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.

[–] PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Math is a tool of the mind to describe our world, imaginary numbers...

There's actually some controversy on that one:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-mathematical-world-real/

[–] walkercricket@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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: https://piped.video/HeQX2HjkcNo

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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[–] walkercricket@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Man I really love Lemmy for that kind of shit. I'll change the link right away

[–] biddy@feddit.nl 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Quantum mechanics, as far as we know, requires imaginary numbers.

[–] dyen49k@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 2 points 1 year ago

Nope, you're just wrong. Quantum mechanics without complex numbers(real quantum theory) is less predictive than complex(regular) quantum theory. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-physics-falls-apart-without-imaginary-numbers/

[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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 points 1 year ago

i completely agree with the first two paragraphs, but i don’t quite understand what you mean in the third paragraph. could you elaborate on what you mean by the present iteration of atheism, how its like a religion, and why you think it’s doomed to fail? it sounds interesting and i haven’t heard much about it.

[–] walkercricket@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Religion and science are orthogonal. Science seeks to answer the question of "how?", while religion seeks to answer "why?"

Religion doesn't try to answer anything: it's just blind faith. You're not gonna try to tell me religious people are "looking for" anything. The definition of religion is "belief in a deity". It doesn't try to explain or find out anything.

It's dependent on ignorance of basic philosophy, and attempts to derive any kind of morality based solely on science results

Since when atheism prevents philosophy? Haven't you heard of atheist philosophers? They exist, they're not fairies, you know. About morality, it's still a subject and a lot of philosophers have different opinion, with the subjective or objective moral, relativistic moral, etc... And whatever you mean by "derive any kind of morality based solely on science results", it's still better than arbitrarily define a moral based on a book written by some people a long time ago to then enforce it for centuries, with violence if needed, and then when the bad atheists come to clean all the mess by making moral laws to have everybody end up agreeing on after few decades, claim it was just a misinterpretation of the texts or whatever, which is the dumbest excuse I've ever heard of.

Atheism isn't a religion either: atheism is a lack of belief in the existence of an unproven (and certainly unprovable) entity. So a lack of belief certainly didn't kill anybody.

And atheism was never the reason or the foundation of the sentence "the end justify the means", it existed long before atheism was even a concept.

[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 1 points 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.