There’s a really good science fiction novel by Robert Sheckley called Immortality, Inc. where scientists in the future have discovered that there is an afterlife, but the only way to ensure you get there is a medical procedure and you can only do that if you can afford it. That’s just the beginning, there’s a huge amount of worldbuilding, but that’s the main theme of the book.
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HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Weird how magic and mystery stops being magic when scientists have words for it.
One day we’ll discover the afterlife, but we’ll just call them “Post-Human Conciousness Wells” or something, and insist it totally isn’t the same thing as that ancient superstition.
Cmon, you wanna tell me the world is purely material when our math literally uses imaginary numbers to make sense of things?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 year ago
dyen49k@kbin.social 1 year ago
actual theoretical physicist here: "imaginary numbers" are just poorly named, there's nothing imaginary about them. You might as well use 2D geometric algebra to do the exact same job (treating real numbers as scalars and imaginary numbers as pseudoscalars)
walkercricket@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Math is a tool of the mind to describe our world, imaginary numbers is only a extension of that tool to allow us to go beyond what mathematical logic prevents us to do, while still getting in the end a real number. Math, despite being powerful, is a flawed tool, so getting around its flaws by creating things like imaginary numbers isn’t absurd and doesn’t make the result any less real at the end.
On the other hand, I don’t think calling everything we don’t understand “magic” or the new trending words “supernatural” and “a miracle” and give god or anything else (like karma) credit for it would be more clever. Back then, we didn’t understood the concept of thunder and interpreted it as god’s wrath. Now, we understand it’s a transmission of electricity from the negatively charged clouds to the neutral ground through ionized particles in the air. I don’t think that scientists now, despite referring to the same phenomena, are talking about the same thing as we did a long time ago.
So no, no scientist will discover the afterlife “but we’ll just call them “Post-Human Conciousness Wells” or something, and insist it totally isn’t the same thing as that ancient superstition.” as it won’t be.
biddy@feddit.nl 1 year ago
Quantum mechanics, as far as we know, requires imaginary numbers.
dyen49k@kbin.social 1 year ago
nope, they're just one mathematical construct out of many (e.g. 2D vector calculus or geometric algebra), and they just happened to stick
biddy@feddit.nl 1 year ago
Nope, you’re just wrong. Quantum mechanics without complex numbers(real quantum theory) is less predictive than complex(regular) quantum theory. scientificamerican.com/…/quantum-physics-falls-ap…
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Math is a tool of the mind to describe our world, imaginary numbers…
There’s actually some controversy on that one:
walkercricket@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Stating mathematics is a tool doesn’t answer if mathematics are real or not. But I would say, from my humble experience, that mathematics is both unreal and perfectly tangible. Mathematics is totally a real thing as it obeys strict rule in logic that are true in our real world, axioms, on which everything else is based so that it can’t be used to state things as being true out of the blue, without any justification before using those axioms, which you can translate into our real world. But math also has its limits and has been used to demonstrate that it itself is incomplete, undecidable and inconsistant (mathematically, of course, it’s not our common definition here). Meaning, as mathematics are imperfect, it can’t describe our world perfectly and therefore isn’t real.
There is an excellent video from Veritasium on the subject of the limits of math: youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo
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affiliate@lemmy.world 1 year ago
On the other hand, I don’t think calling everything we don’t understand “magic” … and give god or anything else (like karma) credit for it would be more clever.
i think quite a few theologians would agree with that point
walkercricket@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
And it’s great. Though, as a religious person, thinking this way is no more than shooting yourself in the foot, which is quite sad because religion has only two choice: either cultivating the ignorance but going against science, which is wrong, or cultivating knowledge but overtime, disappearing as a religion. Either way, nowadays it’s doomed.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Religion and science are orthogonal. Science seeks to answer the question of “how?”, while religion seeks to answer “why?”
Understanding the Big Bang all the way through evolution doesn’t give an indication as to why all of this happened. Why are we here? What is our purpose? Science doesn’t have an answer for these questions because these questions are orthogonal to science. Any kind of answer to this kind of question would constitute a religion.
It’s really atheism (at least in the present iteration) that’s doomed to failure. It’s dependent on ignorance of basic philosophy, and attempts to derive any kind of morality based solely on science results in things like eugenics and an “the ends justify the means” kind of mentality. Atheist ethics have resulted in more deaths than all other religions combined. And yes, atheism is a religion, but the ignorance of atheists has resulted in them believing it isn’t a religion even when it exhibits all the properties of a religion. It’s just a shit religion, which is why it’s doomed to fail.
affiliate@lemmy.world 1 year ago
i don’t see how it’s shooting yourself in the foot. one of the ideas behind the argument i linked to is that pitting god against science isn’t good theology. science will offer more compelling explanations for material phenomena, but that doesn’t necessarily exclude the existence of a god. the idea is to see god as more of an architect: something that made a world that has all these wonderful scientific rules and complex systems that we can discover.
i should mention that i’m not a religious person but i do think it’s an interesting thing to think about.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 1 year ago
If you think it to the end, existence of an aftlerlife would be evidence that we run in a simulation.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Friend of mine (who is dead now ironically enough, and damn, I miss him), wrote a story about this. Where the dead show up on some random planet in the Andromeda Galaxy, in their prime, one that’s infinitely large and does the minecraft thing where it generates as you go, and contains the means to do pretty much anything except for leave… with them just showing up in the Capital City of the planet if they die again, which cannot be done of natural causes here.
The dead initially think it’s Heaven, but then they notice “Heaven” is being powered by a Dyson Sphere, eventually they connect enough of the dots to realize that their world is a simulation.
The protagonist is the grandchild of one of the deceased who wound up here after testing experimental teleportation technology, turns out the simulation brought him there to inform him why teleportation technology shouldn’t be invented.
Eventually the grandchild goes back to Earth, agreeing to keep this a secret, for fear that if people knew about this it would create “Dyson Sphere cults” and would encourage people to commit mass suicide, just “dying to get there”
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 1 year ago
My thought was more like, then there must be god, that god must have been created (since not naturally developed) so he must be there for a reason (administrator or something) so there must be a system behind it.
But nice story!
eran_morad@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Imaginary numbers are merely a poorly named mathematical construct used to reconcile the empirically observable phenomena of nature (e.g., summations of waves). They’re the means by which we achieve mathematical closure under exponentiation. You could call them whatever the F you want, so long as they could be used to represent vectors in the complex plane.
What reason do you have to believe in anything outside of material nature?
HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It’s called a joke
eran_morad@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s fucking mindless.
Ryumast3r@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I bet you’re a blast at parties.
apolo399@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Idiotic joke
monotrox@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Up to the introduction of quantum mechanics imaginary numbers where only ever a theoretical tool and any calculation in electromagnetism, mechanics or even relativity can be done without them.
Also, any measurement you can make will always result in real numbers because there is no logical interpretation for imaginary measurements (a speed of 2+i m/s doesnt really make sense)
eran_morad@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Bro, are you not aware of the Fourier transform?!?
monotrox@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
I said that any calculation in electrodynamics CAN be done without imaginary numbers, I never said that it would be the most common or convenient way of doing things.
If you use a different form of solution to maxwells equations, electrical impedance can totally be expressed as just another real property. Fourier transform also is not necessary to solve maxwells equations or any other physical systems. It just might make it significantly easier and more convenient.
Obviously imaginary numbers existed and where used way before quantum mechanics was a thing but they werent technically necessary in physics because they never appeared in the equations of fundamental theories (Maxwells equations, general relativity, newtonian mechanics)
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de 1 year ago
Imaginary numbers are indeed poorly named. They are not much more imaginary than members of ℝ.
jarfil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s all fine… except for the part where reality has a √-1 component.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Yeah but quantum mechanics is just magic.