this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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All of these are equally just abstractions meant to portray reality.
I like to call these strings of coherency. There is no beginning or end to them. They are available in our situation because of their usefulness (also counting in abundancy or ease).
So if something is "not true" or "made up", it is not debunked by undeniable facts. It is debunked by how grounded it is to innumerable amounts of information.
Thus you will never go all the way to debunk these. People who win something you know to be a "false argument" do so because nobody will stand up to him and go the x+10000 steps of reasoning he built up specifically for bulshitting he trained for.
On the other hand, all of the "false" and "true" labelled arguments most likely stretch into infinity. In the end it really comes down to your "convenience". That is the closest word I have for it.
Its a mess, the purest thing you can ever have is consciousness.
I think you're missing the point the comic is going for.
Fundamentally, mathematics is built off axioms. An axiom is an incredibly simple statement that presumably true within the system they define, such as "the quantity
oneexists" or "the operationadditionexists", then uses these axioms to build mathematical proofs starting from them to draw further logical conclusions, such as1 + 1 = 2.If you continue following these axioms to their logical conclusions, and use those conclusions to follow to even further logical conclusions, you essentially end up with the entire field of mathematics.
Then if you take those mathematical conclusions and apply them to the physical world, you end up with the entire field of physics.
Then if you take the entire field of physics and apply it to molecular interactions, you end up with chemistry, and if you take all of chemistry and apply it to biological organisms, you end up with all of biology.
I'm not trying to say you're wrong about people arguing in bad faith or with not enough evidence to make their untrue claims. But this is just a web comic. It's just making a joke that if we trace everything we know back through all our fields of studies, we end up with the incredibly simple origin points of mathematics.
It's funny.
Laugh.
I was engaged in whatever came to my mind regarding this, I dont care what that comic was meant for.