Do you believe in god or math?

[The Grand Nudger]

650nm or 640nm?

[fr0d0]

As is always the case with surveys, the results are taken as generalizations. A lot of Christians I know are mathemeticians. Lots scientists too. The blurb starts off with "For many people, believing in God comes down to a gut feeling that a benevolent deity is out there" ...so they're talking about nominal Christians: people who have no commitment one way or another but attend church for some reason other than what is being preached from the pulpit. Taking those into account the uk is 70% Christian, and not the 6% who attend a church regularly. (Church statistics are more like 3% believers)

I find that a methematical mind is actually more prone to acceptance of the kind of thinking that would accept something on cognition alone. People that demand the impossible, hard evidence like a slap in the face aren't usually convinced by this.

Of course there are Christians who are quite unthinking and believe on intuition. I don't condemn them for that. There's a lot to be said for a gut feeling and going with it: If it's simple and true to you then the chances are it's good.

So we're covered on both angles: people believe through cognition and through instinct. America is a lot like the uk: There are a lot of people declare themselves as Christian with little idea of what it is they're making a declaration of. And certainly act the opposite of what they would do if they actually held the position.

[edk]

No kidding? And in the "real" world" they will never match the perfect idea in our head. If you take a pound of sugar (you will never get a "perfect" pound)
but then you will never be able to divide it into 3 perfectly equal piles. Do you know nothing about the real world? You might get close, but that is not good enough for the idea of "3 equal piles" in our mind.
The real world will never match the subjective image in our mind.
By the way, I am holding one finger up. Am I saying Fuck YOU, or am I relaying the idea of 1?

YES THEY WILL! They do all the time! That doesn't detract in the slightest from my point, but this makes me angry! If you have an orange, how many oranges do you have? Not 1.02 or 1.3502376502386819305723067423805237049325893205723096731095314 or some impossibly accurate but not-quite-1 number of oranges, you have exactly one.

The sugar can be divided into three equal piles, if we're using an equal number of grains of sugar rather than equal mass. Each grain of sugar is discrete and can be counted exactly, and if there is a multiple of 3 number of grains of sugar in the original pile, it will divide exactly into 3.

Your last point appears to bear no relevance to anything. Please elaborate.

We use math to simplify our understanding of how objects relate in the world. It is a tool from inside. Everything in the objective world has mass, and energy. What mass, and energy do you ascribe to numbers, as you believe them to also be objective?

Light doesn't have mass. Are you saying it's not in the objective world?

[Autumnlicious]

Rhythm, did you just argue reality with the lesser known cousin of solipsist?

[Modular Moog V]

[Autumnlicious]

[Modular Moog V]

[The Grand Nudger]

LOL, Moros, sometimes I don't realize that people are arguing, I fall into the trap of thinking that they actually want/need something explained to them.

[IATIA]

There are a lot of assumptions in QM. Equations are 'normalized' quite often to fit the expected and observed results. In reality, a 'photon' does not exist and certainly not at rest. So the 'rest mass' of a photon is only a 'normalization' to accommodate the formulas. A 'photon' only exists at the speed of light or it does not exist.

We can measure the 'wave function' of a particle or we can measure the 'particle' function of a wave, but we cannot measure both simultaneously. we do not really understand the wave-particle duality. It is probably something totally different than what we can perceive at this time. Once this is identified, we will, again, modify and 'normalize' the equations to suit our needs.

[Modular Moog V]