Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
Arthur C. Clarke
Comment on They are watching
TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Magic is just what you don’t understand. Everything is a mechanism. Even if there was magic, a human soul, the afterlife, God, it would still operate under certain logical rules and principles. Eventually, unless there was something keeping us from obtaining knowledge, we would be able to apply science to magical forces. Science will eventually understand everything it is possible to understand, which might honestly be everything.
fields@lemmynsfw.com 1 year ago
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Yeah people used to think this way. But the Halting Problem proved that not everything in mathematics is solvable. If we can’t solve every mathematical problem, there’s gonna be things in science that aren’t solvable either.
Sorry for upsetting your belief system, but it’s simply not possible for us to know everything. Just one of those quirks of life, it’s been mathematically proven that not everything can be proven.
Noughmad@programming.dev 1 year ago
Not at all, math and science are very different things. Math is a fixed system of rules that we constructed. Within these rules, there are possible statements which cannot be proven or disproved using only those same rules.
Science is different, we don’t know the rules but we observe, measure, and make predictions. It’s not possible to “solve” physics but that’s because we can’t make infinitely accurate measurements, there’s nothing systemic to prevent us from making a complete theory.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 1 year ago
Goes for me into the same bucket as proofs of god.
Swiggles@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Why? The answer is known. You can easily proof it by contradiction. Therefore the halting problem is unsolvable.
This solution actually provides some good insight into other problems and wether or not they are solvable. It is useful, even though the negative result might seem disappointing.
TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I never said we’d be able to understand or prove everything, just that there is some logic underpinning reality. It might be that some things are fundamentally unknowable, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist to be known, just that we’ll never know it.
I also don’t get what the halting problem proves about reality. It might be possible that infinities or unresolvable results are real, so long as we can still exist. The cosmological principle proves that we have to live in a reality that it is possible for us to exist in, otherwise we wouldn’t be here to observe it. So long as the infinities or uncomputable problems don’t prevent our existence, it might represent reality. If the equation doesn’t allow us to exist, then it doesn’t represent reality.