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Not that it matters, but it is a truism that the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth. All truth is relative.
Every last bit of it - relative to the predisposed world view of the observer and decider.

It is a nice romantic idea though.

I've always found it fascinating that people are so afraid to admit there's such a thing as absolute truth or universal logic.
I mean come on does 1+1 always equal 2 or not? Does the sun always rise in the east, or does it occasionally rise in the west?
The fact is I already know you believe in truth and immaterial universal logic. But thinking minds know where that leads...
You either have to give up knowledge and admit you could be wrong about everything you think you know or admit there must be a Creator/Designer who knows everything there is to know.
Making a knowledge claim such as " there is no God" is therefore self refuting. If there's no God you can't know anything for certain. Because the things you don't know could overturn the things you think you know. You could be in the MaTriX. But the fact is you do know some things for certain. Therefore you know for certain there is a Creator and he knows everything there is to know.
So when I hear a self ascribed atheist making knowledge claims, discussing truth and logic i get a little grin.
Epistemology 101 you can't know anything for certain unless you know everything certainly or have special revelation from someone who does.
You see Vic you have to borrow from my worldview every time you want to consider logic, truth or make a knowledge claim of any kind. But you already KNOW that 😉
Atheism reduces a man to absurdity
Thus it was written:
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge"
Thanks for listening!

Just taking a quick break to interrupt the word salad tosser for a minute...

I don't know how irrational numbers means our numbering system is flawed. I would like to see some more about this one.

I mean, absolutely any numbering system out there is going to have integers right?

If your numbering system has integers, then you're inevitability going to end up with irrational numbers.

I mean, could our system be better?... I'm sure it could be, but it's what we got to work, and it seems to work. I mean, I'm sending you this message through the internets right now.

Even our physics is pretty good for the most part, even the parts that end up with complex numbers seem to work out.

I mean, it's hard to explain stuff like Imaginary numbers, but that doesn't make our system inherently bad.

I get you on the rest of your post though... quantum physics basically destroys any hypothesis that requires "fate".

Someone unified relativity and quantum mechanics?

I didn't hear about it.



Brewha gave an excellent example of where 1 + 1 does not equal 2



Sounds like a question for Venus... but technically the sun doesn't rise. You know the Earth is round right?



That's some serious word salad there.



Ya... I hear ya, you seem pretty obsessed with other peoples' lack of your faith.

^ oh what do you know!

hehe....

Is that absolutely true?

Believing that the sun will always rise in the east is faith. Any number of things may happen which will stop it from doing so tomorrow. Believing that it will always rise in the east is complete folly.

Believing that some integer which is human defined, when a human defined procedure is applied to it and another human defined integer always results in the same human defined result is some sort of profound thing is circular logic. 1+1=2 because we literally defined "1", "+" and "2" to do so.


This is nonsense. I have never said I couldn't be wrong. But my willingness to be wrong does not automatically make you correct. It isn't binary....there is an infinite number of possibilities.


Simply wrong. I say there is no god, because there is no evidence for a god. As such, I do not believe there is a god. And yes, there are many possibilities for this world. I deal with the ones which I see evidence for. As a possibility which presents no evidence, is by definition not impacting the world, and therefore not particularly important. An example for this would be the SciFi theory that we are in a simulation run from a supercomputer in another reality. That's fine. If you do not have any awareness or ability to gain awareness of the outside of that simulation, then this is your functional reality.

You realize your little "gotchas" aren't actually "gotchas" right? Like.... I can believe there is no god. Your saying I know there is some omniscient creator is not actually doing anything. Just because you believe that the logic game you're playing makes sense, doesn't mean it actually does.

More importantly. I am fully capable of separating the idea of believing in a god, and following a god. Even if you were able to bring your god down to earth, have him/her unequivocally demonstrate his/her omniscience and omnipotence... I'm not going to follow them. I'll believe they exist (after sufficient testing). But why would I suddenly become a follower? Being born with omniscience and omnipotence doesn't automatically make some deity worthy of my respect.


Huh? You realize this is the real world right? "Certainty" can mean 98.2% confidence. I'm willing to lead my life on that.
To ascribe some random numbers, I could say I'm 98.2% confident in the current knowledge of how we came about.
the other 1.8% possibility has to then be divided across all infinite possibilities which have no evidence of occurring. So every little possibility, from the christian god, buddhist, aliens, matrix, computer simulation, AI, even stuff you don't think about... like we're stuck in the lower colon of a space whale... or we're the creation of a 4th dimensional child... All that sh$t has to share the same equal possibilities as the other "no evidence" possibilities.

So while I can say I believe with confidence there is no god, I can say with statistical certainty that the god described by any single religious text is statistically impossible.


this is absolutely false. To pretend one needs to borrow from religion to consider logic or knowledge makes zero sense.

What if God wrote the single religious text? That would be statistically 100% accurate.

Something like the Book of Mormon that came from the golden plates.

Huh?
Did you just say "what if" and "100% accurate"?

IF a god wrote a text, THEN the god described would be accurate. But without any evidence of the existence of any god, or any evidence after that of the writing of text by any god.... then each text and each god have essentially equal statistical probability. So divide that 1.8% by an infinite number of possibilities, and that's the chance of being correct about that particular one.

Interesting, I've actually been thinking of something similar. Possible explanation for some things in relativity.

Thought about the concept of maybe c is only constant to our relatve perception, but is not constant relative to the size of space. Basically think about it this way... our ruler in our local gravitational potential is a meter... but relatively speaking, in expanded space, the ruler locally would still be a meter... but it would appear larger to an outside observer. Thus, if our distances were defined by the size of a single unit of space, then c would not be constant. Anyway, just a thought experiment I had... thought I would share it.

I don't know a ton about astrophysics, but if you're asking about whether the observation of distant objects takes into account the expansion of the galaxy over time, and the fact that observations in the now are of things which actually occurred millions/billions of years ago and only reached us at the speed of light now.... they have already been accounting for that and I believe the expanding distance measured by that unit c over the same time.

I mean... if a meter is expanded external to our local gravity, that would have been identified already.

Items in space would be the same size to an astronaut as they travel with the item from earth, to space (lets say both the observer and the object expand 2x)... but both would appear larger to observers on earth.

I think our tech is sufficient that we would have picked up on that (perhaps not with something as small as an astronaut, but with measurements of planets/moons as well as the distances to them.

(granted... I only am assuming our tech is sufficient to have noticed that. A small enough difference may not get picked up)

I don't think our tech would be able to detect that. Even deeper in our solar system I would think the difference would be too small to detect. Gravity is pretty weak relative to the other forces.

Our ability to test gravity is quite limited... thus the reason we still don't have a unified theory.

Then again, I'm not in the field, I'm just a fan and keep up with all the latest, so there's a good chance I'm wrong;)

You should watch some Sean Carrol, that dude is awesome. I've watched quite a few of his lectures.

I actually envision if you were able to teleport a ruler from here, to the deepest known void, the ruler wouldn't be able to hold it's mass together due to the lack of gravitational potential.

Again, I'm probably wrong;)

Ok, lets go the other way with it, lets teleport it to the center of the earth, is its overall structure going to stay the same, or is it going to collapse?

I'm making the claim that in the deepest of voids, the space between the particles would be too far to effectively hold it's structure. At the very least it would become incredibly brittle.

Unfortunately, this is not testable... kinda curious now, probably have to research it more later.

Void meaning a place in space time where the effects of expansion are relevent. We have no means to test such a place. We cant even get out of our own galaxy let alone to a point in space where expansion matters.

You sound certain that you are correct though... we need to get us a physicist in here.

I'll have to come up with a better way to explain what's going on in my head.

Basically, I'm taking the best theory we got, and doing a thought experiment on what the theory is stating.

If space is expanding... then the individual units of space expand... or more space is created in the absense of a meaningful gravitational field, or it's just one plane that gets larger but there are no meaningful units of space.

A paper got published recently claiming to have found evidence that suggests there may be individual units of space. That's what caused my thought experiment.

So my thought experiment was exploring the possibility of individual units of space time expanding in the absense of a meaningful gravitational field.

I took it farther than what I described, but if you can't visualize what I'm saying, then the rest if it will split your dome. Ive actually considered seeking out some physicists to discuss this, as nothing that I'm saying disagrees with the standard model. It's just going down the rabbit hole of what it means if individual units of space actually exist.

That's exactly what I'm trying to do!!!

Unfortunately, whether or not the universe is fundamentally discreet is still an unknown.

So everything I said above was exactly what I said it was, just a thought experiment.

Ugh I hate that term. It was created by the press and a book publisher. No scientist ever called the Higgs boson the "God Particle". It was called the "Goddamn Particle" as a joke among physicists.

Dude.... 98.2% is a cbid term for "Who knows, I'm throwing a random made up number in here" (you're new, so I'll let it go... this time).

But more importantly, your certainty because of your "worldview" is not real. You are certain because of faith. Which is the opposite of evidence. I will never substitute faith in the unprovable for certainty.

I would argue that the gravitational field of the ruler would be insignificant relative to the expansion of space. Yes, 15 nm would be 15nm.... because of how we define the meter. That's not what I'm arguing. Im arguing you would fill the same space, but the space itself would be expanded limiting the ability of the matter to hold their bonds.

Again, this is assuming space is discreet... which is currently unknown.

The gravity of the molecules of the ruler will definitely NOT be insignificant, if you're in a void where there are no other forces acting on the ruler. think about it... there's nothing to pull the molecules away from each other. In this imaginary void, there is no gravity other than that of the molecules. The only forces in this scenario are gravity between molecules, electromagnetic forces, and the weak and strong interactions of particles. Unless one or more of these forces start pushing away from each other, or some imaginary wind blows through, there will be no other force to cause the particles to move away from each other. Even if the space between the molecules is "expanded" so you've got a ruler perfectly blown up 2x... the only forces are the ones pulling the particles together. Even if you expand everything to the point that particle A is so far away from particle B that the electromagnetic, gravitational, weak and strong forces between them cannot affect them.... what force would cause them to do anything other than stand where they are?

Why would you think absolute zero doesn't exist?

At least you’re thinking....

You got a leg up on most us asshats here.

Oh, this wasn't aimed at you, it was aimed at dg.

It was the salad tossing reference wasn't it :)