(June 25, 2017 at 8:14 am)Alex K Wrote: As a scientist and educator, I firmly believe that it is crucial that members of our society learn how to think about their place in the world as well as their true origins. The notion that we don't have to educate anyone who hasn't thought about the issue by themselves seems absurd to me.
I also disagree with your somewhat arbitrary criterion what is a nonexistent object. I understand that you got to study a bit of mathematics for your degree and encountered some concepts that seemed alien to you and therefore got the impression that you just then began to work with nonexistent objects, but you've been doing that all the time, and everyone is doing it. Numbers in general. Show me a 1.5 in Nature. Show me a clear-cut cause and effect. We all use tons of idealized abstractions to describe and deal with the world, complex numbers and the axioms of classical geometry are just new to you. They are one more abstract idea we can use to describe reality, e.g. the phase and amplitude of an alternating current. Electrical current is an idealization, it's a bunch of quantum waves whizzing down a crystal, meanwhile the energy is transferred through the electromagnetic field around the wire.
I do not understand the connection to Will, nor what your point is in general.
Should I have a point?
I just present what I have in mind before expecting from some others to share with me what they have in their mind too.
Me too, I seldom understand a new idea the time I hear it. And, not every idea presented to the world has to be included in my personal set of knowledge. So, naturally, I also expect that other human beings could be as I am in this respect in the least.
