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Author
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Topic: apple Pi, cherry Pi, great american hair Pi
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tsunamitsu
PenIsite
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posted 05-01-2001 14:10
   
Did anyone see the Darren Aronofsky film Pi?
If you did what did you think of it? If you didn't, give yourself a stern talking to and go rent it.
IP: Logged |
eod
TREAT MERIGHT!
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posted 05-01-2001 15:12
Seen it, and I have a feeling a majority of penIs readers have seen it. If not I think it should be a #1 penIs movie recommendation.IP: Logged |
tsunamitsu
PenIsite
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posted 05-01-2001 15:57
I'm going to link the page even though a good number of the links are busted up. See the movie, visit the page, then come talk to me here.
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Snag
Leaky Pen
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posted 05-01-2001 15:57
I think the concept of mathematics and some higher powering force, not a God, but more like the coding for the universe is definetely a possibility and a cool one at that.------------------
All your... shut the fuck up. IP: Logged |
BaldGhoti
Member with a member
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posted 05-01-2001 16:14
If God is a coder, then he definitely should have spent more time beta-testing.And if you think he's omniscient and omnipotent, then that means he wouldn't need to debug... so you're forced to conclude that God is a world-class asshole. Personally, I think the only way a logical individual can believe in God is to explore the Deist view, and if you're a Deist, why bother believing in God at all? ------------------
Reverend Rob IP: Logged |
deeznuts
Member with a member
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posted 05-01-2001 17:13
quote:
Originally posted by BaldGhoti:
If God is a coder, then he definitely should have spent more time beta-testing.And if you think he's omniscient and omnipotent, then that means he wouldn't need to debug... so you're forced to conclude that God is a world-class asshole.
not true. two of the most fundamental laws of computation are that it is always faster to actually do something than to simulate it (this is why you will never see a "real time" perfect simulation of the universe. even if you could code it, it couldn't run as fast as the real thing) and that for a sufficiently large system you cannot know the output from the input (unless it's something trivial). this leaves us with a couple of things to think about the "beta test". first, even with omniscience, there is no way to predict the outcome of running the largest possible system (that being the whole universe). so the don't need to debug argument doesn't hold even if god is omniscient. you could always say god just knows the future but that would create a paradox (since that would be either knowing the outcome from input or simulating faster than the real thing) and we were arguing a "coder god" who would be logical and not have any powers which were ultimately paradoxical. god might know the entire state of the universe at any one time but still couldn't say what happens next before it actually does. caveat: if god exists entirely outside the universe, there technically wouldn't be this bound. but as long as god is "real" in the same sense that we are real, then god would exist in the universe and therefore be slowed up like the rest of us. howoever if god did exist entirely outside the universe he would just be an observer and couldn't really blamed for anything that goes on anyways. second, perhaps god is doing the debugging now. perhaps we are the beta test or even a simulation in preparation for world 1.0. there's no reason to believe that we are the finished product. see if that kind of thinking doesn't make you feel small. IP: Logged |
deeznuts
Member with a member
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posted 05-01-2001 17:15
oh, and pi rocked. the soundtrack was particularly sweet as well. my favorites were "we've got the gun" by clint mansell and "bucephelous bouncing ball" by aphex twin.IP: Logged |
tsunamitsu
PenIsite
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posted 05-01-2001 18:24
On the website there used to be a link to a study done by some fellas over in Israel. They took the Torah and put its numerical equivalent into a database of some sort. They then began searching for the names of important Hebrew people. The men's name were hidden inside the numbers. They also found the birthdates and death dates of these men inside the text. They claimed that they could find anyones hebrew equivalent name/death/birth in the database within a "relevant interval" as long as that person had already been born and had already died. As controls they entered similarly long texts such as War and Peace (and some others that I can't remember) and searched those for the same name/death/birth combinations. The other texts did not contain such information. Now when I first read this I was blown away then I started thinking about it and it occured to me that this "experiment" didn't seem altogether scientific. So I tried to go back and read it again and alas it was gone. If you've never read this paper or have never heard of it, don't attack it based on my description. I've developed some massive memory leakage and so I'm sure my recount of the whole thing is a little screwy. However if anyone knows where I can find info on this please let me know. IP: Logged |
BaldGhoti
Member with a member
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posted 05-01-2001 18:54
I have heard of it and read the book, it's usually called "The Bible Code", and it was proved in a that using the method the authors of the book used, one can find such "hidden meanings" in any text on the order of size of the Bible. I believe the counterexample was War and Peace, which adequately predicted several past events.The fact remains that the Bible Code has never been used to successfully predict an event--hence its fade into obscurity as an odd little quirk. I also might add that the Bible Code places Armageddon (via nuclear war) in Israel, at one, four, AND eight years ago if my memory serves me correctly. (1993, 1997, 2000) ------------------
Reverend Rob IP: Logged |
deeznuts
Member with a member
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posted 05-01-2001 20:28
quote:
Originally posted by BaldGhoti:
I also might add that the Bible Code places Armageddon (via nuclear war) in Israel, at one, four, AND eight years ago if my memory serves me correctly. (1993, 1997, 2000)
hmmm... looks like a binary progression there. so what happened to 2? what is it about 1999 that they don't want us to know? IP: Logged |
zippy
Member with a member bigger than the member with a member
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posted 05-01-2001 23:32
Pi brings up some other interesting points. the one that bothers me most is this: is mathematics a language that models the universe, or is the universe built on some fundamental principles that humans were lucky enough to discover and call mathematics?IP: Logged |
Miri
PenIs Virgin
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posted 05-01-2001 23:42
The Bible Code actually places "armageddon" in the Jewish year 6000. We are currently at 5761. Still a while left to go. Though the Torah does not really depict an "end of the world" per se.
Anyway, while I would normally be inclined to agree that the Bible Code does not actually predict anything...there are some examples of things that I believe were predicted. For instance: the Nuremburg Trials. On Purim (the holiday that celebrates the events described in the Book of Esther)of 1947 a famous Nazi general and 10 of his henchmen were hung following the Nuremburg Trials. The last guy to hang started yelling out "purimfest, purimfest, purimfest" over and over again just before his death. These events were very similar to those depicted in the Book of Esther. In the part where Haman and his 10 sons were hanged there are three small letters that seemingly dont fit in with the story. Hebrew operates on a system called "gematria" which means that each letter has a number to which it is equivalent. These small letters when read numerically equaled 1947, the same year of the Nuremburg Trials.
However, while I do believe in the above connection, all sorts of crazy things can be found in the Bible Code. I have this program on my computer that allows you to search for things in the Bible. I know people who search for their name with the name of their intended to see if G-d approves of their match and they actually obide by the results. Silly...lol-though I can admit to trying it too.
People have found a lot of things in the Bible Code, for instance, there are a lot of mentions of Yitzhack Rabin's assasination by Yigal Amir, unfortunately, no one thought to search for that before his death. That's why this system is flawed, I mean, how would you know what to search for? And just searching for something is not all, you then have to interpret it according to the passage that it is found in. An interesting thing that I read in a website devoted to people's Bible Code findings claimed that Al Gore would win the election while Bill Clinton went on to become the King of the World and then later to declare himself as the anti-Christ. I dunno, maybe in the next election? IP: Logged |
zippy
Member with a member bigger than the member with a member
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posted 05-02-2001 00:04
damn. i always thought my sixth child would be the anti-christ. there goes that dream. thanks a lot, mir. IP: Logged |
Miri
PenIs Virgin
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posted 05-02-2001 00:25
we're having 6 children?!
wow-the Bible Code didnt' tell me anything about that!IP: Logged |
Clme
cake fiend
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posted 05-02-2001 00:32
I thought it was something like the seventh son of a seventh son.Of course... 6 WOULD make more sense.
Like the
6th son of a
6th son of a
6th son. It has to be sons of course, since God is probably female. -Chris IP: Logged |
tsunamitsu
PenIsite
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posted 05-02-2001 02:54
Actually, the paper I was talking about was not the Bible Code but a "study" that was published in a statistical journal. I found it and it's titled "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis." It appears that it has been ruled out as merely data manipulation. IP: Logged |
Jimbo
1 dr3w j00 4 p1ggy!
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posted 05-02-2001 02:49
quote:
dozenuts said:
... even with omniscience, there is no way to predict the outcome ...
Dude, I think you're having trouble with the concept of omniscience and omnipotence.  IP: Logged |
deeznuts
Member with a member
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posted 05-02-2001 14:43
like i said, onmiscience could very well give you knowledge of everything but one of the most basic laws of computation is that you can't simply know the output of a system from it's inputs. at least not in less time than it would take the system to come up with it. to know the future before it happens would violate this, and if god could violate this rule then god could not exist in the same universe as us.i'm not saying god or anyone else could not forsee future events. some things are inevitable or blatently obvious and i'd imagine with omniscience those things would be much more numerous than for us. but, invoking the size of the system again, you couldn't see how that would affect the system as a whole. remember a butterfly flapping in brazil can cause a hurricane in florida. knowing that one or the other is going to happen does not imply knowledge of the other even with omniscience. i suppose this looks like absolute crap if you believe that the future is already written, but in that case what's the point? if god exists in some reality where our future can be known ahead of time then he could do nothing about it without becoming "real" and therefore limited like the rest of us. if god exists like us but the future is already decided then what could even god do about it? by arguing for complete foreknowledge you argue either against the existance of god or against the omnipotence of god. another point, in support of you no less. i've heard of a recent finding by some theoretical mathmatician that suggests that mathmatics is not in fact the language of the universe but is really a random collection of facts that people see patterns in, much like the laws of physics. if this conjecture is true it means that the fundamental laws of mathmatics (and therefore computation) could be incomplete or totally wrong much like classical physics is utterly wrong as compared to todays model, which itself we recognize to be only a poor approximation of reality. of course i, being me, can't remember said mathmatician's name or where this was published but whatever. it sounds kind of weird when you think about it, though. using mathmatics to prove that mathmatics proves nothing. so what did he really do for all those years it took to come up with that? IP: Logged |
BaldGhoti
Member with a member
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posted 05-02-2001 16:27
Yeah, Deez, but God defies logic, remember? So even though it's theoretically impossible to know the end result of some given program, God knows EVERYTHING. That's what omniscience means--"all-knowing", whether it's possible or not. I dunno, he uses his magical God-powers or something. If an omnipotent, omniscient God created the universe, then there can be no free will. As soon as he creates it, he knows how it's gonna end, cause he knows everything. And if he's omnipotent, he can manipulate time and therefore can go back to before he created the universe and fix any problems he wants with no weird time-effect things--he's God, he's omnipotent, he can do that.Ergo, if there IS a God, he's got a sadistic streak, otherwise we'd just spend all our time being nice to each other and singing hymns. And in advance--if you think God gave us the "gift" of free will, then I submit to you that under the Judeo-Christian framework, free will is evil. It's just a way for humans to choose to disobey God, and is therefore an evil process. ------------------
Reverend Rob IP: Logged |
BaldGhoti
Member with a member
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posted 05-02-2001 16:30
PS, Deez--I'm running for office in AASA (the Atheist/Agnostic Student Association) next year. You might have seen me tabling in Turlington.
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Reverend Rob IP: Logged |
Snag
Leaky Pen
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posted 05-02-2001 17:08
Someone say "seventh son of a seventh son?"Someone say...
IRON MAIDEN!!!------------------
All your... shut the fuck up. IP: Logged |
deeznuts
Member with a member
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posted 05-02-2001 17:17
it depends entirely on your definitions of omniscient and omnipotent. literally they mean all knowing and all powerful. they do not mean infinitely knowing or infinitely powerful.infinity is not a number. it is a relative measure of anything which is superlative compared to anything else. if you are talking about wavelengths of light a few centimeters is infinity (and will behave as such in scientific expirimentation). if you are talking about humans vs god, god would indeed appear to have infinite power and knowledge to any human observer. my argument is that there are some things that simply can't be known or done, even if you are god. if you asked god to change the past god might change you or your perception of the past, but the past would remain unchanged. so god's power would indeed appear infinite to a human being lacking that power, but if god had any peers they'd see it as nothing but smoke and mirrors. you were the one who brought up the idea of a logical god who tests and perfects his creations. why would a god who could be perfect on the first try have to "debug" at all? using the idea of a cold, logical, exploring god and a chaotic, hateful, despotic god in the same argument is the same tactic as that of the zealots who tell you how much god loves you and how you'll burn forever if you don't love him back. it's meant to do nothing but confuse people and get them arguing against themselves. if you're arguing against the existance of any god at all then present arguments to that effect rather than weakly arguing the opposing side. IP: Logged |
BaldGhoti
Member with a member
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posted 05-02-2001 17:38
I sincerely doubt there is a god. If there IS a god, the only logical kind is the Deist god--the Divine Watchmaker.Omniscient, in a logical sense, means knowing everything--including the future. Omnipotent, in a logical sense, means being able to do anything. Infinity has no relevance, unless you're referring to the infinite lifespan of god--in which case it works against you. But omniscience and omnipotence means the knowledge of and the ability to know and do ANYTHING--even that which is impossible. I'm not sure what you're getting at in the next bit, though. Our universe is a logical universe, so one would assume that if god created logical guidelines in our universe, god uses logic, regardless of goodness or badness. If god were as omnipotent, omniscient and holy as the Judeo-Christian tradition preaches, then our universe could have no free will. It's as simple as that. If the Judeo-Christian tradition is true, free will is a razor-blade in an apple, so to speak. I almost went off on a Genesis rant to follow that apple comment up, but I'll get to that some other day. ------------------
Reverend Rob IP: Logged |
deeznuts
Member with a member
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posted 05-02-2001 18:10
arguing the existance or nonexistance of god based on the judeo-christian tradition is a bit like arguing the existance of extraterrestrial life based on the x-files. sure you'll find plenty of evidence for both sides, but most of it is manufactured solely for the purpose of keeping people tuned in to it. don't confuse religion with spitituality or rubber suits with spacemen.IP: Logged |
zaksquatch
Member with a member
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posted 05-02-2001 18:22
Well said Mr. Nuts!Also, I have often wondered why it is that so few people have arrived at the same conclusion I have. If there is some sort of Governing Force of Life the Universe and Everything, why are so many humnas arrogant enough to think that they know what it is, and more importantly, what it wants? We are puny little humans, who know very little, and spend huge amounts of time staring at the blinky things on the screen and masturbating. Why are so many willing to hate and kill and die to defend their version of "The Truth" when by definition almost, no human will ever know it. Someone smart once said (Occam's Razor or something) that the easiest explanation is usually the best, and I have decided that my answer is that there is no answer. Easy enough! Bring on the blinkies and pass the hand lotion! IP: Logged |
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