nothing? Or is that not belief?

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

#99

Post by Turing_Machine »

defrost wrote: post #94
bardsimpson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rationality is not an inscribed property but rather a natural consequence of observing the order in place. For example, the table of elements expresses the properties of integers as inherent to reality. As such, it is rational and rationally-ordered. This is not so much “philosophy” as it is “logic”, it is the conclusion of philosophy and mathematics and the subsequent origin of the computational reality.

One of the distinctive properties of integers is that there are at least 200 of them. Oh, and some of them (either nearly or exactly half) are negative. The table of elements falls a little short here.

> Oh, and some of them (either nearly or exactly half) are negative.

Well, it doesn't quite work that way. Yes, you can put the negative integers in 1:1 correspondence with the positive integers, but you can also put them in 1:1 correspondence with the positive integers that are divisible by 2, or 3, or 3,000... or, for that matter, the negative integers that are divisible by three thousand. All of those sets have the same cardinality (often called "countably infinite").

There are, however, provably more real numbers than there are integers.

It is unknown whether there are any sets whose cardinality lies between the cardinality of the set of integers and the cardinality of the set of real numbers.

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

#100

Post by ganzuul »

swayvil wrote: post #83

Arguing for an afterlife is probably a wrong turn. Better to see it for yourself (in a way that doesn't involve dying of course.) The far reaches of meditation (dhyana, yogic self-cultivation) can provide such. But that requires a lot of work and a deviant lifestyle. Something a rare few are prepared to invest in.

Bhakti is much faster.
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