The most striking thing to me is that Ayer hopes there isn't life after death.
> My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. (italics mine)
I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife. (I think Thomas Nagel wrote something along those lines.) I sort of get it but regardless I think it's very interesting.
I'm just 40, and while I won't go into it, I've lived a very long life so far. An incredible amount of joy, but also grief and pain. Memory for me, when I'm drinking my coffee in the morning, is warm and cozy in a numbing sort of way, but I have to be careful where I walk in it.
I certainly don't wish for death, I still find so much beauty and joy in life, and I still find and experience love. But I don't wish for an afterlife, or prolonged life. If I'm fortunate to live until my natural death, I will welcome it.
Humanity will go on, there are billions of threads of consciousness right now, and I feel so much gratitude that I was and am one of those. I have a lot of comfort in being wrapped and surrounded by those threads, and that they will continue around me when mine frays and ends.
My cannon view is that we're just the universe experiencing itself, and that while my consciousness will end, that universe will go on, my atoms part of it.
One thing I sometimes hope is true, in my materialistic atheistic way, is to do with the problem of sci-fi teleportation. See, if you go through a transporter on Star Trek, you're taken apart and reassembled. This makes people worry, ludicrously, that the reassembled version "isn't really me". You could after all refrain from taking the original apart, and simply duplicate people. Both copies of some guy called Bernard would claim "I am Bernard", and both would be right.
So this makes me think that from moment to moment, as we pass through time at one second per second, it's as if we're being sent through a transporter. That is to say, if in the far future after my death I am reassembled, or even if just a close imitation of me is assembled from whatever data they can get hold of, then that would be no different from me, or Bernard, being brought back to life. "I am Bernard", he would say, and he'd still be right. Of course other Bernard wouldn't get to share his experiences, but so what. My former self can't share my present experiences.
So, why hope for this to happen at all? It has to be that what we're emotionally invested in is not really "continuity of experience", which is a myth, but continuity of ideas. It's nice if those ideas can sit together in the coherent context of a mind. The Woody Allen quote is "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying." But perhaps in fact through your work is good enough, really? Like a close second.
What I mean to say is, I don't so much hope for an afterlife, as to discover that it philosophically doesn't matter anyway. Though I prefer people not dead.
> I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife.
I feel that eternity in Heaven would actually be Hell, because nothing would matter. No danger, no failure, no challenge, no goals, no purpose. What gives life meaning are mortality, limitations, beginnings and endings, progress.
I recently watched the film "Eternity" on Apple TV, starring Elizabeth Olsen, in which everyone after they die has to choose their own form of afterlife and then stick with it forever. All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get. (The film itself was pretty good, not boring. That's because it had an ending!)
Fiction is ideal for playing out these scenarios. Think also of the film "Highlander", in which the ultimate "prize" of the immortals turns out to be mortality. MacLeod's life had become repetitive, and he couldn't fully invest in it, because he kept losing everyone he loved. They grew old and died, while he lived on and had to keep changing identities. For a while it's a grand adventure... until it isn't anymore.
I can certainly understand wanting to live longer, but eternity is unimaginably long, way too long. I don't think that's something to be desired.
The reference to eternity in afterlife doesn't mean "very long time"; it means "no time", a world that has no time. You can briefly feel the difference by being present in the current moment.
Eternity in its proper sense belongs to God alone; human beings sharing in "eternal life" will experience time differently. Even the angels experience "aeviternity" which is unique to their kind.
Could be; I'm not too literate on this, I'm only retelling what I understood directly and this could be very limited. I just wanted to point out that "eternal life" is not going to be the same life we have now, only endless. It is very different and, speaking of boredom, definitely not boring. Boredom is an invention of mind.
Problems, yes. "Biology is going to kill me soon" shouldn't have to be one of those problems, and in fact I think it makes us all slightly crazy in different ways, from not caring about the future to unscrupulously believing in afterlives.
No, I was disputing "mortality" while agreeing with "challenges", which I've written as problems in the nice sense of "please let me finish my problem". That's some historical figure's alleged last words, I think.
(Edit: probably an embellishment of Archimedes, supposedly saying to the Roman soldier who killed him, "do not disturb my circles!" - not exactly a plaintive attitude about mortality, more just being a grumpy geometrist.)
"All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get" I used to wonder this. I read the religious answer to this relies on the concept of infinitude: what if an infinite god can invent an infinite number of exciting new... things to do?
If you have respect for the unique chance of conscious experience of others you get your moral system rather trivially from the first principles. Certainly not worse than an arbitrary religious stick and carrot system.
Writing a Typescript program that takes external input but has no runtime error checking is already a mistake, though. Dealing with external input requires type assertions (since Typescript doesn't know what the program is getting at compile-time) and if you write type assertions without ensuring that the assertions are accurate, then that's on you, not Typescript.
However, if your point is that Typescript can lull people into a false sense of safety, then sure, I take your point. You have to understand where type assertions are coming into play, and if that's obscured then the type safety can be illusory. The benefits of Typescript require you to make sure that the runtime inputs to your program are sufficiently validated.
> Writing a Typescript program that takes external input but has no runtime error checking is already a mistake, though.
If it's a service, yes, and that's true no matter what technology the service is using. If it's a library, no, because...
> and if you write type assertions without ensuring that the assertions are accurate, then that's on you, not Typescript.
That's on whoever is using the library, not the library author. If the library author provides type definitions, and you as the consumer choose to ignore them, then it's on you.
Sure, but if the caller is Javascript then you're running Javascript, not Typescript*, so it makes sense that you're not going to get type safety.
I'm also not sure we're actually disagreeing on anything, so perhaps my reply was pointless. I agree that if you mix JS and TS in the way you describe, you'll have problems. My reply was just to say "yes, and that's not really Typescript's fault", but perhaps you weren't implying that to begin with.
* I'm aware that you can't run Typescript directly, but I hope my point here is clear... you're running a program that wasn't type-checked by TS.
I don't think we're disagreeing either. I didn't mean to suggest that it was Typescript's fault, just that the relationship between TS and JS in theory is something like "TS is a superset of JS" but once you get down to the practice of writing idiomatic reusable code it's more like TS and JS are fully different languages.
This might be a dumb question but are there any current or foreseeable practical applications of this kind of result (like in the realm of distributed computing) or is this just pure mathematics for its own sake?
Not a dumb question. The links to mesh networking etc seem interesting. It sounds like the insights from descriptive set theory could yield new hardness/impossibility results in computational complexity, distributed algorithms etc.
are there any current or foreseeable practical applications of those results?
the math of infinity isn't very relevant to the finite programs that humans use. Even today's astronomically large computing systems have size approximately equal to 3 compared to infinity.
> The solution was reached by using codebreaking software the team had developed along with extensive manual work, in part required because Perwich had mistakenly omitted a couple of letters in his ciphertext.
That explains how the team of 3 codebreakers got it, but what about the other codebreaker, Matthew Brown, who figured it out by himself? The article doesn't say anything about his approach. Seems impressive if he can match the effort of three cryptographers using their own custom software. I want to read more about him!
Recently, I ripped usage examples out of a rust project's README.md, and put them in doc comments. Almost all of them were broken due to small changes over time, and I never remembered to update the readme. `cargo test` runs doc comments like mini integration tests, so now the examples never rot. I wish more languages and tools had this feature.
It means having to go to the linked docs (which are automatically pushed to the repo's github pages) to see examples, but I think this is a reasonable tradeoff.
If you're looking for something real-time, I'd recommend checking out NASA's "Eyes on the Solar System" visualizer (not as comprehensive but still pretty cool):
> My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. (italics mine)
I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife. (I think Thomas Nagel wrote something along those lines.) I sort of get it but regardless I think it's very interesting.
reply