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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Digression: I'm suspicious of philosophy because it throws around absolutes with nothing to back them. Like 'The mind is not capable of understanding blah blah'. Really? What is this supposition based upon? Its like saying there's a highest number we can understand - but what if we add 1 to that?

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Welcome to philosophy and why we are still in this mess academically in the 21st Century.

Welcome to philosophy's number one question. What can we base anything on? To Spinoza it is rationalism. Soren Kierkegaard (My son is named after him) there is nothing but faith that we must leap upon when we have no faith.

>>I'm suspicious of philosophy because it throws around absolutes with nothing to back

Bertrand Russel had a definition of Philosophy that fits your suspicion - in that he said that Philosophy is the contested no-mans land between Theology and Science.

Hence - you're probably not going to find absolutes.

but what if we add 1 to that?

He's talking about the name of that number.

Do you think that there is no limit to human understanding?

Whatever it is, it's a psychological question. The only hope of answering it would be to go around measuring how much people could understand - and if that wasn't possible (due to understanding not being defined, i.e. not really meaning anything specific, or due to it just being really difficult to measure), then you'd have no chance of ever knowing.

By your definition once 1 is added it’s not a number we can understand.

Yes, but the claim is that there is such a number, not that it can be defined.

A number is simply a state; a concept held by a state machine, such as a human. Numbers do not exist, but to the enumerator.

Then it will be especially hard to argue that an inconceivable number exists.

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