The Second Apocalypse

Miscellaneous Chatter => Philosophy & Science => Topic started by: TLEILAXU on December 20, 2017, 11:11:04 pm

Title: Gods as Topological Invariants
Post by: TLEILAXU on December 20, 2017, 11:11:04 pm
Article:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.6902.pdf
Title: Re: Gods as Topological Invariants
Post by: H on December 21, 2017, 01:01:11 pm
Very interesting.  It would probably even more so if I understood more than half of the words they use...
Title: Re: Gods as Topological Invariants
Post by: TLEILAXU on December 22, 2017, 08:43:59 pm
Yeah I don't understand too much of it either, but it's interesting how they actually go about this semi-seriously, based on some assumptions and look at where the mathematics take them.
Title: Re: Gods as Topological Invariants
Post by: Francis Buck on December 25, 2017, 12:48:00 am
This is the best fucking thing ever. Thank you Tleilaxu for posting, much obliged.
Title: Re: Gods as Topological Invariants
Post by: Wilshire on December 26, 2017, 05:12:40 pm
First this, as it relates to Earwa:

Quote
no causal chains are finite and do not
contain loops.

The logos is in fact with a beginning and therefore an end, since our lord-and-savior-Kellhus found that there were loops :) . Taken the paper linked,  we can say that Earwa is literally the world of our ancestors, ie pre-Einstein world, and therefore the proof applies direct to Earwa. From this, assuming the paper is correct (I have no way of really knowing since I'm sure most of it was beyond me anyway), We can then know for certain that there is in fact just 1 ultimate god, be it the Solitary God/Zero-God/Whatever.

---
Back to IRL:

Just would like to point out a few things:

Quote
However, this argument does not remain valid if the universe has origined from
a Big Bang. If the universe expands out of a zero-volume point at t = 0, there no
causal relation can connect an event at some time t > 0 of the existing universe by
an event t < 0 before the Big Bang. In the watchmaker analogy, the watch could
not have been wound up.
Essentially the paper doesn't apply to our univerise if Einstein and special-relativity exist - which by all accounts they do.

This conclusion makes more of an impact given the following, which is later in the 2nd page:

Quote
We nevertheless embrace the result of the argument, as far as it is restricted
to the types of steady-state universes for which it was originally intended.

Meaning "Ok lets pretend like post Euclid mathmatics don't exist", and from there goes on to prove a monothesitc universe exists mathematically.

Hopefully that makes this paragraph make more sense:
Quote
It goes without saying that anything beyond the three-dimensional Euclidean space was
out of imagination for the medieval scholar. Before Einstein, time was considered
absolute and independent of space and matter. A physical explanation for a universe
emerging out of nothing was unthinkable and incompatible with the mechanics of
their time, may it be Aristotelian, Galileian or Newtonian. The initial singualarity
of an Einstein-Friedman universe is, however, a distinctive topological feature of
the manifold itself. We assume therefore, in accordance with the cosmological
argument, that a finite Aristotelian universe, which manifold can be desribed by a
compact subset of R3 homeomorphic to a ball (a 3-cell), has one and only one god.

So the long of the short of it reads:
In a universe where time is absolute (no special relativity), which is the world Euclid et al believed they lived in, then we can actually construct an algebraic proof that shows that gods exist, and further that only 1 god exists.
Unfortunately, since we now live in post-Einstein reality, said proof is fundamentally flawed and doesn't apply, but its still fun to think about...


At least that's what I got out of it.