/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15289385
>A materialist follows logic and reason where it takes him, his conclusions may be cold or unpleasant, but he must acknowledge them regardless
Like what? Give me an example of a specific controversial claim that materialists make and the rigorous reasoning behind it. Most of the so-called materialist claims I've heard don't come with any hard reasoning whatsoever, but rather just emotional appeals.
>There is no emotional or "spiritual" impulse sated by materialism, whereas in opposing views this is not quite the case
This is absolutely not true. There are plenty of emotional and "spiritual" reasons to support materialism.
1. The emotion of feeling smarter and superior to regular people by letting go of what you view as superstitious thinking encourages a more materialistic and more anti-layman view of the world.
2. Nihilism. Frustration with moral judgements or low self-worth will drive one to deny morality and other commonly accepted metaphysical phenomena, a view which best fits the framework of materialism. Immoral people still want to view themselves as right in some sense, and denying morals altogether and embracing materialism gives them comfort.
3. Feelings of powerlessness and lack of success in life incentivizes people to shift blame from oneself and refuse to take responsibility. A materialist determinist worldview lets you do this much more easily, and makes it much easier to cope with one's failures in life and inaction.
4. The feeling of satisfaction you get from rebellion against your religious parents.
5. The desire for comfort in believing that hell/final judgement doesn't exist.

>>15267083
5. (it's very surprising how few people know this or understand this) Mathematics is actually intimately connected to the real world and a very large portion of its propositions can be empirically falsified or verified (usually called Pi^0_1 and Sigma^0_1 propositions respectively). What's more, these kinds of propositions are intimately connected with the more pure aspects of mathematics (a great example of this is the Riemann hypothesis being reducible to a Pi^0_1 proposition, or complex analysis being able to prove things about the prime numbers). Thus mathematics cannot be just a meaningless game of formula shuffling, and it's incorrect to think that you can invent whatever rules you want, because they could potentially allow you to prove wrong things about the natural numbers.
6. The finitist part of mathematics (e.g PA) is obviously correct and meaningful. Therefore, a proof of its consistency is empistemically unnecessary. Voevodsky was wrong to doubt its consistency, and so was Nelson. ZFC and other empistemically questionable infinitistic systems have radically changed how people perceive mathematics, wherein they start to view it as meaningless formal game (formalism) and that is extremely wrong and cancerous view of mathematics.

>>15194007
We are cursed to never arrive at a recursively enumerable axiom system that lists all the things that are obviously true.
If you believe in the existence of semantics of an axiom system T, then it's obviously true that Con(T), and Con(Con(T) + T) and so on. Yet Godel says that you cannot encode this set of beliefs in a recursive formal system.
It still might be true that all true statements in arithmetic are provable, just not from a single recursive axiom system.