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  • Believing in something seems to imply thinking something to be true without having evidence for it - otherwise it would be knowledge, a justified true belief. So I know a couple things, like that I exist as a conscious being, and have practical empirical knowledge of the rest of the sensory world too.

    • have practical empirical knowledge of the rest of the sensory world too.

      Oho, that's a pretty bold statement of belief for someone who can't prove they're not a brain in a vat!

      More seriously though, there are tons of things that have conflicting evidence or are simply too big or complex to have enough evidence to have definitive proof for, yet we still have to make decisions about them. Like believing that X vs Y is a better governing system (eg democracy vs republic). Or what about questions that aren't related to proof, like defining and living by ethical standards? Yet most people still find value in "moral" things, and believe that people should do "good" instead of "bad".

    • Believe means to accept as true or real, and does not define the precondition to the belief.

      How can you prove that you exist as a conscious being?

      How can you prove that your senses can be trusted?

        1. I am thinking about whether I exist as a conscious being. Therefore there must be an 'I' to be thinking that.
        2. I can't prove that my senses can be trusted with 100% certainty to tell me truth - in fact I can prove the opposite with things like optical illusions. However, when interacting with the world that I only know is real through my senses, basing my behaviour on those same senses that let me know the world exists seems reasonable to me. That's what I call practical knowledge, rather than true knowledge.

    • A theory I’ve been working on lately is that our worldview rests on certain foundational beliefs - beliefs that can’t be objectively proven or disproven. We don’t arrive at them through reason alone but end up adopting the one that feels intuitively true to us, almost as if it chooses us rather than the other way around. One example is the belief in whether or not a god exists. That question sits at the root of a person’s worldview, and everything else tends to flow logically from it. You can’t meaningfully claim to believe in God and then live as if He doesn’t exist - the structure has to be internally consistent.

      That’s why I find it mostly futile to argue about downstream issues like abortion with someone whose core belief system is fundamentally different. It’s like chipping away at the chimney when the foundation is what really holds everything up. If the foundation shifts, the rest tends to collapse on its own.

      So in other words: even if we agree on the facts, we may still arrive at different conclusions because of our beliefs. When it comes to knowledge, there’s only one thing I see as undeniably true - and you probably agree with me on this: my consciousness, the fact of subjective experience. Everything else is up for debate - and I truly mean everything.

      • Maybe a god's existence is a core belief for some people, but it shouldn't be. There shouldn't be anything you believe without a logical reason to.

    • What you just uttered is a totally valid belief in my eyes :)

      Beliefs don't always have to be based on mere intuition alone. It's totally fine to be able to back up what one believes with arguments.

  • I think the universe we experience is a mathematical continuum with an added layer of probability.

    The problem with trying to describe my theory is that what I'm proposing is literally the simplest thing in the universe. It is the one rule that there are no rules and that by ordering the slices of the continuum into discrete moments of time, all of the rulelessness coalesces into matter and space by virtue of being repeatable probability waveforms which can be represented in 3D space via an emergent 4D manifold.

    Even that is already very dense. For more on the manifold, you may refer to the 1983 paper from J.B. Hartle and Stephen Hawking, "The waveform of the Universe."

    Imagine you want to take the first moment of time, represented as one whole, and break the next moment of time into two pieces, but knowing that the third moment of time will double again to have four pieces, you want the first piece of the 2nd moment of time to be larger, more like the whole of the 1st moment, and the second piece of the 2nd moment of time to be smaller, more like the quarters of the 3rd moment of time.

    Mathematically, you can do this - at least for the first two moments. If you want a magic ratio that you can divide the whole by, and then divide the resulting number by that same ratio such that both of those results added together equal the original whole, there is such a ratio. It is the golden ratio. But it does not follow that continuing to divide by the golden ratio will get you the next four pieces that would also add to one whole, constituting the third moment of time. Rather, adding all of the rest of the infinite series where each next number is the previous number divided by the golden ratio yields, miraculously, the golden ratio.

    No, if you want each moment to snap to bounds where every moment of time has twice the number of "pieces" as the previous moment, there is no one ratio where you can divide every piece by a formulaically derived ratio to get the size of the next piece.

    However, you can derive a perfect equation for a ratio of reduction for the size of each piece if instead of increasing twofold each moment of time, the mathematical size of the universe increases by a factor of euler's number for each moment of time. (Euler's number, for any unaware, is an irrational number like pi or the golden ratio--it goes on forever, only approximated at 2.718. It is the factor used to calculate rate of growth rate as the growth compounds on itself. If you have a dollar with 100% annual growth rate, and compound it only at the end of the year (once), you'll have 2 dollars. If you compound it twice, meaning you'll only apply a 50% growth rate, but you'll do it twice, you'll have 2.25 dollars from the 50 cents you made mid-year experiencing 50% growth during the second compounding. Compound 4 times a year (1.25)^4 and you get about 2.44. Compound an infinite number of times and you get the irrational number e.)

    So, if the universe's size increases by a factor of e every moment instead of a factor of 2, you can find an equation that creates a ratio which smoothly descends from the golden ratio, approaching 1, as the ratio that each unit needs to be divided by the previous unit to prevent any division between moments of time if they were unraveled back into a single continuous string rather than 4-dimensional space. And we start thinking about the internals of moments of time less as discrete units, now that each moment has an irrational unit size, and think more around a descending density as you move from each moment of time to the next. But a vastly increasing size offsets the density to keep the sum total of any moment identical to the total value of any other moment.

    But this does not yet explain why matter or the fundamental forces exist to begin with, how that 4D manifold is supposed to emerge from this theoretical curve. And the answer is that there are an infinite number of possible curves that can fit this ratio regression. There's the simplest one, which solves the problem as simply as possible. But what if you add a sine wave to that? Within the bounds of a moment, the sine wave will go up and also down, canceling out any potential change in density totals. But maybe this is slightly less likely than the more simple curve. And a sine wave that goes up and down twice, with a frequency of 2, even less likely. And the higher amplitudes, higher frequencies, all even less likely, but still possible.

    But why would the universe be calculating frequencies of sine waves as probabilities? And I believe it's not so much a calculation as it is a natural relationship between the positive and negative directions, starting at 0. If you have a moment where the size is e to the power of 0, its size is 1. And you can proceed with the universe I described where the size increases by e every moment, trending toward infinity, or you can move backwards on the number line where e to the higher negative powers trends toward 0. The math should all be the same, but inverted. An equal but opposite anti-verse. I believe that matter arises from interactions between the shared probability of what is likely to happen in either universe at any given moment of time. And from either universe's perspective, they both see themselves as the positive direction where the math of space trends toward infinity and the other universe is the one that gets smaller and smaller. But because they both look the same internally, they are effectively the same universe, thus the shared probability.

    So, these infinite frequencies and amplitudes of sine waves overlaid on top of the lowest energy curve create stable collections of frequencies also known as eigenstates, which can be combined into the sort of manifold Hartle and Hawking described, where 4D space and time becomes an emergent relationship between the underlying waveforms of probability and the spatial organization of layers and layers of mathematical curves that are not identical but do rhyme, in our universe seen as fundamental particles.

    That is what I believe. I think we're living in virtual spacetime continuum that emerges to more coherently organize huge swaths of mathematical probability waves that in concert represent what might or might not be at any given level of complexity.

    Which seems like a lot of words to explain that we definitely don't exist for sure because the fact that we're here indicates we only probably exist.

    Great. Glad we cleared that up.

  • These are some more lighthearted things, but here goes:

    • Sonic the Hedgehog ( Sonic '06 ) wouldn't be as fun of a game if all the bugs and glitches were gone. I live for a good glitch or six sometimes. Same without the highly difficult and janky super speed sections.

    • Sonic Unleashed is an amazing game ( but the xbox/ps3 versions are the superior versions, as someone who has beat it on ps2 and xbox360 ).

    • Due to the janky turn left/right movements on Sonic Lost World and just general movement jank, I am absolutely glad they have the run button to occasionally slow me down and stop me from dying.

    • Also an extreme believer that the special stages ( on the 3DS version of Lost World ) are absolute cancer.

    • Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl was nowhere near as good as The Wrong Trousers. I absolutely hated how they made Wallace absolutely incompetent and idiotic when it comes to normal things ( like how to use a non-electric tea pot ) when he didn't have any technology.

    • Xbox style controllers with BAXY ( right, down, left, up ) button layout are the way to go. The only exception to that belief right now is my 3rd party wired switch controller because it has a headphone jack.

  • God doesn't exist (though there is a tiny, tiny chance there's some higher power that doesn't intervene, because the human intelligence gap is unreasonably huge, making humans undeniably special)

    Every organized religion is a cult

    Free will is an illusion

    Aliens most likely exist, given the insane size of the universe and we know life can exist here

    Humans will still always give in to their brutal tribal instincts and that's why the world is how it is

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