Secular means of reincarnation

[Baruch]

Can you be certain of this? How can we know for sure that pebbles (or anything else) have no dreams, visions or imagination? What's it like to be a pebble?

I didn't expect you of all people, to paraphrase Chuang Tzu ;-)

[Unbeliever]

I relish being unpredictable. 

[Baruch]

I relish being unpredictable. 

But the only way you can top that, is to be predictable ;-))

[Unbeliever]

Oy, what a dilemma!

[facebook164]

The only reality is like ... I have five pebbles in my hand, and two people unrelated to me, come and make an independent count, and sure enough they agree that there are five pebbles in my hand. 

No, two of the items on your hand are rabbit faeces, not pebbles.

[Baruch]

No, two of the items on your hand are rabbit faeces, not pebbles.

Mathematicians have a solution for that problem .. abstraction!  Mathematicians always have solutions, even though they aren't chemists ;-)

[facebook164]

Mathematicians have a solution for that problem .. abstraction!  Mathematicians always have solutions, even though they aren't chemists ;-)

It doesnt help your Reality example though.

[Baruch]

It doesnt help your Reality example though.

Zeno of Elea demonstrated centuries ago, that motion, and therefore much of reality, was impossible.  However he didn't demonstrate that it was impossible to hold 5 pebbles in your hand.  For materialists like Epicurus ... there is no hand, and no pebbles, just uncuttable invisible thingies.

[facebook164]

Zeno of Elea demonstrated centuries ago, that motion, and therefore much of reality, was impossible. 

No, he did not. He didnt know about momentum and kineric energy.

[Baruch]

No, he did not. He didnt know about momentum and kineric energy.

Take a distance ... divide in half.  Continue to do so with the remainder (this is a corollary of Achilles vs the Tortoise), you never travel past the original length.  Momentum and energy are inventions of the 1600-1800 period.  Much later than Zeno.  Also if mass is the product of Higgs bosons, the idea is only a few years old, once Higgs was or was not discovered.  The Standard Model requires how many arbitrary constants to match experiment?  The idea that mass curves space-time .. is pretty well supported, but the idea that mass is curved space-time is not.  Einstein didn't even come up with that idea, William Clifford did, in the 19th century.  And he came up with Clifford Algebra which is essential to QFT.

Consider another ... a wheel with two rims, but on shared axel.  One rim is at a smaller radius.  Both rims are running on two rails without slipping, each at a different elevation.  In one rotation, the circumference of each is completed, two different lengths, yet the common axel moves the same distance.

[Hakurei Reimu]

Take a distance ... divide in half.  Continue to do so with the remainder (this is a corollary of Achilles vs the Tortoise), you never travel past the original length.

The fact that travel happens anyway despite it being "impossible" should have been Zeno's first clue that something was wrong with his logic. The argument tries to convince you that there's this insurmountable mountain of tasks ahead of you, when in reality there's only the simple task that he's subdividing into increasingly trivial sub-tasks.

Consider another ... a wheel with two rims, but on shared axel.  One rim is at a smaller radius.  Both rims are running on two rails without slipping, each at a different elevation.  In one rotation, the circumference of each is completed, two different lengths, yet the common axel moves the same distance.

You just described a physically incoherent system. The axle is either tilting towards the smaller wheel, or the smaller wheel is slipping.

[Jack89]

If you want secular reincarnation, make some babies.  My oldest son is a lot like his old man, but I like to think he'll be an improvement on the original model. 

[Baruch]

Hakurei to the rescue ... you got me this time ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle%27s_wheel_paradox ... there has to be slipping

The motion/subdivision paradox is harder ... at any point, the subdivider hasn't passed the end of the original length, or Achilles has not passed the tortoise, he is always behind him, after a finite number of divisions of distance.  So how come, if one passes from a finite number of steps, to an countably infinite number of steps (not yet the continuum) one can transform from a always behind/not yet there situation to an always ahead/past there situation.  Infinity is paradoxical.  The task doesn't get easier, in a continuum ... there are still a continuous infinity of points between the latest step and the end ... the metric distance is shorter.  One has to define topologically, what kind of topology that line has ... is it conventionally continuous or not.  Example ...

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/01/28/the-continuum-hypothesis-solve/

If math is just an almost arbitrary manipulation of symbols, according to simple rules ... then why should I think it is more real than my hand?  Is checkers more real than my hand?

[facebook164]

The motion/subdivision paradox is harder ... at any point, the subdivider hasn't passed the end of the original length, or Achilles has not passed the tortoise, he is always behind him, after a finite number of divisions of distance.

Seriously? Dont you see through that bullshit? You have been given the answer: the amount of subdivision of tasks is totally arbitrary. Yes there are inifinite number of (arbitrary) tasks but there is nothing that hinders them from being done in finite time.