thought provoking

[Dexter Sinister]

Re: RE: thought provoking

Ah but Dexter, don't you find that despite its illegality, the fact that infinity times zero can give any number is quite poetic? It's as if infinity and nothingness multiplied by each other created the necessary mathematical loop for everything to exist...

Or maybe not...

Right. NOT. That's mystic nonsense to my way of thinking. The notion that infinity times zero can give any number isn't poetic to me, it's just a mistake. Reality provides quite enough poetry without making stuff up. Consider, for instance, that all the elements in your body except hydrogen were cooked up in the nuclear reactions inside stars that blew up and scattered those heavy elements around the cosmos to be later condensed into another generation of stars and planets. We're made of star stuff. And if you ever get the chance, get out of the city you live in, to some dark place far from city lights, and look at the night sky. If you understand what you're looking at, you can perceive the great curving sweep of the Milky Way winding in towards the centre of the galaxy near the southern horizon in Sagittarius... That's my kind of poetry. Reality.

 

[Vereya]

I often wondered - suppose you were born to other parents than yours, at a little bit differen time, and suppose you were another gender. Would you still be you, or would you be someone else? And if someone else was born to your parents, would that person be you in that case, or will it be someone else?

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Well now Vereya, the answers to your questions seem pretty obvious to me. If your parents had bred with someone different, you wouldn't exist at all, in any form. Somebody else would exist, or maybe nobody would exist in your place. I find such questions to be without meaning. The fact is that your parents met, made a baby that became you, so here you are. If they hadn't met, they'd have met others, made different babies, none of whom would be you. You can't be born to other parents than yours, that would be somebody else. You didn't exist before your father's sperm met your mother's egg (and I hope they had fun arranging that), so it seems idle to speculate on other possibilities.

You seem to be implying that you existed in some form before your father's sperm met your mother's egg, and when the meeting happened you joined the party. I don't think that's how it works.

 

[elevennevele]

As for the clock thought. The sun relationship with the earth is what invents time for us. Days becoming night and night becoming day always a constant in length.

Perhaps if our world were very oblong in shape on a tilted axis, and the path of our planet around the sun strikingly elliptical, our concept of time would be truly fantastic.

An early invention of a clock would have to be something like that of a sundial. Perhaps it was hardly an invention in the beginning, but an observation of a young tree that cast it's shadow onto the ground. The time being the moment. A time we could at least know was during a part of the day.

The child that asks what time was a clock invented is actually more telling of the moment. For a clock was invented when one began to recognize a concept of such a thing as time.

 

[elevennevele]

Well now Vereya, the answers to your questions seem pretty obvious to me. If your parents had bred with someone different, you wouldn't exist at all, in any form.

Unless you believe in reincarnation. A concept of being born in some family or another whether random or by a guiding principle.

But I’ll take a leap of faith here and assume you don’t believe in reincarnation.

 

[hermanntrude]

This is obviously nonsense, so the mathematicians solved it by forbidding the operation.

Just because it's nonsense doesnt mean it's not true

and the forbidding sounds like a cop-out to me.

whimsy aside I did plenty of maths and I am a scientist now so i know what you mean but however you do it it doesnt all quite fit together. Its an unsatisfactory situation however you look at it. Maybe what it all means is something very important, but hard to deal with, like nothing exists in the first place or everything is interchangeable and we should stop worrying about the differences.

 

[s_lone]

Re: RE: thought provoking

Ah but Dexter, don't you find that despite its illegality, the fact that infinity times zero can give any number is quite poetic? It's as if infinity and nothingness multiplied by each other created the necessary mathematical loop for everything to exist...

Or maybe not...

Right. NOT. That's mystic nonsense to my way of thinking. The notion that infinity times zero can give any number isn't poetic to me, it's just a mistake. Reality provides quite enough poetry without making stuff up. Consider, for instance, that all the elements in your body except hydrogen were cooked up in the nuclear reactions inside stars that blew up and scattered those heavy elements around the cosmos to be later condensed into another generation of stars and planets. We're made of star stuff. And if you ever get the chance, get out of the city you live in, to some dark place far from city lights, and look at the night sky. If you understand what you're looking at, you can perceive the great curving sweep of the Milky Way winding in towards the centre of the galaxy near the southern horizon in Sagittarius... That's my kind of poetry. Reality.

Of course, I get your point. You are more of the "rational common sense" type, which is always a good thing, as long as your heart can bond with the universe in some way.

The notion that infinity times zero can give any number isn't poetic to me, it's just a mistake.

I wouldn't use the term mistake. To me, it's simply a limitation to our mathematical understanding of the world. You pointed out yourself that mathematicians decided that it was a mistake because it didn't make sense to their undestanding of math and numbers. They could have very well invented a term or symbol representing "a theoretically unlimited chain of numerical possibilities".

From the discussion we already had on the cosmos (astrology) you can guess I already did such a thing as observe the Milky Way. The galactic core is at the 26th degree of Sagittarius (tropical zodiac) and in late december this year, Pluto will be "conjunct" that point. But from your point of view this is a practically useless and meaningless piece of information...

 

[iARTthere4iam]

Dexter Sinister is right.
If you don't respect the limitations of mathematics then why try to use them to prove stuff. meaningless mathematics doesn't really prove anything. Cat X Dog= Walrus
I deem it so , and so it is deemed.

 

[typingrandomstuff]

Who or what formed our universe? Is it really all that pieces of perfectly formed solar systems? How can all the universe be together and linked and how does the god really do the thing he/she/forms do?

 

[typingrandomstuff]

But even so, poetry is a play of words, that sometimes rhyme and have rhythmn to it.